A documentary film called Saving Philanthropy is currently under production. The subtitle is “Moving from charity to social investing before it’s too late.”
From the website: “Saving Philanthropy is a documentary film exploring the issues confronting effective philanthropic giving, specifically those involving the funding of direct service organizations.
The film contends that direct service organizations must be funded based on their performance and that this performance must be clearly tracked and demonstrated. “Performance Management” then, is the backbone of effective social investing (philanthropy).”
Click here to view the video if you are reading this post via email.
Update: Consider this a super sneak peek. The trailer is unfinished and is still under production. The producers would love to hear what you think of the trailer. Just leave a comment below.
In my travels I run across a lot of really interesting people working in the field of philanthropy. While reading someone’s work or reading about someone can give you a sense of who they are, meeting them in person gives you a much deeper understanding of who they really are.
So today I’m launching a new, irregular series titled Three Minutes With… As I meet with people in the sector, I’ll try to grab them for three minutes and have them tell us a little bit about themselves. My hope is that this will offer you an opportunity to virtually meet some of the characters, heroes and villains(?) of philanthropy.
First up, we have independent consultant Melinda Tuan, a co-founder of REDF and author of a recent Gates Foundation commissioned report on the state of the Social Return on Investment concept and other impact measurement frameworks.
In many of the posts on this blog, I’ve explored the idea of uncertainty. I believe that there are limits to what is knowable. But rather than preventing us from taking action, we need to design approaches to life that allow us to take action anyway. One way people do this is to pretend they have all available knowledge and take action based on the assumption they are certain. These approaches are faulty at their core. Instead, in philanthropy and many other areas of life, we need to make decisions based on the best available knowledge and adjust as we constantly learn more about our environment.
In this video, new pictures from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field demonstrate that we’ve achieved amazing feats despite only just beginning to understand a tiny bit about the universe. GOOD Magazine called this the “most profoundly humbling” video they’ve ever seen.
I happen to think that the grants philanthropists make are only one tool they can use to create social impact. An important and often under used tool is influence. Philanthropists that are doing good work and are willing to share what they know can’t help but build a “brand” that will allow them to directly or indirectly influence other financial flows.
Sharing doesn’t always have to be about sharing “knowledge,” sometimes it can just be about communicating an attitude. The Peery Foundation is a family foundation that has recently been aggressively exploring the use of social media tools to share their process as well as learn from the online community. Below you’ll find a video they recently produced (using iPhones and desktop editing software) that profiles their efforts to include their family’s “3rd Generation” in the foundation’s work.
Recently I linked to The Girl Effect video. Today I want to share a video produced by Charity: Water. Charity: Water was founded by Scott Harrison who was on the Bringing Philanthropy Online panel with me at the Council on Foundations conference. Scott was a photo journalist before founding Charity: Water and his background becomes obvious as you notice how effectively his nonprofit uses photos and videos to spread the idea that clean water is a high priority need for the developing world.
Charity: Water isn’t just showing photos that pull on your heartstrings. They are using storytelling to convey the very real underlying statistics that prove their argument. And then they are giving you an immediate way to take tangible steps towards fixing the problem.
My recent Chronicle of Philanthropy column was about the Googlization of Philanthropy and the ways in which third party web applications can effectively organize philanthropic data so long as social sector players digitize their knowledge and make it accessible. I specifically was not making the point that Google the company should dominate this process. But of course they are the heavy hitter in this area.
So it was with interest that I read today about Google’s new efforts to aggregate and organize public data. The initial launch makes unemployment and population data on a county by county basis available in chart form that can be manipulated by the user. You can try it out by googling “unemployment rate” or “population” and the state or county you are interested in. The charting feature makes it easy to put the data in context both across time and in comparison to other areas.
The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.
Since Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction. We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it’s used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations.
This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more.
Google admits that “the hard work” is the data collection. Their job is to make the data “easier to find and use”. As this process plays out in philanthropy, individual donors are going to find that they can begin to act on the information that informs the grantmaking of large institutional funders. Since individual donors give vastly more to charity than foundations do each year, helping their donations flow based on better knowledge of what works will have a transformative effect.
You can see a quick video demo of the new Google product here.
It is a tired, but true, saying that the best conversations at conferences happen in the hallways. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to go to the Skoll World Forum this year, not so much because of the sessions I missed, but because of the hallway conversations I wasn’t there for.
But thanks to Nathaniel Whittemore from the Social Entrepreneurship blog at Change.org, we all get to stand around in the hallways at Oxford and listen in on some great conversations. Nathaniel has posted a series of short videos that capture him talking with some of the leaders of the movement who were walking about the conference.
Below you’ll find Paul Carttar, a co-founder of Bridgespan. Nathaniel also spoke with (click on the name to see the video):
The business world hasn’t yet figured out how to deal with the way that the web makes sharing information incredibly easy. From newspapers, to music labels to anything that can be digitized, the web has destroyed business models that rely on ownership and control of information. Almost all profits comes from the control of certain types of information.
There’s nothing wrong with this. When I say “control of information” I don’t mean some devious withholding. Great musicians have knowledge of how to make great music. Great stock pickers have information about how to pick stocks. Great entrepreneurs have information about an exciting new business opportunity. The incredibly easy sharing enabled by the web means that suddenly only difficult to digitize information is valuable. That facts you learned in high school? Worthless. Your ability to synthesize new data and interpret new situations? Priceless.
Guess what? All this is outstanding news for philanthropy.
I often use examples from financial markets when I write about philanthropy. But there is a core underlying element of philanthropy where financial market framing breaks down. As a for-profit actor, you only care about the returns that accrue to you from an investment. If you have reason to believe that a stock will go up and you share the information so that other investors profit, none of their profits accrue to you.
But in philanthropy, all “returns” accrue to the public at large. If I have information about a great nonprofit, I can share that information widely and if other philanthropists make successful investments in the nonprofit I get just as much benefit from their returns as if I had been the only investor.
This dynamic changes everything.
In philanthropy:
The best philanthropist is not the one who makes the best grants. It is the one whose activities creates the most impact regardless of who actually makes the grant.
Sharing information increases your impact by helping other funders act on your ideas.
A funder who quietly finds a great nonprofit or program, but doesn’t have the resources to fully capitalize it fails unless they attract other funders.
The top philanthropists of this generation will not be the ones with the most money, they will be the people who are best able to influence where the big money goes. That will be the people who most effectively share high quality information.
Check out the video below (hat tip Lucy Bernholz) and every time you hear the word “science” replace it with “philanthropy”. Social media is destroying long successful business models as we speak. But the issues it raises have the opposite affect on philanthropy.
The video of the Tactical Philanthropy Forum is now available on Fora.tv. You can watch the first 15 minutes of the event via the embedded video or jump below to read about viewing the full hour long program and accessing specific segments.
You can watch the full video here. If you want to jump around, click here to access the FORA.tv menu of option for the video. You can click on the various titled chapters. In Chapter 2, I layout the history of the Tactical Philanthropy blog and the purpose of the Forum. You can than click on the other chapters to view Paul Brest, Bill Somerville and myself discussing various issues.
The good people at FORA.tv were at SoCap and filmed a number of sessions. This is the video of the session I moderated on New Wealth Management. The audio is fine on the video, but the mics only fed to the camera, so the large, packed room had trouble hearing us at first. That’s why you’ll notice we decide to stand up to present.
The session after mine was about Mission Related Investing. I thought the session was excellent and it was interesting to hear from the KL Felicitas foundation (a leader in MRI) talk about their experience. KL Felicitas is a relatively small foundation so they have a different sort of story to tell than the multi-billion dollar foundations who are starting to get into MRI. Click here to view the video.
You can find a listing of all SoCap08 videos, including the keynote address by Matthew Bishop (who coined the word Philanthrocapitalism) by clicking here.
