This question - what are we not doing? - may be the most important question any strategist, funder, program officer, or board member can ask. It contextualizes the choices that are being made. It sheds light on how well you (or your staff) have scanned the landscape. It will help you think about what might come next. It may nudge you to reconsider ideas or plans that you had previously put aside. It requires you to explain, contextualize, justify, position the things you are doing.
Next time you are developing a funding strategy, considering a grant portfolio, thinking through evaluation, or doing due diligence with a potential grantee, ask yourself: What we are we not doing? (and why?)
Speaking of strategic planning here is a nice example of openness in the process - check out this "twitter conversation" and Presentation on Philanthropy's Tensions from the Peery Foundation's strategic planning process.
What are we not doing?
Nonprofits and Social Media Podcast
Thanks to the Columbus Foundation and DonorEdge for making possible this podcast.
Sidney Hargo interviews Katya Andresen of Network for Good and me on the future of social media, nonprofits and philanthropy. Enjoy.
Charity Challenge buzzword 2009.5
(photo by exfordy, Flickr, Creative Commons)
One of the key noted philanthropy trends of 2008 was the growth of philanthropy prizes.
This year the buzzword is charity challenge. These challenges tend to be some form of matching grant - based fundraising opportunity that uses blogs, twitter, widgets, online video and every other possible web-based communications tool. They allow the public to vote on where the sponsor's dollars go, or at least those recently run by Target, Toms of Maine, and American Express do so.
Idea Index and changing how we look for change
(photo by psd, Flickr, Creative Commons)
The Idea Index is a great (and beautiful) example of learning from the ecosystem that prize philanthropy creates. The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) has taken all of the entries for its recent challenge and published them in the Idea Index. BFI refers to this as "an open-source database of solutions to the world's most pressing problems."
It is similar to the way Changemakers is running its prize platform. HASTAC also works to connect the many organizations that submit to its Digital Media Challenge. NetSquared's annual conference acts as a way for applicants to get to know one another. These opportunities for networking the people behind the ideas, those selected by competition and those who weren't, is a wonderful contribution to the ecosystem for change.
I think the Social Entrepreneurs API, SocialActions, and AllforGood are great examples of how we can pull data from disparate sources and let people use it for all kinds of purposes. Imagine if we could mashup these "challenge ecosystems" into one massive index of ideas and idea-makers - from health, digital media, social enterprise, poverty alleviation, and so on - and see what they can accomplish when they can find each other....
Even further "embedded" giving
I was hoping I could come up with a term for "deeper than embedded" before writing this post, but my mind failed me. Since I am on vacation this is probably a good sign. So we'll open this up to you, dear readers - what term would you use to describe business models in which the giving element is so thoroughly integrated into the product and its marketing that it is a fundamental piece of the puzzle - even if the giving itself is not the core revenue driver, purpose of the product, or outcome of the service?
Here are some examples:
Contribune provides donor analytic software that allows an organization to track the news that its potential donors read. Users enter the URL of a news story that they care about, and Contribune facilitates donations to related nonprofits, tracks those donations, and elevates the story to the "front page" depending on the actions taken by readers. This seems similar to the services offered by Good2gether.
The Contribune site and blog include a movie that explains the process, but information on who is behind this site and what the revenue model is is somewhat vague (there are photos of the founder, but no last names listed). I presume that revenue (or predicted revenue) will come from selling data (donor analytics) to fundraisers (political and nonprofit) and from news sources. I suppose there could also be a token fee taken off of donations, but my guess is this won't be significant.
Giving is part of this model - but its really just the action that triggers the ratings that trigger the revenue. Sort of the way Nielsen ratings have been used to set broadcast advertising rates.
Contribune also launched a "charity focused URL shorteners - a technology that Twitter has made requisite. This URL shorteners allow you to clip a URL of any length into a shorter one, saving space in twitter and even allowing for some "built in" advertising. This is particularly true with the Giv.to shortener, as the clip will now look like "http://giv.to/cancerprevention" or "giv.to/savethewhales." These URL shorteners are loved for the brevity and vanity - they also provide great metrics as you can track who clicked through on the URL and what actions they took. Again, great data of potentially great value.
Last year we saw the development of search engines that enabled giving. Now we've got news sites and URL shorteners. What do you think will be the next technology action to integrate charitable giving? And what should we call this kind of embedded giving?
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