But the Katine project is more than just a fundraising push. On our dedicated Katine website you will get the chance to find out how the money is spent, how development works (the successes and the failures) and how the lives of the sub-county's 25,000 inhabitants have changed.
There's about six months left of the Guardian's three-year, £2.5m project to help development work in Katine, a rural sub-county of north-east Uganda. The project includes extensive reporting on progress in education, health, water, governance and livelihoods.
It's also pioneering the use of the internet in a development project.
Back at the office Tuesday after a long holiday break. So lots of questions for me, and a busy day. Good to be back. It was also the day that Google announced a new mobile phone, the Nexus. Early reviews all say it’s fabulous, as good as the iPhone in many ways. It’s got a much better screen, they say, but correspondingly worse battery life. Not to be outdone, Apple has been leaking details of their next big thing – a tablet of some sort, to be announced late this month. There’s been lots of speculation about that on the blogs, of course. We can’t figure out what earth-shattering feature might differentiate an Apple tablet from previous, ho-hum tablets. Consensus is that it’s got to be different or Steve Jobs wouldn’t do it. Different and useful. More than “surfing the internet on the can” – which the iPhone and MacBook handle quite well, thank you. If anybody can, I am sure that Steve Jobs and company will figure out what a tablet is good for – or at least how to wow us enough that we’ll want one, too. But, wow, that it has come to this. Three years ago, the iPhone turned the cell phone handset business upside down. Now that the competition has caught up, Apple is moving on to something completely different – presumably an entirely new product line. They’ll still be printing money with iPhones. And we have come to expect that the Steve Jobs won’t do something that’s not revolutionary.
Movember is just like a walkathon, but with facial hair. Enterprising mustache growers sign up, then fundraise for the cause. In the US, that’s cancer research: both the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong benefit from donations.
In philanthropy, might it reduce the cult of the expert? Contests and competitions give rise to their own results-based expertise. Scaling, as always, becomes an issue, and people with scaling expertise even more valuable.
Fundraising comes to look like what Kiva’s Matt Flannery calls “the larger trend toward more connected experiences.” At home, we are all walkathoning (or growing mustaches) and asking our friends to help.
In journalism and publishing, it looks like the rise of the individual reputation and the individual voice. Blogs over mainstream publications. Aggregators will still be important, be they search engines, social networks, or perhaps mainstream web properties.
The shift to short, quick, forms like Twitter reduces the influence of professional copywriters. Amateurs have the time to write influential micro posts. Sharing among friends becomes the measure of influence.
This changes the search engines’ power as the reference source. Right now Google is struggling to keep up with real time publishing. Here’s Jeremiah Owyang on what the search engines’ shift to realtime means for reaching people:
Search marketers must understand that blasting marketing information through Facebook or Twitter won’t be effective, as search engines will filter out irrelevant messages that nobody listens to.
It comes down to content that’s useful, that other people can share. In a future where everybody writes, will anybody notice if your organization doesn’t?
My post for the Case Foundation blog this week looks the explosion of authorship (with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) -- and what that means for nonprofits. Click through to the original post on casefoundation.org, or listen to the audio above ipodding pleasure.
“Empathy increases generosity. The pictures and stories on the Kiva site increase understanding between various parties that would otherwise operate in completely different universes.” That’s Matt Flannery, Kiva’s CEO and co-founder replying in his guest post on David Roodman’s blog.
“If you’re going to advertise yourself as giving choice to the donor, you’d better do it.” That’s Mike Everett-Lane, formerly of Donor’s Choose, commenting on tacticalphilanthropy.com.
Openness buys an organization benefit of the doubt. Even in his initial post, David Roodman acknowledged that statistics in plain view on Kiva’s own website caused him to question Kiva’s message. There was clearly no skulduggery involved.
Listening pays. Kiva responded to the criticism with action. It altered those marketing materials, and Matt Flannery responded quite graciously in a guest blog post. But before any of that, Kiva’s staff listened.
I think 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. I trust the Kiva folks will keep refining. I will visit them today.
For more Kiva conversations – a post on my blog, Code, Camera, Action, outlines the story. The comments in particular, summarize how Kiva resolved the issue. For more detail, see this list of excerpts from the Kiva debate or Tim Ogden’s post linking to the major blog debate.
My post on the Case Foundation blog this week sums up the debate over Kiva and person-to-person fundraising. Plus audio, for your pod-listening pleasure.
Entrepreneurs look at things, see how they can be improved, tear down models, and rebuild them. So when we’ve experienced enormous successes in the for-profit world and then turn our eyes to higher causes, it’s only natural to think the same approach will work.
Granted there is ego at play, but are you going to tell someone who successfully sold a business or took a company public, that they can’t win again in a different sector? Good luck with that one!
For Geoff, an entrepreneur and blogger, advice to slow down is like reigning in the horses as they dash for the barn. Good luck with that one. And he's right, of course.
Having seen a few horses in this business, though, I was hoping to point out how the economics of nonprofits can work against that entrepreneurial spirit.
As a nonprofit, it can be a challenge to know if you're making progress, much less to best organize around it.
Can you imagine this conversation taking place in the private sector?
Nonprofit entrepreneur: I want to take a fundraising job for a nonprofit that's really changing the world. What do you think?
Mentor: Be careful not to get pigeonholed. "Once a fundraiser, always a fundraiser."
Maybe Sasha's example here is just isolated old-school thinking. I hope so. And maybe, as Geoff says, entrepreneurial spirit and gutsy social enterprise will be what shakes up slower organizations.
But I can think of a couple of things that could help speed that day for more entrepreneurs --
Competitions with incubation or startup coaching (a la Y Combinator)
Metrics for success. Government provides some of these statistics, larger NPOs and NGOs provide others
Market valuation for social enterprises. For another post, but in our attention economy, this may be possible.
David Roodman's long post is a great explanation of how Kiva works. It's also critical of the way Kiva markets.
Here's the issue. Let's say you make a $25 loan on kiva.org. You pick an entrepreneur, you make a loan. The web site makes it look like you have funded that particular entrepreneur. But that isn't really how the microfinance organization works. For practical reasons, that entrepreneur has already been funded by one of Kiva's partners on the ground. On one level, Kiva is open about this, providing dates of loans and so forth -- though its marketing simplifies these details. The post is well worth reading if, like me, you're a fan of Kiva or of microfinance generally.
There's a bigger issue here between the stories that motivate donors and poverty in the developing world. Do donor stories help fight poverty -- or do they put drag on the efficiency of the fight?
Kiva brings microcredit and microchips to child sponsorship. Like sponsorship charities, it is all about stories: it was inspired by them and it succeeds by telling them. As a result, it operates in a pincers between the giver’s desire for personal connection and the costs and constraints that imposes on business of serving poor people. In fact Kiva can be seen as an ingenious finessing of this old tension. Technology has brought down the cost of transmitting stories and images.
Though the cost of bringing these stories and photos back to sponsors has come down, it is still significant. Can we afford the photos and stories of entrepreneurs? How can we not afford them?
On Earth Day, 1971, a nonprofit called Keep America Beautiful launched TV ads to persuade people to stop littering.
If you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the '70s, you'll remember them. Each one featured an American Indian paddling or riding or walking through a trashy landscape and a grave voice over, ending with "People start polution. People can stop it." At the end of each ad, the camera zooms in on the Indian's face, onto a single tear. The crying Indian got America to stop littering. That ad is the one I remember most. Do watch it. Then forgive me a guess about what you're thinking: Powerful TV, but really. Of course, the '70s were top-down times. One example: Elvis Presley, master of media, had three TVs built into the wall of this basement at Graceland. Three televisions were all he needed to watch everything shown on TV in America. There were only three channels, so The King was set. The Indian in the ads was a career actor named Iron Eyes Cody. He became known as The Crying Indian -- better known for those ads than for any other role in in his career, which began when he was 12. While Iron Eyes lived his life as an Indian, Wikipedia says he was born Italian-American, from Louisiana. And there are all sorts of conspiratorial accusations against Keep America Beautiful. The organization purportedly got its funding from corporations and fast-food vendors. Wouldn't it be better, the accusers say, to encourage people to buy less styrofoam than to clean up litter? Yet the ads inspired genuine feeling. And people did (mostly) stop littering. A mark of their power today: their YouTube comments are mostly positive. What's the Crying Indian for our time? And, post-network-TV, what's the medium? The net, surely -- but which net? A thousand blogs? Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? (And do all the brand names in that list creep anybody out, is it just me?) I want to know what kind of campaign it would take to stop pollution -- really stop it.
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