Pro-life business people are often surprised that there exists no national pro-life counter to Planned Parenthood – now a $1.4 billion annual revenue behemoth.
Even if pro-life business folks have never studied the theories about how capital markets work in the for-profit world, and may not be able to explain those theories by drawing them on a whiteboard for you, they still intuitively understand how capital markets work through their real-world business experiences.
Bringing that understanding over into the Pro-Life Business Industry, business people are perplexed as to why a national pro-life competitor to Planned Parenthood has yet to emerge.
I admit, it’s frustrating.
But now that I’ve been working in the industry full-time for five years, I believe I better understand the reasons why.
Today, let’s talk about one of those reasons which I’ll put under a broad heading: information.
We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know
Among experts who study capital markets, there is a concept called the “Efficient Market Hypothesis.”
It basically says that asset prices (for example, stock prices) fully reflect all available relevant information about that asset.
If this hypothesis were 100% true, then it would be impossible for any one person to gain an advantage over another and profit from a transaction.
Of course, we know in reality that it’s not 100% true because people do profit from transactions when assets are traded among buyers and sellers, sometimes very handsomely so.
However, what can be said, using the stock market as an example, is that prices of stocks do, in fact, reflect a lot of relevant information – it’s just that they don’t reflect all the information, and some of the information they do reflect is not completely accurate.
So how does this relate to the Pro-Life Business Industry?
Do You Know Where to Invest?
Imagine that the Pro-Life Business Industry was like a stock market.
All of the individual Pregnancy Help Centers would have their own ticker symbols, and each of them would want you to invest in their PHC so that they could have the funds to execute their missions.
Which PHCs would you invest in, and why?
I think it’s safe to say that your investment strategy would be to pick the PHCs that gave you the greatest return on investment (ROI) – ROI in this case being lives saved from abortion.
So far, so good.
The next step is to pull together information about various PHCs.
After all, you’ll need information to analyze which PHCs give you the greatest ROI so that you can pick the winners and start investing.
Ready, set, go. Right?
Not so fast.
Where will you get that information?
Google it right now and see what you can find.
Lost at Sea Without a Paddle
Unfortunately, that information doesn’t exist.
So you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and contact PHCs individually, perhaps starting in your own local area, and get information from them so that you can do your own comparative analysis to make your investment decisions.
Your request for information will be simple enough – you’ll ask each of the PHCs to tell you how many lives they saved from abortion last year.
Easy. Right?
But there’s a problem.
You Say Tomato, I say Tomahto
How do you know that what you mean by a “life saved from abortion,” is the same as what a PHC means by a “life saved from abortion?”
It may be obvious to you what you mean, but it isn’t obvious to many PHCs in the Pro-Life Business Industry because there are no agreed upon standards for the definition of a “life saved.”
That word, “saved,” can mean very different things.
For example, some PHCs will say that a baby was “saved from abortion” because the mother came in to the center to get diapers and formula, and without those resources she would have been “at-risk” of getting an abortion.
That’s probably a different definition of “saved” than what you had in mind, but since there are no industry standards that PHCs must abide by in their definitions, whose to say?
I think you see the problem here.
A lack of relevant, consistent information about PHC performance means that, as an investor, the only way you can know if a PHC is worthy of your investment is to become an insider at that PHC to learn the reality about what they are doing, the results they are achieving, and if those results match with your investment desires.
In other words, you will have to do a lot of your own groundwork.
In the stock market, we rely on others to do much of that analysis for us to tell us which companies are worthy to receive additional capital, and which ones are not.
In the Pro-Life Business Industry, lack of relevant information leads to very inefficient flow of philanthropic investment capital – too much money going to PHCs that are very ineffective, and too little money going to PHCs that are effective.
More tomorrow…
Regards,
Brett