Philanthropy Daily Digest

January 5, 2009 – 6:01 pm | By Sean Stannard-Stockton |
  • Comments (0)

Online Giving: Call for Assistance

January 5, 2009 – 9:50 am | By Sean Stannard-Stockton |

On February 28 I’m guest lecturing in a Stanford University workshop taught by Bill Somerville. My one hour slot is going to focus on “Online Giving”. The class is called Philanthropy is For Everyone and is part of Stanford’s extension program. Most of the students are Stanford alumni who are currently involved in philanthropy or wanting to become involved.

During my presentation I’d like to engage the audience by actually giving some money away through a live demonstration of one of the online giving platforms. So I’m putting out a request for help from one of the platforms. I’m looking for someone who will run through a demonstration of their site during the class. I’ll put up a small amount of cash to give and ideally I’d hope that the group might have a budget so that we can make multiple gifts.

If you are interested in helping out, shoot me an email. I assume I’ll get multiple offers of help, so I’ll just have to go with the group that has the most interesting offer or makes the case that from a learning perspective, their group best suits the needs of the class.

If you like, you can register for the one-day workshop here.

Thanks!

  • Comments (2)

You Can’t Fail

January 5, 2009 – 9:09 am | By Sean Stannard-Stockton |


Philanthropists are in the enviable position of determining their own bottom line. On the one hand if you are trying to achieve something, then by definition you may not achieve it and therefore “fail”. On the other hand, if you are giving money away you are only able to fail the people you hope to help. You can’t personally “fail”.

So if you can’t fail why aim low? Why not strive to do the impossible? Why not make mistakes and then try again tomorrow?

One of the reasons that philanthropy is often compared to venture capital, is because venture capitalists make lots of long shot investments with the expectation that most will fail but some will wildly succeed. Of course a VC really can fail because if they have too few wild successes they will run out of money an not be able to make any more investments. Most philanthropists don’t plan on their philanthropic investments achieving any financial return and so they are not dependent on “successful” grantmaking to make more grants in the future.

In the end, I think the biggest risk to a philanthropist is the risk of playing things too safely. The fallout of playing things too safely is that you end up with a long list of nice things you’ve done for other people, but nothing really to show for it.

Since you know you can’t fail, what are you going to do?

  • Comments (0)

Philanthropy Daily Digest

January 2, 2009 – 6:00 pm | By Sean Stannard-Stockton |
  • Comments (0)

CauseWired by Tom Watson

January 2, 2009 – 3:12 pm | By Sean Stannard-Stockton |

Most people in philanthropy kind of get that the web and “social media” applications are having an important impact on the field, but they don’t really understand what it all means. If this describes you, you need to make it your New Year’s resolution to read the outstanding book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World by Tom Watson.

Tom is a social media guru in the social sector. He is behind the excellent site OnPhilanthropy and has been writing about the Internet since at least the mid 1990’s. What makes CauseWired such an important book is that it is not a book about technology. It is a book about social change. It is a book about causes and how a new set of tools and tactics is changing the way that change happens. Tom doesn’t just explain what Facebook Causes “is” he explains why it matters.

Writing in an ultra-readable style, Tom draws you into the strange, evolving world of social media. Unlike so many people who write about technology, Tom doesn’t geek out on the high-tech elements of the web. What he realizes and what he communicates so well to his readers is the idea that the social web is just a new tool set for impacting the cause.

To regular readers of this blog, you’ll find many friends in the pages of CauseWired. Allan Benamer, Lucy Bernholz, Leslie Crutchfield, Phil Cubeta, Peter Deitz, Allison Fine, Beth Kanter, Heather McLeod Grant, Mario Marino, Ben Rattray, Marnie Webb and I all make guest appearances as the story unfolds. But the audience who I think most urgently needs to read CauseWired is those people who don’t read this blog or any other. For those people, the book tells the story of an exciting new world that is only just beginning to be told. And it tells the story not in the insider language that so much of Internet literature is told in, but in pure, plain English.

As a reader of this blog, I urge you to read CauseWired because you’ll really enjoy it. But I strongly urge you to buy a copy and give it someone who cares about philanthropy and social change but doesn’t understand the web.

  • Comments (2)