We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that many social movement organizations and grassroots organizers alike are starting to embrace the wild wild west of ‘e-organizing’: a landscape of new web-based tools and technologies designed to help self-organize large numbers of people and drive systemic change.

As you might have read recently in a SSIR email sent out to all magazine subscribers, Stanford students recently unveiled the first ever Movement Plan Competition.  This first year, this “Social-M Challenge” (‘M’ for Movement) is thematically focused on environmental sustainability and powered online by Blitz Bazaar, a new movement-management platform that makes it very easy for grassroots organizers to harness the power of the social web to start and grow a micro-movement, even for people with little comfort using the social web.  Full disclosure: I am the founder of Blitz Bazaar. 

Phase I of the challenge closed on January 29th with eighteen submitted movement plans, the best of which were awarded $1000 each. Now through February 27th, movement leaders will nurture and adjust their movements to the realities and lessons of campaigning.  The single best-realized and most-promising of the thirteen active social movements will be awarded $10,000. Challenge funding was generously provided by the following Stanford partner organizations: the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, the Sustainable Stanford Green Fund, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Office of Community Engagement and the School of Humanities and Sciences. 

If you check out the site, you’ll see PhDs, professors and undergrad freshman all taking collective action for the sustainability-related causes.  These are micro-movements that promote issues like vegetarianism, community supported agriculture (a.k.a, eat local food), ‘Green’ values for young children, reusable utensils, ending food waste, oil-free water in Ecuador and more.  Each movement is working towards a very specific goal and lists actions anybody can take to help further the goal.  Again, the movements are not limited to Stanford students so anybody can get involved.

In a new era defined by disruptive new social technologies and a market-driven approach to social change, it is not surprising that social movement-making be similarly incentivized.  Grassroots organizers can also be motivated using the same successful format that we’ve now gotten used to for business plans and more recently the X-prize foundation.  However, this value of this type of competition goes well beyond just catalyzing social movements and therefore social change. Anybody who’s participated in the more familiar business plan competitions in the past knows that it’s less about the money and more about the process. 

Our partners at Stanford, The Precourt Institute, The Woods Institute, and the Stanford Office of Sustainability, have been pleased with the Challenge so far for a couple reasons.  First it embodies the transdisciplinary approach the University is trying to advocate.  Doctors working with engineers, MBAs and lawyers to solve the healthcare debacle makes a lot of sense but it is hard to make happen in practice.  Secondly, Social-M is seen as a valuable tool for experiential learning in an ever-more important but largely ignored discipline: campaigning.  Lastly, it is technologically innovative by incorporating social networking and social media into the loop via Blitz Bazaar.

Contingent on successful results gleamed from this Stanford’s Social-M Challenge, you can expect this “Movement Plan Competition” format to spread just like the ‘social’ business plan competition format has proliferated in the last decade.  Many more Universities and Social Movement organizations are likely to embrace this format as an effective way to teach and catalyze the discipline of movement-making, a.k.a. campaigning.

Lloyd Nimetz is the founder of Blitz Bazaar, a web-platform for grassroots organizers to more effectively manage and grow their movements and social campaigns.  He founded the online giving market HelpArgentina.org. He has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a BA from Williams College and was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina.

One of the most dramatic changes has been the onset of social media, mobile technology, and applications (or “apps”) that allow you to do virtually anything through your mobile device.  Dr. Berholz provided the following example: before the news media had reported the earthquake in Haiti, Twitter was all aflutter with the news of the quake. And by now, everyone is aware of the many millions of dollars that have been raised to date for Haiti Relief efforts via text-messaging through that little mobile device. All you have to do is punch in a few numbers, and your charitable gift is made.

So, Dr. Bernholz reached out to her Twitter followers and asked a simple question:  “What app would you like to see developed for use by community foundations?” Here is the link to her blog so that you can read the results:
http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-kind-of-apps-would-your-foundation.html#comments.

However, closer to home, I’d like to pose the question to each of you, our community of givers. What kind of app would you create for The Community Foundation?

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

Terri Freeman is the President of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region. Prior to joining The Community Foundation, Ms. Freeman was the founding executive director of the Freddie Mac Foundation, one of the largest corporate foundations in the metropolitan Washington region.  Ms. Freeman obtained her bachelor’s degree in Journalism/Communication Arts from the University of Dayton in 1981 and received a master’s degree in organizational communication management from Howard University in 1983.

Kudos to Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project for bringing social entrepreneurs together for a chance to network; with job demands it’s always tough to take the time to get together.  These two organizations are holding four such breakfast events. The other three have already taken place in New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. The purpose of the events is to discuss nonprofits’ collective opportunities and challenges as well as the role “human capital management strategies” will play in their organizations this year.

Attendees are answering a brief survey on their organizations’ budgets, plans, and 2010 challenges. Survey results will be available on the Commongood Careers website in late February. Early results were handed out at our gathering – and comparisons between the Bay Area and the other three cities were intriguing.  (I don’t know how statistically valid the data is but the results were fun to look at nevertheless.)

Across the country, respondents said that a “significantly increased focus to secure gifts from high net worth individuals” was their number one funding goal in 2010, but the response was much higher from Bay Area nonprofits than from nonprofits in the other three cities.  Also according to these preliminary results, in order of priority, after high net worth individuals, Bay Area nonprofits were going to look for corporate partners second, and foundation grants, third.  In the rest of the country, all of these funding sources had about the same priority.

The San Francisco gathering included a panel discussion, and several panelists echoed what the survey data showed. BUILD in particular has been successful in changing its mix of funding to have more of an emphasis on individual donors. The social entrepreneurs on the panel were Suzanne McKechnie Klahr (BUILD), Louise Davis (Peer Health Exchange), and Jill Vialet (Playworks). These three panelists kept up the enthusiasm in the room by sharing their recent impressive successes and their growth plans for 2010.

The fourth panelist was Anne Marie Burgoyne (Draper Richards Foundation), who shared her insights from working with so many Draper Richards grantees (full disclosure: Draper Richards is one of the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s funders). Anne Marie commented that it didn’t surprise her that Bay Area nonprofits had a higher focus on pursuing individual donors given the wealth in the region. She also noted that she has seen that foundations are pulling back and choosing to fund what’s safe. As for corporate funding, Anne Marie said she is observing more partnerships and fewer dollars. She ended by encouraged nonprofits to pass by the “shiny pennies” on the road and stay focused on mission and their organizations’ strengths.

Overall, James noted several surprises he had from the survey: that most nonprofits expected their budget and program levels would expand this year and that government was fairly low on the list as a source of funding.

How about your organization?  Do you plan to grow your budget and programs this year? What funding balance are you aiming for (looking at individual donors, corporate funding, foundation grants, and government support) and has that balance shifted this year? Is the Bay Area a funding anomaly?

Ms. Ridley joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2006 as publishing director. Previously she was group president at CMP Media, where she ran a division of technology publications, events, and websites. Ridley is also founder and board chair of Friends of Timboni Feeder School, a nonprofit that supports a K-5 school in Kenya. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

For many of us, there’s only one answer to that question: Idealist.org. Like many of you, I found my very first full-time nonprofit job on their website. And it was the perfect job for me in the beginning of my nonprofit career. I remember it like it was yesterday…

I had recently graduated from college with a Bachelor’s degree in English that people said would never make me any money. They were partly right. I had already been working in the nonprofit field for almost three years on a volunteer or part-time basis for very little pay. I had no idea whether I could even find a full-time job that wouldn’t leave me homeless since the luxury of financial aid was long gone. My apprehension was heightened because I had also chosen to relocate from Richmond, Virginia, where I went to school – to Washington, DC, where all the nonprofits were, according to my professors. I had no friends in DC and no money. All I knew was that I wanted a job in the nonprofit sector.

My first attempt had been to go through a temp agency where I landed a great administrative position at the United Way, but it just wasn’t the perfect fit for me. So, I left after just a few months. I continued my search for the perfect nonprofit position. But, in the meantime, I needed money. I had an expensive apartment on the outskirts of DC. So, then I did a six-month stint at a District Court in Virginia as a Deputy Clerk. I figured I could put my minor in pre-law to use. The job sounded fancy, but all it meant was that I was supposed to process all the paperwork to keep the bad guys in jail. It was good money for me at the time, plus I had benefits. I’d never had a job with benefits before. But, then I started to get into trouble. People were being charged with crimes they couldn’t even understand because they couldn’t speak English. So, I spent my time running around trying to get them interpreters. I thought it was fair. I thought it was how the justice system should work. But apparently, that wasn’t my job. My job was not to help people have a fair trial. It was to process them and make sure they got into the right jail.

That’s when I knew I could never work in the legal system. Especially for the bureaucratic government. Eventually my boss at the District Court gave me two weeks to either shape up or ship out. I said my goodbyes, then went online and started applying for nonprofit jobs on Idealist.org. I don’t even remember how I found out about Idealist. Maybe from one of my professors. Maybe through a simple Google search. What happened next is that I found an open position with an organization in DC that worked with youth-serving organizations in communities of color, specifically the Black community. I had volunteered with African American youth in college. I cared deeply about people of color and how nonprofits could serve us. This was perfect for me. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted this job. They didn’t even call me until a month after I had applied! All of a sudden, I had an interview with them at 2:00pm. I got lost on the way there because I still hadn’t figured out the DC Metro system. I was late. I thought I’d blown it. I thought I’d have to go crawling back to the District Court. But then they called to offer me the job at 5:00pm that same day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Thank you Idealist.org for connecting me with my perfect nonprofit job. It started me on a path to even more connections and even more opportunities to contribute to my community through nonprofit work. That’s why I opened my wallet and made a donation this morning. If not for the great folks that put the Idealist website together, that maintain the content, that run the organization – those career connections could not have happened for me. I know that many of you have similar stories. And I hope you will share them in the comments!

In the meantime, here are several reasons why you should open your wallet and donate, too:

If you’ve ever found a nonprofit opportunity through Idealist – job, volunteer, board:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If you’re currently looking for a nonprofit job:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If your organization has hired or plans to hire an awesome new nonprofit employee:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If you can’t imagine who or what could possibly take the place of Idealist:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

Please also share Ami Dar’s note below with your friends, especially all of your friends who have benefited from this amazing organization. This is one of those times where we may only have one chance to help save one of the cornerstones of the nonprofit sector. When I talk to young people, they always mention Idealist.org as the way they connected to the nonprofit field. And we desperately need these new leaders to continue coming into our organizations and breathing new life into the work of social change. We can’t let Idealist go down like this. We need them. And now, they need us.

Dear Friend,

You know how sometimes in life you go through a bad moment, and when
your friends hear about it later, they say, “Why didn’t you say
something? Why didn’t you ask? We would have helped.”

That’s where Idealist is now, and I am writing to ask for your help.

Very briefly, here’s what happened. Over the past ten years, most of
our funding has come from the small fees we charge organizations for
posting their jobs on Idealist. By September 2008, after years of
steady growth, these little drops were covering 70% of our budget.

Then, in October of that year, the financial crisis exploded, many
organizations understandably froze their hiring, and from one week to
the next our earned income was cut almost in half, leaving us with a
hole of more than $100,000 each month.

That was 16 months ago, and since then we’ve survived on faith and
fumes, by cutting expenses, and by getting a few large gifts from new
and old friends. But now we are about to hit a wall, and this is why I
am reaching out to you.

If over the past 15 years Idealist has helped you or a friend find a
job, an internship or a volunteer opportunity; connect with a person,
an idea or a resource; or just feel inspired for a moment, now we need
your help. I wouldn’t be asking, and not like this, if this were not a
critical time.

There are two ways you can help. First, if you can, please make a
donation at:

http://www.idealist.org/donate

Some people in this community are not in a position to contribute
right now, so if you are, please give as generously as you can. Thank you!

Second, please spread the word about this appeal by sharing this
message with friends and colleagues who may have benefited from
Idealist over the years. Since 1995 Idealist has touched hundreds of
thousands of lives. If in the next week or two we can reach everyone
who’d give us a hand if they knew we are in trouble, I believe we’ll
come out of this crisis even stronger than before.

I believe this because while this has been a tough stretch, I’ve never
been more optimistic about the future. The content on Idealist has
never been richer, our traffic is surging, we are building a whole new
Idealist.org that will be released later this year, and the potential
for connecting people, ideas, and resources around the world has never
been more urgent or more exciting.

Your contribution will allow us to maintain all our services
(summarized below), and it will also give us some time to diversify
our funding. Being able to breathe, recover, and plan ahead for a few
months will be an incredible blessing.

Thanks so much for your support. Idealist has always been a
community-driven site, and we can’t do this work without you.

Thank you!

Ami Dar
Executive Director
http://www.idealist.org/donate

Rosetta Thurman is a writer, speaker, professor and consultant working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofits, leadership and social change at rosettathurman.com

Spheres of influence were expanded via viral agents across the web.  Ethos changed: Why bring people to your page when you could syndicate your presence to them?  Tentacles emerged in the form of widgets and gadgets, in the form of Facebook pages, YouTube channels and Orkut communities, Twitter decks and LinkedIn badges.  People –known as “users”– were promoted into “friends” or “followers.” But their more optimistic titles ignored arguably more passive engagement.

Firms engaged in an equity split of user interest.  New channels had expanded the number of “friends” exposed to ideas, but this uniform web expansion inflated user titles and diluted user interest in any one particular thing.  There were more shares, and perhaps the potential for growth had increased, but the short-term diminished share value of each follower questioned the veracity of value creation.

New media broadened exposure, but greater passivity reduced the currency unit of each view.  The gold standard of the active user, the “unique visitor,” became passé as monikers du jour –“meme,” and “tweet”– intimated web marketing savvy.  Overlooking the gold standard might have inflated numbers and ego, but did the expansion of exposure create lasting value by growing passive involvement?  Is a large network of passive “friends” better than a smaller network of active, unique users?

Today, one must explore, if not understand, the trade-offs between resource allocation, and user cannibalization across forms of new media.  Rarely are we Facebook fans, YouTube followers, Google Alert subscribers, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn members, following the same organization across five platforms.  We pick, and we choose in what capacity we will follow each cause, company, and cohort.
The question then becomes, how does one segment those demographics of value to the organization, and leverage forms of new media in smart and meaningful ways?  How does one optimize active user engagement, reach the broadest audience at the least cost, maximize and retain interest in the business?

In an ideal world we would understand the currency units of active versus passive support.  There would be a CNBC of online currency units, and across industries and time lines we could understand the trade-offs.  Meme tickers on Bloomberg and across Times Square would indicate the diurnal exchange rate between a YouTube view, a Facebook follower, a “Re-Tweet,” and a unique website visit.
But until that notion takes hold we are left with questions rather than answers.

Suffice it to invoke Yochai Benkler, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers on what he calls the “Networked Public Sphere,” to address network trade-offs.  In his book, Wealth of Networks, he discusses emergent patterns.

While there is a thickening of online ties, and facilitation of online solidarity within communities, there is also a “loosening of the hierarchical aspects” of such relationships.  He discusses the emergence of “limited-purpose, loose relationships.”  While inherently passive and non-emotional, they do cohere diverse groups of individuals around specific topics of common interest, and foster a loose group gravity that enables periodic, but passive, engagement over longer time horizons.

Individuals will necessarily retain small, familial, tightly cohered bonds because it is these interactions that provide emotional sustenance.  Just as the telegraph and the telephone revolutionized communication, they did not supplant human interaction. Equally, today’s revolutionary new forms of content and message syndication broaden our spheres of influence, as people and as organizations, but they do not supplant those constituent, active forms of human engagement that remain vital.

There is a hierarchy of interaction, and not all forms of messaging are created equal. The question is what is their relative value, and in which context is each the most effective form of communication?

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.