Kriss Deiglmeier
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Passions and Voice

Get to Know Kriss

 

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Kriss Deiglmeier is a dynamic board director, CEO, and thought leader who drives growth and innovation. Known for her strategic leadership and transformative approach, she has served on numerous boards, helping them evolve by recruiting new members, restructuring committees, and improving governance practices. Her extensive experience spans both public and private sectors, with a particular focus on delivering value across industries and geographies.

An avid traveler, Kriss's passion for adventure and love of learning has shaped her belief system and fueled her commitment to positively impacting the world. Her diverse personal and professional experiences inspire her to create a better future for everyone’s family, friends, and communities. 

fun facts

  • Kriss believes you grow when you “repot” yourself. She has worked in the corporate, philanthropy, nonprofit, social enterprise, and academic sectors. 

  • She has backpacked around the world and visited more than 50 countries and counting.

  • Kriss has presented nationally and internationally on, social innovation, stakeholder economy, ESG,  responsible AI, design thinking, and impact investing. 

  • Each year, she picks a “word for the year” and strives to live by it — believing firmly in keeping things simple.

  • Kriss’s core beliefs include:  “Learn something new every day” and “Be adventurous. Be afraid.”

  • She loves walking meetings and agrees with Nilofer Merchant that “sitting is the smoking of our generation.” 

  • She prefers research articles over what seems like an infinite number of “blogs” 

  • She co-authored the most cited article on social innovation, Rediscovering Social Innovation—with over 3,200 citations. 

  • Her family, friends, and colleagues bring her joy and keep her going. 

 

Philanthropy: Aligning Intent with Actions

There are several great books and reports out there to help us all be more effective donors — Give $mart by Tierney and Fleishman, Do More than Give by Crutchfield, Kania and Kramer, and What’s Next for Philanthropy by the Monitor Institute, among them. However, in the hundreds of pages of valuable information they provide, rarely do you find the simple idea of putting the ultimate recipient of our dollars — the end customer — first.

These books offer many useful recommendations for engaging in networks, leading change, assessing the landscape, and more. But I contend that the time spent on the systems, structures, and personal motivations behind philanthropy might be better served if we all took a customer-centered approach. Whether we call recipients of our monies “customers” or “beneficiaries,” in the end we need to re-focus philanthropy on whom we’re trying to serve. It is imperative to realign the philanthropic intent with actual effort.

As we can see from this graphic, the for-profit system is a nice and simple closed loop. Organizations develop a product/service, customers who want it pay, and the entire model is reinforced: happy customers, happy organizations, happy employees, happy suppliers, and happy shareholders.

In contrast, the nonprofit sector for the most part is a one-way street. What keeps the system and money flowing is the donor’s happiness, not the beneficiary’s, which means there’s a disaggregation from the customer. It’s a hard barrier to overcome, but it’s vital that we try.

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I am a strong believer that we do a big disservice to the nonprofit sector when we recklessly apply “business” type strategies to it. This is not meant to be one of those cases. However, one thing the business sector has done well is to develop a customer driven eco-system — from product development to supply chains to marketing. What can philanthropy learn from this that could help ensure the true customers we are committed to serving are reached in the best way? The structure of philanthropy is not going to change, but the mindset can. What would happen if everyone involved in philanthropy — individuals, institutions, alliances, and networks adopted the following approaches?

Remind yourself every day that serving the ultimate customer is the reason for giving. We all know philanthropy is personal and optional. But see if there are ways to spend more time and effort on customer service delivery. How can you assess yourself or your organization according to how well your efforts are leading to end-user success?

Put customers first in designing your products or services. Nonprofits serving customers are often very strong in this regard. Those that excel are laser focused on empathy, understanding, listening, and collaborating with their customers. This deep and comprehensive approach needs to migrate up the ladder to philanthropists themselves.

Put customers first in your planning and processes. I just signed a 15 page grant agreement in which less than half a page stated what our Center was actually going to accomplish with the funds. This is a far cry from customer focus. Aligning all the philanthropic processes — strategic planning, grant proposals, evaluation, site visits — with a total customer experience may go a long way toward truly helping beneficiaries.

Maybe we could all take a lesson from YouthTruth, a nationwide effort to gather comparative feedback from the “beneficiaries” of education funders — in this case high school students — about what’s working and not working in their schools. An initiative of The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), YouthTruth shares the data it collects with teachers, school administrators, district and network leaders, and education funders. As a result, many schools have created more rigorous and relevant lesson plans, or rethought approaches to discipline that increase student input and fairness. Other schools have created stronger advisory programs — linking students with teachers as confidants and mentors — or created new professional development programs for teachers.

Valerie Threlfall, director of CEP’s West Coast office, comments, “I’ve come to realize that when given the forum and the opportunity, students provide feedback that is dead-on for how to improve their experience.”
Let’s figure out ways to access the full breadth of feedback loops available to us in all of our philanthropic work.

Above vignette from: http://www.effectivephilanthropy.org/blog/tag/beneficiary-perceptions/

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