Based on what we’ve been hearing, we’ve developed a short list of driving forces that could shape how networks and network practices will help inform and engage communities. We would like to hear your opinions on which of these drivers of change are most important and what you think is certain about this space over the next 5 years. Your input will help us frame a powerful set of scenarios – or stories of the future. (More on scenario thinking here.)

We’ll use the scenarios to stretch our thinking about the opportunities and threats that the future might hold and thereby arrive at a deeper understanding of the philanthropic investment case for networks for community engagement. We’ll be sharing what we learn from you and others along the way. Stay tuned.

The survey will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete. Please respond by Tuesday, August 31^st. Thank you in advance for your participation!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/networks_and_communities

I focused last week on a couple of the ways that funders can begin to “act bigger” in today’s more networked and interconnected landscape for public problem solving. But I want to also give a quick preview of the other major way in which we believe funders will need to improve over the coming decade: “adapting better.”

Adapting better is critical because even if funders begin to act bigger, mistakes made at a grand and ambitious scale are still mistakes. Funders will need to get better at developing judgment based on the best evidence available, and then try to learn and adjust rapidly as they go.

Grantmakers can no longer assume that they occupy a safe and quite haven where people are given the benefit of the doubt simply because they are doing charitable work. As a New York Times headline proclaimed a number of years ago, the public is now “asking do-gooders to prove they do good.”

Much progress has been made in recent years in measuring the impact of philanthropic efforts. But we must also guard against the temptation of false precision and setting simplistic proxies for impact just because they can be easily measured, even if they miss the mark in assessing real progress on complicated social problems.

Further complicating matters is that in today’s rapidly changing landscape, it often no longer makes sense to develop strategy using purely linear approaches: identifying a problem, formulating a theory of action, and executing a clear plan. Nuanced theories of change and the resulting strategic plans can be out of date almost as soon as they’re printed. I think of it as being like steering a boat: if you lash the rudder in place, by the time you get to your destination, the tide, wind, and current are going to have shifted you far off course from your ultimate goal, which itself may even have shifted while you were en route. To succeed in today’s dynamic environment, funders will need to improve their ability to learn, shift, and adapt to keep their efforts headed in the right direction.

On this subject, I think we can learn a huge amount from the design world and what it’s discovered over the last decade or two about rapid prototyping. How can we get more quickly into trying, testing, getting feedback, and iterating? How can we fail early and learn from it, before it’s too costly to change direction? And how can we make sure that don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good along the way?

Luckily, we now operate in an environment that facilitates near immediate feedback and the rapid transfer of knowledge. New technologies allow us to share information and gather input in real time, more easily and cheaply than ever before. And the question for the coming decade is whether we can use these new tools to share what we know and do, get feedback quickly, and then be ready to act on what we (and others) learn in ways that allow the field to have a meaningful impact on public problems.

In What’s Next for Philanthropy, we highlight five key behaviors can help funders get smarter faster and operate and adapt at a speed that is equal to the rate of change in the world around them:

1. Know what works (and what doesn’t). Effective funders will develop systems to learn from their successes, and their failures, in ways that can help everyone—funders and grantees alike—develop the judgment to guide and improve efforts in the future.
2. Keep pace with change. As the speed of change accelerates around us, funders will need to build feedback loops that help them change and shift behavior based on dynamic realities and lessons learned in real time.
3. Open up to new inputs. New tools and approaches now allow funders to solicit points of view from diverse cultures and perspectives, to access new and wildcard ideas, and to get buy-in and engagement from stakeholders.
4. Share by default. In a more crowded playing field, there is tremendous value in reflecting on your work and conveying your lessons to others. It makes sense to start from a place of sharing everything and then make a few exceptions, rather than a place of sharing little where transparency is the exception.
5. Take smart risks. The most effective funders will recognize when innovation is necessary, and will be willing to make high-risk, high-reward bets that have the potential to create transformative change.

I don’t have space to dive more deeply into each of these approaches here, but you can learn more about each in the report, and I believe that my colleague Barbara Kibbe will be writing more about these different strategies here at the Intrepid Philanthropist at the end of the summer.

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We’re looking at how social networks – loose connections of people—are and will be organized to make a difference in communities. We’re looking at how people are co-producing and co-curating content. We’re looking at the role of social technologies in nurturing engaged communities and how people and communities are connecting on-line and in-person — to name a few of the cut-in points.

In the end, we want to answer the questions: What will be the most effective network-centric practices for informing and engaging communities over the next 2-3 years? How will these practices relate to formalized power / institutions? Whose voices will be heard and who will be left out? What does all of this mean for collection action? And, what are the implications for grantmakers that want to fuel citizen-led change in communities?

It’s a huge topic. So our overall approach will be to look at the big picture, making connections across a range of trends and stories in order to surface how strengthening, expanding and activating networks may –or may not—lead to more engaged and more informed communities.

This research will unfold over the next three months. We’ll sharing what we learn and requesting your input along the way through posts like this one. We’re also experimenting with a wiki for coordination and collaboration – and to make transparent our work and learning process.
Over last couple weeks, we’ve been talking to folks at the Knight Foundation and other leading thinkers in this space about what they think the future will hold.

Here are some initial thoughts on trends that may be ‘locked in’ for the next 2-3 years:
• Web will become even more ubiquitous.
• Greater connectivity through mobile devices.
• More and new social technologies.
• More location-based services.
• More platforms where people are going to be able to come in and out at their own pace.
• Ongoing competition for attention. It will continue to be a challenge to manage information flows.
• More sharing (intentionally or not). Information about you will be out there, whether you want it to or not.
• There will be privacy issues.
• People will be relying more on their networks of personal connections.
• People will continue to have a producer / consumer mentality around news and information. There will still be people who want information from trusted journalists and community leaders. There will be more people wanting to bend and shape information.
• More instances of manipulated news.
• Increased peer production.
• New forms of online cooperation will result in efficiencies
• Organizations and governments will have more porous boundaries. We’ll see more interaction between individuals and institutions (versus the inter-organizational work that has been dominant to date)
• There won’t be more engagement with people across national borders, even though it will continue to get easier to do so.
• Continued acceleration of pace of change. And, technological change will continue to move at a faster pace than societal change.
Do you think this will characterize the world in 2013? What would you change? What would you add?

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.

The idea is that if the last decade was mostly about funders improving their individual organizational effectiveness and capacity, the work of the next 10 years will have to build on those efforts to develop next practices that also help funders ACT BIGGER and ADAPT BETTER.

• ACT BIGGER, because given the scale and social complexity of the challenges they face, funders will increasingly look to other actors, both in philanthropy and across sectors, to activate sufficient resources to make sustainable progress on issues of shared concern. No funder alone, not even Bill Gates, has the resources and reach required to move the needle on these types of wicked problems.

• And ADAPT BETTER, because given the pace of change today, funders will need to get smarter faster, incorporating the best available data and knowledge about what is working and regularly adjusting what they do to add value amidst the dynamic circumstances we all face.

My colleague Barbara Kibbe will be blogging after the summer about some of the ways that funders are beginning to think about adapting better, so I thought I’d write over the next day or two to explain a little more about what we mean when we talk about acting bigger.

In the report, we highlight five key ways that funders are beginning to act bigger:

1. Understanding the context. Strong peripheral vision—seeing and developing a shared understanding of the system in which they operate—will be critical to helping funders build and coordinate resources to address large, complex problems.
2. Picking the right tool(s) for the job. Funders have a wide range of assets—money, knowledge, networks, expertise, and influence—that can be applied deliberately to create social change.
3. Aligning independent action. Philanthropies are developing new models for working together that allow for both coordination and independence. Funders don’t necessarily need to make decisions together, but they do need their efforts to add up.
4. Activating networks. Advances in network theory and practice now allow funders to be more deliberate about supporting connectivity, coordinating networks, and thinking about how the collective impact of all of their efforts can produce change far beyond the success of any single grant, grantee, or donor.
5. Leveraging others’ resources. Funders can use their independent resources as levers to catalyze much larger streams of funding and activity from other sources by stimulating markets, influencing public opinion and policy, and activating new players and assets.

The Strategy Landscape tool I discussed yesterday was an example of how funders are now beginning to develop new ways of understanding their context: how individual foundations and donors are learning to put the problem—not themselves and their organizations—at the center, and to try to recognize their role as actors within a larger ecosystem of stakeholders working on the issue.

Today, I’m going to talk briefly about another one of the next practices: activating networks.

Although the individual grant is the typical unit of analysis for most foundations, the success of any single grant or organization is rarely sufficient to move the needle on a complex problem. We’ve all felt the irony when successful programs are lauded while the system they aspire to change continues to fail.

Funders are well positioned to support connectivity and to coordinate and knit together the pieces of a network of activity that can have impacts far beyond the success of any one grant, grantee, or donor. And advances in network theory and practice now allow funders to be much more deliberate about supporting and participating in networks and in thinking about how the collective impact of a coordinated portfolio of grants can produce more significant change.

One of my favorite examples of how funders are already using networked approaches to act bigger comes from the Barr Foundation in Boston. The foundation’s Barr Fellows program aims to explicitly build a stronger network of civic leadership in the Boston area by providing fellowships and other activities to cohorts of nonprofit and other area leaders. The program offers the fellows a three month sabbatical and a number of retreats and other connective activities, including an international trip, over the course of three years. The idea is to help the fellows build the trust and relationships that, once they return to their jobs (refreshed and inspired), will allow them to self-organize and work together in the future as needs arise. Instead of simply supporting a group working on a single, specific issue, Barr is building the bonds and linkages that create a robust network that can respond more effectively to challenges of all sorts over time.

The Fellows program is just one example of how Barr is explicitly building networks to advance its programmatic goals. In other cases, they’ve used social network mapping to help groups of local green and healthy building advocates better recognize common goals, and have supported “network weavers” to help build local connections and capacity around after school programming.

Barr is just one foundation working on the cutting edge of networks. At the Monitor Institute, we’ve been working with a number of different funders over the last several years, particularly the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, to develop tools and training curriculum that help them and their grantees better understand, build, support, and work as part of networks.

If you’re interested in learning more about how funders and nonprofits can use networks to advance their work, there are a growing number of great resources out there: Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s new book The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change (or Beth and Allison’s respective blogs), Pete Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor’s Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and even the Monitor Institute’s own Working Wikily article (and its accompanying blog).

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Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.

Change in philanthropy is especially hard. As organizational theorist Edgar Schein puts it, the only time that organizations learn and change is when the normal level of “learning anxiety”—the anxiety produced by having to shift and learn something new—is trumped by “survival anxiety”—the anxiety produced upon realizing that if you don’t adapt or improve you’ll be forced out of your position or out of business entirely.

Among many endowed philanthropic institutions, there is almost never a threat that raises survival anxiety, which means, in turn, that there is nothing that forces philanthropic organizations to get over their learning anxiety in any consistent way. The result is a field in which many of the most powerful players have few (if any) incentives to prompt adaptation and behavior change.

For years, we’ve joked that this dynamic has left philanthropy with a unique set of “learning disabilities” that get in the way of change in the field. In What’s Next for Philanthropy, we look deeply at a number of these different barriers: funders’ need for independence and control, their insularity and inward focus, the cumulative effects of caution and risk aversion, the challenges of time and inertia, and the dangers of an unspoken competition for reputation and credit.

Because the field is both voluntary and independent by nature—unconstrained by the need to please political constituencies or maintain shareholder value—these challenges add up to a situation where there is no pressure that forces any one actor to respond to another, to learn, or to change course. Individual philanthropists and institutions can act without much reference to the success or failure of their efforts or to what others do.

The result is a system with no natural mechanism for coordinating effort, for learning, for sharing knowledge about what does and doesn’t work, or for adapting to shifting circumstances. And given that learning and adaptation are optional in philanthropy, it’s hard for the field to overcome the inertia of the status quo.

Which is why I’ve become obsessed over the last year or so with tools. Is it possible to facilitate change in philanthropy by building tools that make it easier for funders to do the “right” things and harder to do the “wrong” things? The status quo is typically the easiest road to follow. But what if we could create new tools that make the path to new behaviors just as easy?

The problem is that the barriers I mentioned above make adopting new tools in philanthropy extremely difficult. Top-down, centralized, sector-wide tools and infrastructure are often rejected, even if they could improve performance. And at the same time, bottom-up innovations—individual foundations creating specific solutions to their particular problems and circumstances—rarely spread or scale. One foundation’s innovation remains just that: one foundation’s innovation.

For funders to truly begin acting in new ways, we will need to begin to merge top-down and bottom-up mindsets to develop new tools and platforms that help individual funders do their own work better, while at the same time designing with interoperability in mind. That way the data and knowledge gathered by one actor can be integrated with that gathered by others, with modest investments of money and time. Since many funders face similar issues, tools and behaviors developed to solve specific problems—but with an interoperable mindset—can begin to build useful and healthy platforms, standards, and conventions that cross institutions to add up to something more powerful than just multiple individual solutions.

Over the last two years, we’ve been working with the Rockefeller Foundation to experiment with developing these types of new, interoperable tools.

The first innovation we’ve produced, the Strategy Landscape, was created as a way of helping visualize the strategies and grants both within, and across, foundations. The project aimed to solve a key internal challenge that the Rockefeller Foundation was facing: how to help people understand the connection between its different programs’ strategies and their grants. It was an important issue for Rockefeller, but also a problem faced by many other funders as well.

So we began building a tool that could help the foundation easily visualize and understand how the strategies and grants of each of its various initiatives are aligned. But we designed the tool with special attention to interoperability—how it could also be used by, and across, other funders. When seen as a collective platform, the tool actually becomes more than just an assortment of individual maps that allow us to better understand each foundation; it allows us to start mashing the maps together so we can see the entire landscape of strategies and grants across the different funders.

In the past, foundations have done their work essentially flying blind, unclear about what others with similar interests are doing, and without a clear picture of the ecosystem of funders around them. It simply took too much effort to know what everyone else was doing. You could spend all day on the phone or in meetings with other funders trying to find out what they’re funding, and still only come out of it with a vague sense of what they’re up to.

The Strategy Landscape aims to make it simple for funders to see what their peers are supporting, making it easier than ever before to see gaps and overlaps between foundations, to identify new opportunities for coordination and collaboration, and to develop strategy with an understanding of the larger system in which they operate. The goal is to make it so easy to see and understand the broader context that you would actually have to make a choice not to see the landscape of funders around you.

The first prototype of the Strategy Landscape is now being developed to map philanthropic funding flows related to climate change across more than a dozen funders, and we will be testing it with numerous other issues over the coming year.

But we also hope that the tool will help to kick off a wave of new innovation in philanthropy—the first of many new approaches that will span across all of the different areas of next practice that I’ll be discussing over the next few days.

When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years, the field—and the institutions and individuals within it—were going to need to change too.

Now, ten years and a financial crisis (or two, if you want to count the dot-com bust) later, I’m working on the other side of the coin. The challenge is no longer about convincing anyone that the world around philanthropy is changing. An intimidating range of forces—blurring sectoral roles, new connective technologies, and globalization—are transforming the landscape of public problem solving. We face “wicked problems” (to borrow the language of design theorist Horst Rittel)—large, complex social and environmental challenges that don’t adhere to traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries, and where both the problem and the solution are often unclear and shifting.

And in this new landscape, the question isn’t about whether and how the world is changing. It’s about how funders can have a greater impact in a world that’s already shifting—and will continue to do so.

But as organized philanthropy in the United States hits its century mark, what’s quite remarkable is that many of the field’s core principles and practices remain remarkably similar to the ones created by John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie when they first created the foundation form 100 years ago. The world around philanthropy is changing much, much faster than philanthropy itself.

So the pressing question for today, and for the future, is about how funders can begin to institute, adapt, and invent practices and approaches that will better fit the emerging environment in which they work. For philanthropic and civic leaders looking to cultivate change in today’s rapidly shifting landscape, simply tweaking the status quo and adopting established best practices won’t be enough. Funders will have to pioneer “next practices”—effective approaches that are well-suited to tomorrow’s more networked, dynamic, and interdependent context.

In our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World, Katherine Fulton, Barbara Kibbe, and I have put forward our best thinking about the shifting landscape for philanthropy, and about ten key practices and principles that we believe can help funders achieve greater impact in the coming decade. We feel that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaptation—how funders can act bigger and adapt better.

We highlight five practices that funders can use to act bigger:

• Understand the context
• Pick the right tool(s) for the job
• Align independent action
• Activate networks
• Leverage others’ resources

And five approaches to help them adapt better in the coming decade:

• Know what works (and what doesn’t)
• Keep pace with change
• Open up to new inputs
• Share by default
• Take smart risks

These practices are by no means new; innovative funders have been doing many of these things, and doing them well, for years. And we certainly don’t pretend that the list is in any way comprehensive. But we believe that these ten practices represent what Chip and Dan Heath (in their new book Switch) refer to as “bright spots”—instances where new strategies are showing especially great promise, especially as emerging tools and approaches catch up with the aspirations of funders in the new context.

Over the next few days, I’ll dive a bit deeper into a number of these next practices, and hope you’ll join me in starting to think intentionally about how we might innovate new ways of working that will become the best practices of the coming decade.

I think this is an important cautionary tale for anyone leading an organization who is trying to answer the often-asked question: “What’s your social media strategy?” The dangerous answer is, as we’ve mentioned here before, “We’re going to get on Twitter, start a Facebook group, and launch a blog.” Those are answers that focus on the tool, not the outcome. We see the same issue when we talk to people about innovation, which is a process that is often mistaken for a goal. New technology is just like a new process: a means to an end that should always be used with care to serve your underlying organizational needs.

Why is it so common to confuse the two? One reason is the fear of “grasping the nettle,” hoping that the new process or technology will mean that your problem will simply vanish. Another reason, often ignored, is that we in the West tend to have a kind of lightweight messianism in how we see technology. To my eye, part of the reason why the story of the “Twitter revolution” was so easily believed was because many see new technology as simply making the world better. Technology represents progress, an idea that has a special place in American culture, and that feeds into a common attitude that when there’s new technology available that simply using it should solve the problem at hand. But that’s rarely the case and especially rare when the technology is designed to improve the way we interact. The opportunities we see in those technologies for improved relationships, and the ways we grasp those opportunities, have far more impact than the tools’ mere presence. When we fall in love with the newness of a technology, as the media did with Twitter, we can easily be blinded by that unconscious belief that it will simply whisk us off into a brighter world. But of course, new technologies merely open the door. It is up to use to step through.

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the publication of the Monitor Institute’s new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World. The piece updates our 2005 report, Looking Out for the Future, and represents more than a decade of work by the Institute in exploring the evolving “future of philanthropy.” It highlights the changing context in which funders now operate, and identifies ten emerging next practices that can help funders of all sorts increase their impact over the coming decade.

Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, What’s Next for Philanthropy argues that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaption—acting bigger and adapting better.

We hope you find the report helpful and look forward to hearing any feedback you might have.

The new Smart Money Award offers one small incentive in the other direction. Since following in others footsteps rarely earns high praise, it offers that praise officially, recognizing and honoring the choices of philanthropists choose to support worthy projects that already exist rather than striking out on their own. The inaugural recipient: the McKnight Foundation, which used $100 million earmarked for fighting climate change to three major initiatives that were already underway.

The Award was born out of a session at the Monitor Institute convening in May, when we brought together leaders from throughout the field to brainstorm new innovations for advancing the field. Many good ideas emerged from the creative ferment but the Smart Money Award surprised everyone by launching a new project on the spot.

Can you think of a smart philanthropic follower who deserves to be recognized? Be part of the crowd-sourced scouting effort and submit your suggestion at http://www.smartmoneyaward.org/.

Below is the press release that provides the official announcement:

Recognizing the McKnight Foundation

June 29^th, 2010

Last Sunday, June 26^th, marked a little-known but very important date in philanthropy. It was the anniversary of the announcement of Warren Buffett’s 2006 gift of over $31 billion to the Gates Foundation—perhaps the single largest act of followership that the field of philanthropy has known. In a field of “leaders,” Buffett’s gift recognized that sometimes the best way to demonstrate leadership is actually to follow the good work of others.

With the spirit of Buffett’s gift in mind, we are pleased to use the anniversary of his largesse to mark the announcement of the winner of the new Smart Money Award, a bi-monthly* recognition given to the most important acts of followership in the field of philanthropy.

The winner for this first period is the McKnight Foundation, for the powerful act of following represented by its $100 million commitment to three re-granting institutions that are leading the effort against climate change: ClimateWorks, the Energy Foundation, and RE-AMP.  The McKnight Foundation, after thinking rigorously about the challenging task of affecting climate change, decided it would be most effective to forego acting alone and instead join the efforts of others already in progress.

The McKnight Foundation had long worked with the Energy Foundation in its efforts to promote alternative energy in the Midwest. And when McKnight’s Board of Directors saw Design to Win, the 2007 report that laid out a comprehensive plan for tackling climate change, they were moved to make a gesture that was quite extraordinary for a foundation of McKnight’s scale and focus. The Foundation committed to provide $100 million over five years through three established intermediaries to help implement the Design to Win plan. The Board felt that there was no need to reinvent the wheel, given the urgency of the situation, the existence of partners that they trusted, and a plan with a clear and compelling logic.

McKnight’s vice president of program Neal Cuthbert explains it quite simply: “We have a long history of working with established intermediaries to try to put decisions in the hands of the people closest to the work. We often find that the best thing we can do is to support smart people who know what they’re doing and get out of the way.”

In receiving the Smart Money Award, the McKnight Foundation is the second organization to be selected as a winner for an honor that is about bringing recognition and praise to funders who are willing to embrace the idea that sometimes, in order to maximize your impact, it is best to “follow what works.” The award celebrates funders that decide to lead by following the good work of others, helping to scale up or replicate an already proven initiative developed by someone else. Followership is a way to make smarter investments, and the Smart Money Award committee feels that McKnight’s commitment to ClimateWorks, the Energy Foundation, and RE-AMP is an ideal example of that.

As McKnight’s Cuthbert points out, “This is a field where the necessity of authorship is so high that it often gets in the way of so much good work. So on behalf of the McKnight Foundation, we’re honored to win the Award.”

One of the goals of the Smart Money Award is to remove any stigma associated with the concept of following, and to instead highlight how it can be a powerful “next practice” in philanthropy.  The idea was developed at the Monitor Institute’s Future of Philanthropy workshop.  The inaugural Smart Money Award, given out at the workshop, went to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for its $16.5 million grant to the Buffett Early Childhood Fund’s initiative to improve education for children from troubled families.

Every other month a new Smart Money Award winner will be selected, and each of the funders’ stories will be posted on our website to promote the powerful impact that following can have in the world of philanthropy.  Then, at the end of each year, on June 26^th, a funder (selected from the bi-monthly winners) will receive the Annual Smart Money Award.

We are always taking nominations for individuals or foundations that exemplify the act of following and welcome your submissions (which are rolled over after each month).  If you know of other great examples of followership in philanthropy, we’d love to hear about them. Please let us know by nominating them!

You can visit our website at http://smartmoneyaward.org and also follow us on Twitter @smartmoneyaward

*We mean every other month, not twice a month.  How is it helpful to have a word mean both every other month and twice a month?  It just seems like you’re asking for confusion.

About the Award: The Smart Money Award is about bringing recognition and praise to funders who are willing to embrace the idea that sometimes, in order to maximize your impact, it is best to follow what works. The award celebrates funders who decide to lead by following the good work of others, helping to scale up or replicate an already proven initiative developed by someone else.

About the McKnight Foundation

The McKnight Foundation seeks to improve the quality of life for present and future generations through grantmaking, coalition-building, and encouragement of strategic policy reform. Founded in 1953 and independently endowed by William and Maude McKnight, the Minnesota-based Foundation had assets of approximately $1.8 billion and granted about $98 million in 2009.

About RE-AMP

RE-AMP is an engaged and active network of nonprofits and foundations working on climate change and energy policy in an eight-state region in the upper Midwest. This ambitious project is aimed at transforming the upper Midwest energy sector into a model of clean, efficient and safe energy use, while reducing global warming pollution economy-wide 80% by 2050.

About ClimateWorks

The ClimateWorks Foundation supports public policies that prevent dangerous climate change and catalyze sustainable global prosperity.  ClimateWorks partners with an international network of affiliated organizations—the ClimateWorks Network—to support smart policies in the geographic regions and economic sectors that have the greatest potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

About the Energy Foundation

The Energy Foundation is a partnership of major donors interested in solving the world’s energy problems. Its mission is to advance energy efficiency and renewable energy — new technologies that are essential components of a clean energy future.

One of the running themes in the report is that development work will require a greater range of intervention methods. In several scenarios, for example, philanthropic organizations and other development actors encounter significant obstacles in working with large institutions, but discover new and effective approaches by teaming with nontraditional partners and even individuals. Refreshingly, the report does not approach technology as a panacea to lowering barriers to development, opting instead for a more treatment of the question. The full text of the report is available for download and a preview is shown below:

Below are a few of my filtered highlights from the conference, including those sessions I found most useful for the social sector (or the most interesting overall!). For more information, or to download taped sessions, visit PdF’s website or read techPresident’s recap of highlights.

• Beth Kanter and Allison Fine hosted a session on the second day about the importance of connecting nonprofits to politics, and their forthcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit. Here’s a great summary of that session.
• Clay Johnson of the Sunlight Foundation shared an important message that echoed throughout the two days: “Stop worrying about open rates and campaigns, and start thinking about how to solve problems.” He underscored the recent tendency to focus on “phallic metrics,” such as the size of one’s list, rather than the impact that we are having on social issues.
• Deanna Zandt, author of Share This!, echoed his sentiments: “We fetishize technology. Technology is a means, not an ends. You do need to know about tools and tactics, but those are the trees in the forest. Politics is about more than electoral campaigns….it’s about redefining power relationships, and dismantling hierarchies. That’s the true disruptive promise of the Internet.” She encouraged the audience to follow three principles: Be Authentic (self-evident); Mix it Up (interact with people who are different from you online); and Embrace Empathy to build trust and relationships.
• Eli Pariser, co-founder of Moveon.org struck a more cautionary note: he talked about the “filter bubble” being created by platforms like Google and Facebook, which increasingly filter and feed us information based on our past preferences. As a consequence, we are now being exposed to “news,” rankings, and information that is not objective, but rather, has been run through our own “personalized” (and invisible!) filter. As he said, “The more efficient the filters get, the less likely we are to be exposed to ideas different from our own.” He urged Google and Facebook to be more transparent about how they are using our information, and to give us more control to choose heterogeneity in the information we receive.
• Scott Heiferman of Meetup.org. Scott was one of the most compelling speakers of the conference: he’s passionate about pushing power to the people, and enabling self-organizing. He reflected on the proliferation of simple on-line actions that ultimately don’t amount to real change: “It’s easier than ever to get pseudo-members, and harder than ever to get real members. There’s now a standard set of what we can do online: watch, download, friend, visit, contact, follow etc…. But this is the illusion of engagement. We need to connect these people to each other. Fans and followers are not a social movement!” He went on to emphasize the importance of connecting real people face-to-face, allowing ideas to emerge spontaneously, and then letting people self-organize to do things together, what he called the “power of let’s…” (as in, “Let’s get together and organize a beach clean-up…”). And his message very much resonated with our thinking on the importance of “working wikily,” by enabling looser, network structures to emerge. He ended with the rousing cry: “We need to use the Internet to get off the Internet!”
• Clay Shirky (my own personal favorite!), told three stories about the use of social media; in one case it was to empower people to self-organize; in another case it was about gaming the system online to vote for a favorite. His point – that the cost of communication is now so low that people are gaming the online system, and political representatives are inundated with email, tweets, etc. “Digital activism has trapped itself in a tragedy of the commons: instead of producing signal for representatives about an issue, now they’re in a campaign for the most-generated emails. It’s all noise.” So, how do we get out of this collective action trap? He suggested a few ways forward:
  • Raise the cost of communicating: when you do something offline it is far more significant and meaningful than action taken only online
  • Design for groups: Get people to support your cause by getting them to DO SOMETHING other than firing off a message. Have them come together to achieve something.
  • Assume faction: we’re never going to overcome differences – give each faction a place to have their say; don’t make hierarchy of issues (which leads to voting, ranking, and gaming).
  • See people as partners, not constituents. Step out of the current “arms race of email” list-building mentality, and have people do meaningful things to influence the debate.

• Howard Rheingold talked about the importance of mindfulness, by which he meant taking time to reflect and direct our attention mindfully in an increasingly overloaded environment. “There’s increasing evidence from neuroscience that directed attention is what changes the mind.” He talked about new research on attention diffusion, and the amount of wasted time spent online. “The time has come for us to begin to learn discipline and literacy around how to use our attention with the new media. We need to know how to find the signal in the noise.”
• Panel on Innovation in Philanthropy: On the last day, this session was hosted by Chris Gates of PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement), and included Kari Saratovsky, from the Case Foundation who talked about the Open Innovations Award, which we’ve written about before. She said it “changed the way we do business at the foundation. It’s about citizen-centered engagement, and shifting the balance of power between grantors and grantees.” Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation: said “A traditional foundation is a “fortress” – interested in preserving capital, not spending it; impenetrable. Closed in every aspect of our work and risk averse. We’ve decided to operate differently.” From the Omidyar Network, Stacy Donohue also talked about how they are approaching their grantmaking in innovative ways, and leveraging networks for more impact.

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1. The Minnesota Community Foundation pulled off a very successful open grantmaking process with their new Minnesota Idea Open, a grant-as-prize competition focused on fighting obesity that used a diverse group of outside experts to vet the submissions and then tuned over the ultimate choice to a public vote. The process is closely aligned with that of the Knight News Challenge—and not surprisingly, the Knight Foundation was a sponsor. It went so well that the Minnesota CF now plans to make it an annual event and intends to let the public choose not only the winner but also the topic next year. Beth’s Blog has an interview with the VP.
2. Twenty-one marquee funders are supporting a new initiative called Scaling What Works, a Grantmakers for Effective Organizations “action network” whose primary purpose is to capture the insights from the new White House Social Innovation Fund. This is a great example of high-leverage giving to build the field. It will hopefully not only bolster the SIF but also amplify its impact on other funders’ use of metrics, capacity-building, collaboration, and everything else that the collective experience of the SIF has to teach. Tactical Philanthropy has further thoughts.
3. CauseGlobal is taking notes on the growing power of “swarms” for a forthcoming book and highlighted a number of striking examples that cropped up recently: the backlash against Facebook’s abuse of privacy, the watchdogging of the Chase Community Giving and Pepsi Refresh contests, the successful campaign for Nestle to cut down on deforestation, and the growing use of “buy-cotts” to support socially-responsible businesses. There are more than just examples now – a second post shared a set of principles that make these groups effective.
4. Twelve foundations committed to nearly matching the federal government’s $650m Investing in Innovation (i3) education grants program with $506m of their own. The group is not a formal pooled fund but something closer to a strategic alignment network where the participants have each committed to working in tandem with the federal program but otherwise retain their complete freedom. But this is more than just an example of loose-knit collective: the funders also chipped in to create a website to encourage further collaboration, the Foundation Registry i3, where projects competing for i3 funding can list themselves in a single location to solicit additional foundation support from the thirty-four funders that have now joined.
5. The Case Foundation published a direct and honest acknowledgement of the struggle it has faced with PlayPumps, a grantee of theirs working to provide safe water to rural communities in Africa. The post tells the story simply and clearly of how the foundation came to realize that the original strategy for growing PlayPumps was deeply flawed and finally arrived at the current state of affairs where PlayPumps are now part of the portfolio of Water for People alongside a number of other solutions for providing clean rural water. Kudos to them for sharing the challenges they faced in public as a learning experience that can help others navigate similar waters.
6. Applications are now open through July 16^th for the 2011 Lodestar Collaboration Prize, honoring high-impact collaborations among nonprofits with a $162,500 prize and seven $12,500 runner-ups. As always, the contestants will compete to show that their collaboration led to increased impact, achieved higher resource efficiency, responded creatively to the problem, and can stand as an example for the sector. To the winner go the spoils!
7. Modeling one way to scale your impact by spreading your ideas & model rather than your own organization, the nonprofit consulting group New Philanthropy Capital expanded into the German market not with a branch office but by helping to create an independent sibling called PHINEO. PHINEO will start with NPC’s organizational model and methodology but adapt its practices for the German social sector, accomplishing the same social goal as an NPC branch office without the additional managerial challenges—and overhead—of expanding the original organization.

We hope you can join us!

* * *

Working Wikily: Social Networks for Social Change

Featuring Heather McLeod Grant and Diana Scearce
Senior Consultants, The Monitor Institute

Many nonprofits have begun to use social media like Facebook and Twitter as an ancillary part of what they do. A few organizations, however, are using these tools to fundamentally change the way they work and increase their social impact.

Heather McLeod Grant and Diana Scearce will share the results of research and pilot programs the Monitor Institute has conducted in partnership with The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and other clients.

Webinar content includes:

• Key points from article “Working Wikily”
• (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2010)
• Findings from research and pilot programs
• Reasons to use a network approach for social change
• Five main lessons learned
• Recent case studies
• Ideas to start working wikily
• Questions from the audience

Who should participate:

This webinar is for nonprofits and foundations interested in using social media and a more networked way of working to help their organizations achieve greater social impact.

You can download the summary, the full report, or preview it below.

• The Environmental Grantmakers Association ran a webinar to discuss funders’ responses to the oil spill and encourage coordination. Over 200 foundations attended the event and EGA is now surveying the group to gather further information about their responses, which will serve to increase the field’s peripheral vision.
• The Greater New Orleans Foundation is using not just grants but also low-interest loans and guidance to help fishermen through its support of the Commercial Fisheries Assistance Center, which is also facilitating peer-to-peer advising on best practices from the communities affected by the Exxon Valdez spill. In a blog post on RE:Philanthropy, director Marco Cocito-Monoc attributes the foundation’s ability to respond quickly to the networks among foundations and nonprofits that it helped to build along the Gulf coast following Hurricane Katrina.
• At least five foundations have begun new grantmaking in response to the disaster, stepping out of their usual grant cycles to respond to the situation in a timely manner: the Community Foundation of Sarasota County, Greater Escambia Community Foundation, Greater New Orleans Foundation, the Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice, and the Gulf Coast Fund for Community Renewal and Ecological Health.
• Apparently without any financial support or formal organization, students at Tulane created a crisis map for the oil spill in collaboration with the Lousiana Bucket Brigade (a nonprofit) and Radical Designs (a web development team), built on Ushahidi’s open-source platform.

These all deserve a round of applause. And they make me wonder: how else could we collectively go about addressing this crisis in new and innovative ways? Here are five concepts I’ve been toying with, some of which are surely already being done:

• Create a series of compelling viral videos connecting the disaster to larger social and environmental causes, with guidance on how to get involved with the appropriate grassroots nonprofits
• Promote peer-to-peer lending, donations, and other forms of individual support to the people and small businesses affected
• Set up a pooled fund where the member foundations will match individual donations and donors get a substantial say in the grantmaking
• Set up a “marketplace” that quantifies the work being done by all of the nonprofits who are doing work on the issue and present their services side by side to donors (i.e. X dollars for cleaning up a beach, Y dollars for saving 10 birds, or Z dollars for advising a shrimper).
• Offer micro-grants to journalists for high-quality investigative coverage of the crisis
• Offer micro-grants to experts for making large-scale contributions to the coverage on Wikipedia, CrisiWiki, CrisisCommons, and other online resources

Have you heard of any other creative responses? Can you think of anything else we could be doing?

One thing is certain: networks cannot thrive with more typical organizational styles of leadership, which tend to revert to hierarchy, position, or individual decision-making. Even the term “leader” connotes an individual, and conjures up so many of our past perspectives on leadership: the heroic or charismatic individual, the social entrepreneur, the CEO executive at the “top” of the organization–rather than a more fluid, adaptive, facilitative style. The term “leadership” is perhaps more apt for networks — because in networks leading does indeed become a shared act: they are true “do-ocracies,” self-organizing and dynamic. And as the table above indicates, different leadership capacities are needed to work at the level of a network or system.

For those who are designated to help facilitate or steer a network’s work, the term “network weaver” is emerging as a counterpart to more traditional leadership terminology. We like the image this conjures, as well as the emerging description of the role: someone who weaves connections, who helps strengthen ties by making introductions and building relationships, whose job it is to help see and hold the whole dynamic system without imposing his or her own agenda. For more information on network weaving, we’ve found June Holley to be a useful resource. We’ll continue to share our thoughts on network leadership as this emerging field develops.

Where the paper really packs its punch is in the bright line it draws between these new tools, the ways that philanthropic practice is already changing as a result, and the tools’ potential to spur far greater shifts in the future. The authors argue that five types of philanthropic practice are being reshaped:

• setting goals and formulating strategy
• building social capital
• measuring progress
• measuring outcomes and impact
• accounting for the work

They also argue that in the future we will see an increase in at least three things: new blendings of market-based and non-market solutions, ephemeral networked alliances, and more high-quality data. We at the Institute could not agree more. And, as we prepare to release our own forthcoming work in June that focuses on the new set of “next practices” that are emerging in philanthropy, we’re thankful to the authors for doing such a wonderful job capturing how technology is reshaping the broader realm of social change. Give it a read and let us know what you think.

You can preview the paper below:

Over the past few years, we at the Monitor Institute have created a diagnostic tool for assessing the health of networks. The tool is intended to help network weavers, network participants, and grantmakers reflect upon the health of their networks against eight commonly cited areas of network health: value, participation, form, leadership, governance, connection, capacity, and learning and adaptation. These characteristics will differ in priority and relevance, depending on network type (e.g. networks for building knowledge versus networks for weaving communities) and the stage a network is at in its life cycle.

We have also taken a stab at aligning areas of network health with potential actions you might take should you chose to focus on strengthening a particular aspect of your network.

This is a work in progress. The diagnostic has become a knowledge management tool for us around network health. We have shared it in various settings, learned more about network health from our audiences, received useful feedback, and revised multiple times.

You can preview the latest version below and download the full document here.

We hope you find it helpful. Please let us know what you think and how it can be improved!

It was this context that made me an avid listener at this year’s Skoll World Forum, and a grateful recipient of Pamela Hartigan‘s wisdom. In her closing remarks, she proposed her own resolution of the dilemma I wrestle with. Pamela has devoted her life for many years to social entrepreneurs, as managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entreprenership, as co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, and now as director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Said Business School. She closed this year’s Skoll forum with this statement, shared with her permission:

I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on an oft-repeated comment that has followed me over the last decade or more – and it questions the focus on the heroic entrepreneur. Is that not misguided – I am frequently asked? Certainly it takes more than the visionary individual for his or her initiative to be successful – what about the people in the organizations they set up who are often instrumental to its success? And as we have emphasized throughout this Forum, a fact underscored by our Catalysing Collaboration theme, social entrepreneurs cannot hope to scale their solutions without the essential support of other public and private sector stakeholders – and most importantly, of the communities in which they work.

So why continue this hero worship, I am asked? I would like to look at this question differently. We are all human, and we know that people and their institutions – whether government, business or nonprofit – strongly resist new ideas, however great or lousy they might be. It takes extraordinary persistence and creativity to sell the idea to others. The entrepreneur is incredibly inventive in that regard, working day and night to find a way to motivate, persuade, to engage others in believing in that change. In fact, that ability to overcome these barriers turns out more important than the original idea. An idea in itself is often so simple – giving credit to the poor, involving communities in the protection of their ecosystems, revolutionizing access to quality health care and education and the like – such simple ideas… but making them happen takes years of persistent seduction.

So while these individuals will always be heroes – and slightly mad, much to humanity’s great good fortune – celebrating these social entrepreneurs should not lead us into the trap of assuming that they single-handedly achieve their results. Nothing could be further from the truth. And much of what they achieve despite severe resource constraints is due to the type of leadership they exercise. Kouzes and Posner, gurus on the subject, define leadership as “… the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations. All leadership involves inspiration, vision, competence and interpersonal skills.” And that is exactly what social entrepreneurs possess. It takes courage, imagination and persistence to drive through the kinds of fundamental changes needed to respond to new challenges and opportunities. And that can only be done through a more open style of leadership that combines intellectual humility and personal confidence which doesn’t confuse ambition with omniscience.

Finally, one of the messages I continuously reiterate to MBA students at Oxford and at Columbia Business School is the following: It is okay NOT to be a maverick. It’s okay NOT to be a social entrepreneur and have a system-changing idea that you doggedly pursue at all costs and every waking minute. Most of us are NOT change-makers or entrepreneurs. And thank heavens for that, having done nothing but live and breathe with entrepreneurs for over a decade and found them wholly wonderful and exciting but completely unreasonable. But, for the majority of us who are not entrepreneurs, wherever our careers take us, we can and should be instrumental in facilitating, supporting and strengthening the work of these pragmatic visionaries because they are coming up with many of the solutions we so desperately need.

Here are the slides I presented:

Here’s our handout on mapping your personal network:

And here’s our Healthy Network Diagnostic:

This post will soon be cross-posted on Tactical Philanthropy as part of a series on the GEO conference happening this week.

How do you effectively steward technology for online communities? For the past year I’ve been facilitating a community of practice (CoP) for funders. While much of our work has been designed around in-person convenings, we have also been connecting using a group on WiserEarth. WiserEarth is an online social networking platform, similar to Ning, but it’s dedicated to social change.

Our space on Wiser has served us well. Many members of the CoP have been using it to connect and build a shared repository of resources. It’s a simple way to deepen and extend our reach, and from my perspective, as the person managing the CoP day-to-day, it has been critical for coordination. Yet I’m plagued by doubts. Are people using it enough? What is enough? Is there another way we should be connecting and coordinating? No one needs yet another username and password, not to mention another membership to another online community that they can then feel guilty about not using.

At the GEO conference this week I attended a session on “Virtual Global Learning Networks.” The session gave some useful food for thought as I try to answer these questions. Two excellent case studies were shared – Claire Fallender on how Ashoka has networked its fellows and Shalini Nataraj on the Global Fund for Women’s network of advisors that connect GFW with the nearly 4,000 groups they’ve funded in 171 countries around the world. Both Ashoka and GFW are wrestling with tough questions of connectivity and engagement in a global context. They’re dealing with considerable language barriers and digital connectivity challenges that make my concerns of engagement among a highly wired group of funders seem luxurious. And, they surfaced a number of principles for stewarding online communities that have wide applicability:

• Focus on the principles, not the platform. Your community should be technology served, not technology driven.
• Prioritize trust and relationship building. As you do so, make sure you’re clear about boundaries. Is your network closed? Open? Porous?
• Frame a clear value proposition so the give/get bargain is obvious to participants.
• Create a user-driven design. (Ashoka is co-creating their platform with 25 fellows who asked for it.)
• Design a space that enables many-to-many connections. Don’t act a gatekeeper. Facilitate direct connections in your network.
• Make it easy to belong. Invite participants to opt in and opt out as makes sense for them.
• Take a ‘combo-platter’ approach. Create different channels for your network to connect – such as in-person meetings, conference calls, webinars, Facebook, and your group’s dedicated online space.

I would also make one addition: the role of the network weaver – the person or people taking responsibility for making and strengthening connections across the network – is critical. The tools alone won’t suddenly motivate and full and regular participation, but individuals reaching out and inviting people to engage can make a real difference.

I spend far too much time thinking about networks. Why do networks matter to social change? How can funders tap their power? How do they relate to movement building? What’s their role in ‘scaling up’? Talk of networks was everywhere today at the GEO conference. What does this mean for grantmakers?

The day kicked off with a plenary session on scaling. Angelica Salas spoke of her work on building a national movement for immigrant rights, rooted in the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Angelica said, “Coordination for us is a necessity.” So, they work through a nationwide network of state-based coalitions that are speaking live on a weekly basis, sharing what’s working, listening hard, stepping forward at times, and stepping back to take others’ strategies when needed. She’s a true network weaver. So, what does it take to support this kind of work? Angelica’s ask: a line item for collaboration, coalition building, and network building—things that philanthropies typically don’t fund.

Bill Strickland was speaking alongside Angelica. He spoke of his work scaling the Manchester Bidwell model for learning and community development. He’s using an affiliate model—job training centers in cities throughout the US and around the world, linked through strong relationships. It’s what I would call a ‘multi-hub network’ – multiple centers connected to one another. There appeared to be thoughtful network design. It’s not a command and control model. It’s about “pushing power to edges” – or in Bill’s case, to the affiliates. And, as Bill said, “Relationships are where you achieve scale.” However, I left confused about how this is going to work in practice. How will learning about what works flow among the affiliates? How will governance be structured? What’s the role of center (Bill / Manchester Bidwell) and what’s the role of affiliates? I’ll look forward to learning more from Bill’s work as the job training centers are built around the world in the coming years.

Then, I got the chance to hear Manuel Pastor talk on movement building (such excitement and it wasn’t event 9am pacific time yet!). I highly recommend his paper on social movements and how to support them. Manuel’s work has helped me understand networks as an important vehicle to movement building. One of the recommendations he offered was, “support networks and network building to sustain success.”

The day finished with my own session on funders’ roles in networks. By design, networks were at the center of that conversation. There was lots of interest and enthusiasm for figuring what it means for funders to be intentional and strategic about how they support and participate in networks.

Why does this common network thread matter? It matters because today I saw ample evidence of a growing appreciation for the power of increasing impact through models that are decentralized and relationship-based—what I call network models. And, supporting this work requires a special mindset. It’s one that is comfortable with ambiguity, oriented toward the long-term, and places high-value on relationship building.

Have you noticed a similar trend? What skills and practices will this require for grantmakers?

To do this well, I’m firmly of the mind that we have to foster relationships between everyday people and issues and organizations that are personally relevant to them. It’s now possible to provide each person with information and opportunities for meaningful action tailored specifically to who they are. If Jumo can make sure that happens and offer opportunities for meaningful engagement alongside it, I think we can speed the pace of global change.

Hughes floated his idea at New Profit Inc.’s Gathering of Leaders in Miami about a month ago. Given our interest in online networks for organizing offline social action it’s great to see someone like Chris dedicating his incredible talent, experience, and personal networks to the goal of connecting people to the issues and causes they care about. We will be eagerly following the site and its evolution to see what we can continue to learn. If Chris has anywhere near the success he had on the Obama campaign, Jumo could break some very interesting new ground. There are a number of other social networks focused on networking individuals around their causes, such as Change.org and Changents. Those sites and others like them already provide an avenue for existing activists to connect with each other. But I think that as these tools grow and develop there’s a chance that someone will figure out a way to make giving and social action far more appealing than they typically have been. And I think the central challenge is the one that Hughes has targeted: helping people at any stage of dedication figure out what they care about and find out how to get involved. He’s already shown a special talent for understanding what makes users engage with social media — perhaps with his touch we’ll see these tools reach the next level. Stay tuned: the service will be unveiled this fall.

I have seen firsthand the power of networks – both in my work as a grantmaker and as a leader at Tides where we have built a network across our various program offerings: grantmaking and donor advising, nonprofit program sponsorship and management, and nonprofit real estate development. In our work with Community Clinics Initiative we have participated in the development of a network of funders in California who fund community health centers and technology development. That work has not only resulted in increased dollars to clinics for technology development, it has produced a coordinated strategy for funding that assesses the big picture in which clinics operate, identifies key areas of needed investment, supports individual grantmakers to fund within their unique constraints (geographic, types of grants, etc), and then shares lessons learned back to the funders as well as the grantees. This powerful coalition has leveraged millions of dollars in a coordinated fashion and positioned California’s community health centers to benefit directly from the almost $11 billion now available for community health centers through the Health Reform Act that was signed into law this week.

She also notes a number of core principles of working with networks that closely mirror our own research and experience:

Leave your ego at the door – this is not about any one person or institution. We must be focused on the larger goal of moving a change agenda.

Leadership is about facilitation and connection – new forms of leadership, and new capacities that leaders must embody are critical for moving in a network direction. The old model of the “sage on the stage” is rapidly becoming obsolete. Network leaders must develop leadership in others.

Relationship are at the heart of networks – that means that learning how to communicate effectively, disagree respectfully, and appreciate differences in all their manifestations, are skills we must hone. Learning how to work together from a basis of trust will move a network a long way.

Networks need investment – whether it is a “network weaver” who keeps the network connected, or investing time in meetings and coordination, the infrastructure needed to keep a network vital and vibrant is necessary to pay attention to as a fore-thought and not an after-thought.

1. Sharing data creates new opportunities for impact. You just never know who will find your data interesting and what use they can find for it. Thanks to the USDA making its datasets public, there are now new games in development for reducing childhood obesity. Thanks to the Federal Register being put online, there are now two websites that can guide the public through the shifting maze of federal regulations in an intuitive and accessible way. The aggregated library of raw government data now available at data.gov has had over 64 million hits and countless developers have used that data for web-based projects. Imagine the possibilities if foundations considered themselves libraries of information and analysis on the public problems they try to solve.

2. Even messy public input can become quality ideas. One questioner asked Noveck if she had figured out how to set up the process of public input so that it wasn’t just the “angries and the crazies” who showed up—a common challenge whenever the stakes are high. She shared her reflections on the early public input session that the Open Government Initiative held in order to gather suggestions for how the government could become more transparent. It was a process that some bloggers derided as ineffective since the bulk of the early posts were dominated by demands for Obama’s birth certificate, demands for information about UFOs, and various other questions representing extreme points of view. She noted that while that was a challenge at first, other users of the site were very effective at flagging those posts as “off-topic,” shunting them to the side and clearing the board for productive debate. The result: detailed and thoughtful proposals that a large group composed together using MixedInk, a wiki-like tool for collaborative composition that I blogged about at the time. The effort has now matured into the OpenGov Tracker, an IdeaScale-powered board where (as of today) 1,399 ideas have received 14,576 votes and 2,427 comments that address the prospects of transparency and participation at every federal agency. Foundations might have similar worries about what could happen if they asked the public for input on their choices, but today’s tools are increasingly effective at allowing online crowds to truly be wise.

3. Build your organization around the power of outside experts. Noveck is the inventor of a new system for running the patent office called Peer to Patent which taps the expertise of scientists, engineers, and other experts in relevant fields to help patent officers make the detailed assessments required to evaluate the merit of a given patent claim. The task is not entirely unlike that of evaluating grant proposals: while the decisionmaking power rightly lies in the hands of the institution, the expertise to wield it well is distributed throughout the relevant field, and today’s technology makes it easier than ever to tap this distributed knowledge at will. Imagine if the typical foundation model was to specialize not in certain topics but in the cultivation of trusted expert networks with the right mix of knowledge—a resource that would be equally useful for other funders.

I had the opportunity to join a webinar led by Steve Waddell recently on what he terms “visual diagnostics.” Steve has an extremely clear frame for thinking about the range of tools for visualizing systems, or in his words, “visualizing complexity.” He discussed four tools:

• Web crawls – The host of tools out there for mapping virtual reality. These can be really good for developing intelligence on a field and identifying the major players.
• Social network analysis (SNA) – Can use a range of inputs (web crawls, interviews, surveys) to visualize relationships. It’s great for developing a structural understanding of a network and identifying strategic intervention points.
• Value network analysis (VNA) – Pioneered by Verna Allee, this method visualizes the players’ different roles within a system.
• Strategic clarity analysis — tools for visualizing systems dynamics that create a shared picture for stakeholders.

For all of these tools, the main caveat is to keep in mind is that maps are only as good as their inputs. For a deeper dive into each I recommend reading Steve’s paper on Visual Diagnostics.

One of the things I found especially helpful about Steve’s analysis is that he contextualizes social network analysis within the broader frame of understanding systems. It’s not just about links and nodes. It’s about power of developing shared mental models that can provoke powerful strategic dialogue, and action.

As promised, all of the materials are up on SlideShare. We’ve released them under Creative Commons, so please feel free to download them for your own re-use and re-mixing, just so long as you give us credit. I’ve embedded the documents below so that you can flip through them quickly. To download a copy to keep just click the “download” button above each one.

Here are the slides:

Here is the healthy networks diagnostic:

And here’s the network mapping exercise, which is only a slight modification of June Holley’s original design:

• The advent of the Stanford Social Innovation Review as a journal, and now website and online community providing connective tissue for knowledge sharing across the field (Katherine Fulton and I both serve on their advisory board).
• The launch of the Social Innovation Fund, which creates a new networked model for government, working as a partner with nonprofits, foundations and borrowing best practices from the private sector.
• Social Capital Markets conference, where we’ve spoken and shared our research on the rise of impact investing
• The iPhone, which is facilitating mobile connectivity, and furthering both network mindset and action among social activists. It signifies many of the new technologies driving the creation of networks that we’ve written about here.
• The importance of the Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar’s philanthropy in creating new models of giving for the field, influenced by their experience at eBay and a more network-centric approach to grant-making

For the complete list and commentary, here’s the original post.

The roots of 350.org are in the campaign that Bill McKibben and six students ran to convince their Vermont college to become carbon-neutral by 2015. When that was successful the organizers decided to try out a similar message on the state level and then on a national level. The national campaign was called Step It Up, in which the goal was for people in each location to teach each other about climate change and visually depict the concept of 80% carbon reductions by 2050. The idea resonated: three months of organizing netted 1400 local events throughout the country. Following up on that success the organizers decided to, in Aroneanu’s words, “make it even more ridiculous” by tackling a global campaign with the same seven staff.

They launched the global campaign with a simple message: returning to 350ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, the level that most climate scientists believe to be safe. The seven organizers split up the world into seven parts and each went to work finding activists who were interested in volunteering to build the campaign. As they found volunteers they organized a series of six training courses—in Turkey, Johannesburg, Bankok, and the U.S.—where they followed in the footsteps of the Obama campaign in drawing on the “Public Narrative” community organizing principles of Marshall Ganz. The focus in those sessions was to build the organizers’ core organizing capacity: how to build trust, how to build collaborative commitment, and how to think strategically about a campaign. When the final date of October 24^th rolled around the organization had a wide pyramid in place: seven core organizers, 28 field staff, over 200 volunteer organizers, and 5200 grassroots leaders in 181 countries. Over 25,000 photos showing the number 350 streamed into the website, showing groups as small as one all the way up to a parade of 20,000 people.

Step back for a moment and contrast that model with the Sierra Club and MoveOn. In simplified terms, the Sierra Club is structured as a traditional membership organization: they ask for a regular yearly contribution to support professional advocacy work and email petitions to show support for certain issues. The organization’s mission is broad enough to encompassing a wide range of environmental issues. MoveOn runs a leaner model, leaving off the professional advocacy to focus on email petitions but still maintaining a permanent staff and an even broader focus that includes the full spectrum of progressive issues. 350.org focused on a single issue and went deep, investing the majority of its resources in the ability of its grassroots organizers to run highly effective local campaigns. In Aroneanu’s words, “The tangible piece that you’re looking for is that commitment to taking action.”

350.org doesn’t have a plan yet for how to use that commitment in the future. Aroneanu said: “We don’t think of ourselves as an organization but as a campaign. This was entirely towards the goal of building a movement, and movements aren’t typically led by organizations…. If the movement can move forward without the 350 team driving it, we’ve done our job… We’re about to go on a retreat with our core staff to talk about strategy. But at the local level there is now infrastructure that can be used for things like a city plan to go carbon neutral, build a city garden, or affect the politics of that city or region.”

This is what it looks like to give up control. Contrast the comments above with the approach of Organizing for America, which amassed powerful grassroots networks in the course of the Obama campaign but then started asking local organizers to simply rally support for the new administration’s projects. 350.org treats its grassroots leaders not as foot soldiers in an army but as fellow organizers. They have no reason to think otherwise. They may have offices now but it wasn’t long ago that they were just seven people with laptops.

What does this mean for people who are running campaigns from within today’s organizations? Certainly it means there’s new competition in town. But it also means that there are new collaborators and new proven models for augmenting offline networks with online connectivity, a tough nut that few have managed to crack. We’ll return to this point later as our research continues.

How do you think the traditional membership model needs to change?

• It’s a new year with new predictions. Two lists worth reading are CauseGlobal’s general predictions of trends in the social sector and Change.org’s predictions for online action beyond donations. For a more thoughtful and long-term set of ideas about how technology is shaping the sector, Lucy Bernholz’ new paper “Disrupting Philanthropy” is a must-read.
• Transparency is a hot topic. The once-promising Chase Community Giving program resulted in fiery critique because of the opaque manner in which the administrators removed several vote-getters from the final round. What does that mean for foundations? Mario Morino argues that foundations should be getting ahead of the curve with a “transparency offensive,” because going transparent is simply inevitable. But as Chase has (hopefully) learned, the public takes you seriously when you promise to give them input. The Obama administration appears to have lost interest in giving the public a voice, much to techPresident’s dismay. Here’s hoping that Pepsi, as it crowdsources input for the giving campaign that will replace their Superbowl ads this year, won’t make the same mistakes as Chase and Obama.
• Online giving continues to expand. A new survey shows that consumers planned to give even more online in ’09 than they did in ’08, and there’s a new study out highlighting no less than 55 online giving marketplaces that were ready to meet the demand. The bigger players are leading the way, such as Pepsi which is running a crowdsourced giving campaign instead of its Superbowl ads. Here’s hoping they learn from the error of Chase’s ways.
• There’s two new blogs on the block: Larry Blumenthal at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has launched What We Give where he’s begun publishing his thoughts on the many ways that social media is changing philanthropy. Also, you can now find a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of current issues in philanthropy at Philanthropy Central, hosted by the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society. Let’s welcome both of them to the public conversation.

As always, just post in the comments if there’s anything you’d like add. (Thanks to Ed Skloot for several suggestions after the initial post.)

It’s a simple question – one that only takes a few minutes to answer. But it’s a question that has dramatically simplified how we think about knowledge management within the Monitor Institute. Like many organizations, we have Yammer, an online “case team database,” several blogs, and other technical tools set up for sharing ideas and best practices within our organization. We have codified documents out the wazoo, and monthly team meetings to touch base on the most urgent priorities.

But most of these tools and documents don’t get used as much as they should – and consequently, we are often struggling to “know what we know” and to stay connected as we do our work, head down in client projects, pulling off into our own little silos. I suspect we’re not alone – most organizations of more than a few people struggle with how to do “knowledge management,” and few truly do it well. How do we keep connecting the dots?

As a group we recently brainstormed ideas about how to create a simple knowledge management system that would at least be a small step in helping us all be more connected, and work more wikily internally. The one that actually has received the most uptake is one of the most simple – our old friend email – but with a personal twist. In this case, it’s an email sent out by one of our practitioners (Diana) each week with four short but sweet questions:

1. What are you working on this week?
2. What question has been top of mind for you this week?
3. How have you been learning or sharing learning this week?
4. What are you most grateful for this week?

The questions only take a few minutes to answer – and there is a real person on the other end (not a Yammer, not an automated tech tool, not a silent and all-knowing database that waits to swallow your codified thoughts.) I think this is why it’s had such dramatic uptake – I for one feel guilty blowing off a colleague, while blowing off Yammer is as easy as “delete.” Practically everyone answers every week, and then Diana synthesizes the answers, and emails them around. Each answer has a personal voice – it’s almost like a Twitter synthesis. It comes from a real person. It’s short and easy to read. It makes us laugh; it causes us stop and reflect for a few moments; it prompts us to pick up the phone, or walk down the hall, or ping each other on email with a follow up if we see a connection to what we’re working on. It is helping us to build community. And it is helping us all to know more what we know collectively.

Email – so old school. We could be using Facebook, or Twitter, or IM, but in thise case we don’t. Call us Luddites or whatever you will, but I for one prefer the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Which just underscores something that it can be all too hard to remember in these days when social media is becoming like air: fancy new tools are only sometimes necessary to achieve the goal of a tightly networked team.

• Two resources for getting up to date on the current trends. First, ThinkSocial ran a competition for the best public-spirited uses of social media and released their first report, Social Media Blueprints 1.0, which offers a useful overview of the 10 trends that they’re seeing emerge. Second, Lucy Bernholz has a handy set of links to several year-end lists of social-sector trends.
• The crowd continues to be given increasing amounts of power. Governmental experimentation with crowdsourcing is beginning in earnest, as illustrated by these six examples and the launch of ExpertLabs to crowdsource policy advice. And JPMorgan Chase set a new milestone in trusting an online crowd with decisionmaking power with its Community Giving initiative that put $5 million of grants into the hands of Facebook users with only minimal supervision. What we’re seeing, says Lucy, is a shift towards organizing around expertise, wherever it exists in the organizational landscape.
• Performance measurement should take collaboration into account, said one of the SocialEdge experts in a thought-provoking piece, which points out that ecosystem mapping can lead to surprising realizations about the ways that certain organizations are performing important yet invisible roles for the other organizations in their niche. Achieving that kind of collaboration is a matter of organizational culture rather than the technology you install. And it comes in many forms, as we can now see thanks to the well-organized database now available to the public thanks by the team that runs the Collaboration Prize.
• Data continues its march to center stage. There’s an important new piece by Bridgespan in the Harvard Business Review about the ways that data on outcomes is helping philanthropy become more effective, and McKinsey just released its beta test of its new database of Tools and Resources for Assessing Social Impact (TRASI).
• It’s been a banner month for giving online. GiveMN raised a whopping $14 million of online gifts in a single day, simultaneously illustrating the power of place-based fundraising and the growing public comfort with using online tools for donation. Meanwhile, the Case Foundation hosted its second annual America’s Giving Challenge competition for online fundraising with social media, with $245,000 in prizes that catalyzed $2.1 million of fundraising and a great deal of nonprofit experimentation with the new tools. (Beth Kanter has distilled three of the best tactics for using Twitter in particular.) And there’s now another new way to choose the target of online gifts with the launch of Philanthropedia, a site that offers guidance to individual donors by synthesizing expert advice on the best nonprofits for a given issue and facilitating donations to the whole list as individual “mutual funds.” (They announced their launch with a guest post on Tactical Philanthropy and an interview at Gift Hub.) But progress in this space is just getting started, as we can see clearly from the result of a recent survey: nearly three quarters of respondents agreed with the statement that new media raise their awareness about causes but do not motivate them to do any more to help, and 39 percent said they didn’t trust that their efforts would actually help the cause.

Anything I missed?

In 2007, the Blue Planet Run Foundation set itself the audacious goal of providing 200 million people safe drinking water within 20 years. The challenge is how to deliver on this goal with such a small organization.

The typical rural village in the Global South has a population of 1,000 people. That means in order to reach 200 million people you would need to do 10,000 projects a year. Jin Zidell, founder and chairman of the Blue Planet Run Foundation, doesn’t want to fundraise and staff a huge organization to do this, instead they are going to rely on networks. As he explains: “If we can save 20% because we don’t have a large staff, that’s 20% more money going to the work on the ground.” The key to their plan is the Peer Water Exchange (PWX), a “unique participatory decision-making network of partners, [which] combines people, process, and technology to manage water and sanitation projects around the world – from application, selection, funding, implementation, and impact assessment.”

Here are the key elements of the system their organization has developed. They turn the typical nonprofit functions on their head:

• The community evaluates projects: If you want to apply for funding from the Exchange you have to agree to evaluate at least five other applications for each project you want PWX to fund. The platform automatically assigns five peer reviewers, often from completely different countries.  You can see in the picture below that a project in Ghana is being reviewed by peers in the US, China and Thailand. Each reviewer scores projects on a 1 to 10 basis. If your project scores an average of 5, you get funding. Here is an example of a review.
• Their application is standardized and transparent: Any organization that wants to apply has to use the same form which details the need, the technology, the organization, government involvement, the budget and co-funding. It’s all there to see on the website. Here is an example of an application.
• Competitors collaborate: Traditionally it’s been very competitive in the nonprofit water sector. With the Exchange anyone can participate (presently there are 59 partners in 21 countires) and they have seen both large and small players review each other.
  
• Peer learning leads to improvements: Since peer reviews are from outside of an applicant’s existing network, it often results an exchange of learning. For example, one Indian peer was able to source a hand pump for $250 versus the $450 that an African applicant could access. In another case, a Bolivian applicant was able to find solutions from a Bangladesh peer on issues with arsenic.
• A network of volunteers monitor projects: Evaluating water projects is relatively simple – is there water coming out of the pump and what is the quality of that water? Jin envisions volunteers from a number of larger civic institutions like The Rotary Club (with its 33,000 local groups) going to the site, taking a picture of the system and measuring its quality using a cheap disposable device. Here is an example of an assessment visit.

One unexpected result has been that two medium-sized water nonprofits are migrating their projects (1,100 in total) on to the PWX site: Watershead Organization Trust and Gram Vikas. That’s another cost saving – they no longer need to invest in complex IT solutions. Jin is looking for partners in other sectors who might be interested in using the Exchange’s approach and software platform. If you are interested, feel free to contact him.

Industrialist, philanthropist and environmentalist, Jin Zidell has been a principal in a number of businesses including scrap metal processing, steel forging/fabrication, film and television production, fish farming, real estate development and software development and marketing. In 1991, Jin and his wife Linda established a donor-advised philanthropic fund at Marin Community Foundation that focuses on environmental issues. Jin has served on the board and staff of numerous nonprofits over the past 35 years. Along with being a board member of The Natural Step, US, Jin serves on the board of the Predator Conservation Alliance and the Earth Trust Foundation. Since 1979, Jin has been affiliated with Dia Rosatsu Zendo Kongo-Il, a Zen Buddhist Monastery. Jin Zidell received a BS from the University of Colorado School of Business in 1960.

A little bit of background on Bill and Lawrence Community Works:

Lawrence, Massachusetts was founded as a manufacturing center in the mid 19th century. Today it is one of the 25 poorest cities in the country. Bill Traynor grew up there. After working as a community organizer for many years (and, in the process, developing a critique of Alinsky-style organizing), Bill came back to Lawrence. At the time, there was no vision for the city and the infrastructure for and spirit of civic engagement had both crumbled. So, Bill joined Lawrence Community Works (LCW) with the initial goal of creating an environment that drew people back into civic engagement. When he joined LCW it had a staff of two and a deficit.

Today Lawrence Community Works has over 50,000 members. They have attracted over $50 million in new investment in the community, and are projecting total investment to grow to $90 million by 2011. But these numbers don’t adequately tell the story of strengthened community ties, increased trust, and new sense of opportunity that is motivating locals to re-engage in their city.

Bill has made a significant investment in codifying and sharing his learning about net-centric community organizing. Here are a few highlights from his presentation to Grassroots Grantmakers:

• The nature of place as a value has changed. In an era of increased telecommunications and physical mobility, our relationship to place is changing. However, Bill argues, place—our cities, our neighborhoods—is still a very important environment for connectivity, especially for people with limited options. Community organizing practices need to embrace this shifting sense of place – and focus on the power of connectivity and fostering network environments, as opposed to the creation of static organizational forms.
• The forms of engagement are shifting. We’re shifting away from highly structured forms of long-term commitment to looser more flexible forms of engagement. We need to find the forms of engagement that feature – rather than fight – these trends. One of the ways LCW has embraced this shift is by offering many different doors of entry to the network and by creating more provisional, flexible, action-oriented forms of engagement. For example, at the neighborhood level they found that people weren’t engaging with block clubs or neighborhood associations in Lawrence because they were too entrenched, detached and issue (versus relationship) focused. So they started Neighborhood Circles. Residents come to dinners hosted by trained hosts. At the first dinner, people tell their journey to the neighborhood. The aim have good conversations, connect, and follow the energy. The result has been things like campaigns for budget reform and garbage clean-up –outcomes similar to what you would hope for from traditional community organizing.
• Building a “connected environment” requires new tools and language. LCW is borrowing terminology from science, design, business and networks that reflects the flexibility of the space for citizen engagement that they’re creating. For example, they use terms like create a “demand environment” and talk about their work as creating “value propositions (versus programs for service delivery). I’ve been really struck by the power of language in our efforts at the Monitor Institute to make sense of what networks need for effectiveness. It’s easy to hold onto language used in organizational contexts – e.g.,“network “leadership” (versus network “weaving”) –because it’s familiar. The problem, I’ve found, is that the familiar language comes with associations that may not be relevant to networks. Using a new term, like “network weaving,” opens a conversation, in this case, about what it means to lead to in a network context.

I’ve also found his “FOLKS” protocol for network management really instructive. It embraces the power of network emergence, dynamic fluidity and openness with solid management principles to get the job done. Here it is (quoted directly from his NPQ article):

• F (form follows function): We want to build only the level of structure and formality that we need to do the job—no more and no less. If we overbuild, it will require more resources to support and be that much harder to deconstruct.
• O (open architecture is best): We try to build forms (i.e., committees, teams, and processes) that are flexible, informal, provisional, have provisional leadership, and are always open to new people. These forms are more in sync with a network environment.
• L (let it go): If it isn’t working or if there is no demand, you have to let it go and let it go quickly. That goes for an idea you might have and for which you can’t get interest or for a program you have run for five years that no longer sells.
• K (keep it simple): We need to keep simple things simple so that we have the time and energy for the complicated stuff. Anything that can be routine should be. A five-minute problem shouldn’t take 15 minutes.
• S (solve the problem): In a flexible environment, we need to move through stuck places a hundred times a day. Everyone needs to make “solving the problem” the most important rule of engagement with one another.

So, how does all this look in practice? Certainly, take a close look at LCW itself. Also, look at the community development efforts that have embraced his principles of net-centric organizing, like Making Connections Louisville. MC Louisville, catalyzed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Making Connections initiative, works to increase engagement and community interaction in Louisville. The images and story of their slide show, The Power of We, paints a powerful picture of net-centric organizing, reminding us that: “Programs don’t transform lives. Relationships do.”

In one sentence: It’s time to build a global network that will serve and support all those people who want to make the world a better place, online and in person.

The key to doing this is to bypass all those specific issues that can overwhelm and divide us, and instead focus on three challenges that affect all of us:

1. There is often a big gap between our good intentions and our actions.
2. Our problems are connected, but we are not.
3. The world is full of good ideas that don’t spread quickly enough.

What we need, then, is a network, a movement, an ecosystem that will:

* Make it easier for people and organizations to move from intentions to action.
* Connect people, organizations, and resources in every possible way.

* Find good ideas wherever they are, and distribute them as widely as possible.

If we can do this, and do it well, most of our local and global challenges will be easier to deal with.

The network they envision appears to have a number of key features:

• Self-organizing. It sounds like almost all of the actual organizing that might happen under the ICA umbrella will be done by the participants. The role that ICA describes for itself as an organizer is limited to lightweight coordination, to maintain a decentralized model, but participants are encouraged to organize activities themselves that will create social impact. It’s a little bit like the role that Flickr plays for photographers who use the tool to organize interest groups and tag their photos together.
• Decentralized. The decisionmaking power is pushed to the edges rather than being held at the center. The choices to make are around the kind of action to pursue and that choice sits firmly in the hands of the participants. The only activity that Idealist/ICA envisions for itself at the center is facilitating the discussion of what the network should be, integrating feedback from that conversation, making the public announcement in March, and any other lightweight coordination that needs to happen.
• Open participation. Like MoveOn.org and many issue-specific campaigns such as 350.org, anyone and everyone is invited. This of course expands the reach of the network but also makes it more of a challenge for the members to establish deep personal connections.
• Focused on connectivity rather than alignment or production. In Net Gains, Plastrik and Taylor propose a typology for the goals of networks: connectivity is about building connections without specifying what they’re for, alignment is about building shared interest in pursuing a mission, and production is about taking action together. It looks to me like the goal of the ICA is connectivity, with the aspiration of encouraging its participants to form their own networks for the purposes of alignment and production.

A flip way of describing this would be to say that ICA is throwing a party with a mission statement and hoping that social change will be the result. But that’s not necessarily a crazy idea. After all, many would argue that the deeper function of protests is not media attention but the tightening of the social web among those who care about the cause and are likely to take action again in the future. But that’s at an event where simply showing up is a statement to everyone present that you believe in achieving the same goal. Imagine that it was 1999 before the WTO protests in Seattle and you had the magical ability to convene all of the activists who were about to show up. If you read them the ICA manifesto, what would happen? Would they sit down with each other, share their various goals for social change, and split up according to common interest in order to organize campaigns? Or would the group turn fractious as the many rifts between their rainbow of leftist ideologies came to the fore? The latter might well happen without good facilitation. So here’s my question for the ICA: what are you going to do to help people find common ground?

I got to hear that attitude in person just the other week when the Peery Foundation’s Jessamyn Lau (twitter: @jessamynlau) graciously agreed to take time aside for an interview. Here’s a summary of our exchange.

Could you give me some background on the foundation?

We’re just now getting together our strategic goals. The foundation has existed on paper for about 30 years, but the family just started their giving about five years ago. It began with “checkbook giving,” but about two years ago Dave Peery (twitter: @davepeery) became more heavily involved and started establishing a strategic direction, partly based on his evolving understanding of social entrepreneurship. The family is now becoming more strategic in how it employs its philanthropy and is focusing in on social entrepreneurs. I was hired in May, which marked the point at which the family has begun professionalizing their giving. That opened up the opportunity to do a deep strategic planning process: to establish what it is that they’ve been doing, what they like about that, and what they want to change. The organizational environment is now like a startup. The family is interested in continuing to be entrepreneurial but in a more structured fashion. I came straight from my MBA, having graduated in April. One of the things that Dave wanted was someone who would learn with him and with the foundation rather than coming in with existing ideas about how a foundation should work.

How did you decide to share the conversation openly on Twitter?

I started out my work by scouring the Internet to find out about philanthropy, and I’d been on Twitter, as had Dave. We had just one conversation to weigh whether it was appropriate to have the foundation on Twitter, which we decided wasn’t an issue, so long as we could keep some personality in it. We thought it was interesting and wanted to explore it as a platform for communication.

This is a very lean shop, so there were only two of us in the room, and we were aware that while we were working with limited information there were a number of philanthropy professionals that were following us on Twitter. Dave came up with the hashtag and we started putting it on the end of any questions we were asking. It was spur-of-the-moment, really—we didn’t strategically plan to do this. We hadn’t fully figured out Twitter and we were playing, to be frank. We realized as we started doing it that it could provide a lot of value. Sean Stannard-Stockton is a close associate and we knew we could rely on him to offer advice from afar.

The result was that a lot of people listened to it but there wasn’t a cascade of dialogue. There were quite a few retweets, and they got some responses, and very occasionally they would start conversations. I hope it was valuable for other people.

How would you like to carry this kind of interaction forward?

It was valuable for us in the sense that even when the responses weren’t an answer to what we put out they still made us think more deeply about the questions we were asking. We especially enjoyed the comments that came directly from social entrepreneurs about how a foundation should act. Twitter is fleeting, so it encourages honesty.
Another benefit was that people pointed us in the direction of resources—reports, organizations, and people—making connections so we could find more information. We also got answers and more thought-provoking responses to specific questions, especially from people who had particular expertise. It also helped established a peer group. We’re at an early stage, still developing, and it helped us establish who has similar opinions. Also, the geographic focus has definitely been on the Bay Area.

We’d like to build something like this into our website, perhaps by having a blog called PFwhiteboard, to explore the idea of foundations listening to grantees. I’m thinking that we may have social entrepreneurs blog about their best and worst experiences with foundations, and that as a funder we can get other funders to listen to what they say.

Working openly like this reflects a lot of Dave’s personality and the informal way that we naturally work. We’re not looking for proposals and specific criteria. We’re developing more of a formal process, but we’re most interested in having an honest dialogue with social entrepreneurs. It helps us be a little more trust-based.

What we’ve realized is that we would definitely like to continue being an experimental foundation. The family has a tradition of entrepreneurship, so they recognize the value of taking some risks. We’d like to do both tactical and strategic philanthropy, as well as grassroots philanthropy in the tradition of Bill Somerville. We’re also interested in market-based solutions, PRIs, and MRIs. We don’t want to close off any doors—rather, we’d like to employ multiple methods as necessary to create a powerful result.

Given that, I do see social media being a big piece of our work. We use Twitter, we have an internal blog for the family to keep them up to date, an internal wiki for fleshing out ideas and gathering together foundation resources, and Dave is starting to create videos. We’re also exploring ways to use media to support our grantees. (Do they need a short video made about them? Would Twitter be useful to them? Do they need to learn how to use Salesforce?) People like Tipping Point are fantastic for that.

All of which brings me to MomsRising.org – perhaps one of the most compelling “new” models for issue-organizing. The mission of MomsRising is to mobilize mothers, and as they say, anyone who has a mother, on issues that pertain to their economic security and well-being, along with that of their families – things like health care, paid family leave policy, flexible work options, affordable early learning/childcare, environmental toxins, and ending wage and hiring discrimination against mothers. Launched in 2006, MomsRising is a trans-partisan organization that started on a shoestring budget (supported in part by the Packard Foundation), and with a very small staff. It has grown quickly – now counting more than a million members on its list. In fact, MomsRising grew its list substantially last spring, when it launched a viral video campaign called the “MomsRising Mother of the Year Award” which lets you insert your favorite mom’s name and email a customized video to her. This hilarious video, which has been viewed by over viewed by over 12 million people, subtly weaves in information about economic discrimination against working mothers. The campaign has been blogged about extensively, and is often held up as a model for creative ways to build a membership list.

We recently had a chance to talk to Mary Olivella, MomsRising’s Vice President, who is involved in setting strategy for the organization, about what they are learning about engagement and mobilization–both online and off. Here’s a quick summary of the highlights I took away from our conversation:

• MomsRising is focused on “movement-building” and large scale systems change, not just building an organization. They ultimately want to change policy and business practice; change the popular culture; and, improve democracy by engaging more women in the political process.
• They explicitly take a partnership/ network approach and work with and through other organizations focused on issues their constituents care about. E.g. they work with policy groups, environmental groups, social justice and poverty prevention groups, etc. and collaborate to move issues forward. MomsRising can quickly mobilize tens of thousands of people on an issue, but they recognize that their partners bring deep issue-expertise.
• Since MomsRising is much less interested in building an “organization” per se, they have very low overhead and no central office. They operate with a very light staffing model: roughly 8 FTEs made up of 12 total staff, some of whom work part-time, many of whom live in different states – supporting over a million members!. Most of the work is coordinated online.
• MomsRising focuses on their membership’s needs—and elevating those voices into the political process. They are member-centric, not organization-centric. The organization is there to support the members, not the other way around.
• Consequently, listening and responding to their membership is critical to their success – they say “we have multiple ways to listen and engage in a dialogue with a diverse range of mothers across the country”. Members help determine which issues the group focuses on – not the other way around. They are not a single-issue organization, rather, they focus on multiple issues of concern to women from varying economic and ethnic backgrounds because they believe that to build a truly family-friendly America we need to address the overall pattern of how policies and business practices are developed.
• Data analysis is also critical to their success: they constantly evaluate response rates (to campaigns/ emails, etc), to understand what is working, and make adjustments as they go – it’s a process of continual iteration. Running MomsRising is as much a science as it is an art.
• They are working to combine online and offline organizing and see that as critical to their success. They encourage members to “meet up” in their own neighborhoods and run online campaigns designed to get people to show up in person at a rally.
• There are multiple technologies in their tool-kit and they combine them in any variety of ways depending on the campaign: website, blogs, ties to external bloggers, online media sites, Facebook, Twitter, online ads. Increasingly they are looking at ways to use mobile technology (cell phones) for engagement.
• They don’t silo their skills: Their team consists of a multicultural group of campaign organizers (all women) who do both strategy and tech implementation – that is, they need to be skilled in issue organizing as well as be proficient in various tech tools. MomsRising believes it is critical for staff to understand the online tools well enough to “push the limit” on campaigns. There is not a divide between “organizers” and “techies” as in many nonprofits.

To sum it up, MomsRising’s critical competencies are speed, flexibility, decentralization, integration, holistic thinking, listening, dialogue, engagement, mobilization, constant learning, iteration, and rigorous analysis.

Their biggest challenges: 1) educating funders about this form of ‘new organizing’ that takes a multi-issue and multi-strategy approach; 2) convincing funders to invest in an organization that is willing to test multiple approaches knowing full well that some will fail but that this experimentation is critical to being able to find ‘break-through’ strategies – it’s challenging because it’s a “non-linear” model; and 3) evaluating and documenting their success: they can do this well at tactical level (e.g. response to email campaign, etc) as well as when their work has played a key roll in passing a particular piece of legislation or influenced company policy, but they are also working to obtain resources to be able to measure traction over longer term periods against larger goals of cultural and wide-scale policy change.

Does MomsRising remind of you of other novel approaches you’ve seen? Can you think of a way to apply it to your work?

Q: Tell me about the role of money in asking for help from the crowd. How much does it make sense to offer, when should it be offered, and how do you know whether to offer it at all?

When we were putting Innocentive together, the question came up of whether it should be based on intellectual stimulation or funding. I was adamantly opposed to doing it without funding. On the commercial side, I think it’s shameful that the benefactor would benefit and not share. But when it comes to the philanthropic side, sharing your intellect is a donation in-kind. That could be a perfectly acceptable way for social institutions to further leverage their capital.

For me, the key to whether there’s a prize etc. is absolute transparency every step of the way. Be clear about why you’ve posted it, what the benefits are intended to be, and why you’ve decided for or against a prize. You should be completely open about what the model is, how it’s funded, and what we’ll try and do to help defray your expenses. Then you let the marketplace decide whether you’ve offered something reasonable.

I’m very much in favor of foundations funding prizes. Let me ask you, what percent of foundations that have more than five million dollar budgets have unpaid or volunteer CEOs? Very few. So they don’t really have a problem with paying someone for working on their behalf. I would argue that finding solutions is a good use of donor dollars. And, you can give individuals the option of donating the prize money back to the organization. The compensation may be a combination of dollars and societal benefit. In fact, if we really wanted to solve disease problems like malaria, we’d approach them that way, because there’s not enough money available in that market to make it worth it for purely financial reasons. We’ve drawn artificial boundaries between commercial and nonprofit models. I think we should be very open to all of the mixed-utility models in between.

This is the final section of our interview with Alph. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)

Q: I’m curious to know if you’ve had any experience with prediction markets. Do you think they have applications for social-sector organizations?

I look at prediction markets as a kind of cognition example of collective intelligence; how does one aggregate the analytical pieces of knowledge that need to contribute to a conclusion of some kind? Do we just vote on it? Do we take a poll? Do we average across everybody’s responses or find the midpoint? I happen to be more intrigued than opposed — I think [this approach] aggregates knowledge in a very clever way, more accurate than just taking the average.

One of the areas I’ve seen [prediction markets] being used is in predicting legislative outcomes, so there could be political applications. They’re quite adaptable.

The challenge with them is the challenge with challenges: articulating the “security” to be traded. I’ve found that until people have been through it a couple times and are trained to think that way, they keep writing polls, which won’t work if you’re trying to get a true prediction out of it.

What characterizes a good security is that there’s an unambiguous strike price — which has two components: the pricing mechanism and the act or event that determines when the pricing kicks in. It’s not trivial, although I think there are some pretty good rules for writing good securities or deciding that this isn’t a good candidate for a prediction market.

We ran a closed study one time in which we predicted scientific outcomes that were complex, such as FDA approval at the end or in the earlier stages of the process. Even though that might sound like a black and white technical question, at the time you’re predicting it you’re asking a lot of questions about which you have a lot of knowledge but where the knowledge in each of those areas isn’t perfect and the way in which all of those areas fit together to determine an outcome isn’t clear.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

Q: Some social-sector problems are settled but require expertise, which are typically addressed by service delivery, while others require experimentation because we have yet to discover a solution. When would you go open versus closed on each type?

Let me use the AIDS issue as a way of stating where I think you may want to go open and where you may want to stay closed. Say there’s a newly created foundation that’s focused on AIDS in Kenya. Posting a challenge that says, “Well, what about AIDS should we address?” isn’t terribly useful. You’d tend to get a lot of chaff coming in. First I’d let the internal program director stumble around to figure out what the organization’s mission is and where they’re going to cut in. Having concluded that they think education of women in Kenya is going to be a fruitful area, now there’s potential to open it up. Maybe we need to explore more ideas than we’ve thought of for reaching Kenyan women and addressing barriers to their education. With the answers to that you could return to the organization to do some design work, and let’s say that after that you end up with a question of how to distribute educational materials. Then you could open it up again to the crowd.

I would cast it open each time I had a concrete question to ask. That’s what separates successful users of open systems from the unsuccessful ones: a well-articulated challenge. The challenge needs to allow people to see where the skills they have can be applied to the problem. That doesn’t mean aiming it squarely at a certain skillset, because then you’re back to digging in the pit of closed innovation but on a massive scale. There’s an art to challenge-writing that I didn’t appreciate when we launched the company.

An historical example is Archimedes. We remember Archimedes for his stroke of insight, but we forget that Hero posed a clearly articulated problem and it was that problem that helped coalesce the geometry and the math. It was Hero’s posing of the challenge in its general form, not to Archimedes as a geometer or as a person who took baths, that made everything come together. The first time Hero posed the challenge, Archimedes sent him away saying there was no solution; it was not until he took the bath that he realized there was a solution. Even in ignorance, Hero articulated a clearly-bounded, well-framed problem.

The goal is not to use the crowd for an answer you know they are specifically trained to provide but rather to focus the question in a way that they can bring to bear a mix of skills, some of which you can predict and others of which you can’t.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1 and part 2.)

Q: Is there a middle ground where you can cast out to a group that’s very much beyond your organization without the fanfare of a fully public Innocentive challenge?

Recognizing that there might be a need for this, Innocentive does have a product that they call “at work” that lets you specify a private network which could include employees, contractors, vendors, or any other group with which you have existing relationships. Companies are interested in this for a number of and one of them is definitely the desire to manage confidentiality. We’ve seen that it works. In my pre-Innocentive days at Eli Lilly, when we cast out for 1000 different perspectives across the company, we raised the diversity of perspectives we were tapping and found a lot of hidden pockets of expertise that we hadn’t necessarily recruited for.

There are three levels you can work at: the classic keep-it-small level where a person is assigned to work on it, the intermediate level where you broaden to a closed network, and the public level. Confidentiality is obviously one of the criteria for choosing between them.
It’s also worth mentioning that if all of my experiments are succeeding and the measure of where I am relative to where I need to be is really a matter of time, money and execution, I don’t see that much of an advantage in doing that externally. Then the question is whether I want to outsource: if I’m just churning the crank on the easy-to-solve problems, I might contract them out so my employees can focus on the really difficult stuff.

To be honest, if I was going to throw it open and it’s not a confidentiality issue, more is better. It never stops you from using the ideas of the larger network, whereas smaller precludes you from using the ideas of the larger group.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1.)

This piece was originally published on WiserEarth by Kerry Vineberg.

The climate change movement has been gaining momentum in recent months. We’ve felt it building at organizations like 350.org in preparation for the major UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen this December. We had a call with social media coordinator Joe Solomon of 350.org to get a sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all, and his thoughts on how to effectively network for a cause.

The person: Joe has roots in technology and social change, and figuring out web-connected community solutions for an array of causes. He was the Director of Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge and joined 350.org to get closer to the point of impact. “The climate movement affects many of the issues of our time,” he said. “It’s also a matter of survival.” The desire to help the world came early for Joe: he can remember drawing pictures against rainforest logging in third grade.

The connection: He’s no stranger to WiserEarth, having helped us network with NetSquared for our first WiserTuesday Paris event!

The plan: At the time of the interview, 350.org was leading up to the International Day of Climate Action, and Joe mentioned excitedly: “Twitter and Facebook are on fire right now! It’s such an offline, collaborative movement that explodes onto the online scene. We’re really riding a wave, with at least two dozen active 350 organizers on Twitter – with accounts like @350Vermont, @350Peru, @350London — And so many new people are jumping on board, asking, ‘Where am I going to be on October 24?’”

The advice: Joe has been working in the social media arena for some time, and offers some tips on how to get impact:

• Highlight your partners’ efforts: “350 is a super collaborative campaign. We’re trying to build and demonstrate a movement, and like any open movement, it’s not about us — as much as it’s about a collaborative groundswell of organizations, organizers, rock climbers, messengers, bloggers, super models, photographers, you name it — all working to get us back to 350. We’re always trying to highlight our friends at Greenpeace, TckTckTck, Avaaz, Powershift, 1Sky, Oxfam, Transition Towns – and hundreds more, plus all the thousands of grassroots organizers who are the reason why we’ve collectively come this far…. How can your organization act more like a movement and shine the light on what others are doing to change the world with you?”
• Try open threads on Facebook: “As a way to support the conversations that were already happening, we started inviting organizers and supporters to connect around ‘open threads’ in Facebook. Literally, we would start an update with ‘Open Thread:’ and then share quick updates and a few questions. So far, we’ve had some very positive results.”
• Start or support a Twitter hashtag for your cause or sector. In the global climate movement headed towards Copenhagen, there’s #350ppm, #COP15, #FABTreaty, and others. What hashtag can help your cause area connect, share resources, and collaborate for more effective impact?
• Group people together using TweepML: This is a way to highlight a group of community members via a list that any Twitter user can follow all at once. 350 tries to employ this to connect organizers to each other.  Joe says, “There are also Twitter Lists, but what’s great about TweepML is community members can actually follow each other. The stats from the 350 Organizers list claim to have generated over 1,300 followers. Now we just gotta figure out a way to help the 1,077 350 badge wearers connect! Ideas welcome!”
• Don’t feed, inspire: In the days before the International Day of Climate Action, 350 turned off all feeds. They don’t pipe their blog into Twitter or Facebook, and purposely choose where to share that people will find useful and inspiring, and can connect around. The feeds are still off.
• Get face to face: “We’re way ahead of ourselves in mastering how to connect on Twitter, Facebook, and other online communities. We’ve discovered the most brilliant ways to build our lists. We’re all of us social media gurus. Now it’s time to invite our supporters outside, empower them as leaders, and together transform our communities for the changes we all seek. WiserTuesdays are an amazing step in this direction.”

The hope: Joe says, “In December (next month!) world leaders from every country on the planet are meeting in Copenhagen to craft a global climate treaty. What’s at stake at that meeting is massive — a treaty that’s in line with what science and justice demand could be key to turning the tide on global warming and getting our planet back on a sustainable path.

“The hope we can act on is that we keep the pressure on, through delivering 350 photos directly into the hands of our leaders, and other actions — December 12 looks like it’s gonna be big — to help world leaders see just how powerful and global this movement has become.”

The reward: “It’s incredible to watch all of us rise together, to be a part of this call to action around a scientific data point that’s above our organizations’ walls and shows how widespread and collaborative the climate and social justice movement really is,” Joe reflects. “Many thanks to WiserEarth for all your support, for being such a great resource, and for inspiring calls to action as strong and adorable as this one:

Q: You’ve probably seen more configurations than most of today’s crowdsourcing tools. What are the most interesting ways you’ve seen people are taking advantage of them?

I see some people recognizing that crowdsourcing technologies can be used in an iterative fashion, where people cycle between casting out broader questions, using ideas from the larger community, then going back within the smaller community until you encounter a more specific question for which you need the large, diversified group.

Let me contrast that with two less effective approaches. One would be the simply internal or “staying closed” approach in which the amount of diverse thinking I have to bring to the problem is a function of my staffing, which itself is designed to weed out a certain kind of diversity. A lack of diversity of approaches is one of the shortcomings baked into a wholly internal approach.

The second is when you realize you need something external but “bolt it on” to the outside of your current internal innovation engine, in which case it’s not an integrated work system. The truth is, if you want to have an effective external innovation system, you have to reshape both your internal and external systems, appropriately designate roles and align them to the different cycles of opening wide, narrowing down, and so forth.

This is often a challenge for foundations because they tend to run leaner on their internal innovation expertise relative to the commercial world. It’s also an opportunity — they’re less likely to institutionalize themselves into a box that wasn’t the most effective box to be in. They’ve got these trained people (I’m still very much in favor of trained experts, don’t get me wrong on that) and hopefully they’ve also got an advisory board of highly intelligent experts. It might be that the advisory board would identify an area where the current approaches weren’t working as well as they could; that could be a signal to open the challenge up to a broader set of avenues that wouldn’t have otherwise been explored; and then they evaluate the different suggestions and winnow them down; then let’s say one of the selected suggestions runs into a barrier that the internal organization can’t tackle, the advisory board could then open it up again. A good example is the Prize4Life, focused on the disease ALS. They identified the specific issues to solve and then offered a prize to the scientific community for a solution.

Crowds aren’t wise just because they’re crowds. They need process and focus, and their wisdom can do much more if you’re providing some of that. Some of that process comes from the new toolbox of technologies; some of that focus comes from experts saying, “This is the reason the problem isn’t solved” and narrowing it down so the crowd has something to chew on.

What you want are discrete, clearly articulable challenges for which the responses could be a broad spectrum of ideas. If I cannot articulate what it is I need, it’s very hard to assign others to just stumble around and see what shows up, though we know that there’s sometimes a phase of that on projects. That’s something that I suspect smaller groups are better at making sense of, and there’s efficiencies to gain in keeping it in one mind. You’re getting the human intuition and whatever else it is that makes great scientists great.

One example that comes to mind comes from the wreck of the oil tanker Valdez up by Prince William Sound. In cold temperatures, oil floats so viscously that you can only move it around at a very slow pace. Recognizing this, experts said that we needed to somehow lower the viscosity of oil to allow more oil to flow per unit of time at these abysmally low temperatures. They defined the problem really well and posted it on Innocentive. It was solved by a chemist at the University of Illinois who’d worked in the construction industry during the summer. It turns out that with cement, the more viscous the better, so the concrete industry has figured out a way to keep cement moving through the injection of certain small particles. This chemist submitted his solution, they tried it in Alaska and it worked.

(Stay tuned for further insights from Mr. Bingham in the coming days.)

• Top of the list: assessing the impact of networks is really hard.
• People participate in networks for multiple reasons (and similarly, funders fund networks for multiple reasons). It’s hard to align around and clarify desired outcomes – and/or figure out how to assess progress towards multiple sets of outcomes.
• Network impact can be hard to see. It’s difficult to measure causality (or even simply track activity) in decentralized, complex systems with lots of players.
• Some of the most powerful network impact may be unexpected. How do you measure the impact of emergent, self-organized action?
• Finally: it can take a really long time to achieve measurable impact.

Added to the challenges is the fact that, according to evaluators I’ve spoken with, the tools for assessing emergent systems are lacking. (Social network analysis does seem to be promising in some cases, though it is resource-intensive). Kudos to the evaluators who are bravely taking on the challenge of measuring network impact!

Challenges aside, what can you measure? I really like the framework set out by Madeline Taylor and Pete Plastrik in Net Gains, and Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt in “Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks” (both highly recommended reading). In both these thought pieces, the authors outline three levels of network impact to consider:

• Connectivity: what is the nature of relationships within the network? Is everyone connected who needs to be? What is the quality of these connections? Does the network effectively bridge differences? Is the network becoming more interconnected? What is the network’s reach?
• Overall network health: how healthy is the network along multiple dimensions (participation, network form, leadership, capacity, etc.). How have participants been impacted by the network?
• Field level outcomes: what progress is the network making on achieving its intended social impact (e.g. policy outcomes, innovative products)? How do you know?

The network funders community of practice has been working on this question: how do you make the case, and what principles to keep in mind when assessing the impact of networks? Here are few starting points:

• Be clear about 1) the network’s value proposition, 2) expectations for the network, 3) to whom is the network accountable, 4) the donor’s role in the network
• Pay attention to network history and context
• Gather data from diverse perspectives, including feedback from constituents outside the network
• Emphasize learning over near-term judgment, so that the purpose is not punitive
• Focus on meaningful contribution toward impact
• Integrate into an ongoing process of network learning and adaptation
• Build capacity to conduct self-evaluation

What are you learning about making the case for network impact? How do you know networks work?

It’s been an eventful month in the wiki-working world. The most important event is the second annual America’s Giving Challenge, a competition which launched on October 7th at the Case Foundation where nonprofits go head-to-head in using social media to raise money. It’s a triple win: the champion gets $50,000 on top of having run a successful campaign, the other contestants get to raise money and sharpen their social media fundraising skills, and those of us watching for what works get a new set of examples to chew on. Facebook Causes smartly offered its own tips on effective strategies in a video interview with Case.

Speaking of fundraising, the question of whether social media can really raise money can also be answered by the case studies that Fast Company published under the headline “Tweet, Tweet, Ka-Ching.” There’s two traditional nonprofits on the list–LiveStrong and National Wildlife Federation–while the remainder are the social-media natives DonorsChoose, Twestival Local, and 12 for 12K Challenge.

Beth Kanter often poses the provocative question of whether yours is a listening organization, and this month kudos in that category go to both the micro-lender Kiva and marketing guru Seth Godin for modeling what it means to listen to your online community and adapt on the fly. Godin made a couple of rather egregious mis-steps, first taking an ill-informed swipe at nonprofits in his blog and then launching a business model that asked companies to pay him $400 a month for the right to control how they were represented on his website Squidoo. Both were critiqued loudly in public in various corners of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, to the extent that many would expect his reputation to be irreparably tarnished… yet his immediate response was to both  change the offending business model and start working directly with nonprofits. His about-face was so rapid and complete as to earn a hat-tip from Geoff Livingston at CRT/tanaka, one of his most outspoken critics.

In the case of Kiva, blogger David Roodman published a muckraking post that posed a profound question about whether Kiva’s supposed model of direct-to-the-needy lending was actually a bait and switch. When this sparked a firestorm of debate, neatly summarized on Tactical Philanthropy, Kiva’s CEO not only wrote the blogger a lengthy email addressing the matter but immediately changed how Kiva describes its process. In Roodman’s words: “Flannery’s response to my criticism blended grace, humility, and quiet confidence. The world would be a much better place if all charities, all organizations for that matter, were as open and responsive to criticism as Kiva has been.”

Transparency and responsiveness can penetrate even an organization’s strategic planning, as the Wikimedia Foundation is demonstrating with its doors-thrown-open approach. They’ve engaged Bridgespan for help navigating the questions, but their commitment is to forge a strategy that is driven by the desires of the “wikimedia movement”–the people who believe in the potential of public wiki-based collaborative creation. They’re open to suggestions through a wiki, online “office hours,” Twitter, and self-organized face-to-face gathers.

Finally, two important pieces take a step back and help explain the shape of this very interesting moment: Lucy Bernholz discusses the implications of data for the field of philanthropy in three posts (1/2/3) and strategy+business offers lessons for open-source collaboration from the quality movement: The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration.

The stereotypical volunteer gig is cleaning up a park or stuffing envelopes for a mailing, repetitive physical tasks that require a lot of bodies in one place for a certain amount of time in order to get something done. About 26% of the population is willing to pitch in that way on a regular basis. Jacob thinks that number is too low. He believes that The Extraordinaries can help nonprofits reach far more volunteers by giving them a way to help using their computers or their smartphones. Crowdsourcing volunteer help over the Internet has been around for some time, as NASA’s ClickWorkers and TPM Muckraker can attest, and it’s shown considerable promise. But there’s something exciting about crowdsourcing volunteer help through smartphones: people carry smartphones with them all the time and the devices have a range of capabilities that go beyond Internet access: making calls, sending emails, tracking location, snapping photos, and even reporting the angle at which they’re being pointed. This is all very cutting-edge today, but according to an estimate that Jacob quoted, 1/10^th of the world will be using a smartphone in about four years—not hard to believe considering that yesterday’s $200 Nokia phones are now $10 in much of the developing world. The Extraordinaries, along with others who will doubtless jump into this space, is creating a platform for nonprofits to tap these emerging abilities as the basis for new kinds of volunteering.

Even with these fancy new technical abilities in mind, it might sound strange to think that “real” volunteer work could be done through a smartphone. After all, the tagline on The Extraordinaries website promotes the idea of volunteering in just a few minutes while you’re on the bus or waiting in line—and how much can you really get done in that time? Jacob gave me a number of examples that illustrate how micro-volunteering can be genuinely helpful:

• Kaboom! is using volunteers to document the quality of play-spaces around the country using pictures, location, and written descriptions
• First Aid Corps is using volunteers to record the locations of defibrillators in public places
• Big Cat Rescue is using volunteers to document the abuse of big cats by giving volunteers the ability to record the location of an abused animal and snap photographic evidence
• The Extraordinaries team will soon be using volunteers to translate documents, which can be done on either a commercial or a charitable basis
• The San Francisco Bike Coalition could, Jacob suggested, show the city which streets are most in need of bike lanes by providing its members with an application that would track where they ride

It will be interesting to see what kind of new social change efforts will arise through micro-volunteering and other forms of collaboration that are now possible through smartphones. Text messaging alone gave us flashmobs and real-time coordination at protests, increasing the power of grassroots activists. Email, web access, GPS, still cameras, video cameras, and tilt sensors each open up a new realm of opportunity, with more to come as the technology develops. The strength of The Extraordinaries is that it is a platform through the less tech-savvy organizations can use these new abilities with a minimum of hassle, widening the range of organizations that might come up with innovative new ways to harness them.

Yet in network terms, the volunteering that The Extraordinaries offers still works on the traditional model of “hub and spoke,” with the nonprofit as the hub that takes chunks of works from individual volunteers who don’t otherwise connect with each other. It’s a simple, efficient, yet still hierarchical model for a group of people to work together. That’s useful for organizations to accomplish a centrally-organized task. But the possibility also exists for the volunteering to be done in ad hoc networks, teams of individuals who use their smartphones to connect for the purposes of a pro-social task and then disband, perhaps organized by volunteer “team captains” who were inspired by a certain cause and tapped their personal networks to bring together teams. Those teams could be local, of course, but they could also be brought together from anywhere on the Internet, taking advantage of the far-flung social webs of social connectivity that individuals can now sustain through Facebook. This already happens in political advocacy, where phone-banking is a potent form of volunteer work. But that only requires a phone. Can you think of a cause where ad hoc teams could use GPS and cameras to help create change on their own?