The Realist Idealist

My great friend Marissa and I were talking on Wednesday about how actually accomplishing many of the best things we want to see in the world will probably mean a lot of – for lack of a better term – “suckiness” and time to get there.

Earlier in the day I was at an event called “Innovation for Nonprofit Success” put on by the Salesforce Foundation and had a similar thought. Salesforce has done some extraordinary work with nonprofits and at this point has more than 3000 organizations to which it distributes free licenses of its services. As Salesforce has exploded over the last two years among for-profits and non, I asked Steve Wright, their Director of Innovation how long the Foundation had been working to get to that group of 3,000. Answer: 8 years.

I’m completely saturated in this little world do-gooder technology and I’ve only known about their work for about 25% of the time they’ve been doing it. Before that, they had to go through unknown-ness and under-supported-ness like so many others.

Earlier in the week someone asked me how long Idealist.org had been around as it recently eclipsed 70,000 nonprofits/NGOs in its network and now has people from 215 countries and territories who visit the site every month. Depending on who you ask, Idealist could be considered a household name in the nonprofit sector. Asked when they first heard of Idealist.org, though, most people say “in the last two or three years.”

The site launched in 1995, had no money for its first 6 years, and building the network early on took individual calls and one-by-one cataloguing by its very tiny, broke staff.

Essentially, for the better part of this decade, the work of Salesforce, Idealist, and hundreds of other now-well-known organizations has been mostly unknown (even Google was mostly unknown in 2000). In other words: It’s damn hard work to get an organization, service, or idea to a place of pervasiveness, effectiveness, or solution proffering.

Beyond Kiva.org, I can think of almost no other website in the social sector that has seen a meteoric rise soon after launching. Beyond YouTube, I can’t think of any on the for-profit side either. Any other ideas?

How can we better communicate to people that doing this work and building these tools is hard and shouldn’t be taken lightly?