Noah’s Roundup

Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
Filed under News

There’s been a lot of rich new material this last month and it’s about time that we took a moment aside again to summarize it in one place.

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.