By Daniel Ben-Horin

This is a condensed version of a panel presentation I gave at the European Foundation Center conference in early June. The panel topic was: “Social Media: Threat or Menace?” No, I made that up. The panel was called, Social media: A fad or the future?

I decided to take a personal tone. People of a certain age, and/or a certain techno-anxiety level feel a lot of pressure to ‘operationalize’ social media in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds. Nothing much good comes of this, and one of the worst things that can occur is a kind of passive-resistance, or not so passive. People block what they can’t understand. Or make poor decisions.

The audience was about 80 ‘early adoptors’, actual or would-be, from European philanthropies across the continent.

1. Social media is not a ‘tool’.
Social media is about  choosing whether or not to operate in a different way in the world, a way of looking at innovation, collaboration and communication that can’t be left at the office overnight.  That doesn’t mean that if you tweet at work, you have to keep tweeting compulsively at home! But either you are truly excited by the possibilities and embrace them, or you are rolling a stone uphill.

2. Social media mileage will vary.
Most of my friends think that the values of social media and of effective philanthropy — values of transparency, innovation and collaboration—merge to form a completely compelling unified proposition.
But communications cultures vary and the social media norms of the States are by no means universal. What is most important, I think, is distinguishing between the personal and institutional stance toward social media. On a personal level, can you explore social media in an open enough way to discover if it meets any intrinsic needs of yours?

On the institutional level, it is true that since philanthropy is a key player in the public sphere, you should indeed, on some institutional level, join the conversation. But if you don’t find yourself engaged personally, find  people you trust and who do enjoy the process and allow them truly guide your social media practice.

The good news is “you can stumble if you’re humble,” which is a phrase I didn’t coin but really like. You can make mistakes, accept correction, do better next time and, in the process, achieve your goals… as long as you do it in plain view.

3. Social media flattens.
A cat can look at a king, as the saying goes. There’s not much point in standing on ceremony 140 characters at a time; it is a waste to take a command and control mentality into the social media arena. The opportunity here is to push out ideas in real time and see how the marketplace of ideas responds. The opportunity is to respond in real time to others’ ideas… ”others” whom you don’t necessarily know. The opportunity is to observe and interact with others as they interact with each other.

The social media context encourages mass participation by lowering the barrier to entry.  This results in a scenario where there is much more signal and much more noise. What does happen, amidst all the noise, is that the people who contribute the greatest perceived value are able to grow their network of followers without the permission of a single entity (editor). It is very democratic, very much including the messy parts of democracy.

4. Collaboration, innovation and noise
No one is forced to follow anyone or friend anyone. Think of the numbers in context. What does it mean to have 200,000 Twitter followers? Are they the kind of followers who follow a thousand other Twitterers (which is the same as following no one at all)? And, always, come back to what do you yourself enjoy and find meaningful in interacting with others using new tools.

Configuring your social media practice to your interests and personality is a dynamic process; at the beginning, it feels overwhelming but soon you find your way.  As the popular metaphor goes, social media is a rushing river; your words, wise or foolish, will disappear (only to be resurrected when you run for the Senate). What will truly build and what may last are relationships and ideas. 

When Facebook and Twitter came along, email — my palette! — became passé on a certain level. So when I entered the new waters, I did so grudgingly and instrumentally.  It took me a while to see that (a) I could have fun by just being myself; (b) lots of people I care about—personally and professionally—are in the new waters; (c ) If I just relax and trust that I have something to offer, it all works.

Social media and philanthropy share this: They are, at the core, about people. The SM field is advancing so rapidly in response to whatever people want to do, trivial or profound.

So, as philanthropists, what do you want to do and how do you want to do it?

Keep an open mind.

Punch at your own weight.

But to many people active in online social action communities, these events had deeper meaning. This is a guest post from Amy Sample Ward, NetSquared’s Global Community Development Manager

• Kiva and Matt Flannery’s follower counts on Twitter went from a couple thousand a piece before being added to the Suggested User list to 61,000 and 47,000 respectively today (just 12 days since they were added).
• To put that in perspective, the Chronicle of Philanthropy has a circulation of 34,000 (that’s paid subscription to the newspaper, not their Twitter followers. In may ways it is an apples to oranges comparison, but it does give a sense of reach).
• Acumen Fund, another new Suggested User, has seen their follower count go from a couple thousand to 52,000.
• After I published the post yesterday summarizing the Kiva controversy, Acumen Fund tweeted a link to the post. That link has been retweeted 37 times and generated 276 visitors to this blog (over the last 23 hours). A second Acumen Fund tweet to another post I wrote on the issue has generated another 75 visitors.
• Reading through the profiles of the people who retweeted the Acumen Fund tweet, it appears that many of them have some familiarity with Kiva, but are not regular readers of the philanthropy blogs.
• These new readers didn’t just click on the link and then move on. The number one outbound link on my blog yesterday was the link to the GiveWell blog’s graphical representation of how Kiva explains their process to donors compared to how they explain it to microfinance institutions. This link was halfway down the post, suggesting that many visitors read through the post and took action to learn more.
• Including all Twitter users (not just Acumen Fund), Twitter was responsible for 44% of all Tactical Philanthropy readers yesterday.
• Yet the official Kiva Twitter account has made no mention of the debate and Matt Flannery’s Twitter feed links only to the guest post he wrote giving Kiva’s side of the story on David Roodman’s blog.

A number of the new Tactical Philanthropy readers who came in via the Acumen Fund tweet left comments on my posts. A quick scan of other posts on the debate suggests that readers new to the philanthropy blogs found the debate engaging and are asking questions about important issues.

The Kiva debate is complicated. There is good cause to criticize them and good cause to defend them. What is exciting is that we now have a vibrant online debate about important issues in philanthropy and new platforms like Twitter are exposing non-traditional audiences to these debates.

At the time the Twitter Suggested User list was published, I suggested that the new members needed to realize they were talking to a new audience then they were before and they needed to adjust accordingly.

One small suggestion I would make is to point out that the members of the list are now speaking to a mainstream audience rather than social entrepreneur insiders. I know from my experience writing for the Financial Times, that writing for a mainstream audience is more difficult but also offers more opportunity than speaking to people who already “get” where you are coming from.

Imagine you are giving a talk to a small group of people who are passionate about social change. All of a sudden the walls around the room you are speaking in come crashing down and you realize that their are thousand and thousands of new people outside the room who are now crowding around to hear you.

What would you say?

The Twitter Suggested Users suddenly find themselves holding a powerful new tool. They have the ability to point people’s attention to the subjects they pick. This isn’t a small deal. The current debate is about the validity of Kiva, one of the most highly touted of the “new philanthropy” brands. I’m not sure where this all goes, but I think it is healthy to have so many new people being exposed to the discourse. And I think new winners and losers are going to emerge.

Hey All –

We’re honored to be able to use Twitter to highlight your amazing work! Do contact me with any questions.

Claire and everybody at Twitter

A quick glance at the Twitter profiles of some of the people added to the list shows that their number of followers exploded to as much as ten times what they were on Friday. It will be interesting to see how the members of the list use their new found popularity.

One small suggestion I would make is to point out that the members of the list are now speaking to a mainstream audience rather than social entrepreneur insiders. I know from my experience writing for the Financial Times, that writing for a mainstream audience is more difficult but also offers more opportunity than speaking to people who already “get” where you are coming from.

Imagine you are giving a talk to a small group of people who are passionate about social change. All of a sudden the walls around the room you are speaking in come crashing down and you realize that their are thousand and thousands of new people outside the room who are now crowding around to hear you.

What would you say?

We live in a world with literally millions of nonprofits and many, many individuals working on social benefit projects that are not registered nonprofits. Shifting through these organizations is a daunting task for any donor. But luckily, there are thousands of foundations and other grantmaking entities with paid staff doing just this work. Unlike in for-profit markets where possession of important information helps secure profits, in philanthropy, sharing important information increases a grantmaker’s impact.

What’s interesting about the Social Entrepreneur API, as I’ve written before, is the way it allows for anyone to access a stream of vetted social entrepreneurs and mash the data up however they like. For instance, Tactical Philanthropy Advisors could build a web interface that displayed vetted grantmaking opportunities that took the API data and then limited the data to projects in need of at least $25,000 so that our high net worth clients would be delivered a pool of eligible, vetted social entrepreneurs that we could then help them look into more deeply.

Knowing that the Draper Richards Foundation or Skoll has funded someone does not automatically make them a good grantee. But it certainly helps to search for organizations within a universe of groups that have already been vetted by well resourced, smart funders.

How else might Tactical Philanthropy Advisors or other organizations use the Social Entrepreneur API?

She breaks the profiles into four types:

1. Pure Foundation Brand
2. Foundation with Personality
3. Employee with Foundation Association
4. Pure Personal Account

Personally, I generally think options 1 and 4 are boring. Profile 1 types tend to be versions of press release distributors. Profile 4 types tend to tweet about their cats, what happen on a TV show last night and other personal conversation that doesn’t interest me (I’m not referring to the profiles that Beth uses as examples, just making a generalization).

But Profile 2 and 3 types are really interesting. These are either foundation branded Twitter profiles that clearly are authored by a real person writing like a normal human does or individual branded Twitter profiles where the person’s connection to a foundation is clearly noted.

I think the lesson to be drawn here is that in the search for how best to share knowledge, the key thing is to put humans at the center. Knowledge is not some sort of physical element that we can stack in a room somewhere and index easily. Knowledge is a concept that is rooted in the very fact that we are human.

Information we can stick into databases and take humans out of the equation. Knowledge on the other hand (or dare we say wisdom?) cannot be separated from the human element in which it is rooted.

As we strive to build a more effective philanthropy, to share knowledge and support what works, let’s not become disconnected from the human element that drives philanthropy. Any hope we have to build a philanthropic field that is high performing and high impact must be built on a framework that embraces our humanity rather than tries to overcome it.

It is a messy world out there. But humans are uniquely good at organizing, contextualizing and identifying patterns in messy information landscapes.

The Repository is a project of Council on Foundations, InterAction, Foundation Center and Independent Sector with the aim of making international grantmaking more streamlined. Private foundations and public charities are allowed to make international grants. However, for international “NGOs” (non governmental organizations) that do not hold 501c3 (nonprofit) status in the United States, grantmakers must document their grantmaking at a higher level than when making grants in the US. They must complete an “equivalency determination” that shows that the international NGO is “equivalent” to a US based 501c3. That is that the organization would qualify as a 501c3 if it were conducting operations in the US. Or the grantmaker must engage in “expenditure responsibility”. This simply means that the foundation is responsible for documenting that the grant it made was indeed spent by the NGO on qualifying activities.

While this process makes sense, it requires that many grantmakers repeat the same process over and over again. The Repository Project, being designed by TechSoup Global, is an attempt to fix this problem by working with the IRS to create an approved database where once a grantmaker completed an equivalency determination, other funders could depend on their finding and avoiding duplicating the process.

At first glance I thought that this all sounded sensible and practical, but mostly just a streamlining of administrative duties. Nothing to get too excited about. But recently it has been brought to my attention that there’s actually a lot more going on behind the scenes. While the direct goal of The Repository Project is as I outlined above, the inevitable side effect will be the creation of a dynamic database of international grantees that are eligible for US grantmaker funding.

Whenever you hear a call for more nonprofit reporting on their activities and impact, you hear the response that this reporting is costly and will be a burden to nonprofits. But in the case of international NGOs, they are already required to report on grants they receive from US based funders. The Repository Project will simultaneously decrease the reporting burden on NGOs, while making the reporting universally accessible.

Now lets be clear here. The Repository Project is under no requirement to make all NGO reporting and funder grantmaking information public. But it will be collecting this data and doing so in a way that brings cost savings to the participants rather than increasing reporting costs.

More importantly, I would point out that TechSoup Global was selected to host the repository. TechSoup is the group behind NetSquared and one of the most socially media savvy nonprofits around. TechSoup is committed to concepts like transparency and knowledge sharing. It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point we see a sort of Repository 2.0 that builds on the administrative efficiencies of Repository 1.0 to help make international grantmaking more effective.

One of the underlying assumptions I made in my post about the value of Philanthropy In/Sight was that it would be valuable for individual donors to “follow the smart money” of foundation funders as a way to identify high impact giving opportunities. I would suggest that the value of this practice in the international space is exponentially higher because of even further lack of transparency compared to the US. As more and more donors become interested in supporting causes in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, the ability to find out where large, well resourced foundations are sending their grants and being able to piggy back on a reporting system becomes invaluable.

The Googlization of Philanthropy marches on…

IdeaEncore says this about themselves:

[We are] an online marketplace for the sharing of ready-to-use tools, presentations, course outlines, templates, and project plans within and between nonprofit organizations. The system is designed to provide incentives for sharing and a range of intellectual property protections for shared materials.

Nonprofits can upload any information they want to the system and make it available to anyone. They can share it for free or they can charge a fee for access. IdeaEncore told me that they hope the system will increase the quality and “velocity” (the speed at which information changes hands) of nonprofit knowledge.

Let’s say you are building your development office, you might download the Development Policies and Procedures being shared by the Association of Grant Professionals (for free). If you want to recruit volunteers, you might check out the Volunteer Position Description Template being shared for a price of $5 by Volunteer Vancouver.

What I find so interesting about the project is that we’ll be able to track the demand and supply of nonprofit information under both a free and paid model. From a social benefit standpoint, everyone should be sharing for free. But would the people at Volunteer Vancouver have taken the time to upload their template simply out of the goodness of their heart? Or does the $5 fee encourage more people to share information?

IdeaEncore seems to be asking all the right questions with an in depth FAQ section that covers such things as: the impact of the pricing decision on encouraging sharing while diminishing access, the elasticity of demand (the rate at which demand for the information changes as the price changes, and why buyers should be willing to pay.

IdeaEncore only launched a few months ago. But it seems to me that if they can cross a tipping point and their network of buyers and sellers gets large enough, that they might create a robust market place. Not only will this make information sharing between nonprofits more effective, but it will help us understand the supply/demand characteristics of nonprofit information which I believe are fundamentally different than the market behavior described by traditional economics.

I wrote:

Longtime readers of Tactical Philanthropy know that I’ve always been a fan of the NetSquared conference. From N2Y1, where I heard about some site called Facebook for the first time and was taught how to launch a blog. To N2Y2, a nonprofit “investment fair,” where the seemingly uncontroversial comment “some nonprofits just suck” by a venture philanthropists lead to a heated public debate between participants with the board members of NetSquared sponsor TechSoup Globaltaking opposite sides. To N2Y3, where philanthropy “mashups” won cash and Peter Deitz’ Social Actions took home a prize.

But now I’m disappointed to say that something has come up and I will be travelling next week and unable to attend the conference.

Well, my loss is your gain because now I’m going to give away my $300 ticket to the two day event.

Here’s the summary of the conference:

The NetSquared Global Conference, held in San Jose California, is a two-day meeting that brings together the minds of unlikely allies from different professional fields including: leaders in philanthropy, corporate philanthropy, engineering, media and world-class innovators driving the development, distribution and use of social technologies for progressive change.

The conference provides participants an opportunity to attend interactive sessions facilitated by leaders working at the cross-roads of technology and social change; create new collaborations, and participate in a uniquely democratic approach to funding innovation through the Project voting process.

All conference attendees have an opportunity to share their perspective and insights from the field with competing Projects, and vote to fund N2Y4 Mobile Challenge winning Projects competing for $50k in cash-prizes and in-kind resources.

So here’s the game: To win the ticket you must:

1. Promise that you will use it.
2. Explain in 500 words or less (as a comment on this post) why you think mobile technology can lead to better philanthropy.
3. Submit your entry by midnight (pacific time) on Thursday May 21 (tomorrow).

Ready… Set… Go!

Today, Social Actions, in partnership with The Skoll Foundation, PopTech, ideablob, and Civic Ventures, announced a new resource that will let people interested in social entrepreneurs “follow the smart money.” The resource is called the Social Entrepreneur API:

From the Social Actions press release:

The Social Entrepreneur API (Application Programming Interface) will be the first open database of information about social entrepreneurs who have won fellowships and awards from social enterprise funders.

The tool will allow philanthropists, investors, press, and fellow entrepreneurs to find social entrepreneurs based on keyword, location, cause area, population served, and a variety of other factors.

"The Social Entrepreneur API will provide an easier way for people to find, invest in, and support social entrepreneurs, as well as serve as a resource for social entrepreneurs to connect with each other and partner for greater impact," says Jill Finlayson, Marketing Manager for Social Edge.

Lucy Bernholz offered her take on Philanthropy 2173:

This makes it easier for funders to find entrepreneurs. For entrepreneurs to find other entrepreneurs. For aspiring entrepreneurs to find mentors. For networks to bridge networks. For potential partnerships to be formed or common problems to be worked on collectively. For researchers to look for patterns or entrepreneurs to look for gaps in service or systems thinkers to consider the kind of networks and infrastructure that supports (or doesn’t) these people.

It’s nothing short of putting philanthropic data in the cloud – which leaves it to all of us to figure out what cool things to do with it…

This also happens to be an excellent example of the Googlization of Philanthropy.

I’d love to see a similar database for foundation grantees (Grantfire has been working on this for sometime). One way to think about how this might look is by checking out Stockpickr.com. This site makes it easy for investors to search a database of professional investors’ stock picks (professional investors are required to disclose their investment positions once every quarter in the form 13F, much as foundations disclose grantees in their Form 990PF once a year).

Stockpickr.com lets you enter the name of a company you are interested in and pull up a list of the professional investors that currently hold the stock. It also displays a list of other companies that people own who own the stock you are interested in. This is similar to Amazon’s “people who like book X, also enjoy book Y”.

Facing more than a million nonprofits and a vast field of social entrepreneurs, we need smart ways to create filters so that the great opportunities do not get lost in the fire hose of information.

So it was with interest that I read today about Google’s new efforts to aggregate and organize public data. The initial launch makes unemployment and population data on a county by county basis available in chart form that can be manipulated by the user. You can try it out by googling “unemployment rate” or “population” and the state or county you are interested in. The charting feature makes it easy to put the data in context both across time and in comparison to other areas.

From the Google Blog:

The data we’re including in this first launch represents just a small fraction of all the interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on. Reliable information about these kinds of things exists thanks to the hard work of data collectors gathering countless survey forms, and of careful statisticians estimating meaningful indicators that make hidden patterns of the world visible to the eye. All the data we’ve used in this first launch are produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division. They did the hard work! We just made the data a bit easier to find and use.

Since Google’s acquisition of Trendalyzer two years ago, we have been working on creating a new service that make lots of data instantly available for intuitive, visual exploration. Today’s launch is a first step in that direction. We hope people will find this search feature helpful, whether it’s used in the classroom, the boardroom or around the kitchen table. We also hope that this will pave the way for public data to take a more central role in informed public conversations.

This is just the beginning. Stay tuned for more.

Google admits that “the hard work” is the data collection. Their job is to make the data “easier to find and use”. As this process plays out in philanthropy, individual donors are going to find that they can begin to act on the information that informs the grantmaking of large institutional funders. Since individual donors give vastly more to charity than foundations do each year, helping their donations flow based on better knowledge of what works will have a transformative effect.

You can see a quick video demo of the new Google product here.

Carla wrote:

Today, donors bring increasing expectations to their philanthropy, including the need for complete information, varied opportunities for involvement and full accounting of outcomes. As a result, a new philanthropic strategy is emerging. In a nutshell, it concerns itself with the question: What does it take to leverage limited charitable resources in ways that address the overwhelming needs we face as a global community? For many individual donors, it includes the question: How do I apply the same level of savvy that enabled me to amass wealth in the first place to my charitable giving?

In theory, foundations should be obvious allies for donors who want to develop their own philanthropic strategies… This group has honed approaches to address diverse challenges and communities over many decades. While foundations have undoubtedly produced great triumphs, they have also produced mistakes that neophytes could avoid. Unfortunately, even the best foundations tend to operate in tightly closed systems where such comprehensive information sharing is not valued.

…The “Schwabification” of Philanthropy: It is only a matter of time before some entrepreneur or institution takes a page from Charles Schwab and empowers people with information in the philanthropic marketplace. While the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund and its imitators are making donor-advised funds cheaper, the next round goes to the company whose infrastructure delivers real value to philanthropic strategists. Schwab revolutionized the financial market by disintermediating stockbrokers, who had been able to charge high prices by hoarding information. Look for the same principles to apply, especially within public charities.

Yesterday I suggested that packaging and distributing this “value added information” would be a highly leveraged, high impact, philanthropic activity. Today, Tony Wang, an employee at Blueprint Research & Design who helped Paul Brest write part of the book Money Well Spent, absolutely knocked my socks off with his follow-up blog post. What Tony is talking about is The Googlification of Philanthropy.

Tony writes (you should really read the whole post):

Google revolutionized how we find and access information – but that’s only half the story. Google also revolutionized how we create and share information. As the dominance of Google increased, so did the number of people who tailored their search results for Google’s search engine (what industry people call “search engine optimization”). Google didn’t think, “Let’s try and contact everyone to give us their documents and we’ll reorganize the information” but instead thought of a way to provide a tool that takes unorganized data and makes it more relevant to the person looking for information – with the consequence of people making their information more organized and relevant.

But the most interesting effect of Google and its relation to philanthropy is its effect on the evolution of conversation. For the most part, people read blogs only if they’re relevant and blogs only become relevant if they produce highly useful information. Thus, blogs like Tactical Philanthropy and Philanthropy 2173 have come to dominate the philanthropy blogosphere arguably because of their relevance – but more importantly, they illustrate how people now have an incentive to produce highly useful information as competition for attention increases. The more useful the information you produce, the more likely people are to listen to you – and in theory, the greater your impact.

I’m hoping that philanthropy recognizes the importance of its knowledge assets in addition to its other assets as an institution and as a grantmaker. And I think one way foundations can use their knowledge assets better is by creating a more efficient marketplace of information that provides the right incentives for people to provide highly useful information. And I think that search can be part of the answer.

But Tony’s no armchair theorist. Tony’s gone ahead and started building a tool that helps move the needle. Using Google’s Custom Search tool, which allows individuals to create a version of Google that search a defined set of resources, Tony has built Philanthropy Search. Currently the site indexes 114 websites including top philanthropy media outlets, university philanthropy research groups and the websites of the top 100 foundations. You can see the full list of indexed websites here and you can test drive Philanthropy Search here. Tony is actively soliciting feedback on additional sites that should be added or suggestions for improvement.

Quickly testing the search term “global warming” shows that using regular Google, you get almost exclusively links to government agencies and mainstream press reports whereas using Tony’s Google-powered Philanthropy Search you get links to philanthropic research on global warming and philanthropic media reports of global warming related grants and programs.

The Schwabification of Philanthropy was about lowering the costs of administering philanthropy and thereby giving tools to individuals who want to take control of their giving. The Googlification of Philanthropy is about organizing philanthropic knowledge to allow for smarter giving. Most importantly, the Googlification of Philanthropy means that organizing the information will not be done by the information creators, but by third parties and – excitingly – the users of the information themselves.

Today I want to look at the decisions that Google made and how they fit into the framework I’ve been laying out where “superior knowledge” is the “real currency”
of philanthropy.

In a nutshell, Google said that after a review of the past three years, they had determined that they had been most effective when they had gone after problems in ways that made the most of Google’s strengths in technology and information. In other words, they had had the most impact when they leveraged their superior knowledge.

Writing on her blog The Philanthropic Family, Sharon Schneider discussed the Google.org announcement:

In essence, Dr. Brilliant is saying that Google.org is going to focus on projects where it’s unique strengths put Google.org in a position to bring value and add insight to solving social problems.  And if you think about it, the lesson there is both obvious and yet profound. 

Lots of philanthropists have money to spend on solving social problems–that certainly isn’t a unique strength.  And lots of philanthropists big, tiny and everywhere in between have spent that money, many of them always feeling like they weren’t being as effective as they would like to be, but unsure of what to do differently.  Google.org has come up with an answer: it’s not our money that makes us effective, it’s our know-how.  They plan to focus on problems where information aggregation and innovative technology can bring key insights and move us toward new solutions.

And for those of us without a billion dollars to spend on our philanthropy, the same lesson holds true: It’s not the amount of our money that makes us effective philanthropists, it’s the strength of our other resources that help us decide where to donate that money.

In some ways all of this is obvious. Very few people in philanthropy think that just throwing money at a problem will fix it. Focusing on your unique strength is pretty run of the mill advice. My point isn’t just to point out the obvious fact that knowing a lot about your focus area helps.

My point is that sharing this superior knowledge is a high leverage, underutilized strategy that should be a core value in philanthropy.

Here’s what’s interesting, Google’s corporate mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Clearly Google has put valuable information at the finger tips of billions of people. But note that they don’t just offer a mass library of information. Their genius has been in organizing the information, making it accessible and useful.

Philanthropy as a field is only beginning to view sharing information as an important and valuable activity. While some readers have suggested that it is more common than I suggest, it is rare enough that the New York Times found it newsworthy when the Hewlett and Irvine Foundations released reports on some of their ineffective programs in 2007. But all of this is only the first step.

When I wrote yesterday about Carnegie’s analysis of a failed grant, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom (the author of the Times article on Hewlett and Irvine) messaged me via Twitter:

The question is, how many donors will ever know about the lessons of Susan’s [Carnegie’s] report?

Good point. When philanthropists “share” information, that doesn’t mean it will be acted on. Just as important is that the information be organized, accessible and useful. Again via twitter, Mitch Nauffts of the PND Blog asked how this sort of aggregation could ever be paid for?

Guess what, Carnegie gives $120 million a year. That seems like a pretty good (huge!) budget for an effort to organize the world of philanthropy’s information. And while I’m sure Carnegie has other priorities, it is interesting to note that a single foundation could single handedly revolutionize the way knowledge is organized in philanthropy.

So who’s going to be the Google of philanthropy?

This year’s NetSquared is all about mobile technology.

The NetSquared Global Conference, held in San Jose California, is a two-day meeting that brings together the minds of unlikely allies from different professional fields including: leaders in philanthropy, corporate philanthropy, engineering, media and world-class innovators driving the development, distribution and use of social technologies for progressive change.

All conference attendees have an opportunity to share their perspective and insights from the field with competing Projects, and vote to fund N2Y4 Mobile Challenge winning Projects competing for $50k in cash-prizes and in-kind resources.

N2Y4′s Mobile Challenge calls for your world-changing ideas of how mobile applications can help citizens, groups and others create a better world for everybody.

Last year, I made the mistake of thinking the conference had morphed into more of a “technology conference” rather than having a focus on social impact. But I was wrong and I’m glad I went. To me and others who aren’t on the bleeding edge of mobile technology, I can see the same question about this year’s event. So I turned to technology and social impact guru Ethan Zuckerman.

I met Ethan in Dubai during the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council. Ethan was on the Future of the Internet Council. During a conversation I asked him how he thought web based technology could be harnessed to improve transparency in philanthropy. Ethan laughed and said:

Look, a billion people in the developed world are going to get internet enabled cell phones in the next 10 years and they are going to tell you exactly what they think of you! Whether you are transparent or not, people are going to be talking about you and whether your work makes a difference.

Oh. That just about sums it up, huh?

So in prepping for this post, I shot Ethan an email and asked for additional commentary on the intersection of philanthropy and mobile technology. Here’s what he had to say:

Many of us started working in a field where our job was to raise money to help the voiceless, or to speak for those whose voices are never heard. That may have been a noble idea at some point in the past – at this point, it sounds somewhat embarrassing, almost as a form of neocolonialism.

I’ve given a talk several times centered on the idea that the digital revolution will force us out of a model where we – the well-meaning philanthropoids – speak on behalf of the disadvantaged to one where we point to instances where they’re speaking on their own behalf …ultimately, advocacy organizations are going to have to learn not to speak, but to point.

The rise of mobile tech is going to force these issues. A nation like Ghana has gotten very used to the idea that they can speak back to power – politicians take to talk radio and engage directly with callers using their mobile phones. Columnists like Andrew Mwenda in Uganda use the internet to gain support overseas, and intellectual backing for positions questioning the value of traditional aid programs, and become fierce interlocutors of aid agencies and those that support them – his evisceration of Bono at TED Arusha continues to warm my heart.

Basically, we’ve moved from a world where a very few people have control over media to one where virtually everyone has a chance to speak up. There’s a long, long road from speaking to being heard, but we’re moving into a world where it’s very risky to speak on behalf someone and far wiser to focus on making people who are speaking heard widely…

You better go register for NetSquared. I know I am.

There are probably two types of people in the world. Those who watch that video and feel a sense of dread and those who watch it and feel excited.

I’m one of those who feels excited and inspired when I watch it.

It used to be that if you were a smart person who wanted to be “in the know” and make good decisions, you were best served by seeking out as much information as possible. When I say that “it used to be,” I mean from the beginning of human history until about four years ago. The video points out that more information will be generated in 2009, than was created in the past 5,000 years. That a weeks worth of the New York Times holds more information than most Americans living during the 18th century were likely to encounter in a lifetime.

How is it possible that we operate when the amount of information is growing at an exponential rate? The key is filtering.

Today, smart people who want to be “in the know” need to figure out how to filter the information fire hose. The challenge is not finding information, but finding trusted “filters” and then absorbing information through them while ignoring the rest.

If you look at my blogroll of “Blogs I read every day”, you’ll see a set of filters I use to track what’s going on in philanthropy. Filters can be people, publications, web tools, etc. The key is that they allow you to separate the “noise” from the “signal”.

Twitter has become one way for me to filter valuable “signals” about philanthropy from the general cacophony of “noise.” There is a tradition on Twitter called Follow Friday, where users share with each other their favorite people to “follow” (on Twitter, you can choose who you “follow”, ie. whose updates you see). One way to think about Follow Friday is “filter sharing.” So today I’m sharing some of my favorite Twitter Filters:

• @pndblog
• @p2173
• @Philanthropy
• @CauseGlobal
• @socialcitizen
• @socialentrprnr
• @HildyGottlieb
• @sinatraj
• @Philanthropy411
• @MarionConway

Lots of people feel like Twitter takes a lot of time. But I actually think it is a time saving filter system. Because I am building a set of trusted filters who post lots of interesting news, overtime I have less need to browse broader sets of information looking for things relevant to me. Of course that highlights the danger of filters. You need to evaluate them constantly while always keeping an eye out for new filters. Otherwise you run the risk of simply limiting your world view and missing the shifts that are occurring around you.