Breakthroughs in Online Fundraising (MORE!)
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Powerpoint and transcript-level notes from presentation to Institute of Fundraising National Convention, London UK July 2010
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- 1. Breakthroughs in Online Fundraising designing & aligning for the emerging philanthropic web prepared and presented by Christine Egger
- 4. networked
- 5. systemic
- 8. websites
- 10. giving markets
- 11. giving markets
- 12. free agents
- 13. Social Actions
- 14. #takeaction
- 15. action packs
- 16. bloggers
- 17. media
- 18. what’s next
- 21. design to create paths
- 22. design to diversify
- 24. design for feedback + feedforward
- 25. design to encourage surprises
- 27. design for shared ownership
- 28. facilitate openness create paths diversify redundancy feedback + forward encourage surprises shared ownership open source thinking
- 29. 3 menu items
- 30. Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide watch
- 31. read
- 32. facilitate openness create paths diversify redundancy feedback + forward encourage surprises shared ownership Choose a project: _________________________________________________________________________________ How does it already reflect these elements? What small changes might bring in more of them?
- 33. credits Decentralized and distributed: just.Luc, http://www.flickr.com/photos/9619972@N08/1006957853 Networked: Noah Sussman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thefangmonster/352461415/in/set-72157615109132005/ Systemic: Eduardo DeBoni, http://www.flickr.com/photos/35009339@N00/3062705323 Data: http://www.flickr.com/photos/33384108@N00/2449323180 Facilitating: cproppe, http://www.flickr.com/photos/50246444@N00/3010717453 Openness: Darwin Bell, http://www.flickr.com/photos/53611153@N00/329016865 Creating paths: Ken McCown, http://www.flickr.com/photos/63216345@N00/196862911 Diversity: romsrini, http://www.flickr.com/photos/56118505@N00/84647926 Redundancy: vidiot, http://www.flickr.com/photos/vidiot/2442187502/in/set-72157604729279064/ Encouraging surprises: annia316, http://www.flickr.com/photos/annia316/330752363/ Feedback and feedforward: KiSS_Ze_CHeF, http://www.flickr.com/photos/46892099@N06/4374364231/in/photostream/ Shared ownership: Môsieur J. [version 3.0b], http://www.flickr.com/photos/11445550@N00/45539374 Fortune cookie: Tojosan, http://www.flickr.com/photos/28069288@N00/591733931 Take out: AMERICANVIRUS, http://www.flickr.com/photos/29652825@N08/2928938926 GlobalGiving: http://www.globalgiving.co.uk/pr/2100/proj2056a.html JustGiving: http://www.justgiving.com/kthemans Shawn Ahmed: uncultured.org Takeaction: http://twitter.com/nataliaenvy/status/13202706796
- 35. Social Actions, Inc. 105 E 34th St #171, New York, NY 10016 USA tel (415) 425-7482 [email_address] http://socialactions.com
Notas del editor
- Social Actions makes it easier for people to find and take actions in support of the causes they care about Co-Director with founder Peter Deitz We use the phrase “’philanthropic web” to refer to an Amazing combination of people and ideas and technologies that promote the culture of giving Transforming compassion into gestures of support for causes and charities around the world This moment in online fundraising is one of broad experimentation In this session overview of the web’s key characteristics what’s happening here to support the charitable sector and ways to think about designing intentionally to make the best use of it that might be helpful to you
- We’ll work through this material in a few sections First, a quick review of a few central characteristics that define the online environment Distributed and decentralized, networked, systemic, and technological That’ll be just the briefest overview, nothing complicated, but helpful in getting a sense of where all of this fundraising innovation is happening Then, a tour through some of the more notable innovations in this space We’ll start with an example of the way website content is developing Then sample a few online giving markets, sites that give nonprofits and individuals space to promote fundraising campaigns. 2 are available for registered nonprofits, and a third is available for anyone to use which will introduce the expanding role that “free agent fundraisers” are playing in the online giving space. Those will set the stage for a tour through some really cool, new territory – the stuff that gets me really excited – that take all of those fundraising opportunities and move them around the web without any additional effort on the part of the nonprofits who will benefit from them. (Yay! More results without more effort!). And we’ll include a bit about where the philanthropic web is heading, infrastructure-wise Third and last section, go over some simple design principles that make a huge difference in fully leveraging this online environment. For each of those I’ll share some examples of what we see that’s working really well in that design review, we’re going to build up a working definition of “open source thinking” that I think adds so much jet fuel to where fundraising innovations are going A note about the handouts One is a reference to the design elements I’ll share Thought it would be helpful to be able to jot down some examples that come to mind as we’re going over them The other lists all of the websites I’ll mention Even with covering all this territory, it just scratches the surface of what’s being developed online to support fundraising. For reference later, this will be on Slideshare What I hope is that you come away with a sense of how surrounded you are with some incredible technology and people working daily to develop more, all of which is designed to make the work of attracting funds to your organizations easier. Lots of territory to cover in an hour, we should have a full half an hour for discussion. Time to jump in So first, to understand the trends we’re seeing in online fundraising, it helps tremendously to have a sense of what all of us are working WITH.
- First and foremost, by design, the web is A phenomenally distributed and decentralized environment Literally billions of points of engagement Information flows around the web in that way, in a very distributed and decentralized fashion To get information we have about our organization “out there”, we often feel stretched, trying to be in many places at once with limited resources But that work we put into stretching often feels needed only because we’re not fully leveraging just how distributed the web is, and we’ll get into that a bit more in a few minutes
- There’s been a lot of attention to networks with the expansion of the web – lots of great resources to help us get our heads around what it means to think about networks, and think about ourselves as participants in them. When we think about networks and ourselves being a part of one, we’re often paying attention to the nodes - the points of connection – or what’s traveling through the network. But what makes a network WORK is the very process of connecting – the quality and strength of the connections. So that’s what I want to draw particular attention to here - the tiny lines in this drawing, the lines connecting each of those dots. This is important to note because, when we think about fundraising innovations, we want to pay particular attention to ways to strengthen those lines, the connections We’re looking for ways to reduce friction for the funds, information, attention, and energy traveling to and through your organization.
- This context is also systemic This means that, in this environment, 1 + 1 doesn’t always add up to 2 Systemic doesn’t simply mean there’s something big and complicated going on It refers to the way the parts of this network interact – meaning that they influence each other, there’s an emergent quality to what’s going on here This is important to note because it means that there’s a built-in non-predictability to what happens here If we’re designing online fundraising innovations, and can accurately predict their results, they can still be wildly successful but they aren’t leveraging the systemic quality of the web
- The last suggestion I’ll make about this context: it’s all about a technological infrastructure whose purpose is to hold and distribute information This means we’re talking about information that – while it’s moving around this networked, decentralized system -- is in the forms of 1’s and 0’s What we see on the web might look like a video or a photograph or a blog post or an amount of funds , but behind the scenes it’s 1’s and 0’s That’s important because it means that ANYWHERE on the web is a potential space for fundraising and fund capture, as long as the right piece of software is connected to it, and increasingly that’s the case
- It would make sense that the most successful fundraising experiments, all other things being equal, would fully leverage these key characteristics Distributed and decentralized Networked Systemic Technological data And we’ll watch for that during this tour of the infrastructure that’s being built to support the work that nonprofits are doing
- First off, a quick note about charity websites in general I’m just going to feature one website of hundred possible choices Chose Cancer Research UK – they caught my eye about a year ago, back when Bryan was with them I absolutely love how granular they’ve gotten with their “Support Us” page This is a section of that screenshot, highlighting over a dozen ways to do that Cancer Research UK caught my eye because they’re the first research house I ever heard of that let you donate to a particular research project (third column) So the trend to point out here, and what we’re seeing more and more at the website level: is a recognition that the entire audience coming to a charity website may be drawn to a common cause, but they have different reasons for being there and different triggers for engaging more deeply with the charity You can reflect the same kind of detail on your own website without spending an arm and a leg on IT costs. Each one of these could click through to a different paragraph on a single page. Related session: Tomorrow, 4pm, Nick Burne’s “Optimisation is the New Cash Cow” - “making the most of your website visitors”
- I’m quickly fast-forwarding now to online giving markets, still in very familiar territory For this, just a few to point out, to note the trends here, too GlobalGivingUK and GlobalGivingUS All registered charities are invited to participate, regardless of where they’re based Two-layered vetting process: The first is their own, a due diligence process to ensure the organisations are efficient with their funds, with extra steps taken if the organization is based outside the UK or US to determine nonprofit equivalency Secondly, they bring new charities onboard through “Project Challenges” You get to post a new project on GlobalGiving, and have one month to raise £1000 from 50 contributors Those projects that succeed are invited to remain on the website permanently, and if you miss the target you’ll be invited to try again during the next challenge. The next one is coming up at the end of this year, and you can get on their list to be notified when that’s ready to launch or use an online form (link in your handout) Fee is 10%, ranks at the higher end of the fees assessed for using these online giving markets. They can range from 0% to as high as 15%. Required to submit progress reports every 3 months detailing the project’s progress, how funds have been spent and “how challenges are being faced” Love that they understand right up front that this work is challenging! Notice the action-oriented title that’s another trend we’re seeing, and some of the territory we’ll cover in a few slides will help explain why
- See the Difference - one of the newest (launched this year) Open to all registered UK charities Fee is 5%, and if you’re not already using Virgin Money Giving there’s an additional fee for setting that up Have set themselves apart from others by offering mentor-support to help nonprofits tell their story by video. I love their example of how they helped Ace Africa On their site, follow the registration button to “How we helped Ace Africa make their first film” for a 3 ½ minute video that tells that story. One of the key points made there: to take what you already do, and carry it into this online environment. (That’s very different from GlobalGiving, which intentionally requires their promoted charities to generate reports that they probably wouldn’t have already done) Ace Africa was already having regular conversations with people in the field, and they saw that one of the easiest and quickest things to do would be to record some of them. The video outlines a handful of 15- to 30- minutes steps they took to do that. Last night, I had a chance to meet one of the volunteers here, Carol, from the Surry Association for Visual Impairment And she mentioned that they just started using See the Difference She gave it a huge thumbs up I asked whether I could pass along her contact info – nope, paternity leave
- With this next example, we get into relatively new territory, but still a few years old already: Giving markets that give anyone the ability to create a campaign to raise funds for a charity This is Katrina Themans’ JustGiving page. She has to be one of the youngest trekkers to make it that close to Mount Everest Raising funds for Child Action Nepal JustGiving sends 100% of the donation to the charity and then when Gift Aid is reclaimed they take a 5% fee and transaction charges out of that before sending the balance to the charity What’s newsworthy: is the impact that sites like JustGiving are having in the philanthropic sector by making it easy for anyone to raise funds There are more of them than ever and many of the most recent ones don’t require that funds be collected for registered charities Makes sense that at an average donation amount that’s relatively small, tax deductibility or Gift Aid wouldn’t be as important to those making a donation to something they believe in At some point, we might see this element of the philanthropic web contract but for the moment its still expanding rapidly (Social Actions is aware of over 200 and the list is growing) Clearly topic of conversation at the convention here, this explosion in peer-to-peer microphilanthropic activity: Right now - Clarence Room, John Baquley and Carla Cornwell 2 tomorrow: 12, Peer to Peer Fundraising, Martin Gill, Meredith Campbell; 2:30, Jonathan Waddingham, JustGiving, “Discover the Secrets of Online Fundraisers” 3 Wed: 10:30 am, AJ Leon’s , “Open Source Charity”, I’d guess that 10:30 Vinay Bhagat “The Next Generation of Giving” too, 4pm, Mainstreaming Social Media Within Your Organisation, Jason Potts & Paul Lewis And by the way I love that there’s a session on how to be innovative!! That’s Wednesday at noon, with Lucy Gower and Rob Woods, #89, “You are an innovator, you just don’t realize it yet”
- So you’re going to hear plenty about individuals fundraising, but I wanted to share just one story to highlight the attention this is getting in the circles I follow. This is Shawn Ahmed. He’s like Katrina in that he likes to raise money for charity But he’s a little different in that he has over a quarter million followers on Twitter, 10,800 subscribers on YouTube, and 2.1 million views. He’s getting a lot of attention lately in the US because he says that even with all of that reach, he’s been having a hard time getting nonprofits to take him seriously when he says he wants to raise funds for them. At the Nonprofit Technology conference in April, Beth Kanter and Allison Fine were making a presentation about the book they just published, the Networked Nonprofit Wendy Harmon was there she heads up social media for the Red Cross Beth and Allison were making an example of the Red Cross as a nonprofit that’s really good at building relationships with their supporters But Shawn was in the audience, stood up, said “No you’re not” He said he’d been trying to help the Red Cross after the earthquake in Haiti, and felt completely shut out. The great part about this was that Wendy and Shawn really did want to find ways to work together. It wasn’t just grandstanding on Shawn’s part, or lip service from the Red Cross about wanting to involve more kinds of supporters. They continued to talk and write follow-up posts about what they’re learning from each. Shawn wrote a great post describing what he wants from nonprofits – inspiration, access, influence – that’s great reading for any group that wants to tap into this “free agent fundraiser” trend (handout)
- So back to these online giving markets I mentioned that their number, from what we know, has reached 200 and counting Even back when he only knew about a half dozen or so, Peter Deitz – Social Actions’ founder – thought it would be a good idea to make it easier for people to find and connect with so many campaigns coming from so many sources So he created Social Actions to do that, and we’re now one of several new kinds of actions in the philanthropic web space: a meta-aggregator or intermediary, making it easier for people to find these campaigns even if they’ve never heard of any of the nonprofits who benefit from them, or even any of the online giving markets we collect campaigns from We subscribe to the campaigns promoted on each of these sites, in the same way you might subscribe to a blog Fundraising, volunteer, petition, and other kinds of campaigns from over 60 unique online giving markets from the US, India, South Africa, China, Europe and the UK UK: Global Giving, JustGiving, Pledgebank, Stop Climate Chaos Coalition And all of that information is fed into a single public database Over 100,000 “opportunities to take action” in it at any given time Number is increasing by about 5,000 a month Available for anyone to display, filter, and distribute around the web The data is also available for anyone to research and learn from We launched a year and a half ago Since then 5 million people have clicked through to these fundraising and other kinds of campaigns by finding them through the Social Actions database
- A quick note about two of our sources that aren’t online giving markets – And that expands on our idea of what kinds of tools are contributing to the philanthropic web Anyone can add the tag takeaction to a bookmark on Delicious or to a tweet, and those get scooped up into the Social Actions dataset, too I thought while pointing that out I’d share an example of a really well-written tweet: Asking people to participate in a fundraiser for 300acres.com I would have left off the “http” part and added some exclamation points, but it has all the elements to drive participation: what you want someone to do when you want them to do it, where to go to do it and the #takeaction hashtag to propel it around the web Amazing what you can fit in in 140 characters! Actually, would suggest you limit the tweets you want to see circulated to less than 120 So where does all of the content these campaigns go? Now we’re getting into some newer territory, where people are creating tools to carry your fundraising campaigns forward without the nonprofit or fundraiser lifting a finger
- Now it becomes about filtering, sorting, and distributing those actions One of the things Social Actions has done is create what we call “Action Packs” Sorts the campaigns by topic. We came up with over 50 topic headings – like Autism Actions here – but also posted instructions on how to create more Anyone can go to socialactions.com/actionpacks, pick the one their interested in, and get the code to embed this widget (box) on your site. It shows a continuously updated stream of actions related to that topic Or they can follow them on Twitter, if they’d rather do that Remember when I noted the “actionable title” in the GlobalGiving project See how that title gets condensed into a text message length We’ll see that again and again, how important it is to be concise and action-oriented in the way fundraising campaigns are titled This is one of over 40 uses for the Social Actions dataset that we’ve been a part of building or encouraging with the tech community – iphone apps, mapping tools, etc -- but there are many many more and this is where it starts to get really exciting –
- With this piece of technology and the one of the next slide, getting into really exciting stuff We’re now blurring the lines between “where philanthropy happens online” and “where ANYTHING happens online” Zemanta is a tool that anyone who writes blog posts can download for free. It presents information that’s related to what you’re writing, WHILE you’re writing it, so you can incorporate it into your post Works On All Platforms 10M+ pictures and Thousands of Blogs and News Sites Over 20 Specialized Sources including all of the fundraising and other kinds of campaigns circulated by Social Actions are included This is also a fantastic tool to USE to enhance your organization’s writing, find articles related to the work you’re doing, find other organizations to partner with You can check it out without downloading anything. On the site’s demo page, copy-and-paste any text into the demo window and see what it shows you As of this morning, has been dowloaded 177,171 times
- This next site is another that draws from the Social Actions collection This time, to promote ways to take action that relate to video content Link TV broadcasts news and documentary programs on international news, current events, and diverse cultures. They’re primary goal is to present issues not often covered in the U.S. media. They broadcast online but also via cable tv, and are in about 15 million US homes at the moment This fall they’ll launch ViewChange.org, a digital media hub that highlights issues relevant to global development. Users can access related videos, articles, blogs, and all of the campaigns in Social Actions This image is rough because it’s a screenshot of their promotional video Shows global issues, click through to see films and related ways to take action Gates Foundation’s support of this project is a sign that these large institutional funders are seeing the power of leveraging open (public) datasets to evoke more philanthropic activity among digital audience members Participant Media (which is best known for producing an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s project) also developing a media-based platform that blends film and philanthropy, on TakePart.com, that draws from Social Actions Looking forward to learning more about BigPicture.tv based here in London. Meeting with Jeremy Smith tomorrow
- This has been just the briefest introduction to the kinds of tools being created to distribute your fundraising campaigns across the web, once they’re online. It should be very encouraging that there are large numbers of people working diligently to develop MORE. The week before last, Peter and I participated in a 3-day workshop called “Markets for Giving” that brought together 35 or so representatives from across the philanthropic sector to discuss what online infrastructure was still needed. Giving Markets: GiveIndia, Greater Good South Africa, GlobalGiving US and UK Analysts like Martin Brooks from New Philanthropy Capital, David Bonbright from Keystone Accountability, both based here Foundations: Gates, Rockefeller, Ford, Hewlett Investment firms and infrastructure developers And Social Actions, as one of the broadest aggregators in the space We came up with a long list, and there was a great deal of consensus around a few key concepts: The need for more integration among tools that add layers of information to what each of you are putting online, blending your fundraising campaigns with mapping tools and government data for example. Efforts in this direction are just beginning, lots of potential there We also discussed the need for more feedback from those who benefit most from what we all do, the people and communities that nonprofits serve GlobalGiving is testing a feedback mechanism using SMS or cellphone technology. They shared that in a 3-week period they collected 4,000 responses to a survey that they recently distributed, and they’re refining the process and actively seeking others to work with on that. The need for more standardization in the way nonprofits describe what they do, but no consensus around how to do that yet The need for a unique identification number, with a sense that this will be developed through a combination of bottom-up and top-down processes And we need more tools that make it easier for nonprofits to access and leverage what’s being created Like wouldn’t it be great to have an easy-to-use directory of those 200+ online giving markets? Social Actions collects some information on each of the giving markets we track, for example – what types of organizations can benefit from each, who can create campaigns on them, what issues and geographic regions do they impact, etc. And I’m sure there are other groups in the UK and Europe gathering similar kinds of information. We need to find each other and link up
- That “context part” is like getting the lay of the land… Iinnovations” is trekking through it… Maybe it feels like we’ve gone uphill a bit, taking so much information in So I installed an alpine slide, here - this design section is a fun tour through 8 ways we might want to align what we do in this environment to be best positioned to benefit from all of that – what’s already available and what’s coming down the road
- Design to facilitate… Ties to that systemic quality… means there’s a limited role for “command and control” where “making things happen” is concerned. Because the internet is such a shared space – in that networked, systemic, decentralized environment, you’re meeting people where they are as often as you’re inviting people into your “space”, it encourages a shift in the role your organization is going to play here. Shift in the message from “How can you help us?” which increases the sense of division rather than connectedness, to “How can we do this together?” Example: You’ll remember seeing that on the Cancer Research UK page we showed earlier – “volunteer with us” Also on Cancer Research UK you’ll see instructions on how to use Justgiving and other resources to fundraise on their behalf. Thinking back to the story I shared about Shawn Ahmed, who wants to be fundraising for charities – The role of fund development staff really expands from “fundraising event manager” to “how can we make sure that when people want to fundraise for us, whenever the mood strikes them, that we’re not in the way? That they have everything they need at their fingertips – logos, descriptions of the work we do that would make sense to people who’ve never heard of us before, maybe a way to give funds directly to a program they can help us design?”
- In this environment, fundraising experiments are experiments in connecting which means you’re in the business of creating paths, both internally and to the world outside your organization. Thinking of emails for example… Many are designed in a way that’s very difficult to share (if you think of them as tossing a stone across the water, wanting to pick one out that will skip along as far as possible, most are the kind of stone that will immediately kerplunk into the water) I receive many from nonprofits that I’d love to share with people I’m connected with, but not by email (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). YOU don’t have to be in all of those places, just help me carry your message along. Add a 140-character summary of the information provided and/or copy and paste your emails into a simple blog. Those blog entries become a place people can direct their friends to, to catch your latest news or appeal, and they also become an archive of messages that you AND free agent fundraisers can tap into for future outreach It doesn’t take any additional effort to throw a stone that’s shaped for skipping vs. one that’s shaped for sinking What tiny changes can you make in the way your emails are designed that improve the chances they’ll find new paths to people who share your mission? Related session: tomorrow, 10:30 a.m., Nick Allen and Michael Dooherty will be talking about “Email Marketing”, in St. James Suite What can we learn from the US experience and how does this compare to one of the UK's leading charities, Cancer Research UK?
- Strong networks love diversity, too. Whenever you can, create a path to something new and different Can do that by blending online and offline activity - A great example: A nonprofit by the name of Thompson Child & Family Focus (provide clinical and behavioral treatment and developmental education Held a fundraiser event recently ~ they hosted a luncheon, very typical offline event celebrating the work they were doing. When they set-up the room, at one table they placed laptops at every seat, with internet access available to them, and throughout the luncheon people were invited to sit for a moment and share the fundraising appeal with friends through email, twitter, facebook, whatever networks they used. They called it “Tweeta20”, asking for donations of $20 or more. The table raised more than $4,000 for them that day.
- Whenever you can, create MULTIPLE paths to something new and different – strong networks love redundancy, too Consider Cancer Research UK’s example of listing 12 ways to support them PLUS a “more ways to donate button.” Another example Ss an alternative to sharing so much information with your supporters via text (emails and newsletters and such) Maybe your audience would rather hear you reading them! Consider recording the content of your emails, newsletters, and other updates into a BlogTalkRadio session. BlogTalkRadio is free site that creates archived audio content – it basically creates an online radio program of anything you say during it – you can simply share an update, or record a conversation, or invite people to call in.
- You can probably see how a systemic environment – where different elements are influencing one another – would encourage designing for lots of feedback loops. Every kind of information – every pound, every voice, photograph, document – can be thought of as a piece of feedback or feedforward traveling an arc through this systemic network. You can see a connection between this environment and a trend toward more transparency and accountability. This environment makes it so easy to pass information of all kinds around, it follows that people’s expectations would shift in that direction. One of my favorite examples of how to design to encourage this is to leverage an organization like Great Nonprofits. Shared story of my receiving a telephone call, request for donation reviewed website, clicked through to Guidestar, found they give 2.6% to “primary purpose” of providing direct financial assistance to for expenses related to cancer -> Great Nonprofits review -> meeting with their executive director and board member Discovered they felt this arrangement was worthwhile, better to send a trickle to families while they tried to raise $12 million to open 5 offices I was a potential “free agent fundraiser” for them, but our ideas of how to build out that kind of service organization differed (I feel that mission can be fulfilled with some software and a strong application and vetting process) They’re still learning about Great Nonprofits – saw that last week they added two reviews of their own to raise their star rating, noting that they’d “met with someone from Social Actions and had cleared up the MISUNDERSTANDING.” Lots of opportunities as these communication technologies develop for navigating through all kinds of feedback and feedforward sharing…
- Designing for “systemic” also means you not only understand that the web is loaded with unanticipated consequences but that you intentionally invite them into your fundraising experiments The idea here is to think about innovating online fundraising experiments as “creating conditions that encourage the best possible outcomes for us” When you’re crafting them, ask whether there’s anything you can do to open up that opportunity even more
- This environment encourages a design for openness, simply by making it easier to be open and transparent about what you’re doing and how the funds coming to you will be used, and your challenges and successes along the way. This is reflected in See the Difference’s video, showing how Ace Africe used their site to simply video conversations that were already happening so they could share them with a broader audience. Refers to “open processes” too – less plan and execute, more creativity and play. A number of us in the US have been participating in a weekly conference call – 90 minutes with absolutely no agenda, come if you happen to be free, don’t come if you can’t, just to play with ideas related to strengthening networks in the nonprofit sector. It’s called a sandbox, because we’re just there to play, but it is absolutely amazing the projects that are born there. And fundraising opportunities, too. I tossed around some ideas about why I’d like to be able to get to a conference in California a few months ago. Social Action is a small nonprofit with no travel budget per se, but just by talking through it out loud the group helped me figure out how to make it happen. A blog post led to a “contribute funds if you’d like to make this happen together” button and within a month two dozen people were creating that opportunity with me. (It was the Wisdom 2.0 conference, at wisdom2summit.com, and it was so cool!)
- So openness and also shared ownership Part of this is because any time you move anything you’re doing online that really shares ownership and accountability, you empower others to network, distribute, engage, and support on your behalf There are SO many ways this concept of “shared ownership” plays out in a way that impacts the funds nonprofits can attract: Small nonprofit in Arizona run by Hildy Gottlieb and Dimitri Petropolis Started intentionally blogging about how they wanted to change their name, but didn’t know what to change it to. They wanted to share that decision with their community, as a means to build a shared responsibility for their operation in general When the new name was ultimately selected, it turned out that the URL for it was already taken and the owner wants to be paid a good sum for it But their having no trouble collecting the funds because the entire process was open and collaborative and shared. It’s no longer their decision and their expense, it’s a shared one. Another example, IdeaEncore Network – site where nonprofits can make their intellectual property available for free or as a revenue source
- My suggestion is that – in the long run -- designing fundraising activity in this way puts you in a position of strength in this environment It’s like setting your sails to catch the full power of the wind All of them together create a working definition of what I mean by “open source thinking” This is about designing what you do so that everyone can not only use the services you offer, but really participate in and contribute to fulfilling your mission with you
- If you’re excited about open data – putting more of what you do online, in a way that’s owned by everyone – and want to see more about the possibilities that creates – Watch this quick 15-minute video by Tim Berners-Lee The visuals are simply amazing
- The top two are available online to download for free: Lucy Bernholz, Edward Skloot and Barry Varela have written an important paper called “Disrupting Philanthropy” Cross between a report and an academic paper, can read/download online for free Dan Lockton, David Harrison, and Neville A Stanton have published “Design with Intent” Lots of practical advice for applying design thinking to all kinds of things, from websites to emails to any message you’re sharing It isn’t a book, it’s a deck of cards. Free to download the whole thing or just the sections that interest you. If you’re curious to learn more about how to get BIG results from making tiny changes, little things that make it more likely people will do what you want them to do once they’re reading about what you’re all about: John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison ‘s “The Power of Pull” 4. And Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s “The Networked Nonprofit”, published last month: “Real-world applications of technology to extend nonprofits’ missions by thinking critically and creatively about the wired world”
- Hand-out to use, self-explanatory