The Nonprofit Times has released their annual Power & Influence Top 50 list for the social sector. While the NPT isn’t terribly influential itself to the best of my knowledge, their annual list gets a lot of attention and I think it is generally well done.

The most interesting new member of the Top 50 is Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity: Water. Here’s a guy who seven years ago was a nightclub promoter with no connection to the social sector. Today, Charity: Water, the nonprofit he founded, raises $16 million a year, gets a ton of media attention and in my mind represents a case study in how to effectively use social media to connect with donors.

The vast majority of people on the NPT 50 have spent long careers in the social sector to build the power and influence that the paper is recognizing. Bill Gates is an exception, but it took billions of dollars for him to make list without a long history in the sector. However, Scott Harrison had quite a short social sector career before being named to the list. Whatever you think of social media, the way in which people who know how to harness it can build their own power and influence incredibly quickly is amazing (the one other person on the list with such a short social sector career is Wendy Harman, director of social media for the Red Cross).

So what is it that Scott and Charity: Water are doing with social media that has landed him on the NPT 50? Most importantly they treat social media as a tool, not a strategy itself. In other words, the core of what they are doing so well is fantastic communication with social media simply acting as an accelerator rather then thinking that social media itself is the key to success.

For instance, in this video, Charity: Water doesn’t just pull our heartstrings, they use fantastic storytelling skills to communicate the very real statistics that underlie the problems they are trying to address.

(click here to see the video if you are viewing this in an email)

In this next video, the organization, and Scott, show the humbleness that is required of anyone who is trying to achieve results. While most nonprofit marketing paints a picture of a world where nonprofit interventions always succeed, Charity: Water shows that they understand that talking frankly about their failures is important as well.

(click here to see the video if you are viewing this in an email)

What Charity: Water and Scott’s naming to the NPT 50 demonstrate is that social media isn’t just about having a Facebook page or being on Twitter. It is simply a tool that fantastic communicators can use to greatly accelerate their power and influence. The key to success in social media has little to do with getting the technology part right and everything to do with getting the human communications part right.

By Tessie Guillermo

The demand for technology by nonprofits as a tool for social change has been rising. However, the supply of technology funding has lagged significantly in comparison. Unfortunately, funders don’t know what they don’t know and have so far been unable to keep up with the fast pace with which their grantees are adopting new technologies.

The dramatic demonstration of technology’s role in recent global events (Haiti, Egypt, Japan) provides impetus for this demand growth. Everyone wants technology and believes they need it, but acquiring and using it effectively is a function of knowledge, affordability and the supply of funding for technology. The supply of technology funding on the other hand, is highly variable and quite limited.

At ZeroDivide we have recently released, “Amplifying Social Impact in a Connected Age,” which looks at the gap between the demand for and supply of technology funding, particularly as it relates to the application of technology for program impact. We wanted to find out if there was opportunity for changing the supply curve for technology funding, and what might be required to do so.

While there is overwhelming interest in increasing funding for technology, 68% of participating funders cited “limited staff familiarity and expertise” as the #1 barrier to increasing investments in their grantees’ technology activities. Technology expertise is still the domain of IT, and increasingly the communications departments, but rarely is there fluency throughout most philanthropic organizational infrastructure.

Seventy two percent of respondents reported that their foundations invested 10% or less of their annual grantmaking in nonprofit technology capacity or tech-related activities and most of those grants were directed to traditional technology infrastructure or administrative operations. Skepticism about the impact of technology, particularly the use of social media, in achieving social change objectives is high due to the lack of standards for measurement and documentation of results.

Funders expressed anxiety about their relative lack of technology expertise compared to their grantee. One respondent captured this well saying, “grantees—they’re way out in front of us on this (technology-related) work." This knowledge and pressure from grantees is the greatest push factor for funders to invest more resources in technology funding. Technology service providers validated that the market for technology services is inefficient and resource intensive. They indicated that funders allocate technology funding for nonprofit capacity building by primarily funding discrete activities such as a training for grantees, or a single hardware purchase or software project.

The research surfaced three key recommendations for how to transform the status quo. Changing the “slope” of the technology funding supply curve, building the market for technology capacity and integration for social impact is possible in at least these key ways:

1) increasing funder education and engagement activities through “how-to” guides, case study reports and peer convenings and partnerships;

2) strengthening funder advising offerings that move them from idea to action, particularly for small to mid-size foundation with no or limited staff with technology expertise; and

3) expanding the pool of investment through mechanisms such as collaborative funds, matching grant programs, donor-advised funds, leveraging public sector and private industry investments, and exploring community benefit agreements that created funds such as the California Emerging Technology Fund, the California Consumer Protection Fund, and ZeroDivide.

Philanthropy must literally "get with the program" on technology funding, and get smart on the benefits of allocating sustained resources to this area of grantmaking. By doing so, the potential for technology to increase social impact can be fully realized.

ZeroDivide will be hosting two webinars to discuss their new report. A funders-only webinar is scheduled for April 5 at 2pm EDT (email jeff@zerodivide.org for details). A webinar open to everyone is scheduled for April 6 at 2pm EDT, click here to register.

However, for some time GuideStar has been looking at ways to offer visitors more evaluative information. Now, they’ve launched TakeAction @ GuideStar.

Click here to visit the new website.

The site seeks to help donors select which nonprofits to fund, objectively making available rating information from GiveWell, GreatNonprofits, Philanthropedia and RootCause.

One interesting aspect of the new platform is that it reorients the way in which users seek information. GuideStar, like many nonprofit databases, has traditionally assumed that users are looking for information about a specific nonprofit. Their search interface prompts people to enter an organization name. This format makes sense if we assume that users are checking to see if an organization is compliant and has no red flags. But if a donor is seeking the best organization, they need to search by cause area since they presumably do not already know the organization they are looking for. The TakeAction platform reorganizes the GuideStar database by cause area.

One more step towards helping donors make smart decisions about their giving, even if it doesn’t quite turn GuideStar into “the one platform to rule them all”.

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…

Earlier this week when I was in DC, I had a limited amount of time to meet with people. So I used LinkedIn to identify who I knew in the DC area and on Monday night ended up having cocktails with people from Guidestar, the Gates Foundation, Network for Good, Association of Small Foundations, Independent Sector, Hudson Institute, DC Central Kitchen and a few other organizations. What was intriguing to me about the meeting was that I used web technology to facilitate offline engagement.

One of the ways writing this blog is useful to me is that it regularly facilitates offline interactions with people whose knowledge is beneficial to me. When people who do not understand the value of the web express why they don’t think it is important, they generally point to the sometimes superficial commentary that is common online (Twitter in particular is open to this criticism with its 140 character limit to comments). But the web allows for loose ties to form and be maintained more easily. Since humans can only successfully manage strong relationships with 150 people, managing loose ties is important to allowing us to benefit from the larger collective wisdom.

Credit: Logic + Emotion

The chart and quote above make the point well. Pre-Web 2.0, “well connected” people where those who had strong ties with all the right people. Today, “well connected” people are those who have extensive loose ties with all the right people. The power of social media is that it allows us to break Dunbar’s 150 relationship limit and enter the green section in the chart above. It allows us to maintain loose ties at strong enough levels that we’re able to call up those connections and deepen them when needed.

The web is not impersonal, it is not superficial. At its best it creates ambient intimacy that allows us to greatly expand our access to collective human wisdom.

Sean,
Thanks so much for your comments on our new mapping tool, Philanthropy In/Sight. We are thrilled that you like it! And we’re hoping that the rest of the field agrees. We encourage your readers to take the guided tour at philanthropyinsight.org.

We’d also like to extend a special three-day free trial offer to Tactical Philanthropy readers! Just e-mail me at dlc@foundationcenter.org and I’ll respond with an activation code that will get you set up to test drive Philanthropy In/Sight. Our regular free trial is only 24 hours, so to take advantage of this extended period, please contact me!

Meanwhile, I want to add that we are especially interested in getting feedback on the application. We’re hoping to add new features, data sets, and more to Philanthropy In/Sight over the next few months so any suggestions on how to improve it would be very valuable to us. Thanks again!

Dave Clark
Product Manager
The Foundation Center

Via Twitter, @btazzi suggested to me that he wished Philanthropy In/Sight had ways to distinguish between the geographic location of a grantee’s offices and the area it served. Without this distinction, the mapping tool reveals where foundations are providing funding rather than where they are achieving impact. This seems to me to be a difficult, but doable, challenge for Philanthropy In/Sight to overcome in later versions. How else might they improve the tool?

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.

Oops!

Now I’m a Twitter fan. My Twitter handle is @tactphil and you can find my Twitter home page here. I’ve found that Twitter is actually a very, very useful way to source interesting information, keep tabs on “what people are talking about” and receive quick input from people with similar interests.

Over on Twitter, I’ve been sending out interesting links that I don’t post here on the blog. So if you are an information hungry, philanthropy fan, give it a try and follow me at @tactphil.