I’m also thinking about Beth Kanter’s running blog topic regarding the Pepsi Refresh challenge: http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2010/02/pepsifresh-contest-real-tracking-and-social-impact-analysis.html and the McKinsey study regarding prizes in philanthropy from March of 2009: http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/socialsector/And_the_winner_is.pdf. How do these contests and “insider” tactics to engage the “outsiders” change the general public’s perception and engagement for actual social change? Still figuring this one out but they seem to be related.

Seriously, the problem with crowdsourcing within the philanthropic community as a branding exercise is that the resulting words tend to reinforce the community’s own aspirational identity–a sure-fire way not to achieve the goals of “unexpectedness” and “credibility” noted in the original post.

Rather than looking to people within philanthropy, myself included, for a descriptive word, a potentially more useful starting point would be folks outside the charitable bubble, especially if they don’t feel that there’s an expected answer or one that would offend the questioner. Hence the goof about cigarettes and beer–establishing a context of inquiry outside of do-goodery is more apt to solicit responses beyond the expected do-gooder rhetoric.

Still, even offering commenters a bottle of Jack may not in itself do the trick, since readers of philanthropy blogs tend to fall within the niche. If that’s the group that’s going to be posting answers, we need to start with a different question.

Jeff, what not-so-self-affirming word would you suggest?

I googled the exact phrase of “connected philanthropy” and it looks like we’ve got a nice starting point from SocialEdge in 2007: http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/fine-on-funding/archive/2007/01/09/connected-philanthropy. How do we put it into action? I’m excited!!!