Stories, software and strategies to help nonprofits do the social web
Nathaniel Whittemore on funding the causes (and friends) you know -- Today’s young people have grown up with access to more news - and more connectivity to direct on the ground sources - than ever before. We’re hungry to actually do, and less and less content to sit on the sidelines (or if you will, Morgan Stanley summer internships). When today’s young people are surveying their options for summers, and the options are getting research grants or volunteer positions with international nonprofits doing compelling...
November, 12 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Geoff Livingston responds to Kristin Ivie and my previous posts about new nonprofits. 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...
October, 13 2009 • 2 Comments • 0 Faves
Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, looks forward from the organization's fourth birthday -- What we will see, in the years to come, is that we are just at a beginning of a larger trend towards more connected experiences. Kiva is just one organization that will be part of a much larger shift. It is a shift towards personalization and partnership relationships of mutual dignity. Looking back, the $100M will seem like a small drop. The potential for big change from the aggregate tiny actions of many is now more enormous...
October, 8 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Paul Lamb writes: So how we can innovate the sector as a whole so any nonprofit can do better regardless of the prevailing economic winds? One radical idea is to adjust the nonprofit model and begin to let communities engage directly with causes and people in need. Taking a page from the playbook of peer-to-peer services such as eBay, charity "buyers" and "sellers" could engage directly without the need for a middleman. Instead of giving money to the United Way to support food banks, why not give the money...
October, 7 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
via ted.com TED talk by the Malawian teen who taught himself how to build windmills -- and brought electricity to his village. The BBC has a text version of the story.
October, 6 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Knight is rethinking how to deal with projects funded by the foundation that are later sold. “It’s a safe bet that grant agreements are going to change in the future,” [Gary Kebel] told a large crowd gathered to hear about the Knight News Challenge. (He also described EveryBlock’s sale to MSNBC as a “multi-million-dollar deal.”) When a Knight-funded project is acquired in the future, Kebbel said, the founders may be required to relinquish some of that money: “It might be a certain percentage, it might be a certain...
October, 4 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Kristin, my colleague at the Case Foundation, has some good advice for folks thinking of starting their own nonprofit: think twice. http://www.socialcitizens.org/blog/start-nonprofit The post goes on to list some ways of partnering with existing orgs -- to do the good works without having to do your own 501(c)3. With one nonprofit for every 300 Americans, that's probably a good idea. But I wonder what it is about nonprofit thinking that makes successful, businesslike individuals forget their horse sense. Nonprofiteers...
October, 1 2009 • 2 Comments • 0 Faves
Nearly 100 new nonprofits are created in the U.S. every day about 35,000 a year most of them doing the same things as existing organizations wrestling with the same social problems. Over 90% are very small with less than half a million dollars in annual revenues. In his recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Mark Kramer wrote that, because of fragmentation, redundancy, and the plethora of small organizations "there is little reason to assume that [nonprofits] have the ability to solve society's...
October, 1 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Mark Kramer writes about a new kind of philanthropy he calls catalytic, where donors don't just write checks. You might call it problem-solving philanthropy -- The donors stopped thinking about which organizations to support, and started to think about how to solve a specific problem, using every skill, connection, and resource they possessed. The donors formulated clear and practical goals that enabled them to identify the steps needed to succeed. Above all, the donors took responsibility for finding solutions...
September, 3 2009 • 0 Comments • 0 Faves
Startup thinking for the social sector. Code to help nonprofits do the social web. Plus photography.
(And reading aloud.)
More about Eric Johnson.
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