Dude, You Do Not Eff with the Mission

A pair of stories that broke recently offer some lessons for nonprofits on how to deal with bad news that becomes public.

In New York, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation not only cashiered a couple of employees when an internal audit revealed that hundreds of thousands of dollars was missing, it also asked the Manhattan district attorney to launch an investigation.

“It’s a foolish person who tries this,” [Gail] Pressberg[, secretary of the foundation's board,] said. “We catch people.” She noted, “We had enough evidence to terminate the employees. There’s no nonsense in this organization.”

Meanwhile, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, which is overseen by the Wikimedia Foundation, can’t tie his shoes lately without some sort of scandal falling out of it. His ex-girlfriend, the controversial Canadian pundit Rachel Marsden, says Mr. Wales dumped her when she asked him to keep their relationship on the QT; she then sold some of his personal items on eBay; and a former Wikimedia exec piggybacked on the relationship mess by accusing Mr. Wales of, in effect, embezzling from the foundation.

Okay, the story has sex and money and controversy all nicely wrapped up in it, but what makes it truly interesting from a nonprofit perspective is that, according to Wired blogger Megan McCarthy,

the two met when Marsden contacted Wales to help her "clean up" what she perceived to be errors on her personal Wikipedia page, and there have been allegations that Wales used his influence improperly to make changes.

That is an enormous no-no in the world of Wikipedia, which relies on its community of editors to do self-policing and keep entries as objective as possible. And so the lesson, I think, is: Don’t eff with the mission. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation took decisive action as soon as it discovered something that was endangering its mission, while it was Mr. Wales’s alleged violation of one of his organization’s core principles that has driven others to make the charges that are hounding him now. | 501(c)

Tags: Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales, Rachel Marsden