Nonprofits and Transparency

Lucy Bernholz, in her usual smart and insightful way, has written a terrific post on philanthropy and transparency, Downsides of Transparency. She is riffing on an article that Larry Lessig wrote for the New Republic entitled, Against Transparency.

Lessig’s arguments are more provocative than right. There is, of course, nothing inherently bad with opening up the black hole of government and sharing data with the public. And the Sunlight Foundation, of which Lessig is oddly an adviser, has led the charge in making data available to the public to enable it to connect the dots of connections between contributions, lobbyists and legislation. Ellen Miller and Mike Klein, the co-founders of the Sunlight Foundation, make a terrific counter argument to Lessing writing, “we argue that more transparency in politics will enable a healthy dynamic of rising public attention and engagement in demanding more accountability from government.”

As one would imagine, there was considerable pushback against Lessig’s take around the web. You can see different opinions here, by Patrice McDermott a long-time advocate for government openness, and David Weinberger here, and in the incomparable way that only he can, Micah Sifry here.

I don’t buy Lessig’s argument that there is such as thing as too much transparency in government. But I do buy Lucy’s concern that requiring too much transparency of foundations may drive them into the dark, back rooms without any sunlight of donor advised funds. The difference is that government is public and foundations are private entities. Even with their enormous tax breaks, foundations are private entities that more than any other kind of  institution has very little incentive to make their operations and programs more open and transparent except out of a noble assumption that by doing so they will be more effective.

My area of interest is in nonprofit organizations, which I think in some ways are harder to get our hands around in regards to transparency (does everyone thing that their sector is the most important?)  because nonprofits aren’t public entities and aren’t as private as foundations. We’re somewhere in between. Esther Dyson was right when she said at Transparency Camp a few months ago, “You cannot be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.” And, of course, no one would want a social service agency to reveal the private files of their clients or a clinic to reveal their health records. So, where is the transparency middle ground for nonprofits?

We need to begin from one fundamental premise: Transparency is not a technology tool. It is aided by technology. At its core, a value that creates organizational norms. The default setting for too many nonprofit organizations, to date, has been to the closed, proprietary side of the dial. We need a new transparency default setting and err on the side of openness, or sunlight as Ellen would say!

Nonprofits need to begin to ask themselves questions about transparency to guide their work. These questions include:

1. Will sharing this information advance our mission of benefiting our community?

2. How can others build on our content and make it better?

3. Will revealing this information improve morale and make staff feel better informed and able to make decisions on their own?

4. Will sharing this information better connect us to our network and help us to build relationships that we need to be successful?

Nonprofits spend too much time worrying about things that could go wrong or how they might be able to create a new revenue stream with their content. Both conversations are time spent putting up big walls between organizations and their communities. Take the walls down, make transparency the default setting.

Listening = Leadership

I had two unusual visitors today here in my home office. Jordan and Chris, two FBI agents came calling, and yes, they were both wearing dark suits and ties, although I didn’t they were not wearing dark sunglasses.

They were conducting a background check on a former colleague of mine and came to ask a few questions. (And said it was fine to blog about conversation.)

One question was what leadership qualities my colleague had exhibited. My immediate answer was that he was a great listener. My new FBI friend stopped short. He said he had been doing these interviews for a while and had never heard that answer. Really, I said, that’s a shame because in my mind it is the most critical for effective leadership.

As Beth and I are writing our book the question of where to put listening has come up time and again. Basically, we want to put it everywhere because it affects everything that an organization does, can do, should do in concert with their ecosystems. Social media are unique tools in that amplify good listening and bad listening, as well. So, for instance, it is clear when an organization has their ear to the ground and is hearing what bloggers and Twitterers are saying about the organization, and joining the conversation. All of the staff at the Sunlight Foundation are really adept listeners.

But when an organization is being talked about and the organization or company isn’t listening it’s far more aggregious. Remember the angry mommy blogger storm about the tone dear Motrin ad about all of those crazy and tired moms with sore backs from lugging their babies around in slings?

Beth has written extensively and beautifully about the power of using social media tools for listening. We ought to expect that organizational leaders are adept and appreciative of the power of listening as an important, in my mind the most important, criteria to effectively lead their organizations in the Connected Age.

Nonprofits are Falling Behind Gov 2.0

A few days ago, I tweeted my friend Marty to ask him about an article he had mentioned a while back on how the Department of Defense uses network structures to combat terrorism. I thought this would be a great example to get the attention of nonprofity folks: “Look, even the Dept. of Defense is embracing network structures, so, why are you stuck in your hierarchies!”

Within minutes, I got a tweet back from — YES — the Department of Defense!  A very nice tweeter named ArmyNYC was doing a good job of listening on Twitter and responded immediately and offered help in finding the materials I was looking for. The twitterer was in real life a public affairs officer at the Army Public Affairs office in heart of Manhattan.

The revolution in how government works is in full force right now. We really are at a historic moment in time wherein all of the pie-in-the-sky that I and my fellow geeks speculated about last year in our anthology on next generation government in Rebooting America is happening. Now, chronicled every day by the brilliant folks at the Sunlight Foundation and TechPresident,is Gov 2.0 for transparency. Conversations are fully embraced and, hopefully, maybe, a growing, trusting relationship and conversation between constituents and public officials on blogs, websites and Twitter is happening. It certainly helps that we have the tech savviest administration in history using the internet as effectively to govern as they did to campaign.  Check out Recovery.gov and Serve.gov is you haven’t already.

And then I saw this post from Katya: Nonprofit websites even worse than government ones . . . Turns out a new research report by a market research firm called ForSee entitled Trends in Constituent Satisfaction
with Nonprofit Websites: Building Membership, Donations, and Loyalty through the Web Channel [Warning: very annoying and unnecessary amount of personal info needed to input before able to download the report!] reports that nonprofit websites score a mediocre 73 out of 100 on their quality scale, a point behind E-government sites!

I did a survey in 2007 for the Overbrook Foundation that found that only 25% of the human rights grantees in our sample had a blog that allowed for comments. And I’m not sure the results would be much different today even though nonprofits are joining online social networking sites at a torrid pace as the NTEN survey revealed this week.

Why are we so slow as a sector to embrace Web 2.0? It’s confounding, but here are a few guesses:

1.We are an extremely risk averse sector. Foundations and large donors are by nature risk averse, and this trickles down to grantees. Web 2.0 feels too open and trasnparent to feel safe.  See, look what happened to Domino’s Pizza, after all?

2. We are terrible listeners. Ongoing learning, whether it’s the serendipitous learning of listening to the blogosphere and Twittersphere about your cause and issues, or the more systemic learning of evaluation, are simply not valued in the sector. If they were, we would have more data on what’s effective and how much evaluation is funded and done. We don’t. Period. Feel free to disagree. You can find the one shining example of an org. that learns brilliant on an ongoing basis. Trot out Teach for America and City Year for the umpteenth time. OK, that’s two, only 699,000 to go!  If you’re not focused on listening to and learning from your constituents, then embracing social media that enables that becomes less important.  I’ve never listened before, they seem to say, so why start now?

3. The generational divide is so much more prevalent and harmful to the sector than the digital divide. The Boomers that run organizations from staff or board positions don’t get it. It’s what their kids do, not what grown-ups should have to do.  They just want to close their eyes and go back to their Rolodex’ and date books and wish the whole thing would go away.

Of course, I don’t agree with any of these reasons!  But they are my best guess as to why we’re  falling behind even the government in making the transition to the new world. We’re like print media, desperately clinging to the shores of the old world in the hopes that the storm will blow over.

More Exciting Twitter News

Several exciting Twitter developments over the past few days as clearly the power of micro-messages continues to sweep the globe.

On the oft-dreary newspaper front, The Guardian in London has taken the bold and necessary step to close down it’s printing presses and shift to reporting the news entirely by Tweets.  According to the Guardian:

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

This is a very exciting development in the race to find a new publishing model for newspapers.  Hopefully the Knight Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies are taking note and finding ways to encourage their newspaper project grantees to go all Atwitter as well.

In related Twitter news, the Sunlight Foundation, always strategically perched at the cutting edge of technology and governance, has announced a new campaign to require all future government bills to be 140 characters and posted on Twitter. The legislation will be posted 72 hours in advance to ensure that all Americans have enough time to read the entire Tweet prior to any vote.  In the announcement of the campaign, Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s co-founder said, “Our Twitter Legislation Campaign will ensure that special interests are kept out of legislation; or at least kept to 12 or fewer characters. Every American deserves the right to read the Tweet before legislators vote on them.”  Sunlight is also organizing a campaign in partnership with Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action to change the voting system to enable all Americans to vote by Twitter.

Stay twuned for more Twitter news!

• *Happy April Fools Day everyone — hopefully we haven’t lost our sense of humor with our wallets this year!**

Sunlight’s Twitter Lobby Campaign

The Sunlight Foundation, always pushing the envelope on using social media tools to influence policy making in Washington, announced yesterday the launch of an effort to use Twitter to lobby individual Congress people to vote for

In an email received yesterday, Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of Sunlight, wrote:

Currently there are 17 senators tweeting and we intend to get our supporters to @lobby them to seek their support for S. 482. We believe that this will be the first organized direct lobbying of members of Congress over Twitter.

For those of you who don’t speak Washington, S. 482 is a bill introduced in the Senate to require the electronic disclosure of Senate campaign finance reports.

Not everyone thought this campaign was a great idea.  Ethan Zuckerman wrote a blog post that said, in part:

I realized that the “ask” of the campaign was to send 17 identical tweets to the congresscritters who’ve adopted Twitter. This means that all my twitter followers get to see me nagging Congress – including the roughly half of them that don’t live in the US – with seventeen messages. And it means that Congressfolk start seeing what amounts to Twitter spam, and start dismissing it much as they learned to dismiss email.
So, has Twitter jumped the shark and just become another tool for spamming politicians and decision makers?  Or is it, could it, be something fundamentally different? What if the focus of the campaign was to ask (a nicer word than insist, but perhaps the reality in is somewhere in between) that the 17 tweeting Senators engage in a discussion on Twitter about how we can help them to get this bill passed.  Twitter has so far been used by elected officials as a one-way communication tool, they tweet about what’s on their mind, and we get to listen in. We could ask/insist that they use Twitter to engage in a two-way conversation about legislation. Would it be possible to get Senators to stop talking for a minute and start listening?  Pretty high bar, I know, but perhaps worth reaching for.

Keeping Us In the Dark on the Wall Street Bailout

Do you really trust Washington politicians to get this bailout right?  An enormously expensively, risky proposal comes flying up the Hill from the White House and Congress meekly agrees – sound familiar?  Show us the bill, says the Sunlight Foundation!

Of Course, Next Prez Needs to Listen to Ellen Miller

Wired Magazine confirmed what I already knew — the next President, whoever he is, needs to listen to Ellen Miller, the driving force behind the Sunlight Foundation (and 14 others)!  We know how social media are shaping this campaign, Ellen and her colleagues at Sunlight are leading the way on how it can also shape what we know about our government and how we can shape public policy with better information.

So Many Cool New Sites, So Little Time

I’ve seen so many cool new sites in the last week but two in particular that I wanted to share:

• Witness’ long awaited video hub, called The Hub, is up and running. It is billed as a “global platform for human rights and actio.” The Hub enables human rights activists around the world to upload videos of human rights abuses right to the site. This ensures that activists working on the ground in countries with repressive regimes can bear witness to abuse without implicating themselves by airing the videos themselves. This is disaggregation in the best sense of the term; a video channel particular to the human rights arena under the guiding direction of a quality organization that knows how to share information effectively. Witness is also a wonderfully transparent organization having recently released it’s annual “Performance Assessment Dashboard” a candid assessment of the organization’s progress over the last twelve months.
• Another quality organization, The Sunlight Foundation, announced it’s participation in a new service called, ” Government Documents that gives anyone with an Internet connection the power to investigate the federal government. ” Created in partnership with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the tools allows individual and teams of citizens to review where and how projects are funded by Congress and the interactions between Congress (particularly individual elected officials) and the federal agencies.