While in business school, we had a couple of our classmates become special pro bono board members of a small international NGO that had a close relationship to our school in Shanghai.

Special board members act just as the other board members do, engaging in making important operational decisions as well as strategic ones for the NGO. We benchmarked the idea from our exchange partner school, which was well developed in giving opportunities for students to become responsible business leaders.

The feedback from the pilot project turned out to be a win-win result. The NGO had never had such an enthusiastic professional minded group of young people participating and advising them on some of the matters for which they previously did not have any solution. And the students added one line onto their resume, proud to be participating as board members and also learning about how a real board, although small, worked. This gave them rich experiences as well as some networking chances with other highly profiled board members.

But most of all, they felt and learned about the needs in the society and committed themselves to making things better. This pilot project, once again, proved that everyone has a desire to help the needy if there is a reward, as described in the benefits for the students.

Some renowned international business schools, with lots of operational budget from their alumni contributions, run a program where if their students choose to work for the government or an NGO, the school fills in the gap between their student's salary and the average MBA salary for a certain number of years. Asian business schools, slowly growing these days, do not currently have enough funds to run this type of program but they all agree that this is worth benchmarking in the future.

Many NGOs are run by great people; people with vision and dreams to change a part of a society that needs to be fixed or taken care of. One problem that they always run into is the budget. A majority of them depend on corporate sponsorships or individual donations to run their organizations, and they cannot afford expensive managers to join their organization.

I recently encountered a president of a well known NGO in China with international recognition. He, unexpectedly, agreed to my point of view that they desperately needed highly efficient people. The biggest reason that he could not hire these people, he claimed, was not using the money to recruit them, but justifying themselves to their corporate sponsors on hiring them. He has the money but he just did not have enough guts to tell his donors that he is spending a high percentage of their contribution on human resources.

One well educated highly efficient employee could be worth many mismanaged, uneducated employees. We all know that this is the power of education. Companies also know that this is true. That is why companies are willing to hire MBAs and JDs to take care of their operations even if it takes high salaries and bonuses to attract them. If the companies know this situation, wouldn’t they understand an NGO’s point of view? The answer to this question is likely to be negative since companies do not know a lot about how the NGOs are operated.

Another problem that NGOs encounter, even if they can convince their donors for high salaried staff, is the name value. Many students, especially after earning their graduate degree, want to join renowned companies rather than NGOs. Of course, some with great values do go for the public sector but those choices are limited to governments or global organizations, such as the United Nations.

Hence, if small sized NGOs want to recruit highly educated professionals, it is nearly impossible.

But what about trying this solution: try asking and convincing the companies to sponsor through human resources rather than monetary resources. Then NGOs ought to give these employees the title that they deserve, such as "BP-sponsored Marketing Manager" or "Bayer-sponsored HR Officer". This is how companies sponsor some renowned professors in business schools, so why don’t they do it for NGOs? Convince the companies to give these people the same salary and benefits package as the company employees get and also an option to join the company after the initial contract of a certain number of years. This means in the recruiting process, the companies will need to be engaged, which I don’t think it is a big sacrifice for the NGOs compared to what they are getting.

If this works out, the company could look deeper into the organization and its operation through its sponsored employee; they would actually know how the contribution is spent and NGOs could use high profiled professionals for their operation, improving their efficiency, not to mention the side benefit of keeping a long term relationship with the sponsoring company.

Three stakeholders (i.e. sponsoring company, NGO, and the employee) all need to benefit from the initiative. If the NGOs could give the other stakeholders what they want in return for the employee’s service for number of years, it would immensely improve the organization’s efficiency to a great extent.

About the author:
Sam Lee is a recent MBA graduate of CEIBS (China Europe International Business School). His focus lies on Corporate Social Responsibility strategies as well as Private/Public sector partnerships.  He now works for Trilogy as a Business Value Group (BVG) consultant. 

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