Participating in the Ping Pong Match

Beth and I had a fun discussion at Fenton Communications about The Networked Nonprofit last week. Over and again the notion of integration came up, integration of old media and new, online and on land efforts. On the media side, Geoff Livingston calls this the “ping pong match” between old and new media.

There were a number of times during the conversation at Fenton when someone said something to the effect of, “The effort started to go viral online, and then really took off when (insert mainstream media outlet) reported on it.” For instance, Sean Stannard-Stockton blogged about FORGE’s struggle to stay afloat which is then picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle - and then picked up by more bloggers.

My gut feel is that recently, particular as budgets have been slashed at newspapers, some of the pong has been lost in this equation. I mean that it feels  as though there are far more instances of mainstream media picking up stories from social media, and then it rebounding back and forth, than the other way around. But, I could be wrong about that. I’ve been known to be wrong about other things, like the whole metric system taking off here!

What is important is to help senior staff and boards of nonprofits overcome what I call the nonprofit zero-sum game. The knee jerk, defensive posture, that working online precludes working on land, or using social media is at the expense of traditional forms of outreach. The future of nonprofit is not going to be one channel, one tool, one medium ever, but a blend of many different types of tools and channels. The real challenge for organizations is figuring out the right combination of tools and channels that will be unique to their efforts and organizations.

Giving Guidelines for Disasters Part II

The response to my post the other day about the need of developing giving guidelines for natural disasters was very positive. And I’ve been following other developments online unfold throughout the week as well. Based on what I’ve been reading and discussing with folks, I’d like to expand on my original proposal for national guidelines for giving for natural disasters.

I’d like to begin with a point of clarification. The focus of my proposal is on the immediate affects of an event. In his excellent post on what donors can learn from past disasters, Michael Seltzer calls this period “immediate relief.” What I’m not focused on here is coordinating relief efforts or creating a central fund for nonprofit relief organizations. I’ll let others has those things out. I am simply focused on providing guidelines for giving donations to relief organizations in the first throes of a large natural disaster.

I wanted to mention an interesting experiment happening on the Great Nonprofits website. The idea is to crowdsource relief organizations that are doing a great job. It’s an interesting idea that needs some tweaking in order to be really effective. First, they need a bigger crowd in order to really do this well. Small crowds are good for somethings, like a technical review of a legal document, but bigger ones are needed to assess the performance of organizations working around the world in difficult circumstances.  However, that’s not the real problem. The real issue is that I don’t think crowds should be assessing relief organizations. It’s simply too easy for organizations and their supporters to game a system. Instead we should have an independent, rigorous assessment after significant relief efforts to ascertain which organizations performed well. What we could crowdsource are the criteria for quality relief work.

I was asked who would host the guidelines? Well, it’s a social media world, we don’t need one host, guidelines can live everywhere online and when an event happens organizations, bloggers, tweeters can share them and encourage people to abide by them. At this point, perhaps a group like The Clinton Global Initiative (not to be confused with the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund which is collecting huge sums of money to be given, sometime in the future to unspecified organizations.) Or maybe it’s something a Philanthropy Ambassador’s office as outlined here in this interesting post by Sean Stanndard-Stockton could spearhead.

So, let’s get started!

Step 1: Based on past events and experiences, develop criteria for what is needed for immediate relief.

Step 2: Identify a core group of organizations that meet these criteria. The groups could be organized by geography as Tony Pipa suggested.

Step 3: Draft the guidelines including which organizations in which parts of the world. Just as importantly these guidelines would outline  WHAT NOT TO GIVE TO within, say, the first thirty days. Meaning don’t try to send food or clothing but rather give money to these organizations.

Step 4 Disseminate the guideliens to organizations, media, bloggers and tweeters.

Is it just me, or does this seem pretty simple?

Redlining Online

Ivan Boothe wrote a terrific post last week about Causes taking down its application from MySpace. Causes is an application for use on social networking sites. it enables users to highlight causes that they care about asking friends to join their cause and also to make donations.

Since its launch in 2006, there are around 250,000 Causes on Facebook. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. They are people who are passionate about something, say the high cost of tuition or global warming writ large, and want their friends to know about it. That leaves about 46,000 causes that are connected to a specific nonprofit organization.I have written before about the meaning of Causes on Facebook.

Last year Causes broadened its reach to MySpace. By shutting down the application on MySpace, Causes is leaving about 184,000 cause enthusiasts out in the cold.  The number of users on MySpace was tiny compared to the reported 30 million active monthly users of Causes on Facebook. And, according to the Facebook Causes blog, the application has helped raise more than $12 million for nonprofits based in the U.S. and Canada. Over $5 million has been raised in 2009 alone.

This stirred quite a bit of commentary last week with very thoughtful pieces from Ivan as mentioned above, Amy Sample Ward, and Sean Stannard-Stockton. They noted the lack of robustness of the Causes application on MySpace compared to Facebook, the lack of conversation by and from Causes about why they made the decision, what it means for MySpace users, and the risk that nonprofit organizations take when they use third party applications like Causes to help build community online.

But there was one argument in particular that really resonated with me. When I first heard the news, I immediately began to think about a terrific, provocative talk that danah boyd gave last summer at the Personal Democracy Forum. It was appropriately titled, “The Not So Hidden Politics of Class Online.” Here is the video from her talk. She talked about the emerging online divides by race and class that are appearing, particularly the differences between the college-oriented people on Facebook and the non-college population on MySpace.

danah’s talk resonated with a post by Justin Maasa entitled “Social Networking Redlining.” Redlining was the practice of banks to steer their mortgages to people of certain races and ethnicities in certain neighborhoods. In other words, a way to keep African Americans out of certain neighborhoods was for banks not to lend them mortgages. This short post really summed up something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, the tension between the natural friending that happens on social networking sites that create cliques and silos and that can’t be avoided, and the institutional boundaries that are being created between sites like Facebook and MySpace.It is the institutional boundaries that nonprofit organizations should be fighting the hardest to try to breach.

Causes made a business decision, they were not making, or foreseeing, a return on investment for the application on MySpace. That’s entirely their right. The problem from a social change point of view are the number of nonprofit organizations that are shying away from MySpace in favor of Facebook. some assume from the popular press that MySpace is dying – it isn’t. Some assume that it isn’t cool to be on MySpace now. Or worse, they are focusing their organizational efforts towards Facebook because that’s where they hang out in their off time, that’s where their friends and family are socializing.

Social change needs to happen everywhere. Nonprofit organizations are charged with making it happen, intentionally, in easy places and harder places. MySpace may be a more challenging environment for some nonprofit organizations but it doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be there. Perhaps it means that they need to be there even more, to help raise awareness of issue, listen to what people are saying, and help to organize. Only by intentionally reaching out to communities that are too often overlooked will nonprofit organizations be able to help take down the boundaries that are keeping the voices of marginalized communities from being heard.

I’m glad that this issue was raised and led to a constructive conversation about the need for nonprofits not to overlook MySpace. Thanks to everyone for participating in an interesting dialogue.

 

 

AIG Does It Again

Just when you thought AIG couldn’t sink any lower or act any more despicable, this in yesterday from the New York Post:

Insurance giant AIG is trying to seize a $490 million charitable endowment — and claw back $27 million it already awarded to New York charities — to pay executive bonuses.

The story is a very complicated web of an offshore company called Starr International Co., created to fund bonuses and retirement funds for AIG employees. But Starr also underwrote the Starr International Foundation which are the funds the company now wants back to pay bonuses to employees.

Any story that has AIG and bonuses seems destined to highlight the tone deafness of the company. But there is another story here as well which is the tension that often develops between company founders, Hank Greenberg, who become enamored of their ability to use company stock to create philanthropic entitites, and future managers who may feel less charitable.

Sean Stannard-Stockton writes about a big shift in corporate philanthropy of focusing on the effect of their giving rather than on the package of the gift itself.  Too much corporate giving has focused on looking good rather than doing good. But I don’t think corporations should get stuck on measuring too much. They generally give to ultra image safe programs that are simply good to do; donations to food banks and books for kids and breast cancer research.

But what they do have to think about is being good citizens in their communities. I dispute the notion that the only purpose of companies is to make money. They are important entities in their communities and should model good citizenship as well.  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have continued to recognize their great importance as citizens of the DC area through their ongoing, albeit smaller, giving efforts. On the other hand, one of the saddest moment of the economic downturn this year as the closing of the New York Times and Boston Globe Foundation.

AIG continues to show its true colors; green for greed and yellow for deceit.