While the controversy about the Social Innovation Fund’s process for selecting its first round of grantees seems to be winding down, nonprofit social-media circles continue to buzz about the fund’s future and the potential damage caused by the dispute.
The Social Innovation Fund represents an important experiment in the way government interacts with the nonprofit world, but it’s in danger of being worn down before it even gets started, the victim of overanalysis by the people who should be most supportive, Nell Edgington, a nonprofit consultant, writes on her blog.
“If we don’t give the government some space to actually innovate, they may never go down this road again,” she writes. “Instead of beating innovation to death, let’s get out of our own way and see where this goes.”
Not everyone, however, agreed that the time for talk was over. On Wednesday afternoon, a one-hour Twitter debate …
ShoreBank—a Chicago financial institution that for more than 30 years provided loans in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in the city and later in Cleveland, Detroit, and the Pacific Northwest—failed late last week and was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Chicago Tribune reported. The bank had been struggling for months to raise enough money to stay afloat, according to the paper.
A consortium of large banks and foundations, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and the Ford Foundation, bought the bank’s deposits and most of its assets in the Midwest. It has reopened as the Urban Partnership Bank. OneCalifornia Bank, another community-development financial institution, bought ShoreBank Pacific, which was not part of the seizure.
An article in The Economistpoints to the severity of the downturn in the areas where ShoreBank made loans as well as its…
Americans’ approach to spending has been changing in recent years, with people placing more emphasis on buying “experiences,” such as travel or entertainment, rather than material goods, according to an article in The New York Times.
If that’s true, what are the implications for raising money, wondered Tom Belford, a long-time fund raiser, on The Agitator.
“For fund raisers, the challenge is how to create that sense of ‘experiencing’ your cause or organization and its mission or work,” he writes.
Consumers’ hunger for experiences underscores the importance of in-person events so donors can interact with a charity and with one another, writes Mr. Belford.
Social networks also allow their donors to interact with one another and share their passion for a cause, he notes. And such networks make it easy to share vivid photographs and video that are perhaps the simplest way “of transporting…
The nonprofit world is starting to digest yesterday’s announcement of $50-million in federal grants by the Social Innovation Fund.
Since the program was first announced, its objective has been unclear, Nathaniel Whittemore, founder of Assetmap, writes on Change.org. Was the fund’s purpose to help proven programs grow or to provide support for cutting-edge, risky experimentation?
The intermediary organizations that the program selected to award the money to nonprofit groups shows that the government chose “what works” over “innovation,” writes Mr. Whittemore, who regrets the decision.
“The relative smallness of the amount of resources being deployed lends themselves well to this being the ‘sandbox space’ where the government could support really experimental efforts that could go nowhere, but could also have the disruptive potential that just couldn’t be enacted through a government…
When charities talk about marketing, they usually mean efforts to persuade donors to give, but that’s only part of the equation, Dan Elitzer, a consultant in Washington, writes on Full Contact Philanthropy.
“Nonprofits also need marketing on the delivery side,” he writes. “The intended beneficiaries of the nonprofit’s products or programs (i.e., the clients) need to be made aware that they exist and convinced that they should invest the time and effort to take advantage of these offerings.”
According to Mr. Elitzer, when nonprofit marketing employees are courting potential donors, they are usually communicating with people whose cultural and socio-economic backgrounds are similar to their own. He says the challenge for those marketers on the program side, especially for antipoverty groups, is that potential clients may have very different experiences than their own.
Drew Wheelan, conservation coordinator at the American Birding Association, wanted to find an evocative setting for a video calling on BP to stop using a chemical known as corexit to disperse oil in the Gulf of Mexico. So he filmed it in a field across the street from BP headquarters in Houma, La.
What he ended up with was a video that showed officers from the Terrebonne Parish sheriff’s department trying to stop him from filming and pulling him over after the shoot. The officers explain that BP doesn’t want anyone filming but acknowledge that Mr. Wheelan isn’t breaking any laws.
As Mr. Wheelan talks to the officer who pulled him over on state highway 311, he says, “I guess that’s what happens when you deal with a $97-billion company.”
BP denies that it asked law-enforcement officers to prohibit filming of its property.
“It’s a public roadway,” Daren Beaudo, a spokesman for BP to…
The BP oil spill shows that the “blurring of the boundaries” between the nonprofit and for-profit sectors isn’t always a good thing, writes Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy. ”Just as we can and should ask whether lax government oversight of the oil industry helped make this disaster possible,” he writes, ”we can and should ask whether nonprofit environmental groups have been as outspoken as they could be — both before the spill and since.”
On CausePlanet.org, Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, offers advice about how to make time in your day for social media. “Social media is not something you can do once every couple of weeks,” she writes. “It takes daily feeding, which means that you have to make a commitment.”
Grant makers need to think like storytellers and keep their messages simple, Larry Blumenthal writes on
The fallout from the relationship between the Nature Conservancy and BP, the company responsible for the massive oil spill off the Gulf Coast, as detailed in a Washington Post article, is a good reminder to all charities of the importance of choosing partners carefully, say nonprofit experts.
But commentators disagree on whether the environmental group’s ties to the oil company represented a lapse in judgment.
“The fact of the Nature Conservancy’s taking funding from BP for years, no matter how small a percentage it is of the overall organizational budget, is a very bad sign of organizational values gone missing or soft,” Nancy Schwartz, a marketing consultant who works with charities, said in an interview on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog. “And once those values are endangered, resultant policy decisions are, too.”
To rehabilitate its reputation, the Nature Conservancy has to…
Three young social entrepreneurs are taking an unorthodox approach to raising capital to help their ventures grow. They are mortgaging a percentage of their future earnings in exchange for an unrestricted infusion of cash today.
One of the entrepreneurs is Jon Gosier, founder of Appfrica Labs, a technology incubator that offers jobs, mentoring services, and seed capital to East African technology entrepreneurs. He would like to raise $300,000. In return, he is offering 3 percent of his annual salary for the rest of his life.
“A small portion of the funds would simply be used as a ‘cushion’ to help us get by in lean months,” Mr. Gosier says in an interview on the Web site of the Thrust Fund, which the entrepreneurs started to facilitate the deals. “The majority of the cash would be used to replicate our success in Uganda in another African country, likely Malawi.”
How often are you solicited for charitable contributions each year? A donor who uses the Charity Navigator Web site kept tabs on how many mail appeals he received in a 12-month period and found that the American Diabetes Association sent 24 mailings, UNICEF and World Vision each sent 18, and the Special Olympics sent 14, to name just a few.
With an estimate that 17 of the nation’s 30 biggest foundations are not using social media or using it in a very limited way, Mitchell W. Hurst, a nonprofit communications consultant, says on his blog that “foundations that stay on the sidelines will miss out on the substantive discussions about their issues that are taking place online.”
Alan Khazei, co-founder of the nonprofit group City Year, speaks with Change.org about his bid to fill Edward M. Kennedy’s Senate seat.
Wall Street executives who face public criticism over…
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