What can we create if we reorganize the creating?

(http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2009/03/09/orchestra-innovation/)

I know, I know, I've heard the old trope - "You've seen one foundation, you've seen one foundation." But that's not really true.

• If you've seen one foundation with 3+ staff, chances are they have an executive director, a program officer, and an admin person.
• If you've seen a foundation with more t10+ staff, they have an executive with an admin, 5 program people, 1 grants manager, and either 1 finance person and 1 communications person or 2 finance people.
• If you've seen a foundation with 25+ staff, they have E.D. + asst+ 2 VPs (one of evaluation) + 1 asst; 5 program officers and 5 program assistants, 3 grant mgrs and assts, 3 finance and assts; 2 communications people; 2 IT people.
• If you've seen a foundation with 50+ staff you've been in one of the few foundations at that number. Take the example above and add proportional VPs, assts, program officers. They'll have an HR department, too.

(If you are looking at community foundations in any of the above ranges please insert donor relations/donor advisors staff and ramp up the financial side of things)

As organizational structures go foundations aren't very creative - they actually look a lot alike. Which may be because, as someone once suggested to me, the model works. (Raise eyebrows here). I tend to think it has less to do with results than with institutional isomorphism. I find the inherent organizational similarities between foundations regardless of size, age, or mission to be odd.

Which is why I loved this post about orchestras. If ever there was a body that we would assume took a single form it is the classical music orchestra. X number of strings, Y number of woodwinds, Z for the percussion section. Arrange it in a seating hierarchy that hasn't changed much in 300 years. Put someone in tails, give 'em a baton, a score and a podium - voila!

Not anymore. In one of the examples, the Hamburg Philharmonic put its 100 players in 50 different locations around the city. Connected them with audio/visual monitors. And they played - conducted from atop the city's highest church.

In another example individual musicians from all over the world auditioned independently and online to be part of a YouTube symphony concert at Carnegie Hall.

Will these forms create great new music? Maybe. Maybe not.

But if ever there was a "scripted" form it is the classical orchestra.* So to be creative with that form is to really step outside the everyday and ask Why? Why do we play this way? Sit in this order? Select our colleagues in this way? And what if we tried it a different way? What might we learn? What might we do differently, how will the music sound?

To my mind, the experimenters in these orchestras were all asking "What can we create if we reorganize how we do the creating?" And that is a question worthy of philanthropic consideration.

*Hamburg even arranged its musicians around the city in the same "shape" that they would have been had they been in a hall - see the picture up top - an orchestra superimposed on a city.

Tags: philanthropy, orchestras, innovation, form.

Philanthropic leadership and the tensions of change

This is a 15 second time-lapse video of the aurora borealis from space. It's beautiful, fast, multi-dimensional, and both inexplicable and well understood.



(Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=uiheRnGQGYI)

I'm preparing a seminar on philanthropic leadership in our time. It is nowhere near as profound as the aurora, but the video struck me as an enticing lead-in anyway.

• The changes that are underway across our global society are profound and numerous.
• How we see these changes and forces depends on our viewing point and our time horizon.
  
• Each of us is lucky if we can understand a few of them, let alone be smart about one or two.
• No single force of change - demographic shifts, wealth disparities, religious and geopolitical tensions, technological prowess, data deluges, resource scarcities, planetary health - will be the defining shaper of our present our future. What always matters is the interactions between them.

So here is my proposed thought experiment for emerging leaders:

Several of the primary forces reshaping philanthropy are in real tension with each other. For example:

• Technological advances are pushing to make data cheap. Commercial and business model priorities (mostly) want to make data expensive.
  
• Philanthropy has tremendous freedom in what it funds and how it operates, yet most foundations and funders build remarkably similar looking organizations regardless of mission or reach. At the same time, interesting crowdsourced change efforts - such as Ushahidi and CrisisCommons - are starting outside the realm of traditional nonprofit structures and funding streams.
  
• Transparency is important and there are many efforts underway to make philanthropic institutions more "see through." Increased transparency may also make people less willing to take risks, speak out against the majority, or "follow their gut."
• Social goods have typically been seen as the purview of nonprofit organizations and public agencies. Now, more and more enterprises are producing social goods as well as financial returns.
  

Given this context, what would you do if you had a blank slate from which to create a philanthropic funding enterprise?

What might you say in the seminar? Share your thoughts in the comments and I'll share them with the seminar participants. With their permission I'll share their ideas back here later next week.

(OK, I'll admit, I included the video just because I liked it. I can't really weave it into this theme much better than I've done above. Can you?)

Tags: philanthropy, technology, disruption, #disruptphil, aurora, video

Seattle Foundation Giving Center

CORRECTED INFORMATION FROM FIRST POST - SEE REVISIONS ON CREDIT CARD AND DIRECT DONATIONS

The Seattle Foundation announced its new online giving site today. Community foundations have been rolling out this kind of information for several years now but this is different.

Disrupting Philanthropy is all about this kind of knowledge sharing. When we wrote On the Brink of New Promise in 2006 we said this kind of information sharing was going to be key. When I published Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets in 2004 I said this kind of information sharing was going to be key. When I first went to work for community foundations in 1990 I tried to find ways to share this kind of information.*

So why shout out about the Seattle site? It is not the first of these sites but it does do a couple of things right and worth noting:

1. It is open to anyone - you don't need to be a community foundation donor to use the information. You don't even need to register or log in until you decide to donate.
   
2. It is "social web" savvy - you can link to twitter, facebook, delicious, etc. from anywhere on the site. When you link to the organizations through Facebook, etc the links take you back to the Seattle Foundation Giving Center information. This should help donors, nonprofits and the community foundation spread information about their interests' quickly and using today's tools. It also positions the site to "power" all kinds of community driven, individually developed giving challenges, etc. It should help the information go viral.
   
3. Each nonprofit profile (and I'm told there are 700) provides information on the organization, the strategies deployed, the financials and "similar organizations"
4. It puts a donor's choices ALMOST all in one place - research strategies, read more about certain strategies, find similar organizations, check the financials, read Foundation staff evaluations of an organization, give through the foundation, create a fund at the foundation, or contact the Foundation staff. The only shortcoming - the "donate now" button doesn't take you directly to the nonprofit's site to make a gift. At this point you have to login as a Foundation fund holder for some organizations - for others you can make a credit card donation or login. I don't know why this direct donation feature isn't universal. This is too bad. Otherwise, the way this information is provided is key - it puts the foundation's expertise front and center - and recognizes and encourages all of the many different ways donors will want to use that information.
5. Presents information on accomplishments - both in the organizational evaluation section and under each category of giving.
   
6. Avoids jargon. Amazingly enough, the site is written in plain English.

Of course, I have lots of questions about what might be next steps from this good start. The front end interface seems well designed - with the exception of the "donate now" hoop which sometimes lets you make a credit card donation to the organization and other times requires you to be fundholder at the foundation -it is not clear why this is the case. The site should let you click through and make a donation directly for all organizations. It is notable that the Foundation is not taking a cut of the credit card transaction fees.

The momentum and success (as in so many things) are going to depend on how well the Foundation can encourage people to use it, share it, adapt it, refer to it, link to it, build from it. In other words, (as always) it's going to be about the community, not the technology.

• I'd love to know what the Foundation's plans are for promoting this site - will they use community challenges the way The Columbus Foundation has?
  
• How have they and how will they continue to work with the Kings County nonprofits to share the information, get support from key donors and board members of those organizations, encourage them to use and promote it, and generally make it a win-win?
  
• How will they involve the community in updating, maintaining and adding information to the site? Might they partner with GreatNonprofits or other review sites to get some information from outside experts?
  
• Will they encourage other foundations and funders to share their information - either through through this giving center or on their own sites? Microsoft gave the Foundation a grant to build the site - will they also share their information on nonprofits and community strategies through the site?
  
• How might they connect this information with the terrabytes of information on nonprofits and community issues that Kings County, the City of Seattle, major corporate funders in the region, wealth managers, giving circles or other private foundations in the area might have?
  
• Will they open up some of the datasets and encourage local programmers and developers to create new apps for the data? Or let the organizations on the site use the data to advance their work?
• And the question all other community foundations (as well as other charity rating and information sites) are surely asking - how will they pay for the site over time? What is the business model?
  

This site is the best I've seen in terms of re-positioning a community foundation's assets. It leads with information and expertise - locally sourced, relevant, and highly accessible.

*Luckily, my first community foundation jobs were at places that actively shared information on nonprofits with their donors - using (gasp!) - paper and pencil. We may also have used HyperCard for Macs - or I may be having a senior moment remembering that.

Tags: philanthropy, nonprofit, information, knowledge, #seattlefoundation, #seattlefnd, #opendata

Buzzword 2010.5 - Charitywashing

Charitywashing. Verb. Gaining the trust, good faith, or simply the business of customers by aligning your product with a charity. Often takes the form of statements that claim "...x% of sales of this object will be given to charity." See also embedded giving.

The most egregious charitywashing practices include, but are by no means limited to,

• not naming any specific charity,
  
• not stating whether the percentage is of the retail price, total profit, or total sales, and
• not including any kind of contact information that would allow anyone to follow up and see if you kept your word.

HT to @nathalierose of www.givealittle.co.nz

Tags: buzzword2010, philanthropybuzzword, philanthropy