PHILANTHROPY 2173

A hybrid foundation

2012-05-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

According to Steve Case, the hottest topic for discussion at the second annual meeting of The Giving Pledgers was impact investing. This puts some emphasis on an idea that was raised at our recent ReCoding Good charrette on Impact Investing, Philanthropy and the New Social Economy.

That idea, quite simply, is this - do we need a new form of philanthropic enterprise designed to work across the continuum from grants to impact investing?

The last few years have given us both B Corporations and L3Cs - hybrid forms that provides entrepreneurs with a corporate structure committed to both profitability and social good. Is it time for a similar innovation in the way we structure the capital for social good?

Will the next ten years see the creation of hybrid foundations - a capital investing form structured specifically to allow greater flexibility in how funds are used for social good?

New examples of program related investments from the IRS are designed to make these types of investments easier and more common. Private foundations and public grantmaking charities are permitted to make program related investments, so a new form may not be necessary. Many believe that the barriers to more impact investing by foundations is not the institutional form but the professional skill sets of employees and board members' tolerance low tolerance for risk.

Of course, both those barriers - professional skill sets and risk tolerance - may actually be part of the institutional form, or at least the norms that have been created around it. The philanthropic foundation in its current form is marking its centennial this year and next. Since the creation of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and The Rockefeller Foundation, the first private foundations, there has been remarkably little innovation in the institutional form itself.

Shortly after these private foundations were created Cleveland gave birth to the first community foundation, an innovation in its time that took federated giving (until then a largely religious or ethnic community activity) and applied it to place-based communities. Some eighty years later, in 1991, national mutual fund firms started offering donor advised funds. In this decade, Omidyar Network - which is an LLC with an associated philanthropy - and Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm - have both experimented with alternative structures to allow them greater flexibility in how they make funds available. Jeff Skoll has a "suite of organizations" - including a media production company and two grantmaking foundations - that focus on his social change interests. On the :other side" of the ledger, perhaps, we can also point to entities such as Legacy Ventures, which exists to invest donors' assets for maximum return on the premise of a promise to grant those earnings philanthropically. Social investment companies may be said to be pulling investment institutions into the business of social capital. But there are few examples to be found, out of the thousands of foundations formed each year, of institutional redesign. Few other of today's institutions - businesses, schools, universities, libraries, hospitals - look as much like their forebears as do philanthropic foundations.

It's illogical that this century's wealth creators are going to be content with last century's philanthropic forms. While it is still tough to distinguish hype from reality where impact investing is concerned, there are already several states in the nation with new enterprise forms for social businesses, documented new impact capital being made available from governments and private investors, and an emerging body of experience-based reflections on the capital continuum from philanthropy to impact investing.

Impact investing is not the only pressure point on the institutional form. Digital public goods, real-time payment systems, informal networks, globally-viable small organizations, remote care and education, crowdfunding, tax incentives, attitudes about perpetuity, late-in-life philanthropic focus - changes in all these realities also challenge core assumptions that under gird the foundation structure and institutional form.

With the centennial of the modern foundation upon us, as well as an era of wealth creation and inequality that matches that of last century's gilded age, it's time to think about the institutional forms that fit our current needs. This century's great philanthropists should aim not just to match history's great givers in their largess, but also in the creation of mechanisms and institutions that serve the future as well as their predecessors served the past.

ReCoding Good: Impact investing, philanthropy and the new social economy

2012-05-14T12:51:00.001-07:00

ReCoding Good: Part 5 | Stanford Social Innovation Review

The next ReCodeGood charrette is May 15th. We will be looking at the policy implications of a social economy in which impact investing, new enterprise forms, philanthropy and nonprofit co-exist. You can read the full blog post at Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Putting data in context

2012-04-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

(logo from NFF Financial Scan)

The Nonprofit Finance Fund has a new tool out, called Financial SCAN, that is quite exciting. It takes the deep financial analysis for which NFF is noted as a framework for gathering and making sense of nonprofit organizations' 990 data. In partnership with Guidestar, Financial SCAN pulls information from nonprofit profiles and presents it in a templated form built from NFF expertise.

A user gets the best of aggregated web data - you can search for any nonprofit - and the expertise of financial experts who've been working with nonprofits for decades. I hope this will be the end of "one size fits all" measures, such as the overhead ratio, that were easy to generate from aggregated data but almost meaningless in real life. Financial SCAN takes a broad slice of data and puts it in context so you can understand it.

Here's the video introduction to Financial SCAN:

I've already thought of several uses for Financial SCAN. Obviously, nonprofits can use it to understand their own information more completely - it's an inexpensive way to get NFF's wisdom about their own finances, something a lot of organizations can use. It will be useful to foundations and donors in their due diligence process, especially if they use the reports as a jumping off point for discussion with potential grantees. You can order up comparables - so you can compare arts organizations, you can look at an organization's finances over time, and you can cluster by geography so place-based grantmakers (I'm looking at you, community foundations) can get useful snapshots of key partner organizations.

Financial SCAN can be used as a one-off, as a regular part of due diligence, as a capacity building tool, for regional or issue-based planning (Mash these data with a CEP/Monitor Institute Strategy Landscape tool to get a vital sense of the health of a sector), and to help understand organizational change over time. Nonprofit executives, donors, donor advisers, public agencies, public funders, and program officers can all benefit.

The data powering Financial Scan is organizational and financial information. The NFF screens help users understand what data means what, what financial signs to look for, and how to assess the "health" of the organization from a series of independent "vital signs." Full analysis and understanding still requires knowledge of the people involved, local context, constituent feedback, performance and outcome measures.

In our data rich world, putting data in context and making sense from it is where the fun is. It's taken us almost ten years to build a robust supply of information about nonprofits and make it available online. Keeping that data supply updated, "clean," and comparable is an ongoing task. But now that it's here it's great to see the practical iteration and innovation on top of it that makes it actually useful. This is the phase that's given us WASHFunders, strategy landscapes and now Financial SCAN. There will surely be more to come.

Governance in the 21st Century

2012-04-11T08:33:00.000-07:00

Remember the public pressure on the Komen Foundation that led the organization to change a board decision? I said back then this was a harbinger of a new expression for public accountability that foundations need to understand. It is an early edge of a new kind of governance capacity for which most foundations (and most nonprofits) are not prepared. If you think it's about a social media strategy, you're wrong.

The Gates Foundation is experiencing this right now. The Foundation provided grant funds to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC works on many policy issues. In the wake of the killing of Trayvon Martin ALEC's support for "stand your ground" laws has drawn outrage and calls for boycotts from many directions, including from a group called the The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC). The Gates Foundation has said it will continue to meet its current grant obligations to ALEC (which run over another 17 months) but won't make further grants.

Put aside what you think of Komen, Gates, ALEC, or PCCC for a moment. This is not about any of these organizations per se. It is about public pressure, organized and otherwise, on nonprofits and foundations, about their decision making. It is about making decisions that will be challenged, and striking the right balance between legitimate board governance and respecting people's right to agree or disagree with you.

The kind of organizing that led Komen to change its decision and that is now calling for change from Gates is easier than ever. It can be turned on in an instant and reach unprecedented scale at unprecedented pace. Boards of directors of nonprofits and foundations need to know this, they need to expect it, and they need to engage with both critics and supporters. They need, in other words, to govern in a new landscape in which each and every decision they make may be the one that transforms supporters into critics (see Komen) or turns educational policy grants into part of national outrage about gun laws and racial justice (see ALEC).

Is this about a social media policy? I don't think so. Is it about governance, engagement, conversation, accountability, structural consistency, clarity of mission, and a willingness to remain civil while participating in difficult areas of work riven with disagreement? Yes. Nonprofits are part of civil society which thrives only when it is filled with multiple points of view and diverse approaches to problem solving. The "public" will not agree with every decision a foundation or nonprofit makes and they have a right to express that disagreement. Foundations and nonprofits have a right (and a responsibility) to make their decisions and expect a public response to them.

What we need civil society organizations to do is discuss, civilly, their points of view, their decisions, and their goals. And to structure themselves to be able to do so. This requires thinking about the constitution and skills of their staffs, boards, and advisors, the way they provide access to their key decision makers, and the ways they engage with critics and supporters in the real context in which those things will happen, not in some nostalgic early 20th century institutionally-bound model.

Business has already learned that there is simply too much information for one organization to hold it all. As Bill Joy has said, "the smartest people are always going to work for someone else." The MIT Media Lab has an interesting chart to show the relationship between information and organizations.The point of these ideas is to encourage businesses to build networks that will be better able to manage information and generate new ideas. But the power of networks and permeable organizations applies not just to generating new ideas. In the case of nonprofits and foundations, generating ideas with the public, communicating ideas and theories and strategies with the public, and civilly debating with the public - especially the public that disagrees with you - is going to be a critical attribute in the future. See this article (pp 14- 15) from Darin McKeever of Gates Foundation on "embracing the scrutiny of the crowds."

This may involve new kinds of constituent representation on boards. It could involve an ongoing advisory board role or meaningful, regular discussion of issues with stakeholders. There are many forms and tactics that institutions can try to be more conversational. But first, they need to recognize that the days of "broadcast" and "isolation" are over and structure themselves accordingly. What is at stake is not individual grant decisions, but public trust in and the legitimacy of these organizations as a whole.

ReCoding Good - Are Nonprofits People, Too?

2012-04-06T14:34:00.004-07:00

Stanford Social Innovation Review just posted the latest in our series of #Recodegood updates. Here is the synthesis of the conversation on March 20 about Citizens United, political giving, and the nonprofit sector. The SSIR post has links to the previous updates as well.

The conversation also catalyzed thinking about data - here is that post.

There are several presentations and materials linked off the article. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Data and ...

2012-04-03T13:59:00.002-07:00

On March 20 a group of researchers, policy makers, data experts, and nonprofit policy experts met to talk about Citizens United and the Future of the Social Sector. This was one of the #ReCoding Good charrettes I'm organizing as part of the Stanford Philanthropy, Policy and Technology Project - and a full synthesis of the meeting will soon be available on SSIR.

In the meantime, I wanted to highlight a few themes from that meeting that are very much on my mind.

1) Data and stories

We were honored to be joined by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker at the March 20 event, along with Dan Newman of Maplight and Lee Drutman of The Sunlight Foundation. Mayer is an investigative reporter, whose stories on the Koch brothers and Art Pope have been critical in helping Americans see the emerging intersections between politics and nonprofit organizations. Maplight is a data nonprofit - it collects, curates and shares data on money and politics. The Sunlight Foundation focuses on government transparency and uses a lot of data and data visualization to show patterns and connections.

The journalist and the data wonks agree - they need each other. Stories need data, data need stories. For example, check out the story on money and politics that ran on This American Life, informed by data from Sunlight Foundation. There was further reporting on the story, "Take the Money and Run for Congress" on NPR's Planet Money podcast.

You can listen to the episode here, see the charts and read Planet Money's report here, and check out the analysis Sunlight's Lee Drutman conducted for these stories here.

Let's get past the false dichotomy between data and stories and get on with making change happen. Some new finds that I'm playing with and learning about that fit into this intersection:

Sparkwi.se- drag and drop dashboards to mix web data with video and other context. Find the stories in your data. This system is so easy to use that if you don't use it, you really just don't want to.
PopTech's World ReBalancing App - go ahead, play with it. From @poptech and @datanoborders
Civic Data Challenge - a new challenge to take municipal data and make it useful. Brought to you by National Conference on Citizenship, Knight Foundation and others.
Catalyze4Change - 48 hours to generate idea for ways out of poverty (from Rockefeller Foundation and Institute For the Future)

The point of all this? It's getting ever easier to use and make sense of data. This is great because it means we can get to the next step, using the data to inform decisions, find new opportunities, think differently about change, and work with new partners. The point all along has been not about tech and not about data but about making change happen. We're getting there.

2) Data and a different kind of transparency

Another big point in the Citizens United discussion was the role of transparency. When it comes to money and politics, a lot of the discussion has been (and will continue to be) about donor disclosure. My summary at SSIR will have more to say about this. For our purpose here, however, I want to think about this a little bit differently.

Back in the early days of the web, folks often asked "What do I need a website for?" Nowadays, people think "If I can't find it on a search engine, it doesn't exist." Lots of nonprofits (not so many foundations, fewer than 30%) have since built websites because they want to be found. They need to be findable to be relevant.

This same dynamic is going to work on philanthropic data. More and more governments and businesses are finding ways to use their data, publicly, to inform decisions. Check out what the UN is up to with its Global Pulse initiative. More and more people are mashing up multiple data sets - or using apps that do the mashing for them - in order to think about how the world works.

As this unfolds, nonprofits and foundations (which have a lot of data) are at risk of being irrelevant because of their opaqueness - if their data isn't findable, it isn't usable. If the data aren't visible, they can't be part of new solutions.

(Photo from UN Global Pulse)

And if nonprofits and foundations aren't part of new solutions? Well...I'll leave that to you. Here's what I had to say about this last year at Personal Democracy Forum. Here's what Fast Company said about the UN Global Pulse initiative and "data philanthropy."

I'll be talking more about this (5 whole minutes more, that is) at an Ignite Session at the Council on Foundations conference on May 1st. Hopefully, they'll share it.

3) Data and change

Digital public goods is the next topic for our #ReCoding Good charrettes. Is there such a thing? Is the digital economy - and the changes it makes to funding, creation and distribution - fundamentally shifting the dynamics of using private resources for public good? I think this is true though I don't yet know the full scope or scale of it. Efforts at data philanthropy and data commons, the digital rights work of organizations such as Creative Commons, Media Democracy Fund and Electronic Frontiers Foundation are pointing toward a new set of digital goods, digital associational relationships, and digital assets. We'll be talking about this on April 19 - with SSIR blog posts before and after as always. Please join us.

The most transparent grantmaker

2012-03-22T09:57:00.001-07:00

Twitter made my day this morning when I received this:

Check out David's blog post for what he's up to - here's a short list of what he's aiming to post

"I commit to publishing a blog post within 15 days of the signing of a grant agreement that I have facilitated between Omidyar Network and a partner organization. The blog post will contain the following information:

Amount of grant

Date that grant agreement was signed

Name and link to receiving institution and other organizations involved in the project

Name and link to co-funders

Summary of grant

Contextual analysis of related issues

Metrics to gauge the impact of the grant

Date and manner that the relevant project will be evaluated"

He goes on to note that he'll be using the IATI schema and will get to the XML version of this information soon.

I jumped at this news and hope to speak with David next week to learn more. In the meantime, we have a responsibility to help David's efforts succeed. Let's use his effort to push further on our own transparency initiatives. It's a great opportunity for Glasspockets to chime in, for other grantmakers to think about their information sharing and for the rest of us to use the information that does get provided. It's great that one grantmaker has committed to put this information out there - but transparency improves practice only when the information is used. We need others to follow David. Perhaps you'd like to surpass him, you're not going to let him get away with this "throw down challenge" as most transparent, are you?!

We need activists and grantees to respond, request, use the info; we need sites that can mash grantmaker data with public information, political giving, results data, other financial flows, etc. We do need to focus, as Phil Buchanan of CEP notes, on "the transparency that matters." As important as what we share is why we share it and what we do with it. In other words, transparency is part of a series of behavior, actor and organizational changes (it's part of institutional conversations) not just "another thing to do."

We need to see the sharing of the info as the first step in a conversation that aims toward better results.

Thanks, David, for your efforts. Everyone else, how will you use the information and join the conversation - what will you do to be more transparent?

Nonprofits as the bad guys

2012-03-20T09:48:00.002-07:00

Today at Stanford we're holding our #ReCodeGood charrette on Citizens United: Are Nonprofits People, Too? This post from Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, couldn't have been more timely. It raises several issues about transparency, trust, disclosure, advocacy, and anonymity. The question Roll Call asks, which we'll be grappling with is:

“I think there is a lot of concern in the nonprofit community about this,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, an Indiana University professor who studies nonprofits. “The problem is: What do you do about it? It’s hard to see a solution that’s workable.”

We'll be looking for workable solutions. We're particularly honored to be joined by Rick Hasen, of UC Irvine's law school, who posted his materials on his Election Law blog, along with Dan Newman of Maplight.org, which uses data and visualizations to reveal relationships between money and politics, colleagues from the Sunlight Foundation, Independent Sector, several local foundations and invited participation from the California Attorney General's Office and the Fair Political Practices Commission. Finally, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker is joining us - her articles State for Sale and Covert Operations are critical reads on this topic.

Listeners to NPR's Morning Edition may have heard Peter Overby's first in a series on the big donors to SuperPACS in this Presidential election. Overby explains why the disclosure rules on 501 c (4)s - which are not required to disclose their donors but do report their expenditures - obscure just how much more money might actually be flowing from these and other individuals through social welfare nonprofits. NPR also has an interactive on other "SuperPAC Superdonors."

REVISED AGAIN: Technology and future of social sector

2012-03-19T08:30:00.000-07:00

What follows is a small collection of recent interviews, public discussions on technology and good.

(my photo, The Creators Project)

1) "The Joy of e-Giving," @MattBish in The Economist on Davos panel with Chelsea Clinton, Sean Parker, Eric Schmidt, Yuri Milner, and Alec Ross. Best part is suggestion from Tim Berners-Lee for

"...a radical approach to improving the effectiveness of philanthropy through extreme charity: it should become a routine activity, he suggested, that anyone receiving a donation should publish in cyberspace exactly what they do with it, all the way along the line until the money reaches its ultimate charitable destination."

Platforms like Peer Water Exchange and FLOW are making this happen.

2) A review of a #SXSW session on "The Benevolent Internet"

3) Here is an interview with me in Crain's Chicago Business on future of nonprofits and technology.

4) Darin McKeever from @gatesfoundation on the Internet gets Charitable (Thanks Victoria Vrana)

5) And because The Grants Managers Network conference is happening now, let me point you back to my plea for Open Data from last year's Personal Democracy Forum - (VIDEO) -

Since that speech last June, colleagues at DataWithoutBorders have held several amazing datadives and helped #NPOs across the country put their data to work. We're starting to see how powerful this behavior can be when put into action.

6) Jake Porway of Data Without Borders is in San Francisco tonight for a talk at CodeForAmerica Big Data for Public Good. These are the front end events that we'll look back on and say "that was the moment" when community organizations really started using data as the new platform for change. I can't make it to tonight's CfA event, unfortunately; but you should get there if you can. Yesterday, my family and I had a great chance to hike and talk data, video tagging, the future of news collection, R & D on community data, etc. etc. with Jake.

(Photo by @pbftwit)

Then we went to The Creators Project - an amazing art + tech installation at Fort Mason. This stuff will blow your mind - especially examples of extracting "closed captioning" from video broadcasts to make the video searchable. Which is technologically cool. And there's beautiful art as well:

(my photo, creators project)

That yellow thing is a data-driven, android phone-enabled pinball on a folded metal surface, structured as a multiplayer game. But, I'm sure you knew that.

Institutions as conversations

2012-03-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

Why does corporate philanthropy usually get slotted into the marketing budget/ vision of the company? In this age of conversation and co-production, community engagement/community affairs/community philanthropy seems to me to be a ripe R & D activity. Get out into communities or issues, see what they need, see if you can be useful. It's like social media - a conversation, not a broadcast.

A word from me, my sponsor: Thanks for reading this blog. Thanks for buying the Blueprint - consider it a "Thank you" for a $10 purchase in support of the blog. (It's pledge time in NPR land, why not here?) You can also get the "blog in a box," "a ready to go retreat" and everything you need to talk about the future of the social economy in this toolkit (from me and the Council of Michigan Foundations).

(Regularly scheduled programming)
I listened, attentively, to the story "autopsy" on This American Life. I think they set a new (high) standard for handling the mistakes we all make and are increasingly making in public. After watching, listening and talking about the Invisible Children video and how it compared to the Komen events of a few weeks ago, I realized two things:

The two-way, conversational, visible and video-able nature of our media lives - in which everything is both instant and archived - is part of how our future institutions will need to look. These are attributes of 21st organizations, not just social media efforts.
We engage in words, video, and photos - which broadens the conversations far beyond those who are comfortable writing. Commenting and conversing in video and photos - this is where digital media are taking us. Pinterest is one recent example of this - the boards are conversations in photo form. I post a photo, you respond with a photo, others chime in with photos of interest to them. This development further expands the conversation - not everyone is going to write down their thoughts, but we're all carrying video cameras in our pockets and will get more and more comfortable with recording and sharing our responses, ideas, conversations.

I had a great time in Dallas with the local chapter of Social Venture Partners and the Dallas Foundation. Conversations in the hallways made me realize how much I've been thinking about - and learning from others - about this question of 21st century institutions. I'm reminded of a story that Neil Degrasse Tyson tells in one of his lectures. It starts with a picture taken of the Cydonia region of Mars (below).

(Photo from Wikipedia)

When this photo was first shown to us earthlings, according to Degrasse Tyson, many people took it as proof of life on the red planet. Really, those are just rocks. The photos that scientists used to locate water on Mars show a barren landscape (no "faces"). His point is this - if you go looking for life on a distant planet and think that it's going to look like you, you're not going to find it.

My point - if we go looking for the institutions of the 21st century, and think they're going to look like those from the past, we're not going to find them. So I've started thinking instead about the attributes that viable organizations will have, given our expectations and technologies. A starting list includes:

Permeable and transparent or very clear on why they're not.
Generative - they have to do more than make one thing happen, they have to be able to set the conditions for the next thing to happen.
Longer-term time horizon than one-off networks, but shorter-term than in the past (e.g. perpetuity).
Public governance will change to expect and include outsiders (stakeholders?) in viable ways. Corporate public governance may go beyond shareholder proxies and public nonprofit governance will go beyond self-appointing boards of directors.

Finally, I've been thinking about how we all need to "Act like an Artist." Artists have been getting the work done - their art - in commercial, nonprofit, individual and networked ways since the dawn of time. We need to learn from them because their social economy is now all of ours.

Are Nonprofits People, Too?

2012-03-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

(Cross posted on Stanford Social Innovation Review. See also #ReCoding Good Citizens United Charrette)

Citizens United and the future of the social sector

Presidential primary season has put the practical effects of the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. the FEC on painful display. By removing contribution limits, the decision has opened the floodgates to unprecedented cash flow for elections. It has also given birth to new organizational forms, as PACS morphed into SuperPACS, a new entrant into the already crowded campaign finance landscape of 501 c 4s, PACS, 527s, campaign offices and party coffers. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, the early March numbers show a 234% increase in spending so far in the 2012 election compared to the same point in the 2008 cycle. Most surprisingly, it has positioned nonprofit organizations, specifically 501 (c) 4 and (c) 6 social welfare organizations, at the center of the money flow between donors and the offices their candidates seek.

There is a great deal of discussion about what Citizens United means for elections, campaign finance, and democracy. But what does it mean for the nonprofit sector? This will be the topic of our second #ReCodeGood charrette, coming up on March 20 at Stanford.

We are asking questions about the many possible ways the new rules for political giving might shape the nonprofit, charitable landscape. These include:

· Will the ability to make unlimited contributions to elections change donor behavior? Will more donors seek to achieve certain social outcomes by influencing elections through (c) 4 or (c) 6 nonprofits? Will they draw against their “charitable” budgets to make these contributions?

· How will the constant drumbeat of media attention to these political nonprofits affect public opinion of and trust in other nonprofit organizations?

· How will calls for greater scrutiny of politically engaged nonprofits affect the oversight of others?

· Will the new landscape of donor behavior entice more charitable nonprofits – 501 (c) 3 organizations to start or partner with election-engaged social welfare nonprofits – 501 (c) 4 and (c) 6’s?

· How will demands for donor disclosure in political setting change age-old practice of charitable anonymity?

· How will we know any of the answers to the above, given the current state of nonprofit and election disclosure rules?

Since January of this year, at least four states - Montana, Hawaii, New Mexico and Vermont - have taken steps to counter the effects of the Citizens United decision. In Montana, a hundred year-old statute limiting corporate spending in elections, the Corrupt Practices Act, was upheld by the State Supreme Court, setting up a potential test case for Citizens United. The legislatures of Hawaii and New Mexico passed calls for a Constitutional Amendment to undo the decision and states across the country have revisited their existing rules on corporate spending and disclosure since January 2010. In Vermont, citizens in 58 of 60 town meetings held on “Town Hall Day” approved non-binding resolutions to undo “corporate personhood.”

While enormous spending gets all the attention, the roles of nonprofits and funders in both bringing the cases that resulted in Citizens United and responding to the current reality on the ground has warranted much less discussion. The appellant in the case, Citizens United, is a 501 (c) 4 nonprofit with an associated 501 (c) 3, the Citizens United Foundation. Nonprofit organizations and their funders have played a long role in advancing the legal strategy as well as those arguments being used to counter it. Corporate shareholders can (and are) seeking disclosure of political expenditures, however, there is no analogous process for nonprofit expenditures, as these organizations have no shareholders.

Participants at the March 20^th charrette will include nonprofit lawyers, legal scholars, experts in political transparency, experts on nonprofit policy, and our special guest, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. On March 22, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society is pleased to host Jane Mayer in a public conversation with #ReCodeGood’s Rob Reich. Join us on campus at the Stanford Law School, Room 290 – register here.

Navigating the New Social Economy

2012-03-09T07:13:00.000-08:00

Toolkit

I'm thrilled to announce that Blueprint 2012 is now a customizable toolkit for use by foundations, nonprofits, or any group seeking to improve their community. Navigating the New Social Economy: Making Sense of Philanthropy's Future presents practical information on the implications of three key issues for our sector - the new social economy, the impact of Citizens United on the social sector, and the potential of big data as a public good. You get the content you need on these three issues as well as the materials to lead strategy discussions about your work in this context.

The Council of Michigan Foundations made this possible - and their staff and members (independent, corporate, and community foundations) have vetted and beta-tested the tools.

The toolkit includes a customizable slide presentation that you can fit to your setting (board meetings, staff retreat, community workshops - you name it.) The slides come with an embedded script as well as a slide-by-slide facilitator's guide. There are suggested discussion questions to use with your colleagues. You also get digital copies of Blueprint 2011 and Blueprint 2012 and an introductory video of me kicking the whole thing off. The toolkit costs $100 and are available formatted specifically for private foundations, community foundations, nonprofits, or associations. It's a one-stop "board retreat in a box" - content, facilitation, and background materials included.

Purchase yours here.

Thinking about the future in a room full of history

2012-02-19T01:27:00.000-08:00

It's not often I that I get to walk in Winston Churchill's footsteps. This past weekend I had a chance to think about the future of philanthropy with three dozen philanthropists, advisers, scholars, and others at The Ditchley Foundation. The Foundation is housed a manor house in Oxfordshire where Churchill often stayed during World War II, on the premise that his own lodgings were likely bombing targets. I'm not sure if this concern is on the mind of the Ditchley lion (photo above) but he is the first such guardian I've ever seen who seems to be scanning the skies.

In the midst of Downton Abbey madness it was extra fun to "walk the manor paths." We did do some work - here are my reflections.

1. Fascinating discussion about the potential of philanthropy in 21st century to not be a mere byproduct of capitalism but be a positive force of influence on the shape of capitalism. Global income inequality may trigger major changes to capitalism, de-legitimization of philanthropy...

2. In a 21st C global digital world we will see real philanthropy of ideas. Digital economy of ideas moves and acts very differently than "analog economy." This makes open access issues, public research, subsidized research issues very prominent. Europe, UK and USA (and elsewhere?) writing laws about this now - philanthropy needs to be involved.

3. What info tech enables that philanthropy as we've known it definitely needs:

networks and syndicates
lower cost of capital
new sources of data, especially on long tail giving (these are often privately owned by cell carriers and transaction vendors - how do we deal with this?)
feedback direct from citizens - ways to connect donors directly to people in field without intermediating institutions; ways that do-ers also become donors, reshaping NGOs as we've known them
new forms of accountability and governance

4. New policy domains - 20th century philanthropy defined (in US) by trust and tax law. In 21st C will it be defined by (can we shape it by):

intellectual property
telecommunications laws
data ownership
privacy policies
information access rules
securities and exchange
currency laws
corporation codes
multilaterals?

5. When we talk about technology and philanthropy in 2012 we still focus on internet technologies. I think the future is likely to be more shaped by nanotechnology, biotechnology, genomics (the philanthropy of the body - human tissue - is an interesting place to look for this future).

Buzzwords 2012.1 and 2012.2 Data and Flash Mob Philanthropy

2012-02-17T00:00:00.000-08:00

February already? Time to get buzzwords 2012.1 and 2 up and out.

Buzzword 2012.1 - Data

Data are everywhere. And talk about data - big, open, mined, as an asset, as something to protect - is going to be everywhere in 2012. Here's the New York Times on Big Data. Here are five trends that will shape data. Here is an example of Big Data for Good. You can even get a Big Data t-shirt (HT @tkb)

Here is an excerpt from my Blueprint 2012 on data - which I focused on as the 3rd of 3 big shifts shaping the social sector:

"We are only at the beginning of learning how to use data well for social purposes. Following are some examples of ways data are being used by the social economy.

For organizing. [read more]

As avenues for news.

To improve nonprofit work.

In measurement and evaluation.

For philanthropic reporting.

There is another level at which data matter in the social economy. More than just an instrument of change, some data are also public goods. Consider all of the data collected over the years by government agencies – anonymous, massive datasets on our collective health, wealth, education, demographic makeup, and so on. Public access to these public data sets is driving major policy changes and major public technology investments. But what about the public value of a privately held dataset? If online searches can be aggregated and analyzed in such a way as to predict a pandemic or provide ground level reporting on a terrorist attack is the data a public resource or a private company asset?

Many people who use social networks or otherwise post information online have asked questions such as: who owns the information, what can they do with it, and how do I keep something private? We confront these questions frequently with companies like Facebook or LinkedIn and they also pertain to the data held by the Department of Motor Vehicles, tax authorities, and public health departments. One place where these questions are already coming to the fore is in medical research. It is clear that large data sets of information about individuals are very helpful to researchers, holding the key, for example, to medical breakthroughs. But the information within those data sets connects back to real people. Balancing personal privacy with the public good that can be generated from aggregated information will be a defining legal and social question in the next decades.

The current legal structures that define charitable activities or that privilege certain public goods with tax exemptions say nothing about data. They say nothing about any public good created digitally – such as open source software used for emergency response. They also say nothing about access to these resources. Is access to the digital world a right for all citizens or a privilege for those who can pay? There are many organizations of all kinds – political, commercial, and charitable – working on these issues. However, enterprises in the social sector have yet to recognize the stake they have in these questions and in the rules that will define how data assets are valued as public goods. And the stake is huge."

(You can buy the Blueprint 2012 here. Get a new toolkit that includes both Blueprint 2011 and Blueprint 2012, a ready-to-go slide deck presentation, video, and facilitator's Guide from the Council of Michigan Foundations.)

This headline from Fast Company, Why Big Data won't Make You Smart, Pretty or Rich, leads to an article worth reading.

Buzzword 2012.2 - Flash Mob Philanthropy

We will be organizing our own good deeds in 2012. Not just on behalf of organizations or their issues but without organizations. On behalf of causes we care about. Count on it. Crowdsourced organizing, funding and volunteering, on the fly. That's what I call Flash Mob Philanthropy.

ReCoding Good - Part Two

2012-02-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

We published a synthesis and reflection on our ReCoding Good Charrette, part of the Project on Philanthropy, Policy and Technology, on SSIR. Similar pieces will be published before and after each charrette.

This reflection comes from the charrette on the sharing economy that we held on January 24. Part one is here (prior to event), part two is here (post event). All charrette materials are here (this link will be changing over to the PACS website).

Upcoming charrette topics are:

"Are nonprofits people, too? Citizens United and the Social Sector."
Do you live in a State in the US that has already had a primary or caucus? Did you turn on your television in the weeks leading up to election day? No doubt you were bombarded with political ads - mostly negative. These are the most visible results of the Citizens United decision from 2010 - seemingly endless campaign ads run by "independent" groups. Less visible are the effects the decision is having on the shape, culture, expectations, and capacities of the nonprofit sector as a whole. That's where we'll pick up the story.

"Digital Public Goods"
Big data are being discussed everywhere. Are some data part of the public good? How are the tools for generating, making, mixing and using data for public good reflected in our policies about public good? Check out this video for a sense of how data are being used for public good - we'll be asking questions about the policy implications of these abilities:

"Impact Investing"
Impact investing is poised to draw in significant new dollars to fund social and environmental efforts. It also brings with it the responsibilities of markets for reporting requirements, financial disclosure, listing information, and new monitors and overseers. How will these policies, regulators, responsibilities and expectations fit into existing frames for nonprofits and philanthropy? Where are there potential conflicts? How will the new social economy, which includes philanthropy, impact investing, and tech driven options for using private resources for public good make sense of all these different domains?

You can sign up to receive our project materials here.

#takebackthepink - reflection roundup

2012-02-14T10:55:00.001-08:00

I wanted to put links to five reflection blogs on #takebackthepink all in one place. Here they are, linked below. I've added a brief "reflection reflection."

http://amysampleward.org/2012/02/14/observations-and-reflections-on-takebackthepink/

http://www.bethkanter.org/aar/

http://www.allisonfine.com/2012/02/13/take-back-the-pink-lessons-learned/

http://jewpoint0.org/2012/02/free-agents-insights-from-takebackthepink/

http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-calls-for-transparency.html

Reflection reflection - five blog posts, five very different takes on the same shared efforts. Amy Sample Ward looks at it all from community organizing perspective. Beth as an opportunity to constantly measure and learn. Allison captures the essence of the "people power" that makes something like this happen. Lisa looks at the many types of free agents. Stephanie keeps going with the graphics and the facebook presence. And I wonked out on accountability and governance questions.

Which says to me that everyone involved had their own reasons for taking part. We shared some things and not others. We acted on the common concern but brought lots of other interests to it and took away several different lessons. I can only assume this is true for the thousands of others who participated in some way.

I'm also struck by the number of different media tools we used - google docs, email, blogs, twitter, facebook, pinterest, google+, various analytic toolsets, news reporters. Oh, yeah, we also watched a football game on television (at least, I watched it on TV; others probably streamed it through their eyeglasses or something.)

The reflection document is here. It includes several other media posts and some social media metrics and graphics.

Tell your story!

2012-02-14T02:30:00.000-08:00

In the past I've given out a number of "person's choice" awards for digital data use and storytelling. Humanity United won one for their performance report and the Knight Foundation for a slide presentation of evaluation findings. As the person's choice they reflect the wisdom and opinions of, well, me, a single person. And the prize for winning? Well, I name you on this blog. Not exactly bankable.

I'm thrilled to tell you that the good people (as in more than one person) at TechSoup are giving out real awards with actual prizes (iPads, FLIP video cameras, software, Flickr Pro accounts) in their TechSoup Digital Storytelling Challenge (#TSDIGS). So, now is your chance, get out and tell that story.

How to get involved:

Submit a one-minute video or five-photo slideshow to win prizes
Register for TechSoup's upcoming free webinar on post-production (2/16) with David J. Neff of Lights. Camera. Help.
Join in a tweet chat (2/14) about social sharing to learn how to get your video in front of the eyeballs that matter most to your org
Tell everyone you know to participate: www.tsdigs.org
Subscribe to the Google group to stay up to date on all of it!

Deadline is February 29, 2012.

The challenge is open to all social benefit organizations regardless of 501(c)(3) status or location.

Heck, these folks even have an awards ceremony...As they say where I'm from, "Ya gotta be in it to win it!"

Creating 21st C Governance Models - #Takebackthepink

2012-02-13T08:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (Sunday) I attended a women's basketball game at Stanford (The Cardinal beat UCLA 82-59). Maples Pavilion, home to Stanford basketball is usually a sea of cardinal red. Yesterday, it was a sea of pink.

Pink Zone Day to support breast cancer awareness - Wear Pink!

In honor of the Stanford Cancer Center, the team's many faithful were wearing pink t-shirts, sweatshirts, even pink baby carriers. The Ogwumike sisters (Stanford star players) both sported pink headbands. Several of the UCLA players work pink sneakers. As soon as my son and I entered the arena we knew three things - basketball, women, and cancer.

That's how powerful a symbol pink has become. The color - in mass quantities - registers on the brain as a symbol of cancer. Not as the symbol of a specific organization, but as a symbol of a disease, those who've succumb to it, and its many survivors and memories.

This was enormously powerful to me because of the events of two weeks prior. Here's a summary of what happened in the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. The text below was jointly written by Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Stephanie Rudat, Amy Sample Ward, Lisa Colton, and me. Similar versions with their own additional commentary can be found on allisonfine.com and bethkanter.org.

The document below is our attempt to do a rapid reflection on a set of activities. Posting it here and on Allison's blog and elsewhere is our way of sharing what we learned and of inviting you in to the conversation.

From my own perspective, these events indicate an important new expectation of transparency for nonprofits and foundations. Just as Bank of America, Verizon, the legislative sponsors of SOPA and PIPA, and the users of the Path sharing network have discovered, your customers, your supporters, your voters and people moved by a cause are paying attention. They care about the issue and will let you know when they support you and when they disagree with you. This isn't a "maybe," this is the way it is - as the story linked above on SOPA/PIPA calls it, "It's a first draft of the future."

Nonprofits and foundations are used to being held accountable by their boards of directors. That governance structure is our 20th century answer to "how to hold independent, tax exempt organizations accountable to the public." It is not a 21st century solution. This is not simply a matter for crisis communications. It's even more than the free agent/fortress model that Beth and Allison write about in The Networked Nonprofit.

Today's tools and expectations would not lead us to create the kinds of governance models that we built a century ago. It's not enough to think about adapting old models to new tools, although that certainly needs to happen. We are building new models. Just as garage inventors are out there creating new technologies they are also out there creating the organizations, governance, accountability, transparency and privacy models that fit our current capacities. These are the models that will survive the next 100 years.

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Reflections on Take Back the Pink Campaign

"We're not good at thinking fast. We are good at feeling fast." - Clay Shirky

This reflection document is our group effort to capture and think about a flurry of social media activity that we organized last week. It includes a chronology of what happened, when, immediate results of our efforts, and lessons learned. We hope others will add to the document and share their own reflections as well.

The Catalyst: The Susan G. Komen Foundation Will Not Fund Planned Parenthood’s Breast Health Screenings Beyond this Year.

On Tuesday, January 31, 2012, the AP reported that the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s board had decided to stop providing grants to Planned Parenthood affiliates to support breast health efforts. As word began circulating on social media channels like Facebook of Komen’s decision, Planned Parenthood posted, and emailed out to their supporters, a petition created by a supporter.

Komen’s decision would discontinue financing for nineteen of Planned Parenthood’s eighty-three affiliates, which received nearly $700,000 from the Komen Foundation in 2011 and have been receiving similar grants since at least 2005. As reported by The New York Times here, the decision was political: the board created a policy of not funding organizations under government investigation as a strategy for not funding Planned Parenthood.

The announcement angered a large number of people who had supported Komen by walking, running and donating for decades. The Komen pink ribbon, which the organization has fiercely and litigiously protected over the years, has dominated the breast cancer research landscape for years and overshadowed many other effective, transparent organizations in the breast cancer arena. The deep and fundamental sense of betrayal on the part of Komen supporters, many of whom are also Planned Parenthood supporters, fed an outpouring of anger and acrimony aimed at Komen by email, on Facebook and Twitter.

As Kivi Leroux Miller reported on her blog, the outpouring of anger picked up steam as Komen was noticably absent from the social media conversations.

See this blog post re: the reaction
http://www.journalism.org/commentary_backgrounder/On+Twitter+Still+Tough+Going+for+Komen?src=prc-twitter

How did we organize for a collective action in a fluid situation?

Petitions and expressions of outrage felt good, but didn’t seem like enough tangible action to make it clear to Komen that their action was outrageous. Allison Fine started an open conversation on Facebook to discuss this. Out of that conversation came the idea for an online fundraising effort to support Planned Parenthood using Causes on Facebook called, “Komen Kan Kiss My Mammogram.” She circulated the link by email and on Facebook.

On that same Facebook thread, Deanna Zandt reported creating a Tumblr blog called Planned Parenthood Saved Me. The sites enables people to tell their personal stories of how their lives were improved or saved because of the health screenings services at Planned Parenthood. Here is one story from the blog:

Later that day, Beth Kanter created a Pinterest website with the same name capturing the growing number of images expressing anger and displeasure at Komen and posted on her blog about the anti-Komen activities over the previous 24 hours.

From Beth’s link on her blog to the Causes fundraiser, there were 3,800 click thrus out of 3,800 tweets with the link - pretty amazing.

Again, back to the Facebook open, thread, an interesting exchange took place between Tom Watson and Lucy Bernholz:

The conversation shifted to how to catch the attention of some the Super Bowl’s enormous audience. Based on the past few years, the combination of the largest media event of the year, the controversy around Komen, a long-time partner of the NFL, and social media (it was reported afterwards that 11.5 million tweets were sent during the game) would be fertile ground for a protest of some kind. An idea developed to capitalize on the upcoming Super Bowl and the partnership the NFL has with Komen and make a loud statement about the need to take politics out of women’s health issues on Twitter by “jumping” the Komen hashtag. We were aiming to capture just a small sliver of people paying attention to Komen on Super Sunday, self identified by their use of the Komen hashtag of #supercure, to broaden the conversation about breast cancer and women’s health beyond Komen.

And a meme was born.

Great idea! Ummm, what’s “jumping a hashtag” mean exactly? We weren’t sure, but we had three days to figure it out!

We decided that surprise would be a necessary element to the planned Sunday attack. We began an email thread to supercede the Facebook conversation. We invited the participants from Facebook to join the email conversation.

Amy Sample Ward set up a Google doc that would serve as a landing site to explain the planned jump. We would plan by email in advance of the Super Bowl. The instructions on the Google doc were:

Monitor and search on Twitter for the hashtag #supercure
Retweet that message including #supercure with #takebackthepink - it’s important to use both to get the attention of those specifically following #supercure
Add a link to the Facebook page - - https://www.facebook.com/takebackthepink or any one of the cancer fighting organizations listed on it
Join the Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/takebackthepink and add your stories (or your family's, mother's, sister’s, friends.)
Tell your friends - We're all pink!

Beth also created a wiki with more information and resources for people interested in joining the Take Back the Pink effort.

We had built up a full head of steam by Friday when Komen announced it was reversing course and would allow Planned Parenthood affiliates to apply for future grants. Our group unanimously decided to continue our plans for the hashtag jump.

As a result of Komen’s reversal, though, we had numerous conversations about shifting the focus of our efforts from an anti-Komen message to a more positive message. There are a lot of resources and organizations working to eradicate breath cancer and for breast health. We realized that the group of us cared deeply about the issue and knew there were many organizations doing good work. We wanted to take a positive tone of support for women’s health efforts and helping people understand there are lots of choices for how to be active. By highlighting a variety of organizations and movements on Facebook, we created a resource for people to keep them engaged on women’s health and ending breast cancer if they felt betrayed or discouraged.

Over the next twenty-four hours our goals evolved and our email group expanded significantly and eventually splintered. We quickly realized that it was a mistake to try to organize such a large group by email; it’s not a good vehicle for large group conversations. In addition, people added to the email list without their permission felt they were being spammed, not a good route to engagement! A better strategy would have been developing a plan of action with a small group, then reading out to people individually and pointing them to the Google doc with a clear plan and requesting their support and action. If we were going to continue to use email to invite more people to the effort, a better strategy would have been to invite folks in small batches with an invitation to opt out immediately and get them off the list the minute they ask.

On Saturday night, the group on the email thread decided that an embargo of the effort until Sunday would be counter productive, we needed to get the word out sooner to encourage people to participate on a day they may not ordinarily use for protesting and awareness raising. Saturday night, Stephanie Rudat created a Facebook page with an eye-catching and very sharable logo:

The Facebook page became a central organizing spot for aggregating resources, plus positive infographics on breast cancer in order to drive supporters to a permanent home. We didn’t have the time to organize a full-scale blogger outreach campaign, although our effort was covered by Blogher.

Late Saturday night, Lucy kicked us off with a simple tweet, “Join us tomorrow to #takebackthepink #supercure.

Immediate Results

By Monday, February 6th, the quantitative results included:

There were 1500 tweets with the hashtag #takebackthepink, with several influencers retweeting it out to their networks (see below)
While the majority of people tweeting the hashtag pointed to positive messaging around breast, several tweeters retweeted the hashtag pointing to anti-komen posts.
We have a hypothesis that Komen changed its social media plans as a result of the fury aimed at them all week online. We don’t know whether or not that’s true. From our read of the twitter feed, a larger majority of those tweeting #Supercure were also tweeting #takebackthepink.

There were many hashtags and memes created - #takebackthepink was only one. Yahoo! posted this list on which #takebackthepink does not appear http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/twitter-users-drove-furor-over-komen-planned-parenthood-160326208.html (see full graphics and stats below)

Lessons

We could not plan for an event like this, however as individuals who are unencumbered by organizational rules or policies, and that we have our own large networks of people to bring to an effort, and that we are comfortable working in a dynamic, flat, environment, we reacted very quickly and nimbly to events as they unfolded and provided avenues for action for other people angry at Komen. A core group of the organizers are fluent with a variety of social media platforms including Twitter, Pinterest (a fun opportunity to take it out for a social change spin, thought Beth!) and Facebook, plus Stephanie’s graphic design expertise. As one participant recalls, “There was an immediate sense of relatedness amongst the group conjoined by leaders. We all saw something in the uproar and possibility for ourselves and those we care about.”
#takebackthepink was a particularly resonant phrase with our group because it represented the opportunity to begin to separate Komen from the color pink. As Lucy would tweet later, “Pink is a color not an org.” A fundamental part of our effort was to reestablish the primacy of women’s health over the branding concerns of a single organization. We believe we created an opportunity for a large number of people to participate in this process, and the momentum to continue the discussion moving forward.
There were two moments of tension during the week between a centralized approach and a network approach. The first time, the effort split in two; with one group focused on fundraising and another on advocacy and awareness. The second, a faction chose to opt out of the Super Bowl effort. Both times it was brought up that it was no longer about recouping money to PP (as that was already achieved in the first 48 hours) but was about redirecting people’s emotional responses, keeping people connected to causes and organizations even if they weren’t Komen, and demonstrating the importance of knowing what the orgs do that you support.
There was a flow of people in and out of the effort depending on their interest and availability. A public thread rather than the private email thread would have been more in keeping with our interest in and value of transparency. We chose the email vehicle believing that the element of surprise would be important to our efforts. It turned out not to be the case.
Finding the messaging middle ground in a fast changing environment was very challenging. Take Back the Pink was seen by some as Komen bashing and by others as “too nice.” We did our best to find a positive place for Super Bowl Sunday: there are a lot of organizations and way to support breast health, here are options in addition to Komen. It was harder to communicate than, “Screw Komen, fund Planned Parenthood” and it’s unclear how successful we were in explaining the shift and making the message clear.
We could have done a better job of looking for other hashtags in real-time and piggy-backed on them in order to weave together different conversations.
We developed and shone a spotlight on nonprofits and transparency, an unusual element to a discussion of pro-choice and women’s health issues.
Defining success in a very fluid situation was also very challenging. If fifty people retweeted with our hashtag was that success? Five hundred people? Five thousand people? An interesting model to use for comparison is Occupy Wall Street. Rather than using numeric outputs as goals, perhaps our effort, simply being and spreading, was successful. We are still wrestling with this question, although perhaps one answer is that if a single person learned about a new resource or organization that was success. Having the single largest media event of the year on the immediate horizon made for a great leverage point.
It would have been great to have advocacy organizations sign on as participants and partners in this event, however, when we did bump up against organizations they were unable to move fast enough with their approval processes to fully participate. This will continue to hamper the ability of organizations to work with “free agents” like us who need to meet an opportunity like this with speed, agility and a lack of concern for traditional message controls. Perhaps organizations can more fully participate in the next phase of development of the Facebook page.
This group is open to continuing the Facebook page and the conversation about general breast health and the array of organizations and resources available to women. Clearly, there is a void in the digital space for being a resource to those who want to learn, contribute, volunteer, receive services but don’t know of all of the options or how to vet. Our capacity is stretched, though, we all participated in this effort as volunteers.

Additional Stories/Resources

BlogHer:
http://www.blogher.com/will-super-bowl-twitter-campaign-help-women-takebackthepink

Working Wikily (and Schusterman Foundation cross post)
http://workingwikily.net/?p=1851
http://www.schusterman.org/blog/clsff/network-lessons-from-the-pink-ribbon-rebellion#more-7109

Yahoo’s list of hashtags
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/twitter-users-drove-furor-over-komen-planned-parenthood-160326208.htm

The Twitter User Who Drove the Furor Over Komen and Planned Parenthood
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/signal/twitter-users-drove-furor-over-komen-planned-parenthood-160326208.html

Super Breast Sunday: TakeBackThePINK
http://pinterest.com/kanter/super-breast-sunday-takebackthepink/

#TakeBackthePink - @Komenforthecure’s Social Media Nightmare
http://www.business2community.com/public-relations/takebackthepink-komenforthecures-social-media-nightmare-0129052

Irrevocable Damage: 24 Hours in the Life of a Komen Executive
http://www.buzzbox.com/hillary/MyBuzzBox/2012-02-04/komen:planned-parenthood/?clusterId=8431755&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Lessons from the Pink Ribbon Rebellion
http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/network-lessons-from-the-pink-ribbon-rebellion/

Seven Lessons Learned from Susan G. Komen-Gate
http://www.loop21.com/politics/seven-lessons-learned-susan-g-komen-gate?page=4

Abundance: The Future is Much Better Than you Think

2012-02-09T00:30:00.000-08:00

I jumped at the chance to review Peter Diamindis and Steve Kolter's forthcoming book, Abundance. I'm a believer in the power of shifts created by everpresent data, ever-expanding processing power, creativity, and human connectedness. I read a lot of future oriented stuff - both pro and con - and I knew these authors would have the inside track on a lot of it. I'm a Singularity University wanna-be and a Fellow at a place called the Hybrid Reality Institute. I knew the book would talk about DIY, prizes, and philanthropy because of Diamindis' work with the X Prize. I've heard him speak, read some of his other writing, and knew I'd learn something new.

I also think the mind-shift that Abundance represents is one we should all consider. This is especially true for philanthropy, which is created from abundance but operates in a model defined by scarcity. How does our work change, what might we do differently when we examine those absolutely root assumptions? Even if only as a thought exercise, what can philanthropy look like if solutions are possible and resources are available?

It also seemed like it it would be fun to offer you, a reader who comments on this blog, a free book. Which I'm doing. Just comment below, include your email, and I'll pick somebody. (The book will come from the publisher.) Or how about a chance to win a zero-gravity flight for participating in the publicist's Change The Conversation contest (click here).

It all seemed great. Here are my thoughts, read it, and decide for yourself.

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There are certain debates that seem defined as much by their polarization as by their substance. The pro-choice, pro-life divide comes to mind. Technology as utopia/dystopia is another. These kinds of arguments have a special component to them – the tactic of disarming your opponent first, then making your own point.

Peter Diamindis and Steve Kolter’s forthcoming Abundance: Why the Future will be Much Better Than You Think is a masterwork of this approach. The first four chapters are equally split between outlining their argument and making the case for all the neuro-scientific and cultural reasons why you, the reader, are going to want to disagree with it. They explain how we as humans are pre-programmed to be pessimistic. Add in all the bad news that the media feed us and the way our amygdala (part of the brain) processes fear much faster than other parts of our brain can compute “not as bad as you think.” Our cognitive and behavioral biases are all set to “things are bad and getting worse.”

The authors have to prove to us how badly we want things to be bad before they can begin telling us how they’re actually looking pretty good. As they see it, the current nature of our networks and our technologies means “…for the first time in history, our capabilities have begun to catch up to our ambitions.” They do make it clear how today’s technologies are so different. In several clear, convincing chapters they explain the nature of exponential and combinatorial technologies and the ways in which they can spread and change. It is not just the presence of our current technologies, but the ways in which they lay the groundwork for future technologies, that makes this moment so important.

It’s hard for us to see this, argue the authors, because, we humans are wired, after several millennia, to think and act in terms of scarcity. But if we focus on the nature of the technologies and the ways we can use them, Diamindis and Kolter assure us we can actually provide food, shelter and health for everyone on the planet. We can turn Maslow’s pyramid into an abundance pyramid. And we can move all the world’s people into that favored place on every chart – the upper right hand corner of health and wealth. Or, at least give everyone that possibility.

It’s an exciting vision. And the stories that Diamindis and Kolter share are each, in their own right, encouraging. To some degree the book reads like a “greatest hits album” of TED talks, Singularity University seminars, and X Prize competitions. As a source of exciting technology stories that is a darn good pool from which to draw. Of course, as a representative sample of the human race it’s a fairly limited pool of well educated, fairly affluent, mostly men.[i] It’s inconsistent with the authors own argument that so many of the world's solutions would be limited to such a small circle of solvers.

To their credit, the authors do more than list the accomplishments and visions of robotics pioneers, clean water innovators, and genomic entrepreneurs. The real power of these advances, they convincingly argue, is their exponential power and the possibility of them in combination. It’s not that artificial intelligence or robots or cloud computing will save us – it’s the possibility that artificial intelligence plus robots plus cloud computing will fundamentally shift access to basic health care. This, in turn, will improve the economic and educational potential of the very poor, who will harness their own creativity and collective power. This is what will save us.

Quoting their published peers from Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) to Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist), the authors synthesize just enough of others’ arguments to make you want to believe. And every time I found myself scribbling in the margins, “but what about….?” I had to stop and ask myself, am I just reverting to my scarcity mindset?

In a book about the power of abundance, one big problem is all that is missing. There is no mention of climate change – as a problem to be solved or as source of innovation (although it’s assumed in the focus put on energy as a key part of the equation). This is particularly astonishing since climate change is a great example of the exponential and combinatory forces that the authors are trying to explain. Just not in a good way. It's not so much a discussion of climate change, per se, that is missing in the book. What is missing is real engagement with and refutation of counter examples or arguments to the picture the authors draw. Having showed us, early on, why we're biased against this way of thinking they then proceed to either ignore or dismiss out of hand (e.g. anti-GMO advocates are simply "foolish") anything that doesn't fit their model. Ultimately, this approach weakens their argument.

There is no attention to the forces that push back on the rapid adoption of these exponential technologies. A careful consideration of these would strengthen the sense of what is possible. In his book The Wealth Of Networks, Yochai Benkler made a far more convincing case for what these technologies can do precisely because he considers the role of institutional resistance and status quo preservation. In contrast, Diamindis and Kolter’s argument suffers because it seems to have dismissed such thinking out of hand. Without any thoughtful discussion of the actual dynamics of technology adoption we are left with a lot of excitement but no sense of how things really work.

For all the ideas and innovation described in Abundance, I left it feeling like an insider looking out. Regular readers of WIRED, The Economist, or The New York Times Book Review will have heard of everyone the book describes. Most of the people we meet in Abundance have had their TED talk go viral, been profiled on NOVA or the BBC, or had their YouTube channel blogged about and featured in TIME Magazine. In a world of abundance is there really such a small circle of big thinkers? The authors’ note, “Technology is a resource liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.” This may be true for some, but the book fails to convince that it’s going to be true for everyone.

Finally, the other missing actor in the story is government. All of the celebrated figures – and there are many – are individuals and entrepreneurs. Working together, with the incredible new tools of collaboration to mix and match their exponentially powerful technologies, these do-gooding people can change the world for the rest of us. If only it were so simple.

Governments may be part of the problems; but some force for collective action other than good will and cell phones must also be part of the solutions. Ironically, the moonshot of the 1960s is held up as an example of “abundant thinking,” yet the role of nation states in making it happen is glossed over. The book is chock full of socially minded individuals with resources and ideas to capture the abundance and possibilities. There are (generously) five dozen such exemplary characters in the story. Where are the incentives, the structures, and the oversight that might be needed to encourage their largesse, their focus on a greater good, and provide non - market incentives for them to actually engage the “bottom billion,” not simply see them as a market for goods? The book argues that collaboration and networks will play a big role in putting these exponential technologies to work for good. I believe that. These tools can just as easily be put to use for individual benefit and malevolent purposes. The book asserts, but doesn’t adequately address, the human systems we need to over coming known barriers to making such progress possible.

Governments may not be the answer to how to ensure access to these tools. Neither is it convincing to assume that “good will” will be enough. Many of the heroes of Abundance have dedicated their creativity to developing and delivering technologies to help the poor. What the book simply omits are the countervailing forces of innovators working hard to do nothing of the kind. Even if you want to ignore the role of the state and focus on the potential of market solutions, you have to consider the full range of forces that define those markets. Just as there are abundant reasons to distribute these tools and creativity to solve social problems, there are plenty of incentives and institutions that do nothing of the kind.

Of course, all of my disagreements with the book may be because of hyper-amygdalic negativity bias. But I don’t think so. There is much to recommend in Abundance and much from which we can be hopeful and engaged. It reaches far, and offers a compelling vision of a better future. Alas, it comes up short on how we’ll get there.

---

[i] I recall two references to female innovators – Katie Salen of Quest2Learn and Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund.

And the award goes to...

2012-02-01T17:52:00.000-08:00

...Humanity United for it's creativity in presenting foundation information. Here's the link to what they're calling their 2011 Performance Report. It looks good, it's inviting, it's somewhat interactive, it's designed for the web. It brings the concept of annual report into the 21st Century.

Most of the information is what you'd find in an annual report - it's sort-of compliance plus. But the plus is important.

It's a performance report which means they're learning.
They're looking for feedback on it.
It includes the foundation's results from the Center for Effective Philanthropy's Grantee Perception Report - which is no longer a groundbreaking step, but it's a good one.
I like the way they broke down the information under Program Data - particularly including breakdown of new/continuing grantees. This shows they've considered the information needs of one of the key audiences for these reports (potential grantees).
They include information on Program Related Investments - an area which is often hard to decipher from foundation reports.
It's February 1 2012 and the annual report for 2011 is live! Say hello to real(er) time reporting. May we soon say goodbye to mailed hard copies of reports from two years ago.

My (unsolicited) suggestions for improvement:

The grants data should be made for web 2.0 - machine readable, downloadable. At the very least, please include hyperlinks to the organizations funded.
It's not really a compliance report, so this may be nitpicking, but there is no information on foundation investments except one PRI for $600K. Where is the rest of the money invested? In this age of transparency and financial savvy understanding where a foundation invests is becoming of as much interest as knowing where it makes grants.
The interactivity is limited to being able to pick your layout and view. You even have to dig to bottom of President's letter to find way to contact the foundation. Their twitter handle is @HUtweets. The videos are good, the stories are useful, but there's room for much more.

The report is a great step in the right direction. My hat is off to Humanity United (and I thank them for bringing it to my attention in the comments on this post).

In my "Person's choice Award" for foundation data presentation it's good to see someone giving the Knight Foundation a run for their money. As I wrote last year I'd love to see real awards for foundatin transparency, data sharing, and data visualization. After all, incentives have been known to work.

Remember, Humanity United is looking for feedback - so please chime in and help them out with your thoughts.

The Future of Philanthropy is Feedback

2012-01-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

The future of philanthropy is feedback.

Think about it - every big force in the field - data, mobile giving, transparency, metrics, impact measurement, engagement, outcomes, social media, open source, end-to-end monitoring - rests on and accelerates feedback.

That is all.

(Check the link under feedback - Mari Kurashi of Global Giving knew this well before I did)

Shaking up the long tail

2012-01-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

Donors who use cell phones to make donations do more than give, they talk about it. They actively encourage others to give. They may not do much due diligence themselves, but they sure do spread the word.

Those insights come from a new report looking at text donations made to Haiti after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. More than $43 million was raised through mobile giving for that disaster. Given how many of us carry our phones everywhere, it seems likely that we’ll do more of this.

The research, conducted by the Pew Center for the Internet and American Life, The Berkman Center at Harvard, and mGive (with support from the John S and James L Knight Foundation) also found that more than half of the mobile donors to Haiti relief went on to make additional disaster related mobile gifts over time. This makes me wonder if the behaviors of these donors in a disaster will become a new norm – call them “roaming reflexive donors.” This kind of giving isn’t committed to a place, a cause or an organization – it’s immediate, “do-something and talk about it.”

While the ability to give small amounts of money quickly might seem like a fragmenting force for donations, the energy with which these donors tell others about their donations might serve as some form of “glue” and “direction” – sending donations to a few organizations with the most vocal early givers, for example.

I read this research right after reviewing a report from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Cultures of Giving Project. That research notes that Blacks give, on average, 25% more of their income than Whites. Sixty-three percent of Latinos give. These are important insights about the “long tail” of giving, the $211 billion we as individuals give in small bits every year. These data beg to be correlated with data on cell phone use for texting by demographic group (also from Pew).

Every click we make on the web or on our phones leaves a “data shadow.” The collection of these shadows add up into patterns that we are getting much better at “seeing” through data analytics, visualizations, and surveys and research such as that done by Pew and Berkman.

There has been a great deal of speculation in the last decade about how the tech-enabled long tail of giving might change the way all of philanthropy works. One line of questioning asks if the wisdom of the giving crowd, now made visible, will inform nonprofits or big foundations? Online giving platforms have multiplied in recent years, each trying to get the right info to the small donors to motivate them to give.

The question this research raises for me is “what information matters to whom, when?” The best research on this question as it pertains to the "head of the tail" (wealthier donors) is in the form of the Money For Good reports (I and II). There have always been (at least) two sources of information for donors – their peers and the organizations themselves. The explosion of third party information sources (separate from foundations) that rate, review and opine on different organizations mostly provide information on the front end to inform a gift. But if the Pew/Berkman research is right, and the order of action on mobile giving is “give, tell, move on” where does information fit in? And should the goal be to inform the key people in any given network, as it’s their opinion, recommendations and tweets that will influence others?

Bonus buzzword buster and RPOs

2012-01-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

A few random philanthropy observations to start your weekend off right.

Buzzword buster
In conversation with some friends I realized there is one buzz phrase (not exclusive to philanthropy) that drives me batty. That term? Thought leadership (and its derivatives, specifically "thought leader"). Anyone who uses this phrase or claims to "thought lead" is, by definition, not. I guarantee that no one whose ideas have actually sparked other ideas or contributed to lasting change in the world ever identified him or herself as a thought leader.*

There is no such thing as thought leadership. There are thoughts, ideas, concepts, and provocations. Some people have them and share them. They are called "thinkers." If others join in and build on those thoughts, well then, by golly, you are probably having a conversation. Here's to a 2012 without thought leadership.

Public good
Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor and now Professor at U.C. Berkeley) published this piece on The Decline of the Public Good. It's worth a read. Actually, it's worth much more than a read. Philanthropists should read it and wonder "where do we fit into this?"

Private resources and public good
I was delighted to be asked by Zocalo Public Square to offer up an answer to the question, "Is philanthropy too powerful?" as lead in to an event with Professor Olivier Zunz, author of Philanthropy in America: A History. (I reviewed the book in SSIR last month). Here's a long version of my answer to this question. It's influenced by Professor Reich's thinking above.

Stanford ReCoding Good
As many of you know, I work at Stanford with Rob Reich, Professor of Political Science at Stanford. (Bad pun alert) There is an "abundance of Reich-es" in my intellectual life. Rob's work on the new social economy and Professor Robert Reich's thinking on public good combine to create a "conceptual sweet spot" for thinking about how we will create, fund and distribute public good in the 21st C. At Stanford we're looking at 5 big questions:

1. What does a post-Citizens United world mean for nonprofits, philanthropy, and the public good?
2. How is digital technology changing our conception of public accountability and public goods?
3. How will big data, the sharing economy, and open government influence philanthropy?
4. How can we better align our regulatory frameworks that govern and structure the creation of public goods with the technological innovations being made in bioscience, data processing, and other rapidly advancing fields?
5. What are the 21st century policy frames we need to encourage the use of private and public resources to help address our major domestic and global challenges?

We're launching our first charrette in a few weeks. We'll be thinking about the intersections of Sharing and the New Social Economy and what this means for how we create public goods. We're trying to bring together several existing but fragmented conversations and innovations - from sharing to political giving to government 2.0 to nonprofits and philanthropy - and we hope you'll join in, adapt to your field, add to, think with, and help shape this work. We all have a stake in how we use private resources for public good. You can learn more about the Stanford project here, here, and here. You can sign up for information here and follow the whole thing at #recodegood.

*The phrase makes me think of a person walking a bunch of dogs - only the leash leads to little cartoon idea bubbles. Thought Leader. Get it? Sort of like this:

OK. Enough snark for one day.

House of Lies
Management consulting is the next industry ripe for portrayal on television - law firms and emergency rooms being so 1990s and 2000s. Watch out.

2011 - the year in pictures (sort of)

2011-12-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

I wasn't going to blog today but I'm several days into a nasty head cold and can't do much of anything else. To say goodbye to 2011, a year in which #infographics made the #buzzword list, I thought I'd share a few special ones.

First, there is Beth Kanter's collection of #philanthropy and #nonprofit related infographics - in wiki format - so that everyone can share.

Second, The WildAid machine (pictured below) is a virtual Rube Goldberg machine, drop your donation in one end and watch it "spit" out the results.

The "WildAid Machine" must be the ultimate intersection of #infographics and fundraising. (The picture is just a screen clip - you have to go the site to make it work)

Third, I've set two work related New Year's resolutions. One is to unsubscribe from all the email newsletters I receive (please don't send me any more). I've been at this for two days, unsubscribing away. The second is to try two new sharing sites for my work at Stanford (what a thrilling life I lead). Posterous sent me a great link to their "inspiration gallery" - and there I found an entire website dedicated to social media #infographics.

Fourth, this display of the Republican presidential candidates and their typical entourages was fascinating to me and my son. The content was clear and compelling. The display demonstrated the power of pictures to make interesting an idea that would be miserably dull if conveyed in text.

(Photo clipped from New York Times graphics)

Finally, a big thank you and an appreciative Ha! to Tony Macklin, who took it upon himself to create a practical #infographic representation of my buzzword lists from 2009, 2010 and 2011. He turned them into an actual #buzzword bingo playing board. (You can download your own board on Tony's site)

Thanks Tony, and all of you, for reading along, chiming in, and doing the good work that you do. If you like this blog and care about its continuation, please consider buying a copy (or two dozen) of the Blueprint 2012. It reflects my best thinking on the year to come, draws from the conversations we have here, and pays a tiny lit bit toward all the time I put into this blog.

I wish you all a happy and healthy year ahead.

Buzzword 2011.10 - #

2011-12-27T16:46:00.000-08:00

The final buzzword of the year is # - the Twitter hashtag. Philanthropy finally got really hip to Twitter this year (as did so many people, thanks to the Arab Spring and Twitter-enabled TV shows). So the humble hashtag, the pound sign, the # is our final buzzword of the year.

One great example of how this Twitter convention has become part of the regular lexicon - The Case Foundation's end of year #GoodSpotting campaign - born to be sticky, hashtag and all. Forget about folks fumbling to come up with "bumper sticker" statements or even sound bites. #Whatmattersnowisthehashtag.

We've rediscovered the @ sign. Google brought back +. The humble # is 2011's final philanthropy buzzword. As you prepare for your New Year's celebration take a moment to ponder which lowly keyboard key will come to prominence in 2012.*

Happy New Year to everyone.

The full #buzzword list:
.1 Social Impact Bond
.2 Collective Impact
.3 Storytelling
.4 Charitable Tax Reform
.5 Infographics
.6 Evidence-based

.7 Shapeshifting
.8 Disruption
.9 Amplify
.10 #

*I've already had a very funny Twitter discussion about the | - the keyboard symbol that has @jenbo1's vote. Go vertical line!