Noah’s Roundup

Written by Noah Flower on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Filed under News

Welcome back! We’ve been kicking off the year to a busy start here at the Institute, so this is the first chance I’ve had to look back over all the interesting material that popped up in the last month and a half. Here’s another roundup of the links that jump out to me as being the most noteworthy.

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.