1) People vs. Abstractions: My point is that the allegiance should be to the people the grantee is trying to help rather than to the people running the grantee. I use the word impact to capture the concept of making a difference in a cause area. But this isn’t an abstraction, these are real people (often, although many important causes are not just about helping a certain set of people).

2) Golden Rule: My point is that it is a huge opportunity for grantmakers to share info with each other. Sharing info with the public and grantees offers a different set of complications and wasn’t the point of my post, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in favor of it. During the session, the most interesting comment from the audience was a grantmaker who used to run a nonprofit who was saying he wished grantmakers had been more honest and open about why they turned down his grant requests.

3) Whistleblower: This is a straw man. I wasn’t suggesting that impact should be pursued at any and all costs. Acting unethically or illegally is not a path to long term impact.

4) Philanthropy all about impact: I agree. That was part of the point in my review of Strategic Giving when I wrote about the Expressive Element of philanthropy. I’m not trying to craft some sort of absolutists world view with impact the only goal. I’m trying to rebut the most frequent argument against sharing info (it might hurt the grantee!) by suggesting that philanthropy is not about the grantee, it is about the cause you are trying to affect.

It’s interesting that the Golden Rule of Communicating, “Communicate unto others that which you would want others to communicate unto you,” simply says “others,” but you seem to take it as a rule for grantmakers only. It’s a funny sector whose rules and loyalty only extend to half its membership. The grantees do the work, after all.

And what of a funder’s duty to the organization? A whistleblower could share information with a regulator that could lose your organization its tax-exemption. But think of all the impact we might make if we overlook such a transgression… You get the idea.

I think we’re getting carried away with these discussions of impact. We’re now settling moral questions by reducing them to questions of social utility.

Surely, you don’t mean funders don’t have other loyalties, but I wonder about strategic philanthropy sometimes. Philanthropy isn’t all about impact.

I think for philanthropy (in the online space especially), people should be more readily sharing what works and what doesn’t work.

Everyone under the sun is talking about how the new taxation levels are going to be prevent many donors from giving as much as they used to. In the online space we should be mobilizing more quickly around the casues that matter to us, and sharing what did and din’t work.