Noah’s Roundup
Written by Noah Flower on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Filed under News
Now that I’m comfortably settled into the groove of tweeting out links whenever I find interesting material, I’m going to pick up our old tradition of posting the best links I’ve come across—but with a little more narration to liven it up. Let’s call it “Noah’s Roundup.”
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.
