Stanford Social Innovation Review

Heat Wave: Part 3

The Clinton Global Initiative ended Friday, unbowed by the U.S. economic crisis. Top attendees—which included some 45 global CEOs, 60 heads of state, scores of advocacy leaders, and even a few Hollywood entertainers—ended up pledging close to $8 billion for new projects that would improve the lives of some 158 million people around the world.

Some final highlights:

* British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke for a full 25 minutes (extemporaneously, without a teleprompter or cue cards), urging the construction of a “global civic society” and the increased use of the Internet and social media to fight for human rights. He also called on those assembled to innovate their 20th-century institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations to better tackle modern-day challenges of climate change, poverty, and global health and education gaps. Click here to see Clinton’s introduction of Brown, followed by Brown’s full remarks.

* Social media for social change got another nod at CGI when CGAP (Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest, an initiative of the World Bank Group) pledged $10 million to create a mobile banking system for some 25 million people in 20 countries. CGAP CEO Elizabeth Littlefield called it a “mobile banking call to action.” She said: “Millions of poor have been left out of the formal financial system; the brick-and-mortar branch bank system can only go so far.” With cellphone service and a local shop handling the cash, she said, “mobile banking can reach every village and barrio in the developing world.” Target countries include: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, and Uganda.

*Rene Preval, President of the Republic of Haiti, issued a moving, eloquent appeal for fast help rebuilding his flooded nation, ravaged in late August by Hurricane Gustav. “It’s sad to say that if there are no dead bodies on the [TV/computer] screen, public opinion becomes disinterested very quickly,” he said. “Important work remains to be done.” Haiti’s infrastructure needs to be completely rebuilt—but not, he said, so it resembles what it was before. “We need to build back better,” he said—to better withstand what is certain to be more hurricane activity in the region in coming years due to the affects of global warming. “More than 90 percent of the crops in Haiti have disappeared in this recent string of hurricanes,” Preval told a panel on poverty, “and in six months, we will not have any food to give to the population.” Fellow CGI attendees Matt Damon and former Canadian Ambassador Frank McKenna (chairman of the nonprofit ONEXONE.org); Wyclef Jean of Yele Haiti, and past CGI attendees Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt were among those who pledged more aid to Haiti today. More is needed, Bill Clinton said.

“There is a misperception of assets and opportunities in the world and a misalignment of how we invest our time and money and (build) the kind of future we all say we want,” Clinton said in closing remarks. “We need to close the gaps between what we feel and what we see, and between what we say and what we do.” The first CGI-Asia meeting will be held in Hong Kong December 2-3 and a “youth CGI” will be held at the University of Texas at Austin in February.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Election Critical for Nonprofits, Giving

Nonprofits have a lot riding on the November 4th elections.

The candidates Americans elect to serve in federal, state, and local offices will shape and carry out laws and public policies that affect nonprofits and giving, as well as the people nonprofits serve and the needs that are their mission to address.

Nonprofits should make it their business to make sure voters know where the candidates stand, and to encourage voters to go to the polls.

Over one million nonprofits operate in the U.S., employing over 14 million people and working with 61 million volunteers.

The Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network, which aims to spur nonprofits to work on a nonpartisan basis to engage their staffs, boards, volunteers, clients, and constituents in the election process, says it is “not only legal but well within our missions to encourage voter and civic participation.”

And as a new survey makes clear, nonprofit executives expect the new president to help respond to the urgent issues facing America, and have strong ideas about the policies needed to fix those problems.

Four top priorities a broad cross-section of nonprofit executives identified in the survey by the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University include:

1. Restoring or increasing funds for their field in the federal budget.
2. Reinstating and expanding tax incentives, including those in the estate tax, for charitable giving and volunteering.
3. Federal grant support for nonprofit training and capacity-building.
4. Improving reimbursements under Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs to ensure they cover the actual costs of service.

With the economy under severe strain, says Lester M. Salamon, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, “our country needs a strong nonprofit sector more than ever.”

Yet nine of 10 nonprofit executives responding to the survey reported “little improvement in government policy toward their organizations over the recent past, as well as a considerable need for support to meet the challenges the country is now facing.”

And Peter Goldberg, chair of the Listening Post Project Steering Committee and CEO of the Alliance for Children and Families, says that, with government moving “to open the financial arteries of our economy, let’s not repeat mistakes and overlook until it is too late the great stresses and strains spreading throughout America’s vital nonprofit sector.”

Most nonprofit executives responding to the survey also supported policies to:

• Forgive college loans for students who take nonprofit jobs.
• Provide a broad nonprofit investment tax credit to offset the “un-level playing field” for nonprofits in securing capital to pay for technology, facilities, and capacity-building.
• Expand AmeriCorps and other national service programs that work with nonprofits.

Nonprofit executives also want national policy to pay more attention to poverty, provide for university health insurance, and require students receiving student aid for college to perform community service.

What voters decide on November 4th will have a huge impact on nonprofits’ ability to advance their missions of making our communities better places to live and work.

So nonprofits, building on the trust they have established and that is rooted in their good work, need to help their boards, staff, volunteers, clients, and constituents understand about the issues and candidates’ positions, and encourage them to vote.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Vote.

One way of understanding philanthropy is to see it as a regulated industry—that is a basic premise of my writing, my work, my thinking, my blog. Regulation exists in the realm of policy, policy exists in the realm of politics, participation is a core piece of politics and policy (in a democracy). That is my justification for dedicating this post to encouraging you to vote. That and the fact that today is election day and some incredible percentage of your peers have already voted early. According to certain economists, in some places voting “may be equivalent to giving $30,000 - $50,000 to others in expected value and as such is an extremely efficient form of charity.”

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.

Lucy Bernholz is the Founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as Executive Producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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The Secret Sauce

Both Barack Obama and John McCain used the Internet to reach voters this election—but Obama mastered the medium early “and exploited it to the hilt,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and co-founder of TechPresident.com. There’s no question: Election 2008 will go down in the books as the first nationwide political contest for social capital.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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A New Spirit, a Time for Giving

The election of Barack Obama as president marks the start of a new era for giving and making a difference.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Now What?

In the nonprofit sector, the rules governing our tax deductible status result in our sitting voiceless outside the noisy process of selecting leaders and legislators. The trouble is, most of us engage in this work because we are committed to social change. We want to see the world around us become a more humane, just, and supportive environment for everyone. That’s what gets us up in the morning, and that is what motivates us year after year. And the opportunity to do this work is what many of us use to justify our accepting far lower wages, and far higher risks.
As we all know, many in our sector do what we can. We organize and support non-partisan voter engagement work. We highlight and educate the public about public policy questions. And then, law-abiding citizens that we are, we remain silent as the rough and tumble of the fray carries on. Until now: the election is over and the business of governing has begun. Silence is just the opposite of what needs to happen now.
I have watched two other instances where progressives took the reigns of executive power—Jimmy Carter in 1976 in what was largely a reactionary vote to the scandal that was Watergate, and Bill Clinton who raced faster to the center than Mr. Bush (senior) or Ross Perot could manage. In both cases, the idea of a mandate was far from the case. A sea change in the landscape was never discussed. But now, after 40 years of working for progressive change, we have both in Barack Obama’s victory. There is a clear sense of a mandate for change, and there is no question that there has been a seismic shift in the landscape. Indeed, this probably occurred in the months leading up to the election as the subprime meltdown changed everything.
My point is that at least in my lifetime, progressives have never faced such opportunity. Now we have to figure out what we are going to do with it. Let’s start by speaking out loud about what we want. When Carter was elected, I watched in astonishment how many friends and acquaintances were recruited into the administration, and how the public interest sector slowly fell silent. We didn’t want to criticize our friends who we knew were trying the best they could to effect change. What we didn’t know then was that they could not make change inside, if everyone on the outside who supported change failed to speak up. That left only the forces resistant to change speaking out loud.
Let’s not make that mistake again.

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.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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Causefest

Inspired by a sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations this year in cities around the world, dozens of youth activists from the U.S. and abroad met today at Columbia University for Day 2 of the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit—a first-time gathering hosted by Howcast, Facebook, MTV, the U.S. Department of State, YouTube, Google, and Access 360 Media.

Selected panel discussions—featuring many of the young people who organized these various mass-scale marches and civic actions in recent months—are being streamed live here. “We noticed a rise of movements all using social networking to fight extremism, so we thought now would be the perfect time to aid and help build momentum for those using online platforms to catalyze social change,” said Summit co-organizer Jason Liebman, the CEO and cofounder of Howcast. “All of these groups arose independent of each other. It was time to come together.”

Organizers also are using the two-day event to form a new nonprofit to unite global activists and to create a field manual that can be distributed to others about how best to affect Web-driven social change. Updated drafts of the manual can be viewed here.

Among conference highlights so far:

• Oscar Morales, a young engineer and founder of One Million Voices Against FARC, a Facebook group, discussed his use of Facebook to organize what many have described as the largest demonstration in Colombia’s history. Morales told conferees his success has proven that social networking can be used to organize citizen campaigns against oppressive forces all over the world. The February 4 protest used word-of-mouth campaigns over Facebook to repudiate FARC guerrillas and turned out more than 1 million people on the streets of Colombia—as well as smaller groups in some 200 other cities across the world, from Berlin to Barcelona, London, Madrid, Toronto, Dubai, Miami, New York, and others. “The Feb. 4 protest was a big slap in the face to FARC, who saw that its ideals were no longer supported by the people, and many members of FARC then started abandoning the group,” Morales said. “...Digital platforms are a means to social liberties…We proved that the digitally connected few can connect the masses.”
• Juan David Lacouture, the founder of No Mas Chavez, a Venezuelan group that originated on Facebook to oppose Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s policies, said his movement “couldn’t have started anywhere but on the Internet.” The group, which has some 80,000 members on Facebook, staged a mass protest on April 11 that mobilized some 2,000 people to visit Venezuelan embassies in 25 cities around the world to call for an end to terrorism and corruption in that country. The protest also brought thousands of Venezuelans into the streets to call for change. “Facebook lets us stay in contact with friends, relatives, colleagues, and people from our past,” Lacouture told conferees, “and it also helps us to express ourselves and carry our messages to thousands and thousands of people.” When asked if extreme left-wing or right-wing groups should have the same access to Facebook to organize, Lacouture said: “I don’t believe anything should be banned online. If an idea is not strong enough and you expose it for what it is, then the idea can be its own biggest enemy. Oppression is sustained by those who would keep bad ideas in the dark.”
• Gemma Olway and Sharon Singh, both 26, organized The People’s March Against Knife Crime in London on September 20, which drew 6,000 to a protest rally and gained the attention of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, other politicians, and the media. The group, formed in July, started as a Facebook group. “We noticed a lot of anti-knife groups already on Facebook but we wanted to unite them to say that enough is enough,” Singh told a Summit panel.
• Elias Kuri, a cofounder of Iluminemos, organized an anti-violence march on August 30 that was joined by 2 million people in 88 cities across Mexico and in six other countries. Kuri said he organized the march at a time when many Mexicans were horrified by what was then the recent kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Fernando Martí, the son of a businessman. “Does a march work to make change?” Kuri asked his fellow panelists. “We think yes because when people are angry they want to do something…The important thing was that we didn’t use traditional media to protest. We used the Internet, Facebook, emails, and people just went to the march. The authorities were sure we were going to fail. They didn’t believe the Internet could have so much power.”
• Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook, said the 40-and-older crowd is the fastest-growing demographic using the social networking site, a plus for the spread of social activism in the United States and abroad. “We started four years ago as a youth social network and now we are fighting that stigma,” Moskovitz told conferees. “In other countries where Facebook is being used, the average age is 45 or 50 years. Our fastest-growing [age] demographics in the United States are 40-plus and we expect that to continue.” Moskovitz acknowledged that Facebook groups are still “somewhat limited” in their ability to communicate to very large audiences but said the company is working to expand that capability. He also said Facebook is working hard to discourage al Qaeda and other terrorist groups from using social networks to advance their ideologies. “We work with law enforcement in many countries and we are going to fight people who try to repress free speech all over the world,” Moskovitz said. “We already work to expel anyone using Facebook for hate and violence. You can’t organize an al Qaeda group on Facebook and expect us to keep it up for very long.” Moskovitz did acknowledge, however, that there is a “fine line between harassment and free speech” and told conferees the company is planning to hire more people to help it handle site monitoring.
• James K. Glassman, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the Bush Administration, commended Summit organizers for trying to create what he called “a giant global conversation about how individuals can oppose violence and extremism and stand up for universal values of tolerance, freedom, justice, and social change.” He said U.S. government officials have arrived at the notion that the Net is “the locus of civic society” and that governments which don’t use the Net to support pro-democracy movements at home and abroad face a greater risk of being ignored by the people they are trying to govern. “What we face today, these threats to liberty and security, cannot be overcome by governments, alone,” Glassman said. “Only popular opposition can turn the tide. The forces of oppression and terror have little support but they do intimidate and frighten people into inaction. The Internet is a tool that will help people to overcome.” Responding to a question, Glassman said he is confident that the incoming Obama administration will continue the State Department’s policies of “Web 2.0 diplomacy.” Said Glassman: “I would expect the new administration to take this new approach and expand it, and if they do expand it, I hope they also will provide the resources to do so.”

Check out the two videos released to conferees today—How to Smart Mob and How to Be an Effective Dissident. Watch this space for conference updates.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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It’s Time to Turn Back the Dial

I woke up today to a brand new America. An America where any individual can live their wildest dreams and where our collective action can make a difference. I was fortunate to be at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. yesterday as our new President Barack Obama was sworn in. The subsequent Inaugural speech he delivered was so right for the moment. It was as if our incredible crowd of a million people were being forgiven for living mediocre lives for so long, and were now being given permission to be our naturally wonderful selves again.

Sometimes we just need someone to give us permission to fly.

What President Obama has given many of us, I think, is a new sense of responsibility—to our country and to ourselves. Poet Maya Angelou has said that we all must take responsibility for the space we occupy. Shirley Chisholm put it a slightly different way when she declared that service is the rent we pay to be on this Earth. However you want to spin it, millions of Americans all over the country today are inspired to do something better with their lives. Pop diva Beyonce was beside herself with emotion last night as she sang “At Last” to the new President and First Lady, saying that Obama makes her want to be smarter, to get more involved. The voice of the next generation, in particular, knows now what we must do.

It is time for us to begin turning back the dial.

John St. Augustine knows a little something about the span of a life. He gave a talk last year about “living the uncommon life” and how urgent it is for us to make deliberate choices with our time here on Earth. If, on average, we will only live to age 77 or so, what will you do in those short years during the remaining timeline of your life?

Most of us already know what we must do. What we have always longed for in our heart of hearts, in our wildest of dreams.  My Life List has even compiled 90 of the most sought-after human goals. What has happened is that we have tuned out for so long, keeping ourselves busy with everything else on our to-do lists. We have lost the signal.

I believe Barack Obama, in his inaugural speech yesterday, did not just lay the groundwork for a new attitude in America. He also called us as individuals to be responsible for the space we occupy. He called us to turn back the dial and reclaim that signal of hope, that radio station on the inside that compels us to live well and do good.

Deep inside of each of us, there is a glimmer of wanting light that wants to do something real and true. On a clear day like yesterday at the Capitol, you could see it on the faces of a million people shivering in the winter air, wearing nothing but hope on their faces.

We have been forgiven for so many years of waiting until we get our ducks in a row before we do what we want to do in our lives. We have been given permission to fly as far as we want to go. We have all been inspired to turn back the dial and become better Americans in the process.

Listen for what it is that you are called to do. And when you hear it, don’t wait. Do it now.

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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Figuring Out What Counts

Hope is in the air. People are aware of new possibilities, and their own new responsibilities as members of united states rather than a color-coded zone of opposition and attraction, as blue states squared off against red states and with each other. The president’s call to responsible, involved and necessary citizenship in the midst of our surrounding crisis has shifted the basis of what our collective and individual goals are. We’ve been enlisted by our new leader. If the inaugural address stuck in your belly, took root, and is becoming something new, this “we” applies to you. 

Some of us have felt new growths inside of us by ingesting the unfamiliar seed of allegiance to a citizenship that reaches into where we keep our identity. As we reinvent ourselves as part of something that is at its heart united, we are counting the cost and starting to wonder how to look at the impact we are making.

One result is that people who have been about measuring social value are in the midst of a flood of new converging data. Social value and environmental value are no longer externalities and the cost of poverty is finding its way onto the balance sheet.

At another level, the new moral hunger, as Katherine Fulton calls it, is creating a new economy. New consumption patterns are driving new products, which drive different kinds of production. As that supply chain becomes transparent, impact becomes a consumer value. Something people want to know at retail, to know if they are on board or how they are implicated if their choices don’t line up to help the people and the planet. The impact of our buying decisions on the planet and the people are both starting to be counted in new ways. Thanks to our new president, that measurement now has the weight of being part of a larger civic, collective decision as we get ourselves out of the jam of being dependent on foreign energy and find ways to cool our planet and reduce the cost of poverty to all of us.

The day of externalities, costs that could be pushed off the balance sheet and be borne by the planet or the commons or the government or someone else downstream that we could safely ignore are over.

Measurement makes sense when there is enough flow, with enough diverse forces converging, to make the cost of measurement more than a transaction cost without additive value. The value of social metrics applied to economic data is likely to increase. But the intake will be anecdotal as it proceeds to become quantifiable. You will have to pay attention to people’s stories, and compare them to your own evolving lens of social return theory to see it happening.

For instance, I talked to a woman who works at a major fertilizer company this weekend. She says sustainability is on the agenda at every meeting she takes, whether it’s with wheat farmers in Minot, North Dakota or cotton farmers in Southeast Texas. The people buying and selling agricultural inputs have a whole new language and way they are looking at their business. It’s just good business to make sustainability, long term cost to the environment, and the watershed and the soil and the air part of what they consider as they put chemicals in the soil, they say. They know the cost of not thinking about those things now in a way they did not before. They are happy about the new way they can make decisions with their customers, the new on the farm dialogue that has a deeper and ethically satisfying level of meaning. She’s glad to be part of this new thing. I’ve known her for a decade and this is the first time she’s spoken up about what happens at work. She’s got a new story that now has resonance within the larger cultural dialogue and political landscape.

There is a new joy in the room as the people this woman works with get to focus on things they want to focus on. The needs of the planet are driving a new kind of social decision making, adding dimensions to the financial and business analysis that are in the room when fertilizer is bought in bulk. There is a key element of the intersection of money and meaning in transaction that is showing up in the sustainability related costs that farmers are willing to pay, and that fertilizer companies are learning to sell.

The meaning premium that my friend who works for the fertilizer company received shows up in the story she’s now eager to tell friends, and that I’m retelling here. She has a joy in selling agriculture commodities that she wants to tell people about. Somehow a new reality has made its way onto the balance sheet. Things that were externalities, like environmental cost and cost to people are now being calculated and paid for at the point at which the chemicals are being put onto the crops.

There is something here that is worth counting, because counting it will likely reveal more of this new kind of math being done all over the country. And that new math has a narrative value. They are stories that encourage us and cause more kinds of good business that is more conscious of its impact, to happen. And they fit into the united narrative of responsibility to which our president has called us. There are lots of new things to track, stories to listen to and data to measure and correlate to discover patterns. For those of us who want to be part of the new social capital market, those stories and data points and patterns need to be turned into a compelling and reinforcing narrative.

Kevin Jones is a cofounding principal of Good Capital, an investment firm that accelerates the flow of capital to enterprises that use market forces to create large-scale social change. Jones is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and cofounder of Social Capital Markets, the groundbreaking conference on social venture investing.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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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.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Elephants in the Philanthropic Room

Via Lucy Bernholz’s twitter feed, I followed along earlier this month with the DonorEdge Conference. During the conference Jacob Harold of the Hewlett Foundation’s Philanthropy Program gave an address. Jacob talked about the “Elephants in the Philanthropic Room” and said there were two of them:

• Some nonprofits are better than others
• Some donors are better than others

On their face, these don’t seem like elephants, they seem like statements of the obvious. But I remember the heated debate that exploded when at the second NetSquared conference someone suggested “some nonprofits just suck.” To many, this was an intolerable comment (even though, it is objectively true). The fact is, while they try hard and are good people, some nonprofits are not very good. Some of them are even doing harm. The resources these organizations are using are being wasted and could be used by a better organization to make a real difference in the world. The nonprofits that can do more good with the available resources are better than other nonprofits.

Are some donors better than others? In a recent post I talked about a shift from thinking about philanthropy as the act of making a gift to thinking about it as the achievement of impact. When we measure philanthropy by looking at the gift, then it is hard to argue that some donors are “better” than others. Maybe more generous. Maybe more rich. But better? However, when we think about philanthropy as the achievement of impact we begin to see that by making gifts to the right nonprofits in the right way, some donors can achieve more impact than other people who give the same amount of money. These donors are better donors.

This same conversation came up again at the recent National Convention on Volunteering and Service. In a panel I spoke on with Sonal Shah, the head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Engagement, Shah said that it should be OK if there is not a spot for everyone who wants to volunteer. While this seemed heretical to suggest at a conference on volunteering, I think Shah is right. Just like some people are better employees than other people. Some volunteers are better than others.

All this makes many people uncomfortable. These really are “the elephants in the philanthropic room.” But why? It doesn’t seem to make us uncomfortable if someone tells us they think Honda is better than Toyota, or Starbucks is better than Dunkin’ Donuts. We’re all free to believe that some investors are better than other investors or argue over whether the 1998 Yankees were better than the 1986 Mets.

Say it after me: Some nonprofits are better than others! Some donors are better than others! Some volunteers are better than others!

Its OK! That’s how life is. Just because some donors, nonprofits or volunteers are better than others doesn’t mean the others aren’t good people who are trying hard. Doing good is hard work. Really hard work. And some people and organizations are better than others at doing this hard work well.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is a principal and director of Tactical Philanthropy at Ensemble Capital Management. Ensemble Capital provides families both traditional investment management and philanthropic planning. He is the author of the blog Tactical Philanthropy and writes the column Tactical Philanthropy for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Posted by Jason Chua

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Now Media

These past days have been a fascinating time for those studying social media. Even as Iranian authorities continue to prevent most mainstream journalists from reporting on citizen protests, Twittering citizen reporters have been able to bypass government censorship to share events on the ground as they unfold. Many of their rapid-fire, 140-character dispatches are uncommonly empathetic, hyper-personal, and unforgiving, prompting even some of the more sober and astute observers of the Net’s impact on society to recently wax hyperbolic.

“That a new information technology—[so-called “now media” such as Twitter, cellphones, mobile vlogs]—could be improvised for this purpose so swiftly is a sign of the times,” blogger Andrew Sullivan gushed in a post titled, “The Revolution Will be Twittered.” “ …You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before.”

Meanwhile, political blogger Maegan Carberry told last week’s 140 characters conference in Manhattan, the nation’s first all-things-Twitter thoughtfest, that “social media are pushing us into an era of post-partisanship,” where political parties become far less important as wider and more personal communication among groups start to blur the political distinctions that authoritarian institutions of government have previously used to divide us and mute our penchant for dissent.

That statement followed remarks by NYU new media scholar Clay Shirky to TED interviewers earlier in the week that “we are living through the the largest increase in expressive capability in human history” and that the surge of Twitterized news reporting out of Iran has made the Iranian uprising historically unprecedented. “This is it. The big one,” he told TED. “This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.”

Iran, of course, isn’t the first world hotspot where social media have played an abrupt and interventionist role in focusing the world’s attention to urgent social causes and events happening on the ground. Text-messaging and vlogging (video-blogging) was instrumental in revealing government corruption around foreign aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis in Burma last year. Social media also helped to leak word out to the world about the pro-democracy uprising by Burmese monks, hardline censorship by Chinese authorities during last summer’s Beijing Olympics, and the extent of the devastation of the Chinese earthquake —details of which, says Shirky, would have otherwise taken months to go public.

But whoa, Nellie. Indeed, while Twitter with its velocity to spit out information can expose the undercurrents of dissent and the underbelly of corruption, hunger, and the abuse of power in often shocking detail, social media haven’t been able to drive those undercurrents of dissent, nor bring about widespread reforms—at least not yet. For every successful social media-fueled protest, such as the Facebook-fueled protests last year to destabilize FARC in Colombia, there are at least a dozen more digitized uprisings that end when authorities shut down the Net or, as in the case of the as-yet unmutable Twitter in Iran, track down the people whose tweets have been most prominent and revealing and “disappear” them, creating a chilling climate of self-censorship that all but cedes power to those abusing it.

More significant, perhaps, is how Twitter and other forms of social media are accelerating the rate at which events play out, regardless of outcome, and how that speed can be potentially destabilizing, in and of itself. Jason Calacanis, a social media entrepreneur and cofounder and CEO of mahalo.com, speaking on a panel I convened and moderated for the recent Milken Global Conference 2009 on social media and politics, said: “The good news is that the Internet is an accelerator, probably the greatest accelerator since the advent of the written word. Truth gets wrestled away from the rumors more rapidly now; if you’re on the wrong side of society, you get outed in hyperspeed.” Further, he says, activists are better at the conversations spawned by social media because “those on the right side of society are the most willing to engage in conversation; when you’re on the wrong side of an issue, it’s very hard to be involved in a discourse because if you are involved in one, the quicker you get to the inevitability of being wrong.”

Just how much power, ultimately, social media can have will be debated again widely at next week’s Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, which opens Monday with a late-addition workshop entitled “Social Media and Iran.” Such debates are likely to go on for months, if not years.

As Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey queried the a standing-room-only crowd of Twitterati at the 140 characters conference:  “We have this brand new tool to help us in this experiment in democracy but where are we taking this? What are we doing with this technology and how are we sustaining these concepts of immediacy, approachability and transparency to open up the process of every social community from families to the largest governments in 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.

Posted by Jason Chua

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Philanthropy Policy Project

The most recent complete review of regulations, policies and practices for the nonprofit sector (of which I am aware) was the 2005-2006 Panel on the Nonprofit Sector, hosted by Independent Sector, which produced a first report with 120 recommendations and a supplemental report a year later.

Since then we’ve seen the development of new reporting and ratings systems (GIIRS, IRIS), whole new “sectors” such as Social Capital, a steady increase in online giving, a rise in international giving flows, the expansion of two new organizational forms through state law - the low profit limited liability company (L3C) and the B Corporation and probably lots of other system-oriented innovations of which I am not aware.

We’ve also seen a boon in citizen participation in reading, informing, mashing up and making sense of government data and regulations as a result of The Sunlight Foundation, Data.gov, and Government2.0. The federal government is testing new community-driven mechanisms for awarding patents that involve citizen experts, requiring public access publication of NIH funded research, and is now proud home to a Chief Information Officer and a Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Open Government.

This is a perfect opportunity to invite nonprofit and philanthropy professionals, social entrepreneurs, social capital market makers, data wonks, think tanks and others to reimagine the regulatory and policy structures that guide and inform philanthropy.What policies or regulations would improve philanthropy? Here are some that are being discussed at Internet watercoolers (or even being debated in legislatures):

• Proposed new accounting rules for philanthropic equity, based on the proven success of work done by the Nonprofit Finance Fund.
• New requirements for foundations about racial and ethnic diversity, first proposed by the Greenlining Institute, defeated in California (AB 624) and then brought back to the national discussion by NCRP.
• Requirements for independent finance and investment structures to prevent the kinds of endowed asset losses that resulted from the massive Madoff Ponzi scheme.

I’d like to propose a Philanthropy Policy Project as a way of inviting new ways of thinking about the regulations and policies that guide the flow of capital to social good. I tend to try to simplify complex problems in order to get started, so I’d approach this by asking a couple of basic questions:

• What would better philanthropy look like? (Is it more money? More focused money? More democratized? More visible? Better informed? More accountable? More market-oriented? Less market-oriented?)
• What is likely to make those improvements happen?
• Are there policies or regulations that could accelerate or direct the change? (Based on the ideas already mentioned there are viable debates under way on accounting rules, governance structures, reporting requirements, and organizational options)
• What are those policies/regulations and at what level do they need to exist or be changed? (Who needs to be involved?)

If you have thoughts on any elements of this - the existing policies and regulations that guide philanthropy, the areas of policy that should be up for discussion, any of the proposals already on the table, or how to go about sparking this discussion in a meaningful, broad-based, and imaginative way, please let me know.

Lucy Bernholz is the founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as executive producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

Posted by Jason Chua

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America, Reimagined

PopTech, the vaunted thoughtfest that annually gathers some of the world’s leading social innovators in the coastal hamlet of Camden, Maine, just wrapped up its 2009 conference after mulling an uncharacteristically, un-global theme: America and the challenges it faces domestically in the early years of this new century.

Called America Reimagined, the conference featured more than 50 artists, writers, musicians, technologists, and social entrepreneurs—all of whom are creating or leading bold new civic, economic, technological and cultural initiatives in the United States. The sessions were designed to explore how major forces are reshaping the idea of America, its government’s contract with its citizens, its brand, and its role in the world. “The thing about the kinds of moments we are living in right now is that they are often filled with conflicting and confusing signals,” conference curator Andrew Zolli said in opening remarks.” Is it possible for us as a country, economically and technologically, politically and culturally, to reinvent ourselves?”

Radio host Kurt Andersen, the author of Reset, a book about America’s uncertain future, was the first to consider the question, describing the last 25 years of American life as years in which Americans have been “guilty of magical thinking.”

We took Peter Pan too seriously; we took Bob Dylan’s lyrics too seriously.  We committed to never growing up and we didn’t. I mean, when did adults start celebrating Halloween? When did people over 12 begin eating ice cream with mashed up cookie dough in it? When did adults start wearing blue jeans and sneakers all the time and watching cartoons? Most decades end after a decade, but the 1980s—until last year’s financial meltdown—just kept going, and kept going, and kept going.

The point: America has always moved back and forth between economic booms and busts and between the right and left politically. But this moment in time is different, Andersen says. “It’s a time when all of these cycles are shifting dramatically and simultaneously; when complacency is forced to end; when outdated structures are being inevitably and necessarily challenged, and when change is rapid and difficult to predict.”

But Andersen, like many of PopTech’s other speakers, was optimistic. Andersen said the current economic crisis “is actually a great opportunity for reinvention and for getting ourselves as individuals and as a nation back on track.” If reinvention is to occur, however, it will be catalyzed not by today’s present leaders as much as by the amateurs in society, young people and “new-thinking baby boomers” in the grassroots—people unafraid to take risks, think creatively, and see the world through the lens of possibility.

“This isn’t the end of the world,” Andersen said. “But the ‘80s are over. I’d like to think we’re just waking up.”

Among other highlights so far:

• Alec Ross, a senior social media/technology adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told conferees about the ion’s 21st Century Statecraft initiative, uses social media to help nations and leaders empower their citizens and each other. “If you think of the last eight years of American foreign policy, it was about overpowering others in the world,” Ross said. “[We want] to go beyond engaging government-to-government and to connect with people more directly.  If Paul Revere were alive today, he wouldn’t make a ride; he would have just tweeted and the lantern hangers would’ve retweeted.” Ross said he is launching a new social media initiative with Mexican drug-trafficking authorities that aims to engage citizens in their war on drugs.  He described that one of the biggest problems in this conflict is that people fear retaliation if they help out law enforcement.  “So I went [to Mexico]…and we met with NGOs and with Carlos Slim and we came up with a little system where people are able to email or text gang activity.” The system anonymizes their emails to prevent retaliation, and the government can use these tips to respond more quickly, and keep people informed about what’s happening in their anti-drug efforts. “This is just Chapter One of how we can use technology in statecraft.”
• James Fowler, the author of the recent book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, told conferees that humans—like birds and schools of fish—also tend to act in communities of purpose and suggested that online social networks will amplify these natural social tendencies. Humans have always lived in “webs of humanity,” Fowler said, and within these Webs, such physical traits as obesity and behaviors such as smoking tend to spread like viruses. In other words, there is a kind of swarm mentality in social networks, and those people closest to us can affect our behaviors more than we might like to admit. But there is an upside.  When individuals engage in positive behavior, this also can have a ripple effect on the actions of those of their social networks.  “I recently lost five pounds,” Fowler said, “to influence those I loves to do the same. Just think about it, by changing your own behavior, you truly can change the behavior of others.” Social media can help humans influence their communities and have a large positive impact on the world.
• Erica Williams, a 20-something Washington, D.C.-based activist working to help broaden the civic engagement of her peers, urged the older PopTech crowd to put away their stereotypes of her generation. “Call us what you will, the MTV generation, Millennials, the ‘us’ generation,” she said, “but we are not bored or disinterested; our world view is different.” At some 300 million strong, she added, today’s 18-27 year olds “have the opportunity to re-brand civic engagement” and reinvent politics. “My generation doesn’t like traditional politics,” she told conferees. “We are the most ethnically diverse generation that America has ever had. We are post-racial. We came up at a time with 9-11, fighting two wars and a gap between the haves and have-nots that we haven’t seen since the Gilded Age—and a “me” generation that was many of our parents. So we distrust ‘politics as usual.’ It hasn’t worked.”  In the absence of top-down reform, Williams said her generation will always work beyond traditional avenues to get things done, bypassing candidates who don’t deliver, and mobilizing young people directly. “We are re-branding what it means to be politically engaged,” she said.
• Malaysian singer/songwriter Zee Avi, discovered on Twitter, performed several songs she wrote, her fresh lyrics and full-sounding acoustic guitar underscoring the influence that American popular culture has had on the rest of the world. At one point during her performance, PopTech attendee and Personal Democracy Forum cofounder Micah Sifry, tweeted favorably: “Zee Avi, Malaysian singer, sounds like she’s from Northampton, Mass. Is world getting too small?”

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.

Posted by Jason Chua

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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.

 

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Postcards From the Nonprofit Congress

If all goes well, on October 16 and 17 of this year, 500 soup kitchen staffers, Republican think-tankers, bowling league captains, and other nonprofit representatives will join forces to make a big noise about America’s Third Sector. They’ll gather in Washington, DC at the first-ever Nonprofit Congress, brainchild of Audrey Alvarado, executive director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations.  I interviewed Dr. Alvarado about the origins and aims of this ambitious effort ,

SSIR FORUM:  How did the Nonprofit Congress come into being?

AUDREY ALVARADO:  In the fall of 2004, I queried my national colleagues about the possibility of having a joint national meeting. There had been some talk and encouragement from both funders and nonprofits to have one large conference for the sector; however, there was little support from my colleagues for the idea.
Shortly after trying to generate interest in a national combined event I met with Robert Egger who runs DC Central Kitchen. He had just published his book, Begging for Change, which challenges some of the current thinking about the purpose and role of nonprofits. We talked about the idea of having a national event where nonprofits and their allies would come to DC for a Congress. We both were concerned with the direction of the nonprofit sector and wondered out loud what the sector would look like if it was united—what kind of power and influence would we have. We were also concerned with the negative press around the sector and the impact that this media attention was having on the thousands of nonprofits that are doing amazing work in their communities. We both felt like it was time for the sector to unite and exercise a collective voice.

You mention voice, and in fact the tagline for the Nonprofit Congress is “many visions, one voice.”  What are the kinds of things, in your view, that organizations as diverse as the ACLU, the Heritage Foundation, the National Refrigeration Association, and the local soup kitchen might say with one voice?

It is not really a matter of the actual message but rather the role that the nonprofit sector has historically played in stewarding our democracy and raising the voices or the concerns of their constituents.  We, along with many others, see a real need for nonprofits to reclaim their role in advancing civil society by organizing, mobilizing, and encouraging those they serve to speak out and advocate on behalf of their causes.  I suspect that Heritage, ACLU and the NRA would all agree that they want to retain their rights as organizations and individuals to “petition their government” or raise a ruckus when they see the need; as well as to work in effective partnership with the government and business sectors to promote efforts in the public’s best interest.

There are some in our sector who believe that keeping a high profile can only hurt us, that showing our strength will invite hostile legislation and regulation.  How do you respond to that?

I have heard that concern. We have some good-hearted folks who just want to serve and prefer not to receive recognition for their service.  This is commendable and is reflective of the unique character of many individuals who work in the sector. But we have also found out the hard way that being silent often comes at the cost of not addressing the systemic issues facing our constituents and communities. Also, the nonprofit sector is a partner with the public and for-profit sectors so let’s act like equal partners.

The 500 delegates to the Nonprofit Congress will gather in Washington, DC in part to create a policy platform for the sector.  What are the kinds of things this policy platform might include?

The substantive content will be informed by the numerous Town Hall meetings that have been and will be held in communities across the country. It is absolutely essential for the legitimacy of this effort that the issues in the platform come from the field and the Town Hall meetings are designed to do just that. The issues/discussion points we have heard so far are not surprising.  Yet they affirm what many of us trying to represent the perspectives and issues of concern to nonprofits have heard.  Issues raised, thus far, include the need for sustainable funding strategies, the interest in partnering with the public sector to meet community needs, the need for greater collaboration among nonprofits to enhance service delivery, and the need to raise public awareness of the vital role nonprofits play in our communities. There is also recognition from nonprofits on the frontlines that we must come together as a collective force to make a difference at both the state and local levels.

OK, so now we have some regulatory and legislative proposals on the table.  And we’re trying, as you say, to act like equal partners with the public and for-profit sectors.  Even supposing that we could get 2,000 nonprofits to participate in this effort, we’d still be representing less than one percent of all the charities in the United States.  Why would policymakers and businesspeople to listen to us?

You are right 2,000 nonprofits is a drop in the bucket, when you are looking at a sector that is over 1 million plus.  That is why we plan to use the magic of technology for additional outreach.  We want to hear from as many nonprofits as possible and are encouraging their postings on the Nonprofit Congress website. After the event in October, information will be widely distributed for further refinement so the number of nonprofits and allies involved in this movement can increase exponentially.  The NCNA network has 22,000 members right now and we are actively seeking partnerships with other networks so that we can get more nonprofits informed and involved. This is a beginning and with all beginnings you must start somewhere.  Our hope is that this movement will grow as the Nonprofit Congress platform takes shape and shows results.

Audrey, thank you so much for helping us better understand the Nonprofit Congress.  Any closing words for your colleagues in the Blogosphere?

We encourage people to learn more about the Nonprofit Congress and sign up for regular updates via our website.  We want as many nonprofit leaders as possible to get informed and involved. Thanks for the opportunity.

_____

This entry was cross-posted at White Courtesy Telephone, your source for news and nonsense about foundations and the nonprofit sector.

Posted by Albert Ruesga

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Postcards from the Elections

Now that the Demopublicans have routed the Republicrats in elections nationwide, how will low-income communities be affected?

I can answer that question with another: What is the sound of one Diebold AccuVote TS Touch-Screen System™ failing to record a vote?

Exit pollsters did, however, report significant voter frustration with corruption in politics, and Nancy Pelosi, soon-to-be Speaker of the House, promised a shakedown in Congress.  “The Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history,” she said in an apparently unguarded moment.  It’s true that Republicans might have taken the rap, but Democrats, as we know, have not been models of self-denial. In January of this year, for example, the Washington Post reported that

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) [now the majority leader—eds.], like House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), signed a letter in 2002 to Interior Secretary Gail A. Norton on behalf of an Abramoff client around the time he received a large campaign contribution from Abramoff’s tribal clients. Edward P. Ayoob, a former Reid aide, was a member of Abramoff’s lobbying team …

Abramoff picked up part of the tab for two Democrats, Reps. James E. Clyburn (S.C.) and Bennie Thompson (Miss.), on a trip to the Northern Mariana Islands in the mid-1990s, officially sponsored by the nonprofit American Security Council. Clyburn, now chairman of the Democratic Caucus, was recently named to the House Democrats’ “clean team,” tasked with leading the ethics-reform push.

Business as usual for both sides of the aisle.  Remember that heartwarming show of zeal earlier this year for meaningful lobbying reform?  That effort was so toothless, so cynical, that some advocates suggested dubbing it the “Let’s Add Effrontery to Bribery Act of 2006.”  So nonprofit advocates beware.  If history is any guide, you’ll likely continue to be seriously outspent by well-moneyed interests, all cries for an “ethical Congress” to the contrary.

While the reformers do their work (or not), the nonprofit and foundation communities watch closely for new regulatory initiatives from the 110th Congress.  But do the elections hold a deeper meaning for the sector?

I was struck by the fact that many voters repudiated the Iraq War not because it was an immoral invasion based on trumped up charges, but because it was poorly executed and “weakened the United States.”  Perhaps we were too busy fumbling for the keys of our SUVs to mention to the exit-pollsters that we were appalled at having become one of a family of nations that commits torture.  Ballot measures in 11 states banned same-sex marriage, giving legal cover to our bigotry.  And in no election—none—did the issue of poverty play a significant role.

This is apparently what defines the “middle” in these nefarious times.

Albert Ruesga blogs on philanthropy and nonprofits at White Courtesy Telephone.  Currently a foundation executive, he has worked in the nonprofit sector for close to 20 years.  He taught ethics and logic at Gettysburg College before entering the world of philanthropy.  An accomplished writer, his articles have appeared in Social Theory and Practice, The Journal of Popular Culture, and other publications.  He was for many years a contributing writer to The Boston Book Review.

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Ownership Costs and Service Requirements

Presidential campaigns always seem to revive the debate about national service. Candidates, pundits, and we mere mortals again argue about its legitimacy and whether it ought be voluntary or compulsory. What usually gets missed, however, is the message that’s sent when the only price government asks us to pay is taxes and user fees. 

Most of us, I believe, want to live in neighborhoods, in communities, in societies where people care about one another. Whatever our political ideology, we want to see ourselves as compassionate and in some way as serving to help one another. Many of us learn an ethos of service—to be good neighbors, good citizens, good people, through our families and friends, through faith-based and other local institutions; but some of us don’t. 

Our schools have a role in teaching us about service. That’s part of the function of education; its purpose is to do more than try to develop our intellect and the skills we need for economic success.  Part of the role of schooling is to build character, to teach civics, to turn out good citizens, the kinds of people we want for neighbors. That’s why I think it’s as legitimate for schools to require service as it is for them to require reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s a way for them to teach and it’s something for them to teach.

Compulsory national service can also be, I believe, an important, legitimate, and reasonable expectation for citizens made by their government and by one another. If our only obligation is to pay taxes and user fees, then as citizens, we are reduced to little more than consumers of government services, to being government’s customers.  Rather, citizens are government’s owners—and owners know that in spite of your staff, every once in a while you have to roll up your sleeves, get in there, and do some hard work.

Whatever particular form it might take, mandatory national service changes the relationship between people and their government.  Rather than being passive consumers grumbling about what we do or don’t get for our tax dollars, or about the politicians from whom we feel disconnected, we’re more likely to demand accountability from elected leaders who are making decisions that affect how months or years of our lives might be spent in service to society.  As people become more immediately and personally invested in our communities, more engaged in the broader world through our direct labor, we’re more likely to feel vested in ownership of our government and to take it seriously. So, besides learning more about helping one another, actually building stronger communities and serving society, we’d become more active citizens. And that’s a good thing.

Let the debate continue…

Photo: Led by City Year corps members, volunteers paint a map of the U.S. on a playground in Harlem. (Photo courtesy of Jim Harrison)

Mark Rosenman is a public service professor at the Union Institute & University, where he has long worked in various roles. He sees his 20-plus years of initiative to strengthen the nonprofit sector as an extension of earlier professional efforts in the civil rights movement, urban anti-poverty work, international and domestic program development, and higher education.

Posted by Mark Rosenman

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“In the 21st century, the march isn’t the vehicle”

The new leader of the L.A. office of a venerable civil rights organization made this comment in a recent planning interview that two colleagues and I were fortunate to conduct.  Several other civil rights and public interest advocates that we’ve interviewed have made similar comments (including the observation that in L.A., marches are also dangerous to participants). So what are the new pathways for involving large numbers of people in social movements? 

The gentleman quoted above noted that we have yet to use technology to tailor mobilization efforts to how people increasingly live and work.  He went on to suggest that advocacy organizations should investigate how they might engage people through their cell phones. 

Skepticism is natural, of course–how many times have we heard how technology is going to change the world?  But there are some compelling facts to support a focus on cell phones. The sheer numbers argue that cell phones will be the predominant means of access to the Web for the vast majority of people in the U.S., and the world. As Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC (1993-1997), recently wrote on the TPMCafe blog, we are in the midst of the largest and fastest expansion of communications capacity in history: Within the next 10 years, the world will reach nearly 3 billion cell phone users. China already has 500 million subscribers and expects to double that number within a decade. 

Their affordability and diffusion give cell phones the most promise for accommodating how people live in this age, and especially perhaps, for involving people of modest means.  In the U.S., it is common for low and moderate income families to hold down two or three jobs, despite the fact that we’ve seen a large and steady increase in work hours over the past three decades. When it comes to being involved in their children’s lives or in their communities, time is at a high premium for these families. As energetic and refreshing as “netroots” are, participants in MoveOn.org and other forums are fairly elite—well educated and relatively well off. Outside the industrialized economies, low incomes and poor infrastructure mean it’s very difficult for people to focus on issues beyond survival, such as education or participating in democracy.

“Design for the Other 90 Percent,” a recent exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York City, makes a powerful connection between those two goals and the availability of affordable and relevant technology.  Paul Polak, founder of International Design Enterprises, (two of whose designs are featured in the exhibit) promotes the concept of a “trinity of affordable design”—cost, expandability, and miniaturization— which squarely fits the pattern of cell phone advancements.

The growth of this potential power can be helped or hindered by policy, of course. Americans lag well behind Europeans and Asians in the use of wireless access to the Internet, and this is in large part because the status quo is profitable for cell companies, as Paul Krugman recently pointed out in The New York Times. This distortion has moved Google to make a $4.6 billion bid in an upcoming FCC auction of wireless spectrum, just to try to open it up. Apple may also make a bid, if for no other reason than to allow the I-phone to spread as widely beyond AT&T as possible.

But this is not just a commercial issue.  Not only are we spending more money for inferior service, but we are falling behind in developing our skills for this tool.  This is a drag on efforts to get more Americans to participate in civic life—in local community activities, in supporting charitable causes locally and globally, and in elections. 

Riding from JFK into Manhattan last week, the cab driver, who I believe was from Africa and has a son serving in the U.S. military, cursed the Iraq War disaster and painfully lamented that the breadth and depth of opposition to it are masked by the way T.V. and print media cover the War.  He said that the media prevents people in the U.S. from “seeing” and showing their feelings about the War. 

To involve people today in mass social movements, we may need to find a way to use cell phones to do the equivalent of the Chileans’ pot-banging in protest of Pinochet, or the cries of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” from the film Network.

This will require some very creative social innovation. Any ideas?

Peter Manzo is the director of strategic initiatives for the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy organization, and a senior research fellow with the Center for Civil Society in the UCLA School of Public Affairs. Previously, he was the executive director and general counsel of the Center for Nonprofit Management. 

Posted by SSIR Editor

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