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-Based
On Sunday mornings, fresh from my faith-based institution, I stop at the community-based deli for a caffeine-based beverage. After a thought-based interlude, I select an information-based publication from the rack, and the knowledge-based attendant accepts an income-based emolument in exchange for his customer-based service. I return to my home base wishing I could de-BASE this language for good. But in at least one sense, it is already as debased as it can be.
Where did all these -BASES come from? When did things cease to have qualities of their own and start being merely based on other things? In the field of urban development, there was once such a thing as a community development corporation. Now they're all community-based development corporations. Groups of very smart people used to be proud of being learned or expert; now they hide their diplomas behind the lifeless claim of being "knowledge-based." Why are synagogues, churches, and mosques not fighting to regain their sacred charter as religious institutions? Are they content to have it said that they are merely based on faith-perhaps the way Velveeta is based on cheese-and not aflame with the genuine article? Why are the clergy not marching on Washington over this? Where is the outrage?
The answer is that this dodgy game of base-running is actually useful in the sneaky political realms where such coinages proliferate. The Constitution may look askance at alliances between government and religion, but it might be said to be silent on faith-based activities. Community organizations might be expected to demonstrate actual support from their neighbors-something many of them enjoy, but not all. Yet if they're community-based... well, all they really have to do is be based there.
Benchmarking
BENCHMARKING began its popular life as a metaphor drawn from the 19th Century surveyor's lexicon. Originally, it described carved marks in a wall that showed, for example, how high a tide has risen or where, in a mine-shaft, sea level lies.
Management consultants eventually borrowed it to refer to levels of business achievement that could be measured and, one presumes, eventually exceeded-with the help of the right consultant. Because the borrowed phrase (soon transformed into a verb) was never all that precise in its new context, it quickly grew to refer to almost any level of anything that is compared to any other level. It is now practically impossible to read a management paper (or plan, or evaluation) on any topic that doesn't benchmark something.
Interestingly, the word has nothing to do with benches in the ordinary sense. The original surveyor's mark was a kind of groove in the wall, in which the top bar of an angle iron (shaped like a 7) could be inserted. The angle iron then served as a "bench" on which to rest an instrument that measures deviations from the level originally marked.
Best Practices
Here's a commendably simple, agreeable little perennial that has somehow been allowed to overrun the garden. It refers to the most effective things that organizations do - things, presumably, of which other organizations should be made aware. To refer to the best of an organization's practices as its, well, BEST PRACTICES is hardly an affront to clarity or plain speaking.
The trouble is that, lately, every time a nonprofit organization manages to get through the day without falling into bankruptcy, a team of researchers moves in, often with generous support from a major foundation, casting about for BEST PRACTICES. The phrase has gotten out of hand.
BEST PRACTICES was coined - advisedly, it seems - to refer to the very best of the practices in a field, not merely all the good ones that could possibly fit into a 100-page report. And in some new and evolving fields, as the nonprofit organization Public/Private Ventures recently argued, there are not yet any practices that can be canonized as "best" - only promising ones that deserve close study and discussion. Our recommendation here is simply to scrutinize the phrase before using it. Are the practices referred to in this context really the best ones? Or are they just effective or interesting? If one of the latter, then it's best to say so, and save the best for later.
Branding
The mammoth popularity of the idea of branding in the civic and nonprofit world — where every organization, no matter how high its calling, seems to want its name to be as famous as Kleenex® — would no doubt surprise anyone who has ever literally branded anything. The word’s oldest meaning is “to burn with a hot iron,” a definition that ought to take some of the élan (if not the escalating fees) out of the exploding occupation of “branding consultants.” But in most modern contexts, the word is obviously intended metaphorically, in a sense that has been around for enough centuries to have earned the number-two spot in most dictionaries’ definitions: “to mark indelibly.”
In reality, most civic and philanthropic organizations don’t use BRANDING in either the blisteringly literal or the commercially metaphorical sense. They want their name better known not (presumably) to boost its commercial value, but to mark their particular ideas about the public good more indelibly in the public mind, and perhaps to scare up some donations in the process. Public-interest organizations that have achieved a true brand in this “indelible mark” sense — CARE, Big Brothers / Big Sisters, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation come to mind — have seen their names become synonymous with a particular approach to public problems, a way of thinking and acting on those problems that people can understand, identify with, and join. There is nothing crass (never mind scorching) about that aspiration, and many foundations and nonprofits might honorably hope to do as much.
But nowadays, the most common use of BRANDING, at least outside the Wild West, is among the cattle rustlers of Madison Avenue. It was the advertisers, in truth, from whom foundations and nonprofits borrowed the term and fell in love with it. Describing the public identity of public-interest organizations as BRANDING both diminishes and blurs their achievements. What makes CARE or the National Trust famous is not just that its name, like some catchy brand of dish detergent, is easy to remember and subliminally likeable. They are famous not for their packages and logos, but for their work and the ideas behind it.
There are, of course, a few nonprofit organizations whose “brands” are famous in pretty much the same sense as the dish-soap people’s. They have mastered the art of packaging and advertising, even if not necessarily that of exceptional accomplishment. That is both rare and regrettable. But it is precisely the sort of triumph of form over substance that the slick word BRANDING evokes.
Buy-In
Unless we are actually asking people to purchase shares or other securities, they are participating in and supporting our plan, not buying pieces of it. The "buy" language simply takes an ordinary process of participation and turns it into some unspecified kind of securities transaction. [Try "support" or "play a role".]
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