Stanford Social Innovation Review

The Effects of Joining the Conversation

It’s not a surprise to any of us that social media is changing the way our organizations work, not just communicate.  The lessons in social media are especially important for organizations working with the public, whether it’s public service or opinion.  The Hatcher Group, a Maryland-based public affairs and communications firm, released a great report this past fall called New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals (PDF).  Despite the generic title, this is a report chock full of examples, best practices and data about the effects of joining the conversation online.

The 30 participating organizations in the report are members of the State Fiscal Analysis Initiative, a group of independent, nonprofits with a shared commitment to responsible budget and tax policies.  As such, it’s easy to identify some of the goals these organizations have for using social media, including: engaging with and even influencing the general [voting] public, influencing news, engaging with and influencing politicians and legislation, and sharing data, information or viewpoints. Social media is a prominent social gathering place where these goals can definitely be met. Joining the conversation is incredibly important if these organizations expect to change policy and change minds.

Joining the conversation really means conversations.

It’s not just a phrase or some insider lingo, when I recommend organizations join the conversation, I mean just that!  People are talking online and the best way to influence what they are saying or how they are thinking about issues is to talk with them.  The survey found that blogging and blog outreach was the most popular social media choice.

• 83 percent currently reach out to bloggers and the remaining 17 percent plan to in the future
• more than 93 percent now monitor citations of their organization in the blogosphere

Many groups included in the report maintained blogs (either on their own site or elsewhere), but what the numbers above (and the effects listed below) indicate is that you don’t necessarily have to create your own blog to join the conversation. It’s already happening, so go there!

Being an active member of the conversation pays off.

• 88 per-cent of the organizations said they had been cited in blogs as a result of their outreach efforts
• 64 percent felt that they had successfully affected blog coverage of an issue.
• 16 percent of the organizations were subsequently invited to submit guest-posts

Real-time is just as important.

Over half of the organizations surveyed reported that they do not use Twitter and do not intend to, with only 24% reporting use of the tool.  This is a huge missed opportunity to influence public opinion, participate in the conversation, attract attention from journalists and policy makers, and more.  Twitter is part of the real-time Web, meaning it enables people to communicate, share information, spread news, and distribute links in “real-time” as it happens.  As more and more people join the micro-blogging platform Twitter, it becomes an even more relevant tool for organizations working on impacting legislation and connecting with voters.  It’s true that with blogs, there’s a bit more time for responses to be prepared (and even approved internally) before posting.  But, that should not stop organizations joining Twitter and empowering staff to leverage organizational talking points, resources and research to better information the conversations there.

One organization had particular success using Twitter to facilitate its state policy work. As the legislative session in the group’s state was winding down, things began moving at such a rapid pace that daily newspaper updates were not sufficient to inform and promote its advocacy efforts. The organization found that following Twitter updates posted by reporters and advocates from the statehouse was the fastest and easiest way to track legislative developments. The group’s representatives were also able to update their Twitter profile to provide rapid-response statements. These short and timely statements sent out on Twitter caught the attention of local reporters, who then contacted the organization to solicit quotes for stories.

What do you think?

How has your organization joined the conversation online? Are there any tools or techniques in particular that have helped you find or contribute to the conversations taking place across the web?

(Download the full report in PDF: New Media & Social Change: How Nonprofits are Using Web-based Technologies to Reach Their Goals)

Amy Sample Ward’s passion for nonprofit technology has lead her to involvement with NTEN, NetSquared, and a host of other organizations. She shares many of her thoughts on nonprofit technology news and evolutions on her blog.

 

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Privacy (Still) Matters

Make no mistake: the data privacy debate is hotter than ever: the recent uproar over Facebook’s new Terms of Service—and then, more recently, Twitter’s new service terms—is all about privacy. As Georgetown privacy law professor Marc Rotenberg says, it’s not the “old-fashioned parchment scroll, carried by courier on horseback from the castle to the king’s army notion of privacy.” It’s all about modern-day privacy, “about digital identity, the control of personal information, and the brewing battle between what we post and its commercial value,” Rotenberg says. [For more on Rotenberg’s views, see his essay that ran recently in The Huffington Post, suggesting that “we give up personal information all the time but that doesn’t (nor should) end the discussion over privacy.” That, Rotenberg says, is where the discussion begins.]

Just don’t tell the social media executives meeting in Davos this week. There, halfway ‘round the world from Rotenberg’s Washington, D.C., office—and while Rotenberg was commemorating the first annual Data Privacy Day January 28 in press briefings and other talks elsewhere—the chiefs of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were squeezed into a small, packed anteroom at the World Economic Forum, discussing in a rare meeting of rivals why their companies hadn’t yet figured out a way to make big money off their subscriber’s digital social connections.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who invented the World Wide Web, told the Davos gathering that “little changes in how your treat privacy can dramatically affect the way a social network works.” He said that in eBay’s case, for example, the site has stepped-up privacy in some areas as the online auction site has matured. [The site now hides the identity of people bidding against each other.] Younger users, though, seem far more open to revealing personal details about themselves, he said.

Then it was Reid Hoffman’s turn. The executive chairman and founder of LinkedIn, the professional and job-hunting social network, told the group: “All these concerns about privacy tend to be old people’s issues.” Transparency and accessibility are two reasons, he said, that so many younger users—teenagers and young adults—put their mobile phones on Facebook or MySpace. “The value of being connected and transparent is so great,” Hoffman said, that privacy is not a concern but a hindrance.

Rotenberg wasn’t present. But Don Tapscott, author of books on the so-called Net Generation and the need for corporate transparency in the Digital Age, took Hoffman on. Social networking, Tapscott said, would become what “we want it to be” over time, meaning that if we wish to build civic values into social network sites, we will—and should. “[The Internet] has an awesome neutrality and we need to build into it basic human values,” Tapscott told Hoffman. “And one of those values is the right to informational privacy and the right to be left alone. I completely reject this view that privacy is dead. It’s in deep trouble, it needs to be saved and everyone needs to get involved to protect their own information.”

Indeed. [Says Rotenberg: “I smile every time someone says privacy is dead or the Facebook generation doesn’t care about privacy. If there is one issue that people feel passionately about today, that literally unites everyone who goes on line, it is the interest in privacy. And the battle is just beginning.”]

What do you think? Is privacy an “old people’s issue” or increasingly (or once again in society) more about civil liberties in the 21st century? Let us hear from you.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

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Momentum 2009: Fear and excitement about real momentum for progressives

It is ironic that the Tides Foundation founded the Momentum conference 6 years ago when there was no momentum behind the progressive agenda. Now, in its 6th year, Momentum finally has some real momentum. From health care to the environment to labor and the financial system, every speaker was visibly excited and somewhat surprised to find themselves suddenly with the opportunity they have been waiting years for: real change is now possible.

Coupled with that energy and enthusiasm was also fear—that the moment would be lost, or not seized upon entirely, or that the progressives could not put together and market a united front as effectively as the conservatives. There was also a hint of debate in all this excitement. Like a kid in a candy store, the question was: do I completely stuff my pockets and risk losing it all? or do I just grab a few jelly bellies and be content? And how do progressives stage a real debate on the issues while still supporting the President?

I attended the Momentum Conference on Tuesday, Sep 8, the first day of a three-day conference. Tides Foundation did a remarkable job of lining up fantastic speakers to make a long day engaging. Add to that the terrific food, a great location at the W hotel in San Francisco, and cool entertainment, and the event felt like a mini-TED conference. Drummond Pike, founder and CEO of Tides, said, “the purpose of the conference is to stimulate ideas, to move the agenda forward, but not to reach conclusions. Leadership begins with the imagination, and finding interesting new voices on a variety of topics promotes new thinking and strategies to step forward in to the moment.”
Given that objective, the conference succeeded. And with more than 500 registrants, this year was more than double the size of last year. Donors, activists, academics, media, socially responsible investors, students, and artists came together to discuss how to help activists build momentum for their movement. Topics included health care, capital, carbon, and work.

Between the SoCap conference last week and the Momentum conference this week, San Francisco is a great place to see and be seen amongst the leaders of the new economy. As long as we are not blinded into thinking that the rest of the country is thinking these same thoughts, the energy, ideas, and enthusiasm can inspire and catalyze change.

In the interest of full disclosure: SSIR was a media sponsor of Momentum.

Gina Klein Jorasch is currently Senior Advisor to the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Gina was a founder or early-stage executive at five for-profit tech start-ups, all of which had successful IPOs or acquisitions, and a founding board member for two nonprofit startups.

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Nonprofits’ Attraction to Stimulus Funds Could Prove Fatal

Smitten with their new best friends in government, nonprofits need to be careful not to betray what makes them essential to a healthy democracy and civic marketplace.

The job of nonprofits is to take on social and global problems and make our communities better places to live and work.

To do that, nonprofits need to deliver effective services, find innovative ways to address both the symptoms and causes of problems, and ride herd on government lawmakers and policymakers.

But with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, and spending billions of dollars to build the capacity of the giving sector and stimulate social innovation, nonprofits face a big temptation and a run a huge risk.

Seeing a chance after years as outsiders to get a piece of the action, both in federal spending and influence with policymakers, nonprofits risk losing the independence and incentive that have been essential to their work as civil society’s conscience and research-and-development arm.

On the political left and right alike, experts on the giving sector warn that nonprofits should not to abandon or abdicate their role as social innovators and government watchdogs.

Rick Cohen, a left-leaning watchdog who is national correspondent for The Nonprofit Quarterly and former executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, says keeping quiet about the Obama administration and Congress is the worst thing nonprofits can do.

“No, there’s something worse,” he writes in The Cohen Report, a publication of the quarterly.

“We can transform into an uncritical handmaiden of the handful of insiders who have grabbed the ‘nonprofit expert’ roles in the new administration, rather than doing what the nonprofit sector should always do, which is to stand apart, critique, mobilize the communities we represent, and demand social justice.”

Howard Husock, vice president for policy research at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute and head of its social entrepreneurship initiative, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal that the Edward M. Kennedy Service America Act that President Obama signed into law threatens to stifle the social-entrepreneurship movement that has flourished in recent decades.

Standing in “notable contrast to established, large organizations – from Catholic Charities to the Salvation Army – which, in many cases, have come to rely on government contracts,” the social-enterprise movement has been fueled by “new, inventive nonprofits established and operated with little or no government support, says Husock, former director of case studies in public policy and management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

But the Kennedy Act “will throw so much money at nascent programs that these otherwise independent efforts will lurch after federal dollars and bend toward government directives,” he says.

Nonprofits are known as the “independent sector” because their effectiveness in serving people and solving problems is rooted in their separation from government.

Nonprofits indeed stand to gain from a closer partnership with government that would generate more investment in the giving sector and give nonprofits a greater voice in shaping public policy.

But nonprofits should be careful that in chasing government money and access to power they do not devolve from entrepreneurial watchdogs into lazy and dependent lapdogs.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

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Giving-sector Should Raise its Advocacy Voice

Fear of offending giving-sector powerbrokers, and a lack of resources, are muzzling nonprofits.

But supporting nonprofit advocacy, policy and community-organizing work can yield big returns.

Those are the conclusions of two new reports that underscore the need for greater investment in helping nonprofits to be stronger advocates.

While supporting a cause is central to their mission, a lack of funds and staff, along with concern that speaking out will upset donors and board members, often keeps nonprofits from raising their voice on policy issues, says a new report by the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University.

“Nonprofits are supposed to be the agents of democracy and give voice to the powerless,” says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. “But their ability to do this is hampered by limited funding.”

Participants in a roundtable discussion on the topic suggested nonprofits take a more strategic approach to advocacy, integrate it into all aspects of their organization, encourage foundations to support advocacy, build long-term relationships with government, and use social-media tools to support their cause.

A separate report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy says $20.4 million invested over five years to support advocacy and community organization by 13 groups that work with underrepresented constituencies in North Carolina yielded over $1.8 billion in benefits, or $89 in benefits for every $1 invested.

An earlier report late last year found that $16.6 million in advocacy funding over five years for 14 groups in New Mexico generated $2.6 billion in benefits, or a payoff of $157 for every $1 invested.

“When nonprofit organizations and foundations tackle urgent issues in the state,” the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy says in its report on North Carolina advocacy, “they can achieve tremendous success – especially when they use public policy advocacy and engage affected constituencies in the problem-solving process.”

The report says “philanthropic best practices” to fund advocacy and community organizing in North Carolina include providing grants for “core support” and over several years, soliciting input from nonprofits and helping to build their “capacity,” exercising leadership on issues, and reaching out to other funders to expand available resources.

The giving sector can be much stronger advocates to address the symptoms and the causes of the social and global problems the economic crisis only is making worse.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

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The Best Thing we can do for Nonprofits–and Ourselves

Have you seen Rick Cohen’s typically smart and on-target piece “The Worst Thing We Can Do for the Obama Administration”?  While he’s speaking about the nonprofit sector and its/our special-interest-group needs, there’s a broader point: that those of us who supported the President’s election because we share his basic principles and values should express that support by remaining independent and criticizing when necessary, rather than by becoming supplicants to or apologists for the people we put in office.  That’s an idea relevant to each and all of us as citizens.

The Nonprofiteer’s own version of this insight struck her while she was raging at news of the Administration’s refusal to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture.  Abruptly she realized she had two choices: struggle to construct a rationale for a constitutional law professor’s apparent indifference to violations of the Constitution, or struggle to make it impossible for such apparent indifference to continue.  So she’s now volunteering with the ACLU,  whose legal work contributed to the release of the torture memos and which is helping to orchestrate public pressure to bring to justice the people who violated our laws in our name.

Politics, it is said, is the art of the possible.  The citizen’s job is to define for politicians what’s possible, and to make sure that the definition encompasses everything that’s essential.

As nonprofit leaders, we know first-hand how much of what’s essential requires the government’s support.  But as Cohen says, our primary job is not begging for that support; it’s giving or withholding our own based on how well the government–our government–lives up to our ideals, and its own.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is principal of NFP Consulting, which provides strategic planning, Board development and fundraising advice to charities and philanthropies. She is also a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

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The Innovation Imperative

I set out to write about President Obama’s forward-thinking decision to create an Office of Social Innovation to unleash new approaches to solving problems that have resisted traditional approaches. Even though the office and a related social innovation fund are still in their early planning stages and not even officially been announced, it is already clear to me that they represent a significant opportunity.

By creating this office and fund, President Obama is giving a clear signal of support for principles near and dear to Venture Philanthropy Partners: that the nation must invest in innovation targeted at the public good, that outcomes and impact matter, that dollars should flow preferentially to those who are having the greatest impact in addressing our growing social needs.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that blog item. After sharing a draft with others, wiser than I, to test ideas and “poke the system,” it became apparent that I was missing the forest for the trees. There’s no question that shining the spotlight on social innovation is remarkably important. Yet it will require innovation of the broadest possible breadth and depth if we are to solve our most vexing social challenges.

So instead of focusing on social innovation, I feel compelled to lift up a level and talk about innovation more broadly. I am convinced that, amid the many challenges facing our President, nothing is more important for the long-term strength of our nation than driving greater levels of innovation across all sectors of our economy, including the nonprofit sector.

From the halls of Congress to the rural towns in our heartland, we simply have to come to grips with the fact that the rest of the world is no longer ceding the role of lead innovator to America. Emerging powers like China are seriously challenging us in our core competency. As the journalist James Fallows concludes in an outstanding cover story in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, “China [is using the economic downturn] to design innovative products that will get it the high profits and the high-value jobs Americans kept to themselves for decades. And that is very bad news for the United States, unless it uses tough times to reinvent itself, too.”

Existential Urgency
My family and I visited Israel in 2006 as part of an awards program. I remember leaving extremely impressed by the positive attitude toward achievement, the concentration of intellectual talent, and the advanced thinking relative to the reuse and conservation of scarce natural resources.  I also remember that this attitude was present in everyone we met, from top officials and business leaders to the tour guides and shop vendors. In a trip report immediately following our visit, I shared this observation: “Israel is finding solutions to the scarcity of resources in ways we can’t yet comprehend. Their compelling advantage is that as a people and culture they know they have to in order to survive.”

America has a deep, proud tradition of innovation. But we don’t have this existential urgency and, in spite of all we’ve done, we do not enjoy a full cultural embrace of innovation. We desperately need that urgency and embrace.

Through radical innovation in our commercial, nonprofit, and public sectors, we must break the status quo that is too often miring us in mediocrity—from how we manufacture our products to how we educate our children, from how we consume energy to how we provide health care. We have no choice but to discover and deliver new, different, and better ways of dealing with our most vexing challenges. The aftermath of the financial crisis and threats to our global leadership will put America’s spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to the test of its life!

Yes, We Can
We know we have it in us as a nation to meet this challenge. I witnessed the drive to innovate while growing up in the 1950s, when starting my career in the 1960s, and while riding the wave of information technology through the 1980s as an entrepreneur. But nothing in my experience compared to what I saw in the 1990s, when three forces converged to ignite an exuberant burst of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Motivation. The tumultuous industry shake-ups in the 1970s and ’80s caused a breakdown in trust for a generation of employees, blue and white collar alike. The shake-ups dramatically changed the mindset of millions who lost their jobs as a result of—pick your euphemism—“downsizing,” “restructuring,” “consolidation,” “merger,” “outsourcing,” or “reductions in force.”

I witnessed this in several ways. First, the software firm I co-founded helped a number of Fortune 500 firms consolidate operations, with resultant large, well, reductions in force. And, in our own firm, when I had the bitter task of telling good friends that I was letting them go, one looked me in the eye and said, “I understand what you have to do, but, @%*!, I’ll never work for someone again!” He struck out on his own; many others across our nation did the same.

Less obvious is how their sons and daughters internalized what they saw. When many of them started careers in the 1990s, they became entrepreneurs, embraced “free agency,” or went to work for smaller start-ups. They chased their dreams, drove change, and satisfied their desire for independence and self-actualization.

New Capital. Although wealthy individuals had invested through venture capital for a long time, the volume of capital exploded in the 1980s and ’90s as a result of changes in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and an influx of large institutional investors. This vast source of capital funded many aspiring entrepreneurs and emerging business opportunities through the turn of the 20th century.

Disruptive Technology. Early in the 1990s, the Internet, previously the domain of the Department of Defense and academic researchers, went mainstream. It gave the Davids of the world the power to compete with corporate Goliaths. Suddenly, an entrepreneur working from his or her basement had the power to access the world’s resources—anyone, any place, any time. The price of basic business technology plummeted.

The Tailwinds Today
Great crisis and disruption can lead to important new inventions, as discoveries often emerge out of a period of economic collapse. I have a sense that something totally new and really big is going to emerge out of our current crisis. An innovator—or, more likely, a group of innovators collaborating across great distances—is going to create something that will fundamentally change the way we live. I haven’t a clue what it might be and, if past experience holds, I wouldn’t even recognize it if it were in front of me.

What I do know for sure is that I’m picking up the early signs of a new convergence.

Influx of Talent. The carnage in big corporations is going to drive millions of additional people—especially the young people who grew up in homes hit by corporate layoffs in the 1980s—to explore the entrepreneurial route. Clearly, the conditions are once again ripe for bright young minds to pour their energies into bootstrapping their own entrepreneurial ventures rather than tethering themselves to big companies.

In addition to young talent, we will also see an influx of seasoned Baby Boomers, the most highly educated generation ever, who are looking for purpose through an “encore career” rather than retirement. Not all encore careers are entrepreneurial in nature, but the potential for innovation is enormous. Just take a look at the remarkable winners of the Purpose Prize, sponsored by Civic Ventures. I love the story of the former lighting director who built a $28 nut sheller that has made a huge impact on the lives of farmers in West Africa!

In addition to these talent infusions, we will also see huge contributions from New Americans. A key ingredient to American success in innovation and invention has been its openness to new people with new ideas. A disproportionate number of innovators in America were born outside the United States, just as literally millions of small businesses were created by immigrants over the years. This is a vibrant source of talent for our future.

New Mindset. With youth setting the tone for this talent, a new mindset is emerging. Compared with previous generations of entrepreneurs, a far greater proportion of entrepreneurs today seek to do well by doing good. From engineering students at MIT developing an inexpensive shock absorber that harnesses previously wasted energy and uses it to improve fuel efficiency to Stanford grads selling hundreds of thousands of solar-powered LED lights in poor communities in Africa and Asia, the new entrepreneurs are rejecting the greed and ethical lapses they’ve witnessed in their young lives. They have been heavily influenced by macro events like Katrina, global terrorism, growing threats to our climate, and the meltdown of our global financial system. They are much more socially conscious, inherently global, more concerned about the state of our planet, less enamored of traditional political-party orthodoxy, United Way, apple pie, and Chevrolet. YouTube, Stephen Colbert, and the Smart Car are much more relevant.

New Network Technologies. Thanks to an entire new class of social networks, resource-matching and open-source models, and other innovations of the second generation of web development and design (Web 2.0), the Internet is becoming the ultimate tool, not just for connecting but also for organizing and coordinating across a broad and diverse continuum of resources—with a speed, ease, and effectiveness we’ve never witnessed before. The cost of coordination is falling to zero.

If you had a good idea in 1970, it was incredibly hard to move it forward and bring it to market; it was often one man or woman against the world. In the 1980s, the arrival of the PC allowed the little guy to look big and compete in new ways. When the Internet arrived in the 1990s, one man or woman could suddenly sell to the world. Now, thanks to the newest Web-based tools, it’s not just about selling to the world anymore. The next wave is collaborating with the world. The time from idea to result will—again—shrink dramatically.

We’ve only seen the first glimpses of this potential. For example, Barack Obama would still be the junior senator from Illinois if not for the online tools 20-something Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and other innovators put into action. With a modest budget and small team of developers, Hughes and others created community-building tools for the Obama campaign website which made it far easier than ever before for motivated volunteers to organize themselves and mobilize others.

Even when the vast majority of the Obama campaign’s staff and budget were focused in the critical early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, the Obama website was giving volunteers in every corner of the nation the training, talking points, images, databases, and other tools they needed in order to find supporters and get them to the polls. When it became clear that neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton was going to land a quick knockout, “all of a sudden it made a difference that we have 60 really organized groups in Kansas, a caucus state,” Hughes told Fast Company.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban just launched a fascinating experiment in what he calls “open source funding.” He has invited entrepreneurs anywhere in the world to post business plans on his blog. He hopes that his open approach will produce not just good investment opportunities for his company but also spark widespread innovation. “I expect other people can and will comment on [your idea]. I also expect that other people will steal the idea and use it elsewhere. That is the idea. If it’s a good idea and worth funding, we want it replicated elsewhere. The idea is not just to help you, but to figure out how to help the economy through hard work and ingenuity.”

Half Full
These three converging vectors—talent, mindset, and technologies—could create the conditions for commercial and social innovation on a scale we’ve never seen before. This is the forest, the iceberg below the surface, the big kahuna. This is why our national cup could be half full even at this time of deep recession. This is what President Obama has a chance to harness.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then this crisis, which has laid bare the depth of our needs, provides us the dramatic necessity to drive innovation and spur entrepreneurs of all types and sizes to find ways to deal with our challenges. The real change makers will be those throughout the land in small and big enterprises, the new and the old, the scientific innovator to the obsessively compelled entrepreneur, across all sectors, who take up this challenge.
So while I could not be more supportive of the Office of Social Innovation, I believe this is a chance for the President to systematically foster a mindset in America that is nothing short of a cultural and economic ground-shift. He must broaden the focus across and among the private, public, and nonprofit sectors—to seek and spark the most promising innovations whether they come from commercial or social entrepreneurs, executives or line workers, community leaders, public servants, researchers, or citizens who don’t fit into any of these categories. The real opportunity before the President is to supercharge innovators from all walks of life and make commercial and social innovation our national imperative.

Mario Morino, a former software entrepreneur, is the chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners, based in Washington, DC.

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Social Innovation in the White House

In the midst of a thoughtful discussion at the Wagner Center of the competing demands on philanthropies for funding of overtaxed social services and of social-change advocacy, big news: the White House is about to announce creation of the long-proposed Office of Social Innovation to bring together government responses and resources to the concerns of the philanthropic and charitable sectors.

Bureaucratic-style confirmation: the office appears on the list at whitehouse.gov.  Speculation about possible leadership has begun.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

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Spinternet

In the mid-1990s, people began realizing the Internet would transform the world—but the prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be mostly for the better. Last Friday, panels of thought leaders at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford agreed it’s time to take another look at that assumption.

Charles Leadbeater, a social entrepreneur and author of “We-think: the power of mass creativity,” said the Internet has, indeed, given more people access to knowledge [and will continue to do so, through such sites as Ushahidi, kiva.org, the new Wikimap Aid, and M-Pesa, a mobile phone-based money exchange service in Kenya]. It’s also clear, Leadbeater said, that the Web has begun to topple the top-down, Industrial Age way of managing people and projects into more level, lateral types of conversations, relationships and collaborative teams. “I also think the Web has huge potential to allow knowledge to be deployed in different ways which are not determined by profit,” he told Skoll conferees.

Panelists also agreed that the Web—particularly cellphone video-sharing—is empowering many people to hold their leaders accountable for bullying: Witness.org Executive Director Yvette Alberdingk Thijm shared citizen videos that her nonprofit either helped to produce or took viral on the Web in an effort to stop human rights abuses. This mobile phone video, about a California man shot and killed by police, led to the arrests of two officers after it went viral shortly after the incident. [Note the irony of the “danger” sign on the closing door of the subway train that appears at the end of the clip.] Another video, shot on a Flip video camera by Witness.org-trained Yemeni activists, showcases the six-year-old daughter of Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and her recollections of the day authorities broke into the family’s home, beat her father unconscious, and imprisoned him for his pro-democracy views. Witness.org uploaded the video and took it viral; a screen shot of that video, emblazoned with The Hub’s logo, was then published by an Arab newspaper. A public uproar ensued and led to the release of al-Khaiwani last September. “Once a story is out in the public sphere, it cannot be removed from public consciousness,” Alberdingk Thijm said. “The Web can help shift the dynamics of power.”

But citizens, beware. It’s getting harder to use the Web for social change. Challenges to the Web’s potential for democracy and freedom are growing quickly now, panelists agreed. “The enemy is getting just as smart in using these same tools to silence people yet again,” said Evgeny Morozov, a Belarussian journalist who is writing a book about censorship and the use of the Internet by authoritarian states.

Morozov cited a half-dozen examples of government and corporate “Net-cleansing”—including cases where companies are hiring “reputation cleansers” to bury Web references to poor corporate track records on Web search engines, while nationalist groups in Africa and the Middle East are using Google maps to mashup census data, so as to better pinpoint minority neighborhoods for targeting. Crowdsourcing also is being used by the governments of Thailand and China to drum up lists of Web sites and blogs critical of the current regimes; the Thai government, Morozov says, asks citizens to nominate Web sites to be blocked for content that offends the king; in China, a “50-cent Army” of some 200,000 or more citizens is paid to post pro-government comments on blogs critical of Beijing authorities. Morozov also says denial-of-service attacks are emerging as powerful tools for silencing political dissent in Georgia, Burma, Russia—and the United States. [During last year’s debate in California over the controversial Proposition 8, Morozov says, denial-of-service attacks were used by proponents of the anti-gay proposal to stem the ability of gay and lesbian nonprofits and political action groups to fight the measure.]

“We tend to assume the Net is going to be helping [civil rights advocates] and not the dictators,” Morozov says, “but repressive groups and regimes love the Internet, too, and are figuring out how to use it to control others.” When asked by moderator Andrew Zolli which side is winning—citizen civil rights activists or the dictators—Morozov said: “Both ends of the spectrum are expanding, but it’s very hard for me to deliver an argument that the Net benefits one political side more than the other.”

For more on the 50-cent Army and Internet censorship, see “Peep Show”, an August cross-post on SSIR from Cause Global about online censorship around the world. 

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

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Giving Sector Making Wrong Turn in Crisis

To cope with the economic crisis, the giving sector is betraying its roots.

Instead of joining hands to better address social problems, many nonprofits are chasing handouts and looking out for themselves.

And instead of looking for ways to give more and pool resources with other funders to get more impact from their giving, many foundations are hunkering down and hoarding. 



Tough times are a time when those in the giving sector should rise to the occasion by digging deeper and working together.

But in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, many nonprofits and foundations, despite all their talk about entrepreneurialism and collaboration, are sinking in the quicksand of entitlement and self-preservation and elbowing one another as they claw for solid ground. 


Instead of rolling up their sleeves and figuring out how to strengthen, streamline and even merge their operations, big nonprofits and their trade groups are licking their chops over the prospect of federal bailout funds.

And instead of pitching in, as Pablo Eisenberg argues they should in an opinion column in the Philanthropy Journal, big foundations are doing little or nothing to offer a helping hand, let alone take a leadership role, in bailing out the sector.

What’s more, with a few honorable exceptions, foundations not only are failing to give more but are continuing to pitch a fit in the face of critics’ calls to increase the share of their assets they are required to pay out in grants.

Foundations now must pay out only five percent of their assets, and they have fought hard against an increase of even one percentage point in that requirement, arguing that any increase in the payout rate would force them eventually to spend all their assets and go out of business.

And for all the maneuvering in the giving sector for bailout funds, few if any giving-sector leaders have had the courage to push foundations to use more of their vast wealth to help nonprofits strengthen their operations and programs so they can serve more people more effectively at a time of rising social need.

Likewise, in its rush to hit up taxpayers for what easily will total over a trillion dollars to stimulate bank lending, business spending and new jobs, the Obama administration has been shamefully silent, and surprisingly blind, about the need to push foundations to shoulder their fair share of investment to stimulate the giving sector, which accounts for five percent of gross domestic product in the U.S. and 10 percent of jobs.

Banks got into deep trouble because lawmakers eased regulations and regulators fell asleep on their watch. 


Foundations face far less and looser regulation and policing than banks, an inexcusable lack of oversight that must leave foundation executives and board members grinning all the way to their pricey conferences and retreats.

At those events, particularly in sessions that exclude the news media so they can talk more candidly, foundation leaders can wring their hands over the loss in the value of their endowments, congratulate one another over how effectively they govern themselves, and preach about the steps nonprofits should take to be more accountable and transparent.

In addition to letting foundations off the hook, President Obama also bears responsibility for perpetuating the idea that the giving sector is an underclass.

As Rick Cohen argues in an opinion column in the Philanthropy Journal, Obama’s promotion of public-service jobs for groups like AmeriCorps reinforces the mindset in society and the giving-sector alike that workers at community-based organizations are second-class citizens who should accept low pay for the hard work critical to addressing the symptoms and causes of urgent social problems.

The giving sector is in crisis and needs to get over its sense of entitlement and back to its roots in fixing social problems through voluntary enterprise in a competitive civic marketplace that operates with fair play and tough but even-handed rules.

Nonprofits need to figure out how to stand on their own feet and make their own luck, not beg for government handouts or grovel to foundations that talk one way, act another and cannot see beyond their own face in the mirror or the cherished cause of perpetuating their own wealth and power. 


And while government can and should play a role in providing financial stimulus and incentives to the giving sector, which is critical to our economy and society but hurting badly from the economy’s meltdown, Obama should use his clout to push foundations to pay out more of their assets.

In return for the generous tax breaks they and their donors enjoy, using even a fraction more of their assets to help nonprofits do a better job is the least foundations can do to begin to shoulder their fair share of the huge job of addressing the economic crisis and social problems facing America.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

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