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Paul Botts of the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation critiques Eric Kessler's recent guest post on mergers in the nonprofit sector.
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After declining to be part of the All4Good project, VolunteerMatch opens their database to outside developers saying "The move reflects a significant change in strategy." I understand that the move will help VolunteerMatch & All4Good work together.
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Chip Feiss, a a senior fellow at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, speculates that we may be witnessing the birth of a new economic sector called Social Enterprise.
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A list of community foundations that are active on Twitter. To me, the most interesting Twitter stream mentioned comes from Paul Putnam, a program officer at the Cleveland Foundation. Note that his is a lot more interesting than the "official" Cleveland Foundation feed. I for the most part think Twitter is about individuals, not institutions. Same is true with blogging.
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ABOUT SEAN STANNARD-STOCKTON
Sean Stannard-Stockton is the president and chief investment officer of Ensemble Capital Management, located in Burlingame, CA, midway between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. From 2006 through 2012, Sean authored the Tactical Philanthropy blog and wrote regular philanthropy columns for both the Financial Times and the Chronicle of Philanthropy. In 2012, Sean officially ended the blog to focus on growing Ensemble Capital.
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3 Comments
Sean, I read that Chip Feiss article too and was somewhat irritated by the FT ‘No Comment’ feature.
To me, that what he’s describing as a business working on common-good social problems, has been floating as a concept in cyberspace for 12 year is what’s amazing And it’s been developing right under the radar rather than in front of our eyes.
It was in fact first put into practice in Russia, following in right behind Harvard and the 1998 economic collapse with the Tomsk Initiative and microfinance bank, as proof of the concept.
http://www.p-ced.com/projects/russia/
From 2004, since being applied from the UK, the social aim has been to attract investment again from US government, into eradicating poverty and fostering democracy. What’s happened to date, wouldn’t have been possible without some form of acceptance by US government. It was after all pitched directly at them via the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
http://people-centered.net/About.asp
It may come from a very small business, but one creating influence nevertheless.
I’m blogging myself today on the remarkable similarity in terminology between what we call people-centered economic development and what’s being described as constructive capitalism. I think we’ve possibly met mainstream business halfway.
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=130118
Jeff
Hi Sean,
I maintain the Cleveland Foundation’s Twitter account and I wholeheartedly agree with what you said about Twitter being for individuals, not organizations. We’re still tinkering with it, trying to find that voice that’s real, which I think is much, much easier to do as an individual.
Do you have any suggestions for organizations for organizations using Twitter? New followers now see my name, so they can associate a person with the account and not just an institution, but since we already had 800+ followers when we made the switch, I’m not sure if current followers will even notice.
At any rate, we’re just trying to bring people news/info of interest. To have useful tweets. To be more conversational. To re-tweet more. I’m hoping we can use Twitter (along with more conventional outlets) to bring more awareness and a human touch to the foundation.
Thanks and I look forward to any insights you have!
Hey Tara,
Thanks for commenting. It is tough to blog on behalf of an organization because it can be difficult to inject a strong viewpoint. Too often organization twitter accounts simply talk about the organization. Two organizational accounts that I think do a good job are @newprofit and @vppartners. I think the key thing to an interesting twitter stream is answering the question “what has your attention?”. So rather than writing about what an org is doing I’m interested in hearing what has your organization’s attention?
When I wrote that Paul’s account was “better” than yours, I didn’t mean to single your account out from the other org accounts. In fact, I think you’re doing a better job than more organizational tweeter accounts. I like that you say on your twitter home page who you are personally.
To answer your question directly, I think the key to a good org twitter account is to tweet about what has your org’s attention, not tweet about your org.