Foundations - get the widget

Last week I pointed out that the entire ecosystem of information on nonprofits in the USA is changing. Just as the 1990s was a decade of innovation in philanthropic financial products, the 00s have been, so far, a decade of innovation around information. You can read the full post either here or on SSIR.

Here's one more sign of these changes - the Foundation Center, which has a database of more than 1.6 million grants from funders going back some 40+ years, is now offering up widgets. You can load the Foundation Finder widget or the 990 Finder widget onto your website and let donors or nonprofits find the info they're looking for. The data come from the Foundation Center. Your website is the place that helped the user find what the information she needed.

This represents many of the key trends I've been writing about - including the seven I discussed last week at the DonorEdge Conference. The slides from that presentation are here. Here's an abbreviated list of the seven trends that matter in philanthropy today, remembering that it is all about the data:

• Demographics matter
• Groups matter
• Ownership matters
• Mobility matters
• Forms matter
• Markets matter
  
• Alignment matters
  

Personally, I don't think slides without voice are very helpful so you might also be interested in the podcast of the speech and the discussion that followed, which will be live on the DonorEdge Community site soon.

Tags: donoredge, #donoredge, philanthropy, information, trends, future