Category Archives: One Post Challenge

When Technology Trumps Philanthropy

November 18, 2007 – 5:11 pm

When Technology Trumps Philanthropy

This entry to the One Post Challenge is from Valerie, an Alumni Relations Associate at a major university.

By Valerie.

Gone are the days of keeping track of donors on 3 x 5 cards and marking return envelopes on the side with a red swipe of the marker to know that it is the “ABC” appeal (although I heard someone say nary a year ago that they did that!).  Computers are here, we have databases, printers, the web and the ability to track, analyze and reach people in ways that were not possible a decade or more ago.

Yet, I find that with all this technology, if the IT department is left in the driver’s seat, it can hinder marketing efforts rather than help them.  What is “convenient” or makes sense technologically is not always best for Development or - more importantly - the donor.

Two examples have happened recently that illustrate this constant struggle.

In every online marketing class I have taken, it has been emphasized that the donor must be engaged to, well, DONATE first before asking them all sorts of superfluous questions such as “How did you hear about us?” “When did you graduate?” “Does your company have a matching gift program?” and so on.  Therefore, when I redesigned the online giving form for simplicity, I asked the donor for their amount and credit card information first.  Once this has been entered, they are much less likely to disengage - they will fill out the entire form.  (I also reduced the number of overall questions from the previous form.)

Scrolling endlessly is also a no-no, so page 1 is money - amount, credit card - & fund designation, page 2 (next) is donor name, & contact information (next) and page 3 is extras that few people fill out, such as matching, tribute, etc. (submit).

I’ve been informed by the IT department that our particular software doesn’t like placing the credit card information on page 1, so they’d prefer to move it to page 3.  It CAN be on page 1, but it’s DIFFICULT to do, so they’d prefer that each of my online donor forms just have it on page 3.

I’ve explained my reasons, but have been told that “the programming/software makes it difficult…”

Likewise, a different IT person doesn’t care for my requests for multiple redirects (which goes to these many forms).

So that I can track responses to multiple appeals, I have asked for redirects such as

www.company.org/donate
www.company.org/contribute
www.company.org/scholarship
www.company.org/stock
www.company.org/alumni
www.company.org/future

I have been told that this “has to stop” because “it’s creating too many folders” on the website.  The alternative I was given is that I could have as many redirects as I want…under one folder: the “Donate” folder, which would give me the following options:

www.company.org/donate/(appeal1)
www.company.org/donate/(appeal2)
www.company.org/donate/(appeal3)
www.company.org/donate/(appeal4)
www.company.org/donate/(appeal5)

When I tried in vain to explain that it has to be “marketable and memorable” to the donor and can’t go on and on, I was informed that “We can’t have this many folders on the website.”

So, accommodating the software’s preferences appears to trump the donor’s preferences?  This is how we came up with voicemail that says, “If you want ________, press eighteen…”

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Fundraising, Philanthropic Technology, Philanthropy, Social Media, nptech | Comments (2)

One Word. Don’t Think. Just Write.

November 16, 2007 – 9:15 am

This One Post Challenge entry comes from Samantha Beinhacker. Among her many passions, Samantha is working on a project called the Story Index as an attempt to create a Rosetta Stone between all the nascent exchanges, rating agencies and analyst groups that are arising, trying to determine common denominators of the value of “businesses doing good” that are best encapsulated in narratives. See the project’s blog for more info.

By Samantha Beinhacker

One Word. Don’t Think. Just Write.

The philanthropic landscape is littered with remnants of failed attempts to quantify the impact of nonprofits’ activities. High-impact models, quantitative measures, improved business management– these are just some of the tools bandied about. Much has been written about the failure of these systems to adequately capture and track the cumulative value of resources for good; and worse, the harm they can wreak on social change efforts.

How about envisioning a new way of doing this: using words rather than numerics to understand core competencies and stakeholders’ perspectives about value and impact?

If you could express in one word the impact of your most treasured nonprofit or mission-based social enterprise, what would that one word be? Write that one word down in the comments section below. And then start composing your impressions of that word– the meanings they connote for you. You have sixty seconds to write about it. Don’t think. Just write.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (12)

One Post Challenge Outcomes

November 15, 2007 – 5:15 pm

When this thing comes to a conclusion, we’ll get to look back at what we learned, what we can do better next time and what impact we’ve had.

Impact Item #1: One Post Challenge participant Rich Polt (find his entry here) caught the blogging bug and has signed up as a regular guest contributor to PhilanTopic, one of my favorite philanthropy blogs. You can catch Rich’s first post here:

Rich begins his post: “I am incredibly conflicted about Second Life.”

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Giving Blogs, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Is Performance Measurement Undermining Social Change?

November 15, 2007 – 6:04 am

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from Tony Pipa. Tony is a founder and senior consultant to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation and the former executive director of the Warner Foundation in Durham, NC.

By Tony Pipa

Is Performance Measurement Undermining Social Change?

Becoming more strategic and measuring one’s effectiveness is all the philanthropic rage.  It’s a movement with merit, as most foundations were ripe to benefit from more rigor and analysis in their work.
But as I watch the field move in almost reflexive fashion to adopt quantitative performance measures and require high-impact modeling from prospective grantees, I fear it may be eroding its potential to stimulate social change at the deepest levels.  As Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, recently asked at an event sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation:  Would today’s new philanthropies have funded the civil rights movement?

Pervasive social and economic inequities – the racial achievement gap in our public education system, the gaps in wealth among whites, blacks, and other communities of color – require more than technical fixes.  They require grassroots leadership development, community building, political advocacy, and public problem-solving processes that involve and balance the interests of multiple stakeholders.  This requires investment in ideas, people, and process that is often messy and non-linear.  Progress along the way can be hard to discern.

In the current environment, the harder it becomes, the fewer there may be to take it on.  I especially fear that in the quest for greater impact, more and more foundations will move away from investing at the very local, grassroots level where many of the ideas and leaders that transform communities are generated.

High-impact models, quantitative measures, improved business management – all are good and important tools.  But, as in most things, moderation is key.

Transformational philanthropy is an art.  It is necessary to be informed by scientific methods, but it will never be a science.  And, as Paul Ylvisaker said 30 years ago, making social progress flow to those in need will require philanthropy to “move out of fixed and safe positions into more independent, flexible, and far more exposed stances between contradictory forces.”  The current drive would appear to do exactly the opposite – provide cover, rather than inspire foundations to take even greater risks in leadership on the most difficult issues facing our society.  I hope I’m wrong.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Foundations, Impact Measurement, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (9)

Digg the One Post Challenge

November 14, 2007 – 12:38 pm

I’ve been surprised that no one seems to be doing much to advertise their One Post Challenge entry via sites like Digg or StumbleUpon. If you like the Challenge and want to see more participation, why don’t you give it a thumbs up on Digg? Just click here and vote thumbs up!

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (0)

The Burden of “Burden of Disease”

November 14, 2007 – 9:19 am

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from Matt (who is withholding his last name). Matt is an employee in the development office of a nonprofit devoted to providing fracture care in developing countries. These are his views, not those of his employer.

By Matt

The Burden of “Burden of Disease”

Working in development, I get frustrated with some foundations’ tendency to have rigid, mathematically determined goals that we simply can’t furnish the data to meet.

Individual people respond well to our campaigns - they intuitively grasp that fractures are a real problem. We can speak to them on an emotional basis, and they don’t feel patronized; we can use anecdotes, and they don’t cry out for footnoted tables. Foundations, on the other hand, seem to have an obsessive need for facts and figures. This is understandable, given their duty to weed out programs that aren’t necessary or cost-effective. What irks me is the extreme that this bean-counting goes to. I’m speaking of the apples-to-oranges comparison known as Disability-Adjusted Life Years – a measurement of mortality and morbidity, or the “burden of disease”. What I want to say is, “Here - we have numbers on how much money we save patients, how much time in the hospital they can avoid, how many patients we’ve served, how many dollars we’ve spent, how many instruments and implants we’ve produced - the only figure we don’t have is DALYs. Pick something else, anything else, in any units - furlongs per nanosecond, I don’t care. No more DALYs.” We simply don’t have that data. We can estimate, extrapolate - we could even prevaricate (I would get fired, but we could). But we don’t have the numbers.

That puts us at a severe disadvantage writing to a large foundation, one that’s never considered injuries to be comparable to AIDS, TB, malaria, and the like. Providing our own metric doesn’t wash. Nobody wants us controlling the terms; that would be akin to allowing OJ to handle the glove. Instead, I’m forced to say things like, “Assuming one surgery can avert at least three DALYs, our methods are more cost-effective than preventing the mother-to-child transmission of HIV.” It’s a flattering comparison, but “assuming” casts it into doubt. I have little choice in the phrasing, though, because it is an assumption.

Measuring the impact of our treatments with any certainty and objectivity would require 1) a precise estimation of a disability weight (difficult to do) and 2) much more data from our patients. Asking them to return to the hospital to submit that data would be, frankly, inexcusable, considering the hardship some of them go through to even get to the hospital in the first place. The only remotely comparable demand in our lives is a summons to jury duty. Imagine being summoned to jury duty hundreds of miles away, over rocky terrain, while you’re working twelve hours a day to feed your family of five, then being greeted by a battery of tests and dismissed without any compensation. We could conceivably do this. By giving them a surgical implant, we create a feeling of gratitude and indebtedness, and we could exploit that. What I want to know is, who in their right mind would think it justifiable to exploit patients’ gratitude, waste their time, waste their doctors’ time, and waste our own funding (paying for the doctors’ time), simply on account of one column of data? When foundations demand DALYs from organizations like mine, that’s what they’re asking us to do.

This may seem like an exaggeration.

1) Disability weights can’t be that hard to guess, can they? Take a look at this table. There’s no differentiation between treated and untreated broken bones. There’s no definition of “short term” or “long term.” There’s no “long term” data for many fractures. And this is only the start of the problem.

2) What more data do you need? We know that we prevent treatment by traction or amputation. What we don’t know is the ratio of those treatments or the increase in DALYs averted due to the change to our treatment. There’s no DALY weight for traction; it’s not an illness. If we had data on the percentage of traction cases that end in failure – malunion, nonunion, gangrene – perhaps we could calculate DALYs for those conditions, right? Nope, there’s no values for them. Well, what about amputation? The difference between “treated femur fracture, long-term” and “leg amputation, long-term”: .028. Essentially none. This is no doubt due to “treated” being a misnomer in the data table. So, what can we use instead of that weight? Data from the patient. If they report normal leg function, for example, that’s tantamount to zero disability. If they don’t – well, we’re back to guesswork, but at least we have data to work with.

3) Why must patients return in person? Ask someone how they’re doing, and they’ll reply “fine.” Ask a patient how their fracture has healed, and they’ll reply “fine” – even if your questions are so precise as to demand a numerical response, no questionnaire will be accurate. They need to be examined in person for the data to be objective.

4) Say you do this only in urban areas, where patients can return without too much trouble – wouldn’t that work? In a certain sense. We would be able to estimate DALYs averted on some basis – a skewed basis that we couldn’t justify using for rural patients, who have different injury patterns and post-recovery activity. Further problems that would arise: it would still be an estimate. It would still be unreliable. It would still cost time and money to collect. And it would still be on the foundations’ terms. Even in the very best case, we can’t change the basis of the argument to something rational, because foundations don’t accept that DALYs aren’t a nice little simulacrum of reality. We’re stuck within that framework until foundations realize that DALYs are the wrong measurement for complex conditions.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Foundations, Impact Measurement, Philanthropy | Comments (10)

GuideStar Responds

November 13, 2007 – 3:44 pm

Bob Ottenhoff, CEO of GuideStar has responded to the One Post Challenge entry titled “GuideStar for Sale”. Visit the comments section to see his response.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Philanthropy | Comments (0)

Impact Through Inspiration

November 13, 2007 – 3:23 pm

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from Rich Polt. Rich is president of Louder Than Words, a Boston-based PR agency that works with foundations, nonprofits, and mission driven businesses. When he’s not communicating good for his clients, he can be found with his family, on his bike, or with the NY Times crossword puzzle.

By Rich Polt

First let me applaud DontTellTheDonor on their blogging coup. I recently cast my vote for Aid to Artisans on that thread, but my “Spidey-Sense” tells me that Pride at Work might be running away with the prize. Congratulations (potentially)! Don’t Tell The Donor showed us that there is power in numbers on the Web. I believe that there is also power in ideas (and would like to place some internal resources against that assertion… read on).

I believe that inspiration is the greatest commodity this sector has to offer.

Blogging should not just be about casting a vote, but advancing ideas and inspiring others to action through those ideas. Two weeks ago, I attended a great conference in Miami that was sponsored by the Communications Network. The theme of the event was What We Know (Or Should Know) About Effective Communications in the philanthropy sector. The penultimate plenary session included a presentation from the Skoll Foundation about how they have leveraged storytelling to build the successful Web site Social Edge. Check out this amazing example (produced for Social Edge) of how unembellished storytelling can elicit a visceral response.

What I would love to know is this:  What deserving, undercapitalized nonprofit has a story to inspire the masses AND a few sentences on the source of that inspiration (i.e., the “why”). Feel free to either name nonprofits or to comment on other people’s suggestions. Hell… I want to know why Pride at Work inspires so many people! If this post wins the “One Post Challenge,” Louder Than Words will donate the $500 gift card as well as $2,500 of in kind time and services to the nonprofit with the most inspiring comments/story (as determined by us after reading your posts). It’s all about the inspiration…

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Fundraising, Media, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Prize Philanthropy, Social Media | Comments (3)

One Post Challenge: Something’s Happening Here

November 13, 2007 – 1:48 pm

In case you haven’t noticed, the One Post Challenge entry from “a fundraiser” has generated 60 comments as of this writing. I have intentionally not commented on the progress of the competition so far as I didn’t want to interfere in the process that was unfolding. But I’m going to break my silence.

What the $500 For Your Nonprofit post did was take control of the competition and create an incentive for commentators rather than retaining the incentive for the blog post author. This was an exceptional demonstration of the author’s understanding of online fundraising. His/her post generated attention and a link from a high traffic blog called BlogActive, which quickly became the top referring site to my blog (hello Pride at Work!). The fact that both the NY Times and the Chronicle of Philanthropy coincidently mentioned my blog yesterday also spurred traffic (although it is important to note that BlogActive sent more readers, and more engaged readers, than the NY Times or the Chronicle).

So now we see that when competing for attention online, having a great, well thought-out message doesn’t always win the game. You also need to understand the medium that you’re working with. Now the question becomes does the $500 For Your Nonprofit post simply highjack this competition and show that mobs are more powerful/important than intelligent thought provoking commentary? Or are their new and creative ways that participants can take back control of the competition and find a way to redirect this traffic surge to engage people to type more than three words?

To me, this is the central dilemma of online marketing. Is the internet great at getting millions of people to watch online videos of cats doing dumb things? Or can the power of social media be harnessed to provide a benefit to the public good?
I can think of no industry with a more vested interest in this question than philanthropy.

What’s your answer? Email me your entry to the One Post Challenge and demonstrate how social media for the social good is done.

(I’d like to thank Network for Good for co-sponsoring this competition and awarding their new Good Card to the One Post Challenge winner. Click here for One Post Challenge rules.)

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Fundraising, Media, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, Social Media, nptech | Comments (21)

Sleeping With The Enemy

November 13, 2007 – 9:36 am

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from Jeff Tuller. Jeff started his career in the very private sector, with over a decade at financial firms Bear Stearns and State Street Bank. In 2001 he made the leap of faith into the non-profit sector, beginning at the SIFEE Educational Foundation and most recently at The Atlantic Philanthropies. He recently supplemented his MS in Computer Science with an MPA from NYU’s Wagner School for Public Service.

By Jeff Tuller

PreScript: I was just about to send in this entry to the One Post Challenge when I saw today’s earlier entry from the clever yet mysterious blogger behind DontTellTheDonor.  In the name of full disclosure, my name is Jeff Tuller (jeff a-t socialmarkets d-o-t org), I am President and Chairman of socialmarkets, and I hereby pledge to offer the following in response:

If my post wins the contest, I will donate not just the $500 prize to the nonprofit which gets the most votes, but an additional $.01 for the first 100 posted comments (a penny for your thoughts??)   So if you want to get the best results to the best nonprofit, work those contacts and get those posts rolling in!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program… let the games begin!

Sleeping With The Enemy

At the recent housewarming for our new nonprofit and the other start-ups that share our co-op workspace here in NYC, we got lots of love for our novel take on the donor-charity relationship.  Amid the general enthusiasm, someone suggested it might be burdensome for some nonprofits to adopt the outcomes-based model we champion.  This sobering idea was put to bed to seemingly unanimous satisfaction by one of our fans offering this rationale: “Hey, nobody likes being subjected to airport security either, but that’s the reality of today’s world, so you have to just comply or you could get us all blown up…”  At the time I didn’t argue the point, but the statement clearly didn’t go down easy, since it’s several weeks later, and there’s a question that’s still dogging me: In the analogy between nonprofit transparency and bomb screening, who are the terrorists?

I just want to know who the bad guys are, whose threat necessitates the humiliating screening process in the first place. Is it me? I like to think not, at least not with my socialmarkets hat on.  In a nutshell, socialmarkets is a marketplace which views donations as investments of social capital, and non-profits’ success in meeting stated goals as the basis for the return on that investment.  It should be as appealing to nonprofits looking for donors who will appreciate their work, as it is for donors looking for nonprofits who offer the most bang for their buck.  Even beyond the funding issue, the measures of success or failure in meeting their goals are hugely valuable for a nonprofit’s own internal management.  With all that on tap, I should be in the clear, no?

But I’ve worn several other hats over the years, from under which I’m not sure I as easily dodge the bullet. I’ve worked at a large foundation, where it was easy to call the grantee relationship a ‘partnership’, but less so to divorce that relationship of the inevitable dysfunction when one party is writing checks and the other is waiting by the mailbox. I’ve also worked on Wall Street, where I made a lot of money and gave a little of it away, mostly to assuage the guilt that accompanies being a have in a world increasingly efficient at reminding you how outnumbered you are by have-nots.  When I find myself missing the days of fat paychecks and zero-balance credit cards, I console myself with a truly macro-economic perspective:  somewhere out there in the cosmic accounting system, I’m carrying far less debt… and guilt.

I also take consolation in that much of what I learned while sporting my Wall Street hat is still applicable today.  To wit, I think an investment approach to donating is more than just possible, it’s smart.  However donors looking for objective data to help them evaluate their nonprofit investment options currently have no place to turn.  For lack of alternatives, they might go to sites like GuideStar and Charity Navigator, which can tell them something about what a nonprofit spends, but nothing about what all that spending accomplishes.  That’s like offering half a balance sheet, a pretty pitiful basis for evaluation of an investment in any context.

It was also while wearing my Wall Street hat that I would have agreed with the majority of American donors, whose confidence in nonprofit’s ability to spend their donations wisely is polling at historic lows.  Ten years, two non-profits and one MPA later I am happy to report I am whistling a different tune, but sorry to report there are more people who think like I did then out there now. I actually know some of these people, and for the most part they’re not evil, they’re just lazy. An occasional highly publicized nonprofit scandal is all they need to reinforce the convenient image of the nonprofit sector as poorly managed across the board.

So the fickle finger of blame may point back to me, but I share it with a conspiracy of guilty parties. The people giving money as well as those taking it bear some responsibility for the mistrust which sustains the status quo. I’ll buy the analogy that philanthropy wants to fly, and with a little poetry, even soar – but unlike the real flight industry, there are actually no players in our game invested in bringing the plane down. Both charities and their supporters are co-invested in the successful execution of the missions which specify their particular vision of a better world. That’s a pretty powerful starting point for re-examining the way we see ourselves, including the recognition that the thing we’re so afraid of might just be our own reflection.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Effective Giving, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropy, Transparency | Comments (10)

$500 For Your Nonprofit!

November 12, 2007 – 8:34 am

This entry to the One Post Challenge comes from the anonymous fundraiser who runs the blog Don’t Tell The Donor. If you’ve been forwarded this post, I vouch for the fact that the $500 is real and will be given to the winner. You can read about the details of this contest here. I would like to note that the winner is the post with the largest number of people posting a comment, not the most comments. So no need to post multiple comments from the same person.

By “a fundraiser”

I’m the anonymous fundraiser who runs the blog DontTellTheDonor.org and I am thrilled to be published on Tactical Philanthropy as part of Sean’s One-Post Challenge. I have also noticed the same tendency Sean cites that if we can encourage readers to leave just one comment - it can be a springboard for a rapid and engaging discussion.

My blog tries to inject a daily dose of humor into fundraising news stories… sometimes I get my hands on a juicy piece of gossip that makes its way from development office to development office… but my real love is for the profession of fundraising and the opportunity my day job gives me to connect people to the causes they believe in. I love providing opportunities for donors to give.

Therefore, I am going to use Sean’s “One Post Challenge” to demonstrate the power of fundraisers who understand the online world. Blogging is not about talking AT PEOPLE, it’s about making readers part of the story and giving them a reason to be engaged. I am going to attempt to win this first annual one post challenge by turning this contest on it’s very head.

I need your help… and I promise to try and make it worth your time.

The blogger who gets the most comments to their post will win a $500 “Good Card”, the new “gift card” from Network for Good that let’s the receiver make a grant to the nonprofit of their choice.

If I win, I will give the $500 to the charity named by the most people in the comments to this post. For example, if you are reading this post and you want me to give the $500 to your local Habitat for Humanity or your neighbor’s animal rescue - simply post a comment with the name of that charity. I hope to encourage people who love charities to visit this website and leave a comment.

Maybe I’m being conservative, but I think I would need 50 comments on this post in order to win the contest… and there will probably be a dozen different charities with varying level of votes… so, technically a plurality of 10 comments for one non-profit could win your favorite group a $500 donation. It’s that easy.
Forward this post to your friends and co-workers and encourage them to post a comment on my form and you could be a hero for your favorite charity

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Fundraising, Giving Blogs, Philanthropy, nptech | Comments (700)

An Evacuation of the Ivory Towers

November 9, 2007 – 11:10 am

Today One Post Challenge entry comes from Trista Harris, a Program Officer and the voice behind www.newvoicesofphilanthropy.org, a blog about next generation philanthropy issues.

By Trista Harris

Today I am proposing nothing short of a revolution in the philanthropic field. What if foundations were connected to the communities that they were serving; innovation and creativity were encouraged; knowledge was shared within organizations and with the larger philanthropic and nonprofit sectors; and foundations were measured on the results of their investments, not just amount of money spent or number of staff? I know you are probably asking yourselves right now, “what kind of crazy alternative universe are you living in Trista Harris?”

I should probably back up. Any time you are proposing a revolution, it’s important to give proper background or else you scare people off. The philanthropic landscape is changing. Baby Boomers are beginning to retire or re-imagine their positions. Donors are more actively engaged and want measurable results, and the government is spending a lot of time and energy trying to reign in the philanthropic sector. Professional philanthropic staff are trying to figure out how to do more with less time. How do we re-invigorate our troops of professional do-gooders to make sure that are connected to the communities that they serve and have the capacity to move the philanthropic sector from potential to results?

As a life long staff member of nonprofits, I always cringe when someone, usually a board member, says “if you just applied business principals to your work, all your problems would be solved.” But, I think I have found an idea from the for-profit sector that could solve a variety of our sector’s ills. Flexible work schedules and telecommuting have become commonplace in many for-profit organizations, but a Minnesota company has taken flexibility to the next level with the results-only work environment. Best Buy, an electronics retailer, has given its employees full control of how, when, and where they work. A guiding premise is that “work is something you do, not somewhere you go.” This means that employees take conference calls while fishing and start project planning after their kids go to bed. This new model has decreased turnover but, more important to our conversation, has improved productivity by 35%.

What if Program Officers suddenly became office-less? What if we spent our time in the communities that we serve, rather than in a stuffy conference room talking about the community? Would this change force us to create knowledge management systems to connect this out-based workforce? Would that system then institutionalize the wisdom that is currently only available inside of an “about to retire” program officer’s head? How much more effective could our work be? Flexibility breeds innovation and it encourages collaboration outside of the “usual suspects.” The people that probably have the best insight about the need for a new community center are the moms and dads that are at a nearby playground during the day. That’s not who most Program Officers are rubbing shoulders with at 11am.

When people are measured by what they accomplish, not how much time they are at their desks, the rules change. Suddenly the star employee isn’t the one who arrives at 6am and leaves at 6pm, it is the one who is most knowledgeable about community solutions and has the most positive effect on their program area. How different would the sector be if we were all working at full capacity and still had time to be a good parent and an engaged community member?

I am proposing a revolution. So let me know, are you in or are you out?

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Foundations, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy | Comments (17)

One Post Challenge Update

November 8, 2007 – 4:32 pm

I’ve been loving the One Post Challenge entries so far. I do want to stress one thing though. A paragraph or two is all you need to write. Blog posts tend to be short and anyone who is considering entering does not need to feel like that have to write a dissertation.

Case in point: The most controversial, commented upon post that I’ve ever written was 102 words long. You can read it here. The 14 comments on that post was only the beginning. The debate that post kicked off generated two weeks of posts on this blog with at least 10 other blogs chiming in and two board members from the same nonprofit holding a public debate via emails and comments to this blog.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, Philanthropy | Comments (1)

Network for Good & One Post Challenge

November 7, 2007 – 3:09 pm

Katya Andresen of Network for Good likes the One Post Challenge. As a show of support for the burgeoning online conversation, Network for Good is matching my $250 grant to a nonprofit in the name of the winning entry. The winner will now receive a $500 Good Card, the new charitable “gift card” from Network for Good that lets the receiver make a gift to their favorite charity.

The Good Card is a gift card for charity – where the recipient gets to donate to their charity of choice. Customers, clients, employees, friends and family all have their favorite charities and now you can give them the perfect gift – a donation to their favorite charity. The nonprofit Network for Good, which created the cards and donation processing system, is a trusted partner that has processed $145 million to 25,000 charities since it was founded in 2001. Network for Good is approved by the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance.

The card will launch the day after Thanksgiving, meaning that the winner of the One Post Challenge will be one of the first people to receive a Good Card.

Keep those entries coming and don’t forget to add your comments to the entries already posted. You can read about the contests and rules here.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, New Philanthropy, Philanthropy, nptech | Comments (0)

Who Defines the Philanthropic “Product?”

November 7, 2007 – 10:14 am

For there to be a philanthropic capital market, there must be philanthropic products. In this entry to the One Post Challenge, Carla Dearing of GivingNet looks at who defines these products and introduces a web 1.0 to web 2.0 framework for understanding them.

Carla Dearing is the CEO of GivingNet, formerly Community Foundations of America. Prior to joining GivingNet, Carla was president of a financial services firm. GivingNet publishes an excellent email newsletter called InTandem, which you can subscribe to here.

By Carla Dearing

Across most industries, companies are allowing clients to define product, promotion and even price through interactive online platforms. While the nonprofit sector is not there yet, several organizations are starting to move in this direction. Understanding the elements that support this type of client participation is critical for future success.

Knowledge Networking is the amalgamation of knowledge management and social networking. It is the idea of capturing the knowledge of your organization and putting it online so it can be used to efficiently to serve your customers, but also so it can also be used by your constituents: donors, nonprofits, board members, advisors, etc., moving toward the self-serve model that is prevalent in so many other industries online. There may be some debate about how soon we need to make self-serve options available to our clients, but there is no question that this is the direction we are all headed.

On the social networking side, most people think of MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Those are difficult analogies for our marketplace, because they don’t seem aligned with our business. The fact of the matter is that much of our business is social networking that takes place offline: events, one-on-one meetings, donors talking with each other about the organizations they are involved with, etc. The idea that we move some of that online is a logical next step for our market. We have to figure out what parts of social marketing fit our sector.

As organizations think about how knowledge networking fits with their brand, there are several models that span the spectrum of interactivity from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0:

On the left side of the spectrum, organizations provide information that people can search on—there is a minimal level of interactivity. As you move to the right you add elements of social interactivity to offer the user ways to interact with the information. The components are displayed across the spectrum, giving an idea of what components might fit best with your brand. Most people in our sector are still working on getting to Web 1.0 with their knowledge assets—just getting the assets online for people to just have access to online. Many foundations are not comfortable moving beyond 1.0 at this point, but it is good to see what is out there and where they might want to head in the near future in order to be competitive and meet the expectations of the marketplace.

Starting at the left side of the spectrum (minimum interactivity):

DonorEdge:
This tool was created by Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. It allows you to search for nonprofits—the first important element in knowledge networking. Once the organization has gone through a level of due diligence with the foundation, a red checkmark appears. Allows you to “donate now,” but there are no other elements of social networking.

Dot.che:

Dot.che was created by the Arizona Community Foundation, and is now owned by ChesterCap, LLC. When you click on a particular nonprofit, you will see that this product collects less information on each nonprofit than DonorEdge does, but more than you will see with other sites as we move across the spectrum. It also has donate now (ecommerce), or donors can make gifts from their funds, but no other elements of social networking are available.

VisionMgr:

This software allows the foundation to create a “charity wish list” in a form that holds information about different nonprofits. Less information is collected in this system than in Dot.che or DonorEdge. In terms of social networking, there aren’t any elements other than ecommerce.

Moving to the right on the spectrum, we find the following:

GlobalGiving:

GlobalGiving’s founders wanted to build on the World Bank’s efforts to promote a marketplace where ideas for improving communities around the world could be submitted in a competition-style format, and winning ideas would be funded. You can find organizations based on topic area, region, sponsor, etc. The site has a few elements of social networking: giving, volunteering, progress report from each of the organizations. Visitors can look at the results of the progress report and can forward those to a friend, hear from others who have given, add a badge to their blog or website. Users profile themselves and begin to make comments about the organization. Profiling is the second important component of knowledge networking, as it allows organizations to start to collect data about the individuals who are interacting with their information.

Moving again to the right:

Socialedge:

Socialedge was created by the Skoll Foundation, which funds social entrepreneurial organizations, as a resource for these organizations. One of the areas that is particularly strong is what they call discussion forums or discussion threads. This has particularly applicability to our marketplace because the threads are listed by topic. Discussions are hosted by an expert in the issue area, then visitors start to add their thoughts. First, they have to profile themselves. The host responds to the comments. There is a lot that could be done in our market with knowledge networking using discussion forums on issues like housing, health, youth, etc. This site allows visitors to rate different blog entries or forums. Discussion forums and ratings are additional elements of social networking.

A little further to the right:

WiserEarth:

WiserEarth was started by the entrepreneur and author Paul Hawken, who is well known for his book, Natural Capitalism. It is an international network of 107,000 social justice and environmental organizations, with an impressive taxonomy. There are 49,000 U.S. organizations, but 6 months ago there were only 9,000 U.S. organizations. The site collects a handful of important data items about the organizations. As we move across the spectrum from 1.0 to 2.0, we start to see less focus on the amount of information provided about the organization, and more focus on the social networking elements. This site introduces the concept of tagging, which is essentially indexing the information to allow you to search on it. WiserEarth also has wiki functionality, which allows you to edit the information that is in the site. Visitors follow the trail of edits, and can add information, add organizations, post job listings, add events, etc. The site also offers discussion forums.

Sites that add more components of interactivity:

Kiva:

Kiva is an online microfinance site. Lenders profile themselves, shows repayment progress, etc. Not quite as many elements of networking—not rating yet, for instance.

Prosper.com:

A similar site is prosper.com, also an online microfinance site. It has more interactive elements, including bidding functionality like that of eBay. You can pick up the site and add it to your site via RSS, and get some credit information. There is a very high level of transparency in both the Kiva and prosper.com sites. Our market is not always comfortable with this level of transparency.

GreatNonprofits:

This organization is started by Perla Ni, who comes from the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This is basically TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) for nonprofits. Users enter information and ratings on nonprofits, profile themselves, learn what others are doing, add nonprofits and send information to others, e.g., board members, to have them rate, etc. The idea is to have a site that allows donors to find information about “good” nonprofits, based on feedback of the people who are really using those nonprofits or working with those nonprofits. An element of functionality introduced in this site is called a tagcloud. Tagclouds are created by software that “reads” the entire site, collects the tags from the site and displays the tags in a “cloud.” They are displayed by order of prominence due to how often the tags appear on the site.

The far right-hand side of the spectrum contains the most components of 2.0 knowledge networking:

Change.org:

This site has the most elements of 2.0 knowledge networking that we are aware of. This is MySpace for the nonprofit sector. First, the user profiles him or herself. (All of the presidential candidates have profiles on change.org, for example.) Then, as a classic social networking site, it starts to show relationships: how many people you have recruited to the issues/causes you care about. You provide information on the changes you want to see. The issues are listed in order of the size of the community that is working on the issue.

How to figure out where this fits with your brand?
As a marketplace, foundations tend to be on the left side of the spectrum. However, they should slowly and carefully build community around the knowledge resources they offer. They should let the people using the knowledge resource interact with each other, have discussion threads (they could have their staff moderate those threads), and offer ideas. Let people profile themselves if they want to and let them find others who are like them if they so choose. One of the biggest benefits of on-line community functionality, if it works, is that people in the community help keep the information fresh over time. Foundations need to ask themselves whether and how their organization will be a player in this emerging market.

By Sean Stannard-Stockton | Also posted in Cross-Disciplinary Conversations, New Philanthropy, Philanthropic Capital Markets, Philanthropy, nptech | Comments (3)