Disrupting Philanthropy FINAL

Disrupting
Philanthropy
Technology and the
Future of the Social Sector
Lucy Bernholz
with Edward Skloot and Barry Varela
Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society
Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University
1
Authors
Lucy Bernholz is the Founder and President of Blueprint Research
& Design, Inc., a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic
individuals and institutions achieve their missions. Bernholz is
the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award-winning blog on the
business of giving. She is currently the HAND Foundation Fellow in
Philanthropy at the New America Foundation and a visiting scholar at
the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
Edward Skloot is Director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy

and Civil Society and Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at
the Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. From 1989
until 2007, he served as the CEO of the Surdna Foundation, a $1
billion family philanthropy. Prior to working at Surdna, he founded
and ran New Ventures, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in social
entrepreneurship projects and management assistance for nonprofits.
Skloot serves on the boards of directors of Independent Sector; Venture
Philanthropy Partners; Citizen Schools; Partners for Palliative Care;
and TROSA, the largest residential therapeutic community in North
Carolina.
Barry Varela directs the Teaching Case Writing Program of the

Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society. Before coming
to Duke, he was the project editor for the Early Intervention Training
Center for Infants and Toddlers with Visual Impairments, an initiative
of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at
UNC-Chapel Hill. He has also worked in trade book publishing and as
a self-employed editor and writer.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the following individuals for their
contributions to Disrupting Philanthropy: Diana Aviv, Akhtar Badshah,
David Bollier, John Bracken, Sarah Burdick, Robin Ganzert, Will
Heaton, Lakshmi Karan, Geoff Livingston, Darin McKeever, Jane
Meseck, Mario Morino, Marcus Peacock, Susan Promislo, Lee Rainie,
Kyle Reis, Patrick Sabol, Brad Smith, Melissa Stevens, and Debby Visser;
and everyone who commented on the draft versions at Philanthropy
2173 and Philanthropy Central and through Twitter.
Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector
Copyright © 2010 Duke University.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike.
Cover image “5076 backlit leaves” by Flickr user arthurcoddington licensed under Creative
Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society

Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University
201 Science Drive
Durham, NC 27708
Blueprint Research & Design

720 Market Street, Suite 900
San Francisco, CA 94102
Book design by Randi Scherwin, Scherwin Design, LLC
ISBN TK
Funding for Disrupting Philanthropy was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.
Contents
Summary 1
Introduction 3
The Philanthropic Landscape 6
Philanthropy’s Long Tails 10
Stories of Change 16
Five Philanthropic Practices 20
Glimpses of the Future 33

Conclusion 45
Resources 47

Summary
This monograph explores the immediate and longer-term implications
of networked digital technologies for philanthropy. Our claim is that
information networks are transforming philanthropy. Enormous
databases and powerful new visualization tools can be accessed instantly
by anyone, at any time.

We provide a brief overview of the philanthropic landscape,
followed by an explanation of the “long tail” of giving and receiving.
Case studies of FasterCures and the Edna McConnell Clark
Foundation show how information networks have transformed the
grantmaking strategies of some institutional funders. Next, we examine
how networked technologies are affecting five philanthropic practices:
• Setting goals and formulating strategy: how funders and
enterprises make decisions about what to do, where, and how.
• Building social capital: how funders and enterprises support one
another, cooperate, and collaborate.
• Measuring progress: how funders and enterprises set
benchmarks, measure outputs, and make course corrections
along the way.
1
Disrupting Philanthropy
• Measuring outcomes and impact: how funders and enterprises

know whether what they’ve done has made a difference.
• Accounting for the work: how funders and enterprises account
for what they do, to the public at large and to regulators.
We then offer a glimpse of what is to come. While the future is
unknowable to a large degree, we feel confident in predicting we’ll see
an increase in the following three phenomena:
• New blendings of market-based and nonmarket solutions.
• Networked, boundaryless, and often temporary alliances that
call for the creation of new ways of activating, coordinating, and
governing cooperative efforts.
• More and better data, more readily available and at lower cost.
We conclude by pointing out that inequities of access and
capacity prevent many individuals and institutions from benefitting
from information networks. We believe the next decade will see
explosive growth in networking for good, creating opportunities for
creative solutions to large social problems.
2
Introduction
A decade ago, the landscape of philanthropy was relatively simple. There
were foundations—private, community, and corporate—that awarded
grants to nonprofits. Some of the larger staffed foundations also offered
“technical assistance” to their grantees and undertook other activities
such as convening meetings, engaging in advocacy, and financing
litigation. Community foundations administered unrestricted,
restricted, and donor-advised funds. Individuals gave money to
nonprofits as well, mainly through personal checks or cash (while living)
and bequests (upon death).

Ten years ago, givers both institutional and individual gathered
information about nonprofits mainly through word-of-mouth. There
was no easy way for foundation executives, let alone average citizens, to
compare the financial health or budget-allocation practices of different
organizations. Today, ratings services like Charity Navigator and
Charity Guide assemble, analyze, and make available data on tens of
thousands of organizations.
Ten years ago, commercial investment firms were small players
on the philanthropic landscape. Today, companies like Charles Schwab
and Fidelity Investments offer wide ranges of products for donors,
including advised funds, foundation management services, and socially
responsible investment vehicles.

3
Ten years ago, socially responsible investment was a niche

concern mainly of universities, labor unions, and a few pension funds.
Today, socially responsible investment accounts for more than 10% of
professionally managed investment funds and is expected to total $3
trillion by next year.
Ten years ago, individual citizens were unable to contribute
directly in response to a natural disaster like the 2001 Gujarat,
India, earthquake. The best they could do was send money to a large
international nonprofit like the American Red Cross. Today, a worldwide
community of “crisis mappers,” using satellite imagery and on-the-ground
information reported via cell phone, helps coordinate responses to
complex humanitarian emergencies.

Ten years ago, microfinance was entirely top-down—from large
institutional lenders to small borrowers. Today, anyone can lend $25 to
entrepreneurs located anywhere on the globe.
Information networks—the Internet primarily, and increasingly
SMS (text-messaging) and 3G (smart-phone) cell phone technologies—are
overturning core practices of philanthropic foundations and individuals.
Enormous databases and powerful new visualization tools can be accessed
instantly by anyone, at any time. A decade of experimentation in online
giving, social enterprise, and collaboration has brought us to a place from
which innovation around enterprise forms, governance, and finance will
only accelerate.
The legal scholar Yochai Benkler has observed that the
“networked information economy” that emerged over the past two
decades is rooted in a “communications environment built on cheap
processors with high computational capabilities, interconnected in a
pervasive network” (i.e., the Internet) and is “centered on information
(financial services, accounting, software, science) and cultural (films,
music) production.” The shift from a centralized, top-down, often
impenetrable information economy to a networked information economy
has allowed “nonmarket, nonproprietary motivations and organizational
forms [to become] more important to the information production
4
Introduction
system.” It has also enabled “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative

efforts—peer production of information, knowledge, and culture.” 1

As we scan the landscape of philanthropy, we’ll see these
themes—the importance of nonmarket, nonproprietary motivations and
organizational forms and the emergence of effective, large-scale cooperative
efforts—lurking constantly just below the surface.
The widespread availability of broadband Internet access and the
near ubiquity of SMS and 3G cell phone networks give everyone the tools
of both production and consumption. They expand individuals’ sense of
empowerment and lead to profound changes in expectations and norms.
What information matters to funders and nonprofits? Who has it? Who
owns it? How do we share it? How do we collaborate around common
issues? How quickly can individuals and groups act when information is
accessible 24/7?
In 1911, Andrew Carnegie created a general-purpose
philanthropic entity—the foundation in its modern form. Two years
later, John D. Rockefeller established the Rockefeller Foundation. Both
men found that, to provide money and know-how in support of the social
good, they needed to create centralized, vertically integrated institutions
modeled on the big businesses (steel, oil) from which their fortunes
derived. This institutional structure has remained the predominant model
for organized philanthropy for almost a century. Today, peer-supported,
data-informed, passion-activated, and technology-enabled networks
represent a new structural form in philanthropy, and the institutions
that support them will need to be as flexible, scalable, and portable as the
networks they serve.
On the cusp of the first modern foundation’s centennial, we may
be looking at the dawn of a new form of organizing, giving, and governing
that is better informed, more aware of complex systems, more collaborative,
more personal, more nimble, and ultimately, perhaps, more effective.
1
Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 206, pp. 3-4.
5
The Philanthropic Landscape
Philanthropy is the donation of money or labor toward the production of
social good.2 The vehicles through which Americans give include:
• Private foundations, ranging from small, unstaffed family
foundations to large, professionally staffed multibillion-dollar
institutions.
• Corporate foundations.
• Unrestricted, restricted, and donor-advised funds held by
community foundations.
• Unrestricted, restricted, and donor-advised funds administered
by religious, ethnic, or racial community groups such as the
Jewish Federations.
• Donor-advised funds administered by commercial institutions
such as Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, and National Philanthropic
Trust.
• Donor-advised funds administered by freestanding institutions
such as the American Endowment Foundation.
2
In the American tradition (less so in the British), a distinction is drawn between charity, which seeks to
alleviate immediate human suffering, and philanthropy, which seeks to solve or mitigate complex social
problems that neither governments nor markets have been able, or seen fit, to fix. For the purposes of this
monograph, “philanthropy” will be understood to include both impulses.
6
The Philanthropic
Landscape
• Donor networks, such as the Global Impact Investing Network’s

Investors’ Council and the Growth Philanthropy Network,
socially responsible investment clubs, and similar organizations.
• Individual donations of money and labor.
• Bequests.
Many nonprofits build much of their operating and capital
budgets through sales of products and/or fees for service, including from
the government. Indeed, nonprofits cumulatively receive far more money
from the public sector (local, state, and federal governments) than they
do from the
private sector
Foundation Facts and Figures (foundations and
Total U.S. giving in 2008 was estimated to be individuals).
$307.65 billion. Of that total, about $45.6 billion
was given by foundations. Despite
the prominence
There are about 75,000 private foundations, of very large
2,500 corporate foundations, and 700 community
foundations
foundations in the United States.
like the Bill &
Of those foundations, about 28,000 have assets of Melinda Gates
less than $1 million; 47,000 have assets between Foundation,
$1 million and $10 million; 3,200 between $10 individual
million and $25 million; and 2,700 have assets over
donations of
$25 million.
money and labor
In 2006, there were about 3,200 private and are the largest
community foundations with paid staff. The total component of
number of staff employed by foundations was philanthropy,
about 17,500.
annually
Figures come from the Foundation Center, the Urban Institute, the constituting
IRS, and other sources, and are presented here as rough estimates. about 75% of
the total.3
3
GivingUSA Foundation, http://www.philanthropy.iupui.edu/News/2009/docs/GivingReaches300billion_06102009.pdf
7
Americans also contribute to the production of social good

by investing in enterprises that purport to produce both financial and
social returns—the “double bottom line.” Because some potential
income is, presumably, foregone by the decision to invest in companies
that do good, some percentage of the estimated $2.71 trillion held in
“socially responsible investment” funds4 should be considered social
good finance as well.
Furthermore, a range of entities assist, support, and facilitate
giving. They are not themselves sources of money, but rather help steer
where the money goes. They are frequently known as intermediaries;
some are organized as nonprofits, others as profit-making. These entities
include:
• Affinity groups of foundations organized around such rubrics
as geography (Southeastern Council of Foundations), program
area (Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media), giving vehicle
(PRI Makers Network), and profession (Grants Managers
Network).
• Back-office support providers—attorneys, accountants, wealth
managers, and the service professionals who assist donors,
including family offices, and trust companies—and outsourced
servicing firms for private foundations such as Foundation
Source.
• Philanthropy advisors who counsel individuals and families and
who help establish and manage family foundations.
• Commercial institutions that offer donor-advised funds and
socially responsible investment options.
• Online philanthropy marketplaces. Sites such as GlobalGiving,
DonorsChoose, and VolunteerMatch facilitate donations of
money or labor. Other sites, such as Kiva, MyC4, and the
Social Impact Exchange, facilitate loans and other forms of
4
There is no single industry standard for defining or measuring socially responsible investment. See the
discussion at http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2009/09/impact-investing-index.html.
8
The Philanthropic
Landscape
investment. Online information hubs such as GuideStar,

GiveWell, and Charity Navigator describe and assess the quality
of nonprofits.
The last category represents a genuinely new development in
the philanthropic landscape. These sites can potentially connect a vast
number of potential donors (institutional and individual) to a vast
number of potential recipients. They service the so-called long tail.
9
Philanthropy’s Long Tails
The long tail is a marketing strategy that connects products that have
relatively small customer bases to those customers. Large companies such
as Amazon and Netflix service the long tail by stocking not only very
popular titles like the latest Dan Brown novel or Jim Carrey movie—
products that may have millions of customers—but also thousands of
things like poetry collections and documentaries: products that may have
only a few hundred customers each. Cumulatively, the long tail of books
sold by Amazon—ten copies of a scholarly study here, twenty copies of a
memoir there—exceeds the sales of best-sellers.5
In the same way that Amazon allows the 200 individuals in the
world who are interested in reading about some esoteric topic find the
10 books written on that topic, online philanthropy marketplaces allow
individuals to find, evaluate, and invest in or fund the small enterprise or
project that is of interest to them. And conversely, online marketplaces
allow the small enterprise to find the few individuals willing to invest
in or fund it. The long tail of philanthropy describes this dispersion of
resources contributed for social good: millions of people, each providing
small amounts of money to tens of thousands of enterprises.
Figure 1, “The Long Tail of Giving,” shows how the funder market is
organized. In 2008, the 400 largest foundation givers ranged from the Gates
5
Brynjolffson, Smith, and Hu, in “Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased
Product Variety at Online Booksellers” (2003), calculated that about 48% of Amazon’s book sales came from
titles outside the top 40,000 sellers. Since “best-seller” is usually taken to mean only the top 100 sellers, it’s
safe to say that more than half of Amazon’s sales come from non-best-sellers.
10
Philanthropy’s
Long Tails
Foundation, which gave $2.8 billion, to the Greater St. Louis Community
Foundation, which gave $14.4 million; cumulatively, the 400 gave $22.2
billion.6 The 60 largest individual donors ranged from the late Leona
Helmsley, who left $5.2 billion to create a charitable foundation, to Oscar
Tang, who gave $25 million to Phillips Andover Academy; cumulately, the
60 gave $10.6 billion. Together, the 400 foundations and 60 individuals gave
about $32.8 billion to charitable causes in 2008—a small portion of the
$307.7 billion given by all donors.
Online information exchanges focus on the long tail that makes
up the right-hand side of Figure 1: the millions of smaller donors who,
cumulatively, account for about eight times as many dollars as do the very
biggest institutional and individual givers. It is the similarity between
marketing on the long tail (poetry chapbooks v. best-sellers) and giving on the
long tail (you and I, each with $200, v. the Gates Foundation) that is crucial to
understanding one feature of the new philanthropic landscape.
6
Figures drawn from the Foundation Center’s Foundation Directory Online.
11
Figure 2, “The Long Tail of Receiving,” shows how the nonprofit

market is organized. (Figures come from the National Center for
Charitable Statistics and are based on the approximately 355,000
non-foundation nonprofits that filed tax returns in 2008.) As with
the funder market, which is populated on the left-hand side by big
foundations and high-net-worth individuals, large organizations such as
the United Way, the Salvation Army, and major universities and medical
centers make up the left-hand side of the recipient market. In contrast
to the giving market, in which the big foundations and high-net-worth
individuals do not outweigh the millions of small donors, the large
nonprofits in the recipient market take in the lion’s share of donations.
In 2008, the approximately 40% of nonprofits with assets greater
than $250,000 received almost 95% of donations. The over 200,000
nonprofits with assets less than $250,000 received only about 5% of
donations. There is a long tail of receiving, but it’s a starved tail.
12
Philanthropy’s
Long Tails
Transactional philanthropy sites facilitate direct giving and

lending by individuals to enterprises without regard to geographical
location. The novelty of this arrangement can’t be overstated. Ten
years ago, the average American’s philanthropic activity was limited
to volunteering or donating to a local nonprofit (often a church or
church-run operation like a soup kitchen), participating in a United
Way fund drive, volunteering at the local chapter of one of the large
civil-society organizations (Rotary, Habitat for Humanity, Boy Scouts
of America), or writing a check to a prominent national or international
nonprofit (American Cancer Society, World Wildlife Fund, Amnesty
International). Today, individuals can lend money to small business
owners in Tanzania, learn about the leanest, closest-to-the-ground
nonprofits in Haiti, or buy art supplies for a fourth-grade teacher in
a rural school half a continent away. While it’s true that, in the case
of the Haitian earthquake for example, most Americans donated to
the American Red Cross rather than seeking out indigenous Haitian
nonprofits, the trend is clear: With each passing year, more people
learn about alternative candidates for their charitable dollars, in fuller
and more revealing detail. In 2008, online giving surpassed $15 billion
dollars (more than 5% of total giving), and in 2009, while foundation
giving fell by a record 8.4%, online giving rose by 5%.
While we typically focus on online giving and lending
marketplaces for their financial transactional value, they have as a
byproduct also created two large new information repositories that are
invaluable resources for both donors and doers. The first repository
contains information about entrepreneurs, organizations, and causes
around the world or around the corner. Every project featured on one
of these sites is its own data point about needs and opportunities. The
second repository contains data about giving patterns.
The networked information economy is now beginning
to influence the left-hand side of the funder market as well. The
professionals who run foundations, donor-advised funds, trusts, and
other philanthropic institutions increasingly rely on electronic grant
application and management systems, online reporting forms, and
13
so on. Foundations are beginning to experiment with sharing with

peer organizations these systems and the data they produce, creating
collaborative databases that can be remixed, re-sorted, and reconfigured.
Different uses of data are at the core of the behavioral and
expectation changes fostered by information networks. Our individual
use of search engines is proof enough of this. For many of us, the ability
to find instantaneously what we are looking for whether it’s a restaurant,
a news item, or the balance in our retirement accounts—has changed
how we behave. We’re now so used to immediate access to data from
almost anywhere that we’re more likely to take note of it when we can’t
find it than when we can. Think of the last time your browser was slow,
your connection to Google lost, or you were out of cell phone range.
The degree to which we’re comfortable with and depend on information
networks indicates the degree to which we will demand more from
them. A brief example: It’s no longer enough to be in an unfamiliar
city and be able to find an Indian restaurant within five blocks; we also
expect to be able to find user-generated reviews of it.
We see this same rise in expectations around online
philanthropy. We now have sites such as Social Actions or All for Good
that pull together and make available multiple donation or volunteer
opportunities in a given locale or on a certain issue. We can barter for
or donate goods simply by posting on FreeCycle or Craigslist. Smart-
phone applications such The Extraordinaries and Catalista let us donate
mental labor wherever we are and whenever we like.

The next frontier is the blending of donations with investments.
Online giving markets that manage charitable donations are merging
with investor-level exchanges that manage social investments. In some
cases, such as the Denmark-based site MyC4, the user determines on a
case-by-case basis whether she is making a gift, a loan, or a profit-seeking
investment. Other sites, such as Kickstarter, which supports artistic
and cultural projects, acknowledge that the funds they drive to projects
can be classified as investments, gifts, loans, or any combination of the
above—leaving the decision to the funder and recipient and broadening
the options of both.
14
Philanthropy’s
Long Tails
On the soon-to-launch NeXii, individual registered users

will be able to manage portfolios of grants and investments, track
them against financial and social indices, and compare their own
performances against those of other investors. NeXii is designed to be
useful to individual investors, commercial investors with social goals,
and endowment managers seeking to track all of their grants and social
investments in one place.
Sites like NeXii are built on software developed for financial
markets and data derived from the social sector. It remains to be
seen whether these sites will become popular enough to significantly
reduce the amount of money that now goes into donor-advised funds
administered by commercial banks and community foundations—and
if so, whether those institutions will find a way to adapt to, or even
adopt, online social-investment platforms.
While we cannot predict which of today’s online marketplaces
will be leading in transactions processed a decade from now, it’s clear
that the aggregated data from those transactions will themselves be a key
source of information for and about the sector. They will then become
the starting point for the next round of innovation.
15
Stories of Change
To date, individual donors—those millions who make up the long tail
of giving—have benefitted the most from technological innovation,
flocking to online transaction markets to donate and invest, organizing
fundraisers and activist events through Twitter, communicating political
and social messages through texting, and coordinating disaster response
through cell phones. But some foundations have recently moved
energetically to use technology to enhance or even alter the way they do
business. Here are two examples.
FasterCures
Michael Milken’s years of experience in funding prostate
cancer research drove him to reconsider what kind of leverage an
endowed foundation could have in funding medical disease research.
He came to believe that medical research was conducted inefficiently,
even counterproductively, and that funders were part of the problem.
He chose to focus his funding on strategies that could translate basic
research into medical therapies and recognized the potential to amplify
the impact of his own funding by drawing in others. With the launch of
FasterCures and the FasterCures Philanthropy Advisory Service, Milken
expanded this strategy to other diseases and disease research projects.
At the heart of these efforts are changes to the way research institutions
develop and share knowledge and how funders do the same.
16
Stories of Change
FasterCures performs high-quality, independent research on a

variety of diseases and disease research institutions. The research is made
available on the web through its Philanthropy Advisory Service (PAS)
information marketplace. PAS members increase their knowledge and
understanding by accessing disease reports, organization reports, and
searchable disease research project databases. The PAS marketplace
increases funder efficiency by steering donations toward research on
those diseases that appear to be closest to breakthrough and toward
those institutions that score highest on assessment reports. It improves
entire disease research fields by motivating institutions that receive
poor assessments to improve their practices. And it eliminates the need
for each PAS member to separately perform due diligence on multiple
potential grantees, thereby solving one of the “reinventing the wheel”
problems that continually plague organized philanthropy.
FasterCures is also changing how disease research organizations
function, as they can now benchmark themselves against a set of
independently generated and tracked standards, report their results
against consistent parameters, and organize their work in new ways.
FasterCures brings together disease research organizations to share
ideas on knowledge development, organizational practices, community
engagement, and research—so that if experts working in one disease
arena have a breakthrough, the process of others’ learning from the
breakthrough and applying it can be accelerated. FasterCures has
fostered a network of “cure entrepreneurs” to move innovative solutions
across formerly siloed institutions and disease communities, and has
invested heavily in building a data-based system for sharing funding
research and strategies with donors and other foundations.
FasterCures is one example of a foundation-led effort
to transform how both donors and doers work. It’s built on the
premise that donors will value in-depth analysis of a field and of the
organizations engaged in it; and that competition, made possible
by a networked information marketplace, can improve efficiency in
whole fields. The FasterCures model may well prove to be effective for
philanthropic work in almost any domain.
17
The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation

Similar outcomes, from a very different base, can be seen in the
work of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF). Prior to the
late 1990s, EMCF funded programs in five unconnected fields. When
foundation president Michael Bailin challenged his board to increase
impact by focusing its grantmaking in only one area, the board selected
disadvantaged youth. Under Bailin and, since 2005, Nancy Roob,
EMCF performed deep due diligence on and stringent evaluation
of grantees, using what it learned to improve its own work over time
and focus its strategy on “large, long-term investments in nonprofit
organizations whose programs have been proven to produce positive
outcomes and that have the potential for growth.” Still, successful as
the new approach was, it was not enough to achieve the foundation’s
mission of maximizing impact. In order to bring significant change to
the lives of as many children as possible, EMCF concluded that it had to
change the way other, similarly focused foundations worked as well.
EMCF began to pull together its several-year effort to collect,
analyze, and use information about effective organizations in ways that
would allow it to attract tens of millions of other philanthropic dollars
to the work it was doing. This initiative, which EMCF calls the Growth
Capital Aggregation Pilot (GCAP), positioned the foundation as the
lead investor (committing $39 million) in a $120 million, multiyear
fund to support, improve, and expand three sizable and effective
social sector organizations: Nurse Family Partnership, Youth Villages,
and Citizen Schools. By 2009, 22 other investors had committed the
remaining $81 million, and the federal government had selected all
three of the portfolio organizations as exemplary organizations worthy
of public investment.
GCAP funders work from common metrics and coordinate
payment schedules, and all organizations and the funders share
financial models and outcomes. Using data as a centerpiece, EMCF
led the development of a new kind of investment syndicate that has
substantially expanded the reach of its partner organizations and
18
Stories of Change
helped improve the lives of tens of thousands of young people and their
families. It has also taken the concept of funder collaboration to a new
level and brought into the field tens of millions of dollars that otherwise
might never have been forthcoming.
19
Five Philanthropic Practices

The stories of FasterCures and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
reveal the fundamental shift that can take place in foundations
when they use networks as a resource, sharing what they know and
working with others to achieve a common goal. The stories illustrate
five common philanthropic practices that have been reconceived and
redeployed through technology- and data-driven innovation. They are:
• Setting goals and formulating strategy: how funders and
enterprises make decisions about what to do, where, and how.
• Building social capital: how funders and enterprises support one
another, cooperate, and collaborate.
• Measuring progress: how funders and enterprises set
benchmarks, measure outputs, and make course corrections
along the way.
• Measuring outcomes and impact: how funders and enterprises
know whether what they’ve done has made a difference.
• Accounting for the work: how funders and enterprises account
for what they do, to the public at large and to regulators.
The stories that follow highlight examples of donors and
organizations adopting or experimenting with various technological
20
Five Philanthropic
Practices
tools in each of the above practice areas. For simplicity’s sake, we

refer simply to funders (including individuals and institutions) and
enterprises (including nonprofits, intermediaries, and for-profit social-
purposed companies), keeping in mind that both of these categories are
quite diverse.
Setting goals and formulating strategy

How Funders and Enterprises Make Decisions About What to Do,
Where, and How
How do funders decide what social problem to tackle? How
do they choose what to fund? Often the answer to both of these
questions is tied to personal passion and area of expertise, but there is an
increasingly visible use of information assessment and market research
to inform these choices.
Online philanthropy marketplaces allow individuals to do the
kind of enterprise assessment that previously only staffed foundations
(and not many of those) could afford to do. They allow potential
donors to sift and sort by geography, gender, social issue, funding need,
and other variables before deciding on where to direct their gifts. For
example, a user interested in water-quality issues might choose between
lending to a farmer to invest in a water pump, donating to a nonprofit
water pump manufacturer, making a small investment in a new water
cleaning technology, or supporting a community fighting to retain
control of its local water supply. Whereas finding these options in the
past might have taken years of research and access to local experts in
several countries—actions that, in many cases, are still indispensable—
better, clearer choices can now be made by anyone with access to an
Internet connection.
For larger institutional funders, the tools for assessing a field
have also changed. Their process often begins at the strategy-setting
stage, where they might commission an analysis of funding patterns
and then map that information against public data on needs or
demographics. Tools such as Gap minder—a data visualization tool
21
that makes relationships between data sets easy to see—are now readily
available. Network analysis, which can help identify and depict patterns
of relationships among individuals, organizations, or funders, is another
increasingly useful means of understanding a situation.7
The availability of such useful, precise, and comparable
information can enable funders to envision strategies, time frames, and
partnerships that were unimaginable a decade ago. The new tools have
also led more funders to require “evidence-based” proposals.
Foundation professionals and social investors are slowly
beginning to seek external input into their strategy-formation practices.
For example, the Lumina Foundation for Education has posted its
strategic planning process, the plan itself, and the progress measures
being used on an interactive website to which the public can contribute
comments. The foundation also has a YouTube channel where the
public can watch and comment on video interviews with key decision
makers. The Peery Foundation in Palo Alto, California, recently
pushed its strategic planning conversations into public view using
Twitter—welcoming thoughts, sharing its planning tools, and actively
discussing its ideas with anyone who followed the foundation’s board or
staff members. The Twitter discussions prompted prominent bloggers to
weigh in on the process.
These experiments move us in the direction of using the web
to crowdsource8 strategies for giving. One well-known example comes
from Paul Buchheit, an early Google employee, who wrote a blog
post looking for advice on his donor-advised fund and then built a
series of online tools—including a Google moderated voting site and a
FriendFeed Group—enabling anyone to post suggestions. The British
Government proposed a similar project to guide some of its funding
for international aid. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has
used crowdsourcing tactics in its News Challenge grants program, and
7
See examples of how Oxfam has used networks of participants to spread the impact of specific projects.
8
A term coined by the writer Jeff Howe in a 2006 article in Wired magazine to describe the phenomenon
of using large, dispersed groups of amateurs networked through the web to do work that was previously
performed by solitary experts or units within larger institutions.
22
Five Philanthropic
Practices
in 2007, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation used a wiki to solicit
possible approaches to dealing with the problem of nitrogen pollution.
By availing themselves of information networks, these grant makers
increased the variety of expertise and widened the range of perspectives
that shaped their philanthropic strategies.
Another crowd-based strategy, the incentivizing prize
competition is structured to generate a solution to a specified social or
technical problems rather than to reward laudable accomplishment in
retrospect. X Prize Foundation competitions leverage philanthropic
investment by inducing participants to spend more money cumulatively
than is offered as a prize. The prize challenges extended by the
Rockefeller Foundation and administered by InnoCentive draw upon
the talents and expertise of individuals who might not otherwise devote
their time and energy to solving problems in the social sphere. More
conventional prizes, awarded on the basis of merit, include ASHOKA’s
Changemakers, the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and
Learning Competition, and the Case Foundation’s “Change Begins
with Me” challenge. All engage new types of partners in both discussing
issues and developing solutions.
Building social capital

How Funders and Enterprises Support One Another,
Cooperate, and Collaborate
Much of the recent excitement about technology has
involved social networks—online communities where individuals
and institutions can share information and interests, find friends and
colleagues, and encourage one another to take action on issues or donate
to causes. The names of some of these communities are familiar—
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter. However, the extent of their
philanthropic impacts is unclear. A 2009 analysis in the Washington
Post of the funds raised through Facebook led to a high-spirited
disagreement on blogs, as some argued that the tools were therefore
useless while others focused on the networks as awareness-raisers, not
fundraisers.
23
The ecology of social networks has diversified to include

enterprises besides the large general-interest platforms like Facebook.
For example, Ning is a web company that allows anyone to create a
social network incorporating customized branding, visual design, and
choice of features. Ning hosts more than 1,000 networks of nonprofit
organizations, foundations, and charities. Similarly, BigTent Design
supports networks specifically for community groups. Connecting to
like-minded people, hearing from supporters, and sharing information
are key goals for these enterprises. These same goals explain the use of
other digital tools that facilitate outreach and engagement, including
Twitter, blogs, and virtual worlds such as Second Life.
The establishment of cell phone networks in some of the
remotest parts of the world, as well as the low cost of the phones
themselves, has created opportunities for previously isolated individuals
and communities to connect and collaborate in unprecedented ways.
For example, FrontlineSMS, an open-source software program that
enables mobile-phone users to send text messages to large groups,
has been used by local individuals and enterprises to post updates on
commodity market conditions in rural Peru, report the location of
landmine victims in Cambodia, and record human rights violations in
Ghana.
As well as cell phones, GPS and Internet-based mapping
programs have reduced the isolation that remote, often poor
communities have struggled with. Ushahidi began in 2008 as a simple
platform for incorporating field reports of political violence in Kenya
into Google Maps. By fall 2009, the Ushahidi platform had been used
to monitor national elections in India and Mexico and track medical-
supply shortages in Malawi and Zambia. Ushahidi isn’t for just the
geographically remote; in January 2010, an Ushahidi offshoot helped
coordinate storm cleanup after Washington, D.C.’s “Snowmaggedon.”
In the months since a major earthquake devastated Haiti,
we have seen how quickly and on how large a scale individuals and
organizations can collaborate on behalf of others. In a matter of days,
24
Five Philanthropic
Practices
three platforms—text donations, Twitter, and Facebook—moved

from the philanthropic margins to the center of both fundraising
and volunteer activity. A series of loosely managed, globally dispersed
weekend CrisisCamps took place on several continents over many
weeks. Volunteers at these events produced dozens of software tools to
help relief workers on the ground and in government agencies. Basing
its work on the Ushahidi platform and launched in October 2009, the
International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net) responded to the
Haiti earthquake by rapidly gathering and disseminating information
on the location of, among other things, safe water resources, disease
outbreaks, fuel sources, and hospitals and medical aid stations. CM*Net-
produced data were used by the U.S. military, the Haitian government,
and dozens of nonprofits in planning and coordinating their response.
Networked citizens contributed an unprecedented amount of private
money and expertise in a remarkably short period of time. Many used
social networks to spread word of the disaster, round up funds and
volunteers, and stay informed over time about developments in Port-au-
Prince. To date, more than $1 billion has been collected for relief and
reconstruction, with the average donation via the Internet at a mere $10.
{ }
A vast, previously untapped population of contributors was reached
through ubiquitous information networks. When brought together
around a single crisis, smaller
CM*Net responded to the groups and individuals
Haiti earthquake by rapidly can now play a decidedly
gathering and disseminating important role in finding
information on the location of,
and implementing solutions.
among other things, safe water
resources, disease outbreaks, A similar change is
fuel sources, and hospitals.
occurring in the ecology of
conferences. Networking
technologies encourage new kinds of collaboration at conferences
organized around topics of interest to the social sector. Whereas
these events used to be predicated on the idea that only those who’d
paid registration fees and traveled long distances would be privy to
what was discussed, many conference organizers now assume that the
25
conversation will extend beyond the ballroom walls. For example, a

2009 conference on social capital markets devoted several weeks before
the event to building up awareness on blogs and Twitter, had volunteers
updating Facebook and Flickr pages before, during, and after the event,
showcased two different video channels, one live and one recorded,
and equipped several participants with small video cameras to capture
sessions as they happened. All of this information was posted online
for the benefit of both those at the venue and those who could not
attend. This commitment to making visible, and thus learnable, what
was once literally held behind closed doors marks a major shift in our
expectations about information and networks—and about conferences.
Similar social media strategies are becoming de rigueur for major
industry conclaves.
If funders want to support networked change agents, they may
themselves have to adjust their expectations about what constitutes
a legitimate, fund-worthy organization. Ushahidi, for example, was
started by an unincorporated group of colleagues spread over two
continents and several countries. Even though the informal, networked
structure proved capable of building an effective platform for the
advancement of social good, that same structure proved to be a
stumbling block to raising foundation funds. It didn’t conform to the
organizational model funders understood and were comfortable with.
We will see more such disconnects as enterprises that are “native to the
digital world” continue to proliferate.
Measuring progress
How Funders and Enterprises Set Benchmarks, Measure Outputs, and
Make Course Corrections Along the Way
Enterprises have led the way in seeking measures of progress that
help them improve their work and fund-raise in a highly competitive
grantmaking system. Facilitated by low-cost digital technology such
as identity card readers that enable better tracking of service use, the
ability to track inputs and outputs has grown more robust. With
better tracking has come improved ability to analyze, share, and jointly
26
Five Philanthropic
Practices
produce measures and tracking systems of value. These improvements

have, in turn, begun to alter the approach to, and value of, evaluation
and assessment. Evaluation and assessment reports are still too often
retrospective and anecdotal, and they still are not widely shared. But
the culture of philanthropy is changing, and expectations surrounding
evaluation and assessment are changing too.
Donors and investors are also actively engaged in developing
whole new systems for measuring progress. Acumen Fund, an
independent social investment fund focused on alleviating poverty in
Asia and Africa, has begun developing internal measures of progress
that can be used across its portfolios. Each portfolio addresses a distinct
domain, such as job creation, health outcomes, or access to clean water.
As Acumen progressed in this work, major partners such as Google
and Salesforce.com joined in and began the push to create measures
and tracking systems that could be used by other organizations, as well
as to enable it to raise more investment dollars. Doing so required the
development of a shared taxonomy of outcomes and of systems that
could track information within a single organization as well as feed into
a common database. Thus was born the Pulse platform—a software
system for tracking outcome measures. The Impact Reporting and
Investing Standards (IRIS), a shared taxonomy of outcome definitions,
is currently being launched alongside the Pulse platform.
Another example of shared measures comes from the
community development field. NeighborWorks America is a
congressionally chartered nonprofit founded in 1978 to support
community revitalization efforts around the country. About a decade
ago, a group of community development leaders began to see the need
for a measurement system that would go beyond capturing performance
or outputs data such as houses built or jobs created to evaluating impact.
An innovator in participatory (as opposed to third-party) outcomes
evaluation, Success Measures offers a variety of web-based evaluation
framework designs based on collaboratively developed and tested
data collection tools and outcome indicators. Groups can aggregate
data, download them to Excel to create spreadsheets and graphs, and
27
contribute to the further refinement of Success Measures frameworks,

tools, and indicators by sharing what they learned. To date more than
300 community development practitioners, intermediaries, funders,
researchers, and evaluators have participated in the development of
Success Measures.
Sharing progress reports and evaluations is one significant change;
deriving them from actual participants is another, more complicated
and costly one. One of the barriers in all measurement endeavors is
the cost of reaching out to relevant constituents. Cutting corners by
measuring proxy indicators may obscure, rather than clarify, what really
happened to those affected by a given program. Networked technology
can reduce the expense of obtaining on-the-ground data. Recently
GlobalGiving, an online marketplace for donors around the world,
watched as one local group sought comments via text messages on the
impact of its work. Working in a small African village, the group’s leaders
handed out bumper stickers that asked people to text their thoughts
about the program to a certain number. Anyone with an opinion could
respond, anonymously, about the impact, management, and role of the
organization in the community. The cost to gather the data? The cost of
the bumper stickers. More sophisticated data collection and analysis of
stakeholders is also underway, including efforts modeled on customer
feedback and constituency voice. Keystone Accountability, a U.K.-based
research and consulting firm, now offers a free tool on its website to enable
nonprofit organizations to acquire anonymous constituent feedback.
Another example of how data can be collected in the era of
social media can be found in the YouthTruth evaluation. A partnership
between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Center for
Effective Philanthropy, YouthTruth distributed a survey (online, on
social networks MySpace and Facebook, via email, and with the help
of MTV) to high school students attending schools receiving funding
from the Gates Foundation. The data collected are used to inform the
schools, the funders, and the evaluators. Recognition of the value of the
end-user experience is inherent in the process. Students have access to the
information as well as other resources that might help them improve their
28
Five Philanthropic
Practices
schools. This type of evaluation turns subjects into actors. It changes

dynamics at every level—when information is collected, from whom,
how it’s used, and who can analyze it—at a cost that is negligible when
compared to traditional approaches.
Another approach, similar to FasterCures, is the creation of
shared databases of organizations or projects. Examples include the
Pennsylvania Cultural Database, Grantmakers for Film and Electronic
Media’s media database, and the newly launched Social Entrepreneur
API. The issues covered range from cultural programming to non-U.S.-
based nonprofit equivalent organizations, but the underlying practice
and philosophy of these projects is the same—organize and make
accessible data to make change easier, faster, and more catalytic.
These examples are only a few of many tools for measuring
progress that now exist. A 2009 study by McKinsey & Company found
more than 150 such tools being used in the American social sector.
That study informed the creation of a database of these tools known as
TRASI (which can be accessed for free, commented on, and improved)
that is now housed at the Foundation Center. Similarly, a recent analysis
of shared metrics by FSG-Social Impact Advisors provides several
stories like the NeighborWorks example. That study is now hosted on a
website that invites readers to contribute additional examples and comment
on those provided. In short, the very act of researching these issues has
changed. It no longer suffices to document an issue and provide a snapshot
in time. Many major studies now have companion websites that incorporate
interactive conversations about the research and new resources as they are
identified. These tools represent only the first steps in an ongoing process of
improvement.
Measuring outcomes and impact

How Funders and Enterprises Know Whether What They’ve Done Has
Made a Difference
The last decade has seen tremendous innovation around measuring
social change. With roots that trace to both the United Way and public
29
agency efforts at outcome reporting, the social sector has been hard at
work trying to isolate, calculate, track, and report meaningful measures of
impact. For several reasons, the pace of innovation in the last few years has
accelerated.
First, singular efforts at calculating impact, such as the social return
on investment (SROI) work begun at REDF (formerly called the Roberts
Economic Development Fund) in the 1990s, have gradually gathered
attention and respect, and given birth to numerous spin-off approaches.
Second, a growing movement of social investment vehicles, run
by people who want to develop data to improve the work, from program-
related investments to social investment funds, has increased the pressure for
quantifiable, comparable measures of social change.
Finally, the maturation of independent philanthropy advisory firms
has required points of differentiation, and offering new ways to measure
impact was one area of competitive advantage. This pressure to measure
extends directly to the use of technology itself—the rapid rise of social
media is paralleled by dynamic debates and rapid innovation in ways to
measure the impact of these tools.9

The importance of measuring outcomes and impact has lately
become the mantra of most large donors and investors. Some of the push
has come from a new breed of funders who honed their skills (and earned
their millions) in venture capital and investment banking. The recent
financial collapse put more pressure on funders, who were forced to
engage in a kind of triage on their existing grantees, to determine the
quality of the grantee outcomes. The trend toward more and better
measurement appears to be unstoppable—especially since we now have
the tools to undertake it.
9
See the work of Chris Brogan, Beth Kanter, and K.D. Paine, among others.
30
Five Philanthropic
Practices
Accounting for the work

How Funders and Enterprises Account for What They Do,
to the Public and to Regulators
While measures of impact are important, there is yet a larger
issue of accountability that these measures don’t reach. That question
has to do with the degree to which organizations in the social sector,
both funders and enterprises, are held to account for their work to the
broader public and to regulatory and tax agencies. At the most basic
level, in the United States, this accountability is required, though
hardly enforced, as part of the tax-exempt status afforded many of these
organizations. Information networks are raising new questions: to
whom is philanthropy accountable, and what is it accountable for?
Regulatory accountability for philanthropies in the U.S. is
generally limited to financial issues—funds must be properly invested,
tracked, paid out, and reported on. Both state and federal agencies
require such reports, and much of the aggregate data that we have
on the sector comes from analysis of the tax forms filed by nonprofit
organizations, philanthropic foundations, and individual donors.
Some foundations are trying to establish subsector-wide norms
and benchmarking tools. For example, the Community Foundation
Insights toolkit is designed to help community foundations measure
their costs, adjust their fees, and evaluate their staffing patterns. What
once might have been shared only among a few colleagues personally
acquainted with one another can now be captured for the field as a
whole.10 The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s data sets on foundation
responsiveness, grantee satisfaction, and board practices are another
example of technology-enabled, industry-wide benchmarks. Some
foundations, such as the William and Flora Hewlett, Geraldine R.
Dodge, Surdna, and John A. Hartford, have posted their CEP reports
on their websites. Many other foundations have used the feedback to
change their policies and practices.
10
Another relevant example is this wiki of technology use by foundations, assembled by Blueprint Research &
Design and now hosted at Northern California Grantmakers.
31
Grantsfire, an open platform that allows grants data to be

aggregated, has just become a project of the Foundation Center, the
sector’s preeminent data source. In April 2010, GuideStar International
and TechSoup Global announced a merger. The new enterprise is
positioned to launch a global aggregator and repository of information
on nonprofits—a single, searchable source for information on
organizations everywhere.
Who ultimately owns social sector data is an unresolved issue
for donors and enterprises. Voluntary efforts such as the Public Library
of Science (PLoS) and Science Commons have laid the groundwork
for sharing information in pursuit of common goals. In the public
sector, research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be
published in the openly accessible PubMed database within 12 months
of work completion. In the case of philanthropy, because donors receive
tax benefits—essentially, unrestricted grants from the government—
foundations are quasi-public institutions. Data held by foundations
would therefore seem to belong to the public.
Most foundations don’t behave as if they, or the data they
produce, are owned by the public. While a few funders have become
more open by publishing grants applications on their websites,
information about selection and performance rarely sees the light
of day. The work of the Milken Foundation, FasterCures, and a few
other philanthropies points the way toward a future of greater access to
important information for the public good.
32
Glimpses of the Future
The technology expert Clay Shirky has observed, “Communications
tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically
boring.”11 This is certainly the case in philanthropy. Philanthropy is, by
its very nature, idiosyncratic and fragmented. A technology or practice
must be widely adopted, and broadly transformative of individuals’
expectations, before we can expect to see it make a real impact across
philanthropic enterprises. Email; online shopping, banking, and bill
paying; search engines; social networks; wikis; blogs; streaming music
and video; newspaper and magazine online publication; GPS and online
maps; cell phones; digital cameras—these are among the technological
innovations that, to date, have changed people’s behaviors, and most
people now view them as “technologically boring.” (Remember how
amazing GPS was the first time you saw it? That was probably less than
ten years ago. Now—yawn.)
As we have seen, networked information has already affected,
in some domains, the way philanthropy is conducted and the way social
good is produced. But philanthropy is not like the music or newspaper
industries, which have been utterly transformed—mostly against the
will of those who run record labels and newspapers—by information
11
Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. London: Penguin
Press, 2008, p. 105.
33
networks. While no record label can operate the same way it did ten
years ago, and no newspaper can ignore the Internet, there are thousands
of private foundations, and millions of individual donors, who disburse
their charitable assets, whether money, time, expertise, or physical labor,
using no technology that didn’t exist in 1989 (or 1889, for that matter).
Nevertheless, change is inevitable, and the further penetration of
networked technologies into everyday life, among all social strata in all
parts of the globe, would seem likewise to be inevitable.
Some of the changes that networked technologies will bring
may not just fail to live up to expectations, but may also bring negative
consequences. For example, the establishment of network-driven
standardized metrics may direct resources toward easily measurable, low-
cost, low-effect interventions at the expense of less easily quantifiable, but
perhaps ultimately more important, activities. Similarly, while increased
transparency is an important goal in philanthropy, there may be a point
at which transparency limits creativity and risk taking. And there is no
agreement in the funding world on what transparency means anyway.
Some technologies—virtual worlds, gaming—play only
marginal roles in philanthropy at present. They have not yet induced
widespread interest, let alone change. But as today’s new technologies
become commonplace, the next order of change—in behaviors and
in expectations—will set in, and that is where we will see the early
indications of what the future will hold. Here are three phenomena we
expect to see more of in the future:
• New blendings of market-based and nonmarket solutions.
• Networked, boundaryless, and often temporary alliances that
call for the creation of new ways of activating, coordinating,
and governing cooperative efforts.
• More and better data, more readily available and at lower cost.
34
Glimpses
of the Future
New blendings of market-based and nonmarket solutions

Today, socially minded entrepreneurs don’t have to choose
either the market or the nonprofit sector. The ethic of the networked
information economy—reinforced every time you use your Firefox
browser to look up something on Wikipedia or watch a user-generated
video on YouTube—states that people aren’t motivated by profit alone,
and that enterprise can generate both profit and social good.
We observe two seemingly contradictory impulses that, on
reflection, may not be so contradictory. On the one hand, we see a
proliferation of phenomena that harness market mechanisms to solve
social problems: socially responsible investing, information marketplaces
such as the FasterCures Philanthropy Advisory Service, B Corporations,
low-profit limited liability companies (L3Cs).12 On the other hand, we
see an enormous commitment of time, energy, ingenuity, and know-how
to nonmarket, nonproprietary phenomena that are themselves social
goods: open-source software, wikis, Project Gutenberg. The blended
value proposition developed by author and consultant Jed Emerson
states “that all organizations, whether for-profit or not, create value that
consists of economic, social and environmental value components—and
that investors (whether market-rate, charitable or some mix of the two)
simultaneously generate all three forms of value through providing
capital to organizations.” We may be approaching a moment when the
idea of blended value, which resolves the contradiction between market
and nonmarket impulses, may become as commonplace as belief in the
“invisible hand” of the market is today.
Over the past few decades, corporations have pushed for ever-
longer periods of copyright protection and ever-broader interpretations
of what can be copyrighted. In response, the foundation-supported
nonprofit Creative Commons has established a “copyleft” licensing
regime that accomplishes the inverse of what copyrights usually do:
rather than restricting rights, Creative Commons licenses bestow them,
12
For a pithy explanation of the L3C, see this post by Gene Takagi on the Nonprofit Law Blog.
35
ensuring that a work placed in the public domain by its creator, as well
as all works derivative of that work, remains there. In addition to texts
and images, Creative Commons licenses cover scientific data, music,
and video, and they are valid in countries all over the world. A 2009
study performed by the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School found
that while “Open licenses promise significant value for foundations
and for the public good and often for grantees as well,” they are rarely
used in the philanthropic sector, as “many grantees and foundations are
relatively uninformed and inexperienced with open licenses.”
For many tasks, nonmarket entities and the self-organizing
commons can compete with, and even outperform, the market because
market players tend to have higher overhead costs in the form of
advertising, talent recruitment, capital equipment, attorney fees, and so
on. Funders can apply tremendous leverage by making relatively small
investments in maintaining the infrastructure and information resources
that enable nonmarket players to exist and flourish.13
Networked, boundaryless, and often temporary alliances

that call for the creation of new ways of activating,
coordinating, and governing cooperative efforts
The transition from a relatively simple social economy to a
complex social economy made up of a spectrum of financing sources
and enterprise types has already begun.
On the funder side, we’ve seen a decade of experimentation
with different kinds of peer networks. Just as an environmental program
officer in a large foundation has a peer group of program officers at
other foundations, environmentally focused individual donors are now
connecting directly with their peers. The same thing is happening with
regionally focused donors, activists interested in public data access,
individuals who share the immigrant’s diaspora experience, and those
committed to global giving. Acumen Fund and the Edna McConnell
13
The authors wish to thank David Bollier for elucidating this point about nonmarket efficiency and
funder leverage.
36
Glimpses
of the Future
Clark Foundation show how a data-driven portfolio approach can be

used to attract donors to new forms of investing. Giving circles and
Social Venture Partner communities bring together individuals who
want to increase their philanthropic impact by working together. The
Global Impact Investing Network’s Investors’ Council, SeaChange
Capital Partners, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and the Growth
Philanthropy Network are all examples of new networks for donors and
social investors.
We can expect that more and better networked information
will lead to more and better collaborations and partnerships. Donors
and doers will no longer be able to say that data are unavailable, or that
they are too expensive to collect, in order to avoid working together.
Donors and doers who do insist on going it alone may find themselves
at a disadvantage when faced with networks of mutually supportive
organizations and individuals.
Staffing foundations individually, especially small foundations,
may cease to make sense. Consortia of active donors may begin to
thrive, especially for place-based or thematic endeavors, boosting the
case for donor engagement in philanthropy.
On the enterprise side, we see market-based enterprises such
as B Corporations and L3Cs. As this monograph goes to press, there
are 285 registered B Corps, including companies such as CleanFish,
which works to preserve ocean biodiversity by changing the fishing
industry, and Better World Books, an online book reseller that donates
proceeds to literacy programs. B Corps also include retail outlets that
function as employment development programs, such as Juma Ventures
and Greyston Bakery. L3Cs include small, socially oriented enterprises
such as Maine’s Own Organic Milk (MOOMilk) and the Champlain
Housing Loan Fund.
Network-enabled volunteer groups like Ushahidi are radically
different from incorporated enterprises with bylaws, mission statements,
formal boards of directors, and geographical limits. They operate
outside the existing regulations for grant funding that require nonprofit
37
organizational status. They are managed by individuals who seek social

solutions, not monetary gain or market success, and they rely on new
models of accountability. Led by volunteers and managed remotely
with free software, Nonprofitmapping.org rates the states on the quality
of data on nonprofits they make available, with the aim of improving
state reporting standards. It’s an example of how a virtual team, without
an organizational home, permanent institutional affiliation, or shared
locale, can work together to solve a big problem.
Similarly, volunteer-driven efforts that are, by design, here today
and gone tomorrow—“flash” causes—can create tremendous impact
by drawing attention to an issue. Some can even move a fair amount of
money. In February 2009, charity: water raised hundreds of thousands
of dollars through parties in more than 100 cities, all organized by
volunteers via Twitter. These dispersed, crowd-organized events are
common tools of community organizing and political fundraising and
are increasingly present in campaigns for charitable support.
New organizational models will require new modes of
governance. Most of the successful examples we can find of distributed
governance, such as the ongoing development of the open-source
software platform Linux, are made possible by norms and licenses that
are unique to the software arena. For other kinds of ventures—such as
in higher education, medical research, or service provision—where open
source content sharing is not a norm, rules of the road for governing
networks and networked organizations may need to be invented.
The reconfiguration of business forms and the development of
hybrid governance models will undoubtedly stress the laws, regulations,
and cultures that have developed in isolated silos. We will not only see
the blending of market and nonmarket organizations, we will see the
corresponding development of new approaches to funding, finance, and
reporting requirements.
Creating new modes of governance will be an important
endeavor in the future, but in the near term it poses quite a challenge to
the relationships between capital providers and social sector institutions.
38
Glimpses
of the Future
Will foundations find ways to fund dispersed, fluid, unincorporated

organizations like Ushahidi and Nonprofitmapping.org? And if
not, will they fail to be a consequential source of capital for these
organizations? Will new organizational forms necessitate the overhaul
of nonprofit tax and regulatory law? Will governments need to review
and revise the very definition of nonprofit status?
More and better data, more readily available and at lower cost
Here the public sector is leading the way. Governments at the
municipal (San Francisco, Washington, D.C.), state, and federal (data.
gov, the Open Government Initiative) levels are making data available
on the web. In the arena of campaign finance, the Sunlight Foundation
enables users to tease out who gives how much money to whom, when
they give it, and (by implication) why. On the Pew Charitable Trusts’
Subsidyscope website, users can track federal subsidies.
As more such data become available, new correlations and
connections will be revealed in every area in which philanthropy has
an interest, from test scores of middle-schoolers to disparities in public
health to racial discrimination in housing. The ability to mix and
remix public data will influence both governmental and philanthropic
approaches to producing social good.14
Of course, most government data are not accessible via the
web. And philanthropy (with some important exceptions) has been
even less pro-active in making data available. It’s not yet known what
force—third-party intermediaries, regulation, the market, leadership
within the field—will drive an opening-up of philanthropy, but open
access to philanthropically funded data and research is within our reach.
To the degree that new data will lead to new measurements of change,
we should also expect to see major changes in the sector.15
14
Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest, discusses systems change possibilities from this viewpoint,
focusing on nonprofit organizations with similar missions.
15
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth of America. New
York: Riverhead Books, 2008, p. 69.
39
A relatively recent innovation is the storage of information in

“the cloud.” The cloud refers to data and applications that are hosted
remotely (i.e., stored on third-party servers) and that can be accessed
via the web. The best-known examples are probably Facebook, Google
Mail and Google Docs, Flickr, and SalesForce.com. Shifting from
data storage on desktops or mainframes to cloud computing can save
organizations money on hardware and software and allow them to
allocate human resources differently.
Beyond the horizon

We can’t predict what philanthropy will look like in five years,
let alone ten. But it’s safe to say that information networks will continue
to proliferate, become more efficient, and become more accessible to
more people and organizations. So too will new organizational forms,
enabled by networks, informed by data, and motivated by the values of
sharing and open participation, continue to proliferate. If foundations
remain mainly top-down, centralized, reactive institutions while most
of the innovation in philanthropy occurs along the long tail of funders
and nonprofits, will the traditional power dynamic between donors and
doers still obtain?
The resurgence of interest in the commons, as exemplified by
the over 140,000 photos currently under Creative Commons license
on Flickr, is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Just as agrarian
communities managed pasture land for the good of the whole and
didn’t inevitably suffer from the “tragedy of the commons,” efforts such
as the Public Library of Science, not to mention Wikipedia, show how
information resources can be managed for the good of the whole.16
How will quasi-market entities such as B Corps and L3Cs
evolve, and what new hybrids are yet to emerge? What changes might
regulatory structures such as intellectual property law or patent
regulation bring to bear on these emergent forms? What challenges
16
David Bollier and Lawrence Lessig are two of the foremost thinkers on the power of the commons in the
digital age. Bollier’s book Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own traces the
history and transition of commons law from the Internet to other areas of society.
40
Glimpses
of the Future
might hybrids raise to the legal systems that define and shape charitable
activity, such as nonprofit tax exemption or nonprofit status itself ? Each
of these questions has taken on much greater salience in the last couple
of years and all will put pressure on federal and state governments to
look at the sector differently.
While industry and the public sector, especially the Department
of Defense, have for years used simulation technology and game-playing
pedagogy to test new ideas and teach new skills, philanthropic support
for games is newer and less well established. One significant example of
where games have worked is in HopeLab’s development of Re-Mission,
a video game for youth living with cancer that helps them stick to
their medicine regimens. Independent evaluations found a significant
increase of regimen adherence by young people who played the game.
Organizations such as Games for Change and the Serious Games
Initiative are helping build awareness of these “pro-social” games.
Games and mobile phones—in fact all digital technologies—readily
lend themselves to quantitative measurement.
The decentralizing effects of networked technologies are now
familiar. But there is also a counter-tendency: the creation of seemingly
“natural” monopolies on the web. Through a certain ineluctable
logic—sellers want to go where the most buyers are, and buyers want to
go where the most sellers are—the online auction business has produced
a single major player, eBay. Similar logic has produced, at times
shockingly quickly, natural monopolies among online payment systems
(PayPal), classified ad hosting (Craigslist), user-generated video hosting
(YouTube), and social networking sites (Facebook, which appears to
be in the process of dethroning MySpace). Among all the many online
giving markets, will the logic of monopoly formation—donors want
to go where the most doers are, and doers want to go where the most
donors are—produce a single dominant site with a single methodology
of operation and assessment? If a monopoly does emerge, what are the
implications?
41
How will better data sharing affect the way individuals donate?
Will people be more aware of social problems and donate more, growing
the philanthropic pie? Will “issue fatigue” set in, causing them to
donate less? Will the plethora of competing sites, networks, ratings
systems, and the like lead to data, and analytic, overload? This is a time
of great entrepreneurial activity, and claims of the “new, new thing” are
coming fast and furious. Lately we’ve begun to see some mergers and
collaborations among networking ventures, but such cooperation may
not become a trend and may not be healthy for the sector if it does.
Will more and better data raise awareness of “root cause”
problems, as with the “scientific philanthropy” of a century ago,
{ }
resulting in a redistribution of individual small donations—away from,
say, the local church and toward organizations engaged with widespread
social issues? Will donations become less focused on the local and
more toward the regional,
Some of the areas that national, or international?
philanthropy concerns itself To date we have no metrics
with are more likely to see to analyze these phenomena.
significant benefit from a
Will a generational
highly networked nonprofit
split emerge? That is, will
sector than are others.
older people, who are less
wired, remain attached to
the old ways, while younger people give fewer dollars to the Salvation
Army and United Way and more dollars to Kiva and DonorsChoose?
Such a generational pattern seems already to be emerging in faith-based
philanthropy, particularly among Jews and Catholics. Will there be a
similar class-based split, reflective of the so-called digital divide? Are
alternative giving approaches “good” for philanthropy, or will they
effectively slice and dice donations into smaller, and less effective,
pieces?
How will networked technologies affect the major volunteer
civil society organizations—Rotary, Kiwanis, Big Brothers Big Sisters,
Habitat for Humanity, and others? How will they affect donations to
42
Glimpses
of the Future
religious groups? These are the vehicles through which most Americans
donate their time and money, and they represent, in the aggregate, a
much larger segment of the philanthropic sector than do the staffed
foundations. What will it mean for these organizations if younger,
better-off individuals begin to gravitate in significant numbers away from
them and toward DonorsChoose or Kiva? What will older organizations
do with technology to stay current or even ahead of the curve?
In an analysis of the financial models of American theatre,
opera, orchestra, and dance companies, William Baumol and William
Bowen identified “cost disease” as the fundamental financing problem
that bedevils arts organizations.17 In most sectors of the economy,
Baumol and Bowen noted, technology tends to increase productivity.
There are, however, certain labor-intensive activities, such as an
orchestra’s producing live symphonic music, that undergo little or no
growth in productivity through better technology over time. Relative
to the rest of the economy, these activities become ever more expensive:
they suffer from cost disease.
Likewise, some of the areas that philanthropy concerns itself
with are more likely to see significant benefit from a highly networked
nonprofit sector than are others. For example, improved networking
will almost certainly make vaccination research more efficient. But
what of a labor-intensive human service like foster care? Technology
may improve foster child placement service around the edges, by
streamlining management and financial tasks, but at the most basic
level, foster care consists of one family agreeing to take in one child,
multiplied many times over. Though networking may spread the
acceptance of best practices more quickly, there’s only so much efficiency
new technologies can bring to this arrangement. The same is true for
homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and mentoring programs for troubled
students. Labor-intensive endeavors like these can’t be made very much
more efficient; relative to medical research, human services will become
17
Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. New York: Twentieth
Century Fund, 1966.
43
more costly over time. Will the program areas that benefit most from
new technologies become more attractive to philanthropy? Will the least
technologically efficient and most costly subsectors see their government
funding reduced?
Finally, how will the legal and institutional structures of
philanthropy keep pace with the new modes of organizing, facilitating,
informing, and funding change that technology facilitates? What new
forms of accountability will emerge? How will institutional funders work
with distributed networks? What new policy frames are necessary to
maximize the potential impact of these new social forms and minimize
their downsides? What new governance structures may emerge?
44
Conclusion
Philanthropy in the United States is entering a new phase. Through
many independent actions we are building an information infrastructure
that will connect the long tail of donors to the long tail of doers. This
infrastructure has the potential to open up and systematize processes
and decision-making practices that have heretofore occurred exclusively
behind closed doors.
The outline of philanthropy’s future is visible in online, shared
portfolios of loans, as well as in informal networks of volunteers
working together to aid disaster relief workers. It’s visible in commercial
firms seeking social missions and in the capital they attract to the
sector. It’s visible in policy debates about nonprofit tax privileges, in
shared platforms for measures of social return, and in peer networks
of individual donors. It’s visible in foundation-led explorations of
networked governance models and in community-based experiments
with local fundraisers networked across time zones. We can see the
outline of philanthropy’s future in shared databases of scientific
research, in real-time sharing of grants data in exportable, mashable data
streams, and in small teams of app developers who find practical and
unexpected uses for these data.
How are these phenomena shaping how donors give and how
doers get things done? The forms that will animate philanthropy ten
45
years from now don’t yet exist. In the meantime, we can agree not
to fear, scorn, or ignore new technologies but to be open to learning
about them, experimenting with them, and sharing the results. We can
reconsider assumptions built into our work over decades—assumptions
that may no longer make sense, such as whether to fund informal
networks, how individual entrepreneurs fit in the ecosystem of the
social sector, and what kinds of copyrights (if any) advance the social
missions we are pursuing. We can share ideas and data from the online
marketplaces of individual givers with the large professionally staffed
foundations, and vice versa. There are innumerable strategic and tactical
approaches for us—as philanthropic institutions, as social-purpose
organizations, and as individual donors—to consider in this moment of
transition.
It is a scary time for many, a time of unprecedented opportunity
for others. Just a few years ago we could not have imagined using
dispersed networks of cell phones to report on earthquake damage
and relief operations. Doing so seems obvious now. We cannot foresee
what the next application of technology to improving social conditions
will be—we can only be sure that it will seem obvious in retrospect.
Meanwhile, what we can do is facilitate the behaviors and expectations
of sharing structured data that will make that application possible.
We cannot assume that the inequities of access and capacity
that still prevent so many individuals and institutions from using these
new tools of change will disappear on their own. We must work to set
policies and programs that will ensure connectivity for all. We must
grasp the authentic beginnings of what information networks have
enabled, and be prepared for faster, smarter, farther-reaching, and more
innovative opportunities—for a philanthropy that’s truly effective.
46
Resources
Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The
Economic Dilemma. New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966.
Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms

Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Bollier, David, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital

Republic of Their Own. London: The New Press, 2008.
Doctorow, Cory, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,

Copyright and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon
Publications, 2008.
Fine, Allison, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age.

San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006.
Hawken, Paul, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World
Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. New York: Viking
Press, 2007.
Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom (eds), Understanding Knowledge as a

Commons: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
47
Johnson, Steven, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith,

Revolution and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.
Kot, Greg, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.

New York: Scribner & Sons, 2009.
Lessig, Lawrence, Remix: Making Art and Culture Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy. London: Penguin Press, 2008.
Li, Charlene, and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell: Winning in a World

Transformed by Social Technologies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business
School Press, 2008.
Moulitsas Zuniga, Markos, Taking on the System: Rules for Radical

Change in a Digital Era. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without

Organizations. London: Penguin Press, 2008.
Sunstein, Cass R, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge.

Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Watson, Tom, Causewired: Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the

World. New York: John C. Wiley, 2008.
Zittrain, Jonathan, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
48
Resources
Bloggers
Lucy Bernholz
Allison Fine
The Intrepid Philanthropist
Beth Kanter
Tom Watson
Other websites
http://www.moderngiving.com/
http://www.netsquared.org/
http://nten.org/
http://networkweaver.blogspot.com/
http://www.workingwikily.com/
49

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Disrupting

Edward Skloot is Director of the Center for Strategic Philanthropy

Barry Varela directs the Teaching Case Writing Program of the

Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society

Blueprint Research & Design

Book design by Randi Scherwin, Scherwin Design, LLC

The Philanthropic Landscape 6

Philanthropy’s Long Tails 10

Five Philanthropic Practices 20

Glimpses of the Future 33

• Measuring outcomes and impact: how funders and enterprises

Ten years ago, socially responsible investment was a niche

system.” It has also enabled “the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative

• Donor networks, such as the Global Impact Investing Network’s

Americans also contribute to the production of social good

investment. Online information hubs such as GuideStar,

Figure 2, “The Long Tail of Receiving,” shows how the nonprofit

Transactional philanthropy sites facilitate direct giving and

so on. Foundations are beginning to experiment with sharing with

On the soon-to-launch NeXii, individual registered users

FasterCures performs high-quality, independent research on a

The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation

Five Philanthropic Practices

tools in each of the above practice areas. For simplicity’s sake, we

Setting goals and formulating strategy

Building social capital

The ecology of social networks has diversified to include

three platforms—text donations, Twitter, and Facebook—moved

conversation will extend beyond the ballroom walls. For example, a

produce measures and tracking systems of value. These improvements

contribute to the further refinement of Success Measures frameworks,

schools. This type of evaluation turns subjects into actors. It changes

Measuring outcomes and impact

Accounting for the work

Grantsfire, an open platform that allows grants data to be

New blendings of market-based and nonmarket solutions

Networked, boundaryless, and often temporary alliances

Clark Foundation show how a data-driven portfolio approach can be

organizational status. They are managed by individuals who seek social

Will foundations find ways to fund dispersed, fluid, unincorporated

A relatively recent innovation is the storage of information in

Beyond the horizon

Benkler, Yochai, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms

Bollier, David, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital

Doctorow, Cory, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity,

Fine, Allison, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age.

Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom (eds), Understanding Knowledge as a

Johnson, Steven, The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith,

Kot, Greg, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music.

Li, Charlene, and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell: Winning in a World

Moulitsas Zuniga, Markos, Taking on the System: Rules for Radical

Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without

Sunstein, Cass R, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge.

Watson, Tom, Causewired: Plugging in, Getting Involved, Changing the

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