Social impact, work-life balance, toxic workplaces, corporate social responsibility, the Great Resignation – all trendy, overexposed buzzwords that have become clichés. What we can’t deny, however, is that the social impact sector has exploded in recent years amid ever-evolving workplace norms and an increase in public calls for corporate accountability. Against this backdrop, I wanted to share my interview with Kindred Motes-Caso, founder of KM Strategies Group (KMSG), a social impact consultancy that provides an intriguing case study on how to help clients adjust to this new environment while also holding itself, and others, to a higher social impact standard.
In my line of work, I encounter a lot of companies and consultants who primarily support charities, philanthropies, and nonprofit organizations. While many of them do exceptional work, KMSG is an example of a next-generation firm, led by a nonprofit veteran, that is leading innovative and necessary reforms to a sector that needs to practice what it preaches.
Founded just 18 months ago, KMSG’s client list already includes USAID, NYC Health, Global Citizen, New America, and Columbia University. The firm’s advisory portfolio includes communications, development, engagement, and partnerships strategies. Kindred has committed the firm to donating 10% of KMSG’s post-tax profits to funding movement work. This led to the inaugural $30,000 KMSG Social Impact Award. KMSG is also focused on innovating internally, successfully implementing a 4-day work week and requiring that all of its employees and contractors take at least one month of paid vacation per year. Perhaps most importantly, KMSG’s early success and profitability from day one serve as a successful case study and counternarrative to the misguided notion that new businesses must choose between profit and social responsibility.
In May, your agency got a lot of attention for announcing it would be allocating 10% of its revenue after expenses to support nonprofit organizations and advocacy movements through the KMSG Social Impact Award. Why 10%? How did you reach that number?
Before founding KMSG, I’d only ever worked for nonprofits. From the very beginning at KMSG, I wanted to incorporate a lot of the values and mission-aligned strategies that I learned there and create a new kind of company that really practices the strategies that it advises nonprofit and philanthropic clients to adopt and implement. I wanted to be able to tell them, “This isn’t theoretical for us; we’re doing it, too, and we have the data, strategies, recommendations, and lived experience to prove it.”
I’ve worked with philanthropic foundations throughout my career, from being directly supported by The MacArthur Foundation when I led digital strategy at the Vera Institute of Justice and directed communications for Wallace Global Fund to advising five foundation clients in KMSG’s first 18 months. From those experiences, I knew that foundations are required by law to pay out 5% of investments per year to support charities and the public good. I also knew of the growing movement within philanthropy to encourage foundations to pay out considerably more than 5% to address rising inequality, threats to democracy, the climate crisis, and every other critical challenge facing humanity. Global Citizen’s partnership with Forbes to retool the Philanthropy 400 to reflect contributions rather than simply pledges or endowment sizes, as well as its Give While You Live campaign, helped shape my understanding of the reforms happening in the space as well.
When designing KMSG’s social impact strategy, I kept coming back to one question: if philanthropy, which exists to do good, can pay out 5% of revenue after expenses each year, why shouldn’t businesses that support nonprofit industries and claim to be rooted in social impact be required to do even more than philanthropy, not less?
This belief in a true obligation to root our business plan in a meaningful – and tangible – practice of social impact is what pushed us to commit 10%. It’s double what philanthropies are required to give annually, and even more than double if you factor in the exemptions often included in foundation calculations including staff compensation, travel budgets, and DAF contributions. It’s a number that demonstrates a clear commitment to supporting nonprofit work, while still being feasible for a smaller, nascent agency like KMSG. What’s most important to us is to show philanthropies and other for-profit social impact agencies that the federal 5% requirement should be seen as a floor, not a ceiling.
Why was it important to you that KMSG democratize the decision-making process for its social impact award? Are there lessons there for more effective giving strategies?
I wanted the KMSG Social Impact Award to represent a clear shift from traditional, exclusionary, bureaucratic grant-making processes. These have traditionally included restricted funds, long applications, and regional biases that, in our opinion, lead to systemic underinvestment in groups led by people of color, rural areas, and entire regions such as the Deep South and Appalachia.
From the beginning, we wanted the award, and the broader philanthropic philosophy behind it, to reflect a new kind of relationship between advisors, funders, advocates, and communities. That’s why we made the funding fully unrestricted, with no strings on how it could be spent or applied. We also gave majority control over decision-making for this award to an external advisory committee made up of people who don’t work at KMSG, aren’t paid by KMSG, and work for nonprofit organizations—so they understand the work and know what it’s like to spend hours laboring over grant proposal drafts. Too often, nonprofits applying for philanthropic grants never hear back – which makes them feel like they're wasting their precious time. That’s why we made our application short, to-the-point, and set a limit of 500 words or fewer. We asked a single question: “What do you hope to achieve with this award?” Our advisory committee, which consisted of a diverse group of nonprofit and philanthropic practitioners, used these responses to determine where the award could do the most good. And we responded to every single organization who applied – more than 120 of them!
You announced this week that not only would the selected recipient of the KMSG Social Impact award be receiving $45,000 in funds and support, but that your firm would also be offering services, training, and promotion opportunities to every single applicant who applied – around 125 organizations. That’s pretty unusual; was that always part of the plan?
Our plan from the onset was to provide every KMSG Social Impact Award applicant support, but the nature of that support evolved over time. For practical economic and logistical reasons, we knew we couldn’t provide more than 100 organizations with customized support. With that in mind, we decided to offer all applicants access to a series of training webinars hosted by KMSG and Candid.
Every webinar or training will offer concrete support for applicant organizations’ development, fundraising, and communications goals. One webinar will, for example, help organizations obtain a Gold Seal of Transparency from Candid’s GuideStar, which will make organizations eligible to receive funding from Amazon Smile and Facebook/Instagram’s Fundraisers and give them access to Guidestar’s philanthropic database – positioning them for more support from other funders. Remaining webinars will help organizations start to build strategic communications plans, as well as unlock $120,000 in free Google Ads annually. If every organization that applied for our award takes us up on that offer, KMSG will have taken an initial $45,000 investment and leveraged it for up to $15 million in the first year alone. That’s the kind of catalytic social impact and strategic planning through targeted partnerships that we want to bring to the table – not just for KMSG, but for clients and organizations we support, too.
You’re a Millennial executive who is already doing things very differently and shaking up the status quo. Do you think those things are related? How has your experience as a Millennial, with a consultant roster that includes Gen Zers, shaped how you run your company?
I think my experiences in the industry so far have shown me what I don’t want to do as much as indicate what I want to emulate. I’d worked for organizations where their mission, vision, and values were communicated externally and ignored internally, and I saw what that did to the culture. A lot of people have made millions telling Millennials and Gen Z employees that they’re entitled and need to adjust to the workplace they inherited, but I think the reality is that Millennials and Gen Z staff members have a really great bullshit radar and demand accountability – they’re going to take you at your word until you demonstrate that you don’t actually mean it, at which point they’re going to note that contradiction and expect a response.
With those experiences in mind, I knew it was critical to me that work-life balance be an actual priority at KMSG – not just something we paid lip service to while making junior consultants work 80+ hour weeks. So we announced in January that we’d operate a four day workweek and require anyone working with KMSG to take at least one month a year off from their client work. Our consultants and contractors can (and do!) work from anywhere, and we pay at or above market rate for all of them. We didn’t lose a single client from implementing these policies, and we turned a profit in the multiple six figures. Even with all the positive reforms in the sector that have been happening lately, I don’t know of any other consulting firms that are offering this kind of culture and work-life balance, especially when combined with a corporate social responsibility commitment to donate 10% of revenue to charity.
What should other businesses, start-ups, or solo entrepreneurs take away from the strategies you’re testing and deploying at KMSG?
Start as you mean to proceed. Communicate your values clearly and unapologetically and don’t be afraid to call attention to the things that make your company unique. Anyone who doesn’t get them or doesn’t agree isn’t the right fit for your company – and those who get it will be loyal clients (or referral sources) for years to come. Make time to create and innovate, but also to rest, recharge, and continue your own education. I use my Fridays for business strategy and development, reading, new ideas, and rest – and I come back even more prepared and excited to keep delivering for clients on Monday.
What’s next for KMSG?
A whole lot. In 2023, we’re excited to continue expanding our work to support strategic planning, executive thought leadership, digital strategy, partnerships and strategic engagement, and fundraising/donor engagement. We’re going to be working with several philanthropic partners to unlock millions of dollars in free advertising for nonprofit grantees, will be crafting strategies and management advisory for a number of national nonprofits, are taking the lead on planning and executing a few national events, and will be building customized targeting campaigns to put organizations in front of partners and funders who can take their work to the next level.
I’m also taking on a contributor role with Reckon to profile organizations and activists leading critical advocacy work and we’re in the process now of building several other multimedia channels and platforms for elevating client, partner, grantee, and strategic allies’ voices. On the grantmaking side, we’ll be announcing an even larger philanthropic investment as part of next year’s KMSG Social Impact Award. We’re excited to keep growing, learning, building, and doing good work that we can be proud of – both for our clients and for the organizations we’re fortunate to be able to support as a result. We hope others in the sector will join us on this journey, but we’re on the move either way.
