Drummond Pike founded Tides in 1976 and is the chief executive officer. He helped pioneer the advent of donor-advised funds in philanthropy, and has long supported grassroots and public-interest organizations through environmental and social change philanthropy. He received the Outstanding Foundation Professional Award in 2004.

In his victory speech in Chicago, Obama asked Americans to serve, sacrifice, and work together to fix what is wrong in America and strengthen our communities, our economy, our environment, and our security.

Throughout the campaign, Obama has urged Americans to pitch in.

He has promised, for example, to repay college graduates who perform public service for groups like the Peace Corps and Teach for America by helping to cover their college costs.

Charitable giving in the U.S. totaled $306 billion last year, and nearly 61 million Americans age 16 and older volunteered, giving 8.1 billion hours worth over $158 billion.

Over one million nonprofit organizations depend on the contribution of time, money, and know-how, and the dedication of employees who often are overworked and underpaid, to address the urgent needs our communities face.

“So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism, of service, and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other,” Obama said Tuesday night.

Long known as the “nonprofit sector,” or “voluntary sector,” the charitable work and investment of individuals and organizations more accurately should be known as the “giving sector.”

The giving sector is the heart of America.

And now, in the face of overwhelming economic, environmental, and global-security threats, the giving sector needs to be stronger, more strategic, and more collaborative.

Nonprofits must equip themselves to truly succeed. They need to engage their givers and their boards. And boards need to know their role, help the organization focus on the mission, and give staff the support they need.

Individuals must connect themselves to causes they care about, and make strategic investments of their time, their expertise, and their financial assets.

And charitable foundations and corporate-giving programs must dig deep and do more to address the organizational and operating needs of nonprofits.

Obama promises he will work to engage everyone in the job of fixing what is wrong in America, making government truly diverse and inclusive.

That job will require that we learn to bridge the gaps that divide us and work together, and nowhere is that more needed than in the giving sector.

Nonprofits and foundations talk a lot about collaboration, but few are willing to actually give up even the tiniest measure of control or power to form the partnerships that will be critical to solving problems that are bigger than individual organizations can handle.

And most foundations, for all their talk, still will not give more each year than the law requires them to “pay out,” a mere 5 percent of their assets.

In addition to the financial incentives he has promised to give college graduates who perform public service, Obama can push for incentives for individuals, foundations, and corporations to give more.

Obama also can engage in the giving sector the truly remarkable political organization he has built.

And nonprofits, applying the social-networking strategies and technology Obama used to build his organization, now can do a better job mobilizing, engaging, and managing their own givers.

“This victory alone is not the change we seek, it is only the chance for us to make that change,” Obama said Tuesday night. “And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.”

In this new era of giving, the challenge for the giving sector is to move beyond talk and giving as usual to truly fulfill the dream of a “new spirit of patriotism, of service, and of responsibility.”

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.

In an interview today with Cause Global, Rasiej credits Team Obama’s “culture of belief in the Internet” for building a movement for change among ordinary citizens energized via social media into a community of engaged, viral marketers for Obama’s campaign. The Web strategy, says Rasiej, was critical in helping the Illinois senator win the White House. (Indeed, an analysis of the vote today by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press says that without a doubt, “the overwhelming backing of younger voters was a critical factor in Obama’s victory.” Obama drew two-thirds—or 66 percent—of the vote among those younger than age 30, Pew reports. In addition, Trendrr, an online statistics mashup tool, shows Obama had a clear lead in using social media to connect to his audience, as well as an overall lead in winning the attention of the blogosphere as a whole. On social networks, Trendrr says, Obama held a big lead over McCain, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared with McCain’s 219,404. Between November 3rd and 4th (election day) alone, Obama gained more than 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, says ReadWriteWeb, Obama gained 2,865 new followers between November 3rd and 4th, for a total of 118,107, while John McCain’s Twitter account only had 4,942 followers in total.)

Team Obama also saw an opportunity in exploiting the flagging credibility of mainstream media—again chiefly among younger voters. “[Obama’s team] leap-frogged the mainstream media by producing content that they knew would get distributed for them [via social media] once it was uploaded,” Rasiej said. Especially in the final days before November 4th, Obama’s campaign sent daily emails and text messages directly to supporters, urging them to vote with friends, participate in phone drives, and volunteer at campaign events—even offering up a contest in which last-minute donors could be selected to attend Obama’s election-night party in Chicago. Says Rasiej:

“Going forward, social capital will become increasingly more valuable than fundraising dollars...The political power of the future will be a question of how robust and engaged a political entity’s [social] network will be"—not just how much money a candidate has in the bank or how many friends he/she has in Congress.”

A key lesson for cause activists everywhere from the election? Says Rasiej: “What we’re really seeing here is the reaction of a new network publicsphere—or, you could argue, a whole new political media ecology, a generational shift that’s empowering an entirely new human experience of participatory, civic engagement. It’s taking our former notions of civic engagement and redefining it as something continuously very relevant to people’s lives.”

For more on the lessons for nonprofits in Election 2008, check out Tom Watson’s post today at onPhilanthropy.com, where he is a consultant and writer. Watson is also the author of the forthcoming Cause Wired, a book about the use of social media in advocacy.

Writes Watson: “While there is a temptation among those who track causes and online fundraising to separate political organizing from philanthropy, I think that’s a mistake—it’s wishing for a division that the audience simply won’t tolerate going forward. It’s like hoping that a print classified operation will continue to grow during the age of Craigslist. Young people don’t separate their causes into neat little boxes labeled politics and charity. They simply respond to what moves them, what their friends recommend, what they believe might change the world.

“...It’s no accident that my nonprofit clients are asking about Web sites like Barack Obama’s. The [old] order is rapidly fading.”

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.

At a time when individuals and families are feeling the pinch or hesitating with “let’s see how things are at the end of the year,” knowing that their donations will be matched can be a powerful incentive for them to give today.

Do you know about any other stimulus initiatives? Please share them with us. Post below. We need these creative ideas to boost giving during this time, when nonprofits are asked to provide more services than before. 

Perla Ni, founder and former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is the founder and CEO of GreatNonprofits. She is also a co-founder of Grassroots.com.

“The Treasury is encouraging banks to participate,” says Bob Denham, director of corporate communications for the bank, which is based in Winston-Salem, N.C. “With the way the economy is, we almost have a business obligation to support the Treasury.”

But Denham says BB&T’s decision to accept $3.1 billion in return for giving the federal government preferred stock “doesn’t change” the belief by John Allison, its CEO, in the philosophy of Ayn Rand that champions free markets and paints government as the nemesis of capitalism.

“It’s all about helping the financial market, easing credit in the financial markets and creating liquidity,” Denham says. “We have regulators and it’s important that when they ask us to help solve a liquidity crisis, that we want to be at least viewed as a team player.”

Allison reportedly struggled over the decision, trying to reconcile his belief in free-enterprise principles with his sense of obligation to support the government’s financial recovery plan.

Denham declines to comment on details of Allison’s decision-making process but says BB&T was concerned the bailout would give ailing banks an unfair advantage over healthy banks like BB&T that have avoided financial trouble by refusing to make loans to unqualified borrowers.

“We have an obligation to remain in business and maintain our competitive advantage, and from a business perspective, it simply makes sense to take advantage of the same low-cost capital costs as our other competitors,” Denham says.

Banking industry insiders say the U.S. Treasury Department pressured healthy banks to participate in the bailout plan and has the power to punish banks that do not participate.

Denham says the bailout plan actually hurts healthy banks like BB&T by, for example, increasing the premiums it pays the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect depositors, and increasing the costs it likely will pay the Federal Reserve Bank for overnight borrowing.

“Now we are being punished by the bailout plan for having followed our values, and everyone else is being let off the hook,” he says. “The bailout plan is for the banks and investment banks that were poorly managed.”

BB&T has been able to weather the credit crisis through years of putting into practice the moral values Rand spelled out in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Denham says.

Under the leadership of Ken Chalk, who recently retired as chief credit officer at BB&T, the bank over the past 20 years has created a “conservative credit culture that really has shined for us these last several years,” Denham says.

“And it really steered us through these crazy loans,” he says, “and we decided we were not going to make those loans, we were not going to be involved in that kind of crazy lending.”

Among the principles championed in Atlas Shrugged is that of “trading” that creates a “win-win for both sides,” Denham says. “And the idea is that when we make a loan to a client, it needs to be good for them and it needs to be good for us.”

Over the past 10 years, BB&T has donated over $30 million to over 30 colleges to support the moral study of capitalism, and has made it a condition of those grants that the schools require the teaching of Atlas Shrugged.

“We absolutely believe that government has involved itself too much in this crisis,” Denham says. “We’re already too regulated.”

But BB&T also needs to face the reality of the marketplace, he says.

“We’re a business, and we’ve got shareholders and we’ve got employees,” he says. “We’re probably one of the strongest capitalized institutions in the United States. And here we are being hurt by a rescue plan that is actually a bailout for poorly managed financial companies.”

As details of the bailout emerge, Americans will begin to see how reluctant players like healthy banks and unwitting players like taxpayers have been drawn into a massive financial gamble by the government.

That gamble will pour billions of dollars into the financial sector that otherwise might have been used directly to address critical social problems we face.

And those social problems, which are escalating in large part because of the financial crisis, are putting growing demand on nonprofits and private philanthropy.

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.

I recently read in GOOD Magazine that some ridiculous percentage of college students said they would give up their right to vote for an Apple Ipod Touch. Ouch.

Then I received a newsletter from the Ford Foundation that included the incredible chart below (don’t let the list length fool you—the USA is number 139 in voter participation). Ouch.

On the other hand, we’ve seen incredible increases in voter registration in the US this year, unprecedented turnout in the primaries, and enduring interest in the longest Presidential campaign ever. So make the most of it. Get out and vote. Share your experiences and observations of the process via twitter—as part of the new and cool twittervotereport project. It is a right and a responsibility. Please vote.

The 2008 Presidential campaign frenzy will finally come to an end tonight, when all the votes are cast for our next Commander in Chief. And whomever the American people choose will ultimately have the greatest influence on what then happens in our communities and with the people and families that nonprofits serve. Depending on whether we elect Barack Obama or John McCain, the issues that nonprofit leaders fight for every day will certainly be affected: women issues, homelessness, job training, arts education, youth development, environmental issues, animal rights, and the list goes on and on.

We have to remember, even as the polls start to close, that we as nonprofit leaders have an even greater responsibility once it’s all said and done. We have to commit ourselves to working with the new President and dedicate ourselves anew to fight the good fight for the causes that mean the most to us. Because both candidates are promising us “change,” that lovely word we all like to use. But please believe that neither a Democratic or Republican leaders of America can bring about change singlehandedly without people like us on the ground putting in our sweat equity, too. None of us need to be disillusioned that a new President means that all of our social problems will be solved in four to eight years. Not gonna happen. So that means we need to go ahead and pull out the full-length and look at ourselves in the mirror. And really think about how we will help to change this country once and for all. The time is here. The time is NOW.

How will we contribute?

Rosetta Thurman is an emerging nonprofit leader of color working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofit leadership and management issues at Perspectives From the Pipeline.