Kirrily Graham On Scaling The Impact Of Charities By Exploring Their Business Potential
Kirrily Graham, founder of Dovetail Social Enterprises, is on a mission to transform how small & medium sized charities operate, creating more sustainable organisations through empowering micro, small and medium sized businesses to develop successful charity partnerships that don’t just raise the funds they need for their projects but also become social impact investors, building the charity's capacity and capabilities to amplify the great work that they do in the world.
Kirrily’s combined experience of working in the NFP industry, running her own micro, small & medium-size businesses (MSME) as well as working in the corporate sector, has led her to create her own Social Enterprise to empower partnership between MSME's and small but mighty, grass-root charities.
Kirrily discusses how inspiring collaboration between small or medium enterprises and charities presents mutually beneficial opportunities for growth, and how these partnerships lead to scaling solutions for complex systemic issues.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Tom Allen] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion in social enterprise, not for profits and charities?
[Kirrily Graham] - Probably like a lot of people it was a bit of an accidental career change. I have a bit of a portfolio career; I started in interior design when I left school but was then lured into hospitality and event management. I've done everything from being a service manager to a branch administrator, I even used to sell power tools on construction sites to tradies!
Eventually, I moved over into training and development, and that was where I hit my stride. It was something I loved doing and that's where I also had my first small business. Alongside a couple of those roles, I had also started volunteering at the Australian office of a small international NGO.
I had been sponsoring a young girl in Vietnam for several years through that organisation, and when I moved to Melbourne and discovered their office was close to where I lived, I ended up raising my hand when they asked for volunteers.
I started in the volunteering fundraising committee, but we would have a meeting and then nothing would happen for six months. We would then have another meeting and then nothing happened for another six months. I also realised the board itself wasn't active, but I was passionate about this organisation because the founder had an incredibly inspiring story and I just loved what I was doing with the child sponsorship.
I started to get him a little bit more involved, and when I found out the board wasn't being proactive, we ended up putting out a call for a new board to reignite things. That's where I discovered that as a small organisation, they had a grant for about $10,000.
They had an administrator and a branch office manager for a while, but it never led to anything. A lot of the things you would usually have in business, such as a database, a CRM, or accounting software were missing; there were a lot of basic things I started to implement in the organisation.
I later ended up taking on a paid part time role with them. I started becoming more involved in the fundraising and organising campaigns, but a lot of the things I did now that I look back on it were very much in the social enterprise space. We were selling things like books and videos about the founder, and we had a wine subscription as well, all things that we could make profit from.
One of the key fundraisers I used to organise were charity challenges, and that was by far my favourite. We would take groups of people and cycle 500-600 kilometres through Cambodia and Vietnam. We used to do trekking, horse riding and cycling through Mongolia, taking people to our operational centres in those countries. It started to grow, and become a decent size, but it was probably around that $500,000 dollar turnover where we hit the ceiling.
I was doing it as my side hustle along with my own business, and we were relying a lot on the volunteers that we had. It's quite challenging when you've got to recruit, train and manage volunteers while you've got your own job and are managing all the other aspects of running a business within the charity.
That's where we just hit the ceiling, and I just could not get past that point. It got to a stage where I became burnt out, I was probably working somewhere between 60-80 hours a week depending on what campaigns and activities we had going on.
At that time, I saw the TED talk by Dan Pallotta How We Think About Charities is Dead Wrong, and that was a light bulb moment for me. I realised that I was this hamster in a wheel trying to get things up and running, but I couldn't understand why it wasn't working when I could do it in a business. That moment I realised it was because I was walking into the charity, taking off my business hat and putting on my charity hat.
Because of this, we thought we had to get everything done pro bono and we had to get volunteers to do everything, we just left that business mindset at the door. That wasn’t just myself, I'd certainly been indoctrinated into that way of thinking. That was what was expected from the board level, and that’s what led to my burnout.
What are some of the most common challenges you're seeing organisations you work with encounter and how are they successfully tackling them?
When I started Dovetail and doing market research effectively (and the ACNC has published good data around this), in Australia, we have 60,000 charities in operation. 65% of those are turning over less than $250,000, and half of the charities have no paid staff at all. It paints a clear picture of what the state of affairs are.
When you look at the revenue and funds being generated, it is in the billions of dollars, and the sector itself employs 10% of the Australian population. It's a huge sector, but 97% of the funds that come into these organisations are going to the top 18% of the charities. There's a real inequity there, and from what I experienced from being in a charity and meeting several other charity founders, a lot of them were small.
Whether they were the founders, managers or ‘CEOs’, what I realised is that a lot of them come in from a place of their own personal experience. They've either started a charity because they've lost a child to suicide, or they've had a sister who had breast cancer and didn't get the support they needed. It's a very personal and lived experience where they start these organisations from, because they've seen a gap, and they want to make a difference.
But on the flip side, they lack the business experience to know how to run an organisation, so you quite often find that these small organisations are bad with their marketing or finances. A lot of the board directors and the people who come on their boards initially as are friends and family who don't have experience in a governance background.
There's not a lot of support in the sector to navigate this space in the beginning, and so I think many of those challenges founders encounter are just basic business challenges, they just don’t understand how to run a business.
This also reinforces the expectation that they won’t spend money on those things. The benchmark in Australia is that 20% of a charity’s revenue can be spent on overhead and administration costs, but that is a very little amount of money when you're running a half a million-dollar charity, it’s only $100,000 dollars.
I know from my own experience that to pay myself, an administrator, a bookkeeper, insurance, and rent, that that’s not much of a budget. It certainly doesn't leave anything in the kitty to invest in building your team, to step things up to the next level.
As the founder of Dovetail Social Enterprises, can you tell us a little bit more about the work you're doing?
After seeing that TED talk by Dan Pallotta, I starting to think about this charity from a business perspective. It was whilst I was in the charity that I started to develop this program, and it was addressing two issues.
One was that we needed some money so that we could build our team. The other part was that my background was in sales and business development for 20 years. I was a national key account manager, so I figured getting some corporate partners would be no problem at all.
What I realised after a lot of frustration was that being a small charity, going for big corporate partners was not a match. They are looking for the big charities with the big databases and the brand awareness, but what I knew was that we had a lot of great and generous supporters within our own community.
A lot of them were business owners, and so I started to talk to them and ask, "why are you supporting this personally and not through your business?" Business owners shared that they didn’t understand how they could do that through their business, so I started to see a gap.
There was this opportunity to tap into the SME market, who are very generous and almost give on par with corporates. But, while they’re doing it from a very altruistic place, they don't leverage it well in their businesses. In the corporate space, a CSR team with one of the major banks might have 30 or 40 people in their team.
In a small business, you're lucky to have one person in HR or marketing, somebody who is accountable for that side of operations. I wondered what it would mean if we could convert the two million small to medium sized businesses in Australia to give more proactively through their businesses through supporting and activating the SME market?
That’s what the whole aim of Dovetail is, to empower the SME market. We do it from this perspective of not just helping them to fundraise for their projects or create revenue for charities, but we also have a transparent and clear pathway for the business to invest in scaling and growing charities so they can have a greater impact.
The way we structure the program is that the charity might say, "we'd really like to pay the founder,” or, “we need to bring on a partnerships manager,” or, “we need to build a new website so we can take online donations." Those things we build into our program, so the businesses can help fund that as well.
What are some of the most important traits for impact led leaders and entrepreneurs who are working in this business for good space?
You're going to find things like empathy and passion, we find that in spades in our sector, because that's what drives people. I also think (and I do see this quite a lot) that in the impact space we tend to collaborate well also.
We do come from a different space, and I think we understand that we can do that more successfully through collaboration. If I was to say what's missing or what could we focus on, I'd probably say business skills. We need to provide more support in basic business skills and connecting in with the business community as well.
I also think that because we tend to hang around a lot together and we're attracted to other organisations and people working in this space, we can end up in a bit of a bubble.
I do think the only way forward is for this movement to become mainstream, and that's only going to happen when we're fully integrated into the general business community and helping them learn how to make a difference through their businesses as well.
Where are you seeing these key opportunities to help grow this movement and take it mainstream?
I believe there's an incredible opportunity within the charity sector itself. I think a lot of them haven't looked at the opportunity to create a social enterprise model within their organisations themselves, so I do think there is an opportunity there.
I believe there needs to be general awareness of what a social enterprise is. I still remember when I first started people would ask what a social enterprise is, they would say, "are your social media or something like that?" It was very unknown; I think it's certainly becoming a lot stronger now.
Promoting and creating acknowledgement using certifications can also help abound awareness. I hear people in the public talking about how they have a social enterprise, but when you ask a few more questions, they're probably more like a business for good.
There's an element of their business where they're doing something good rather than operating a traditional social enterprise model. I struggle a little bit with that to be honest, it's important to have that distinguished, but at the same time, does it matter if everybody's doing something?
It would also be good to have a legal structure for social enterprises, because currently they sit between the two traditional classifications of for-profit business and a not for profit or charity. There are certainly ways we could support that better through having a legal structure as well, then we can have the benefits of both worlds.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently?
We surround ourselves with a lot of amazing people, but I think in line with the purpose of Dovetail I would like to talk about the release of the UnCharitable film. This is the documentary that was released based on that TED talk by Dan Pallotta that I saw 10 years ago, and I've recently done some screenings of that film.
I had both businesspeople as well as members of the charity sector at those screenings, and the businesspeople were more impacted and found it enlightening. That shift in their thinking was powerful.
A lot of people felt quite discombobulated after seeing that film, and they have a new appreciation of what we must deal with in this sector. The people who are working in that space with Uncharitable and the Pay What It Takes campaigns are starting to educate the public around what it's like to work in the sector. I was guilty of not knowing these things when I first started volunteering as well, what I didn't know I didn't know.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
One podcast I love to listen to is by Justin Hogg of Right Source. He does a great job simplifying governance and how to set up social impact organisation. I just love how they’re very easy to understand short snippets.
I love to read business books; my favourite author now would be Mike Michalowicz. My favourite book of his is Profit First, which is like the Barefoot Investor but for businesses. It was an absolute game changer for me, but all his books are great.
