Change.org's Social Entrepreneurship Blog

Unofficial Results for America's Giving Challenge

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-06T13:05:00-08:00

Sponsored by Causes, Parade Magazine, the Case Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the second annual America's Giving Challenge has come to an end. According to the unofficial results, the Overseas China Education Foundation has absolutely obliterated the competition, raising $188,000 from over 14,000 individual donations and thus winning the $50,000 prize money.

As I wrote last week, there was clearly something in the water of this years competition, as a few of the groups were able to generate a staggeringly higher number of donations than the others. The competition worked by awarding bounty sums of money to groups that were able to generate the greatest number of individual donations (vs. the greatest total amount of money).

The $50,000 prize winner had 14,000+ donations, the two $25,000 winners had 12,000 and 10,000+, and then with only one exception, the nine $10,000 winners had between 1,600 and 2,500 donations.

As you can see there is a huge spread, and that spread was established early. I wonder how the few standout groups performances dampened the competition. I know that I stopped realistically thinking that a number of the groups I was pulling for could win the $50,000 within just a week or two of the conference launching. If others felt like I did, they may not have been very compelled to give.

It's a fascinating case study in online fundraising and the game that goes on between organizations and donors. It's also cool to see $245,000 in resources leveraged to generate about $2,000,000 in additional donations. That 10x leverage is the sort of promise that internet fundraising holds.

Official results will be announced on or before November 20th.

(Photo: tonylanciabeta)

Best Friday Entrepreneur Links

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-06T11:55:00-08:00

It's been a while since I've done a link post. There has been a lot of great content over the last couple weeks - enjoy:

Ten Rules for Webstartups: Twitter CEO Evan Williams shares some tips that, while aimed at web startups can be useful for any young startup leader.

30 Under 30: America's Coolest Young Entrepreneurs: Inc. magazine puts out their annual list of the coolest young entrepreneurs in the country. One of my favorites? Ideapaint, the product that turns any wall into a whiteboard.

Manhattan Institute Social Entrepreneurship Award 2009: The conservative think tank Manhattan Institute demonstrates social entrepreneurship political-barrier-crossing appeal and has been supporting the work of social entrepreneurs since 2001 with a $25,000 award. Meet their new class.

Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship: The very awesome MIT center is recruiting fellows for next year's class.

20 of the Best Resources To Get Your Startup Off the Ground: Mashable puts together a great list of free advice and tools relevant for any type of entrepreneur.

(Photo: Matti Matilla)

For Startups To Succeed Means to Evolve

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-05T15:36:00-08:00

PayPal started as a payment and cryptography platform for palm pilots. Apple - perhaps the savviest consumer company of our era - began by selling assemble-it-yourself computer kits for the uber geeky. Change.org started without any of the content features through which I'm now writing this post. In the land of startups, the ability to adapt and seize new opportunities is perhaps the essential required skill.

I was thrilled yesterday to see a Wired piece on Groupon, the group-purchasing tool for local services. Every day, Groupon emails its subscribers a new offer, or "Groupon." A Groupon is a certain service - like a massage, or a dinner or something else - that has a discount included. The Groupon is only applicable, however, if a certain threshold of people sign up for it.

In that way, the services harness collective buying power to enable businesses to reduce cost in a great big exciting circle. Launched just a year ago, the service now has over a million subscribers, operates in 23 cities, and has sold 600,000 Groupons.

I've known the folks behind Groupon (including a fellow Northwestern University alumni) for a couple years now. It evolved from Thepoint.com, a site that was all about harnessing "reverse auction" models and tipping points for collective action. The idea behind The Point is that sometimes, every little bit doesn't count, and if a certain threshold isn't reached, then its effectively no different than not using any resources. An example would be a well project that needs $10,000 to happen. If it costs $10,000, then $9,000 raised just isn't going to cut it.

The Point accomplished some very cool things, and is still a valuable platform, but it never took off the way that I thought it would. While they haven't shut it down, it's clear that their focus is largely in Groupon right now.

Interestingly enough, they haven't left their community-oriented mission behind. Founder Andrew Mason commented that while originally he just figured that Groupon would fund more social missions, what he heard from his customers made him rethink: “What surprised me was that we got e-mails from people saying it wasn’t just about getting a discount, it was about helping us get out in the city. People said, ‘We go on more dates.’ Groupon was getting people out from the couch and that was a fulfilling purpose. In some ways it’s more impactful than The Point.”

One more notch in the belt of evolution. So what's in the future? According to Wired, maybe Groupon Healthcare?

The Power of Partnerships in the Coming Fundraising Season

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-05T06:20:00-08:00

The end of the year is the biggest part of the fundraising season for many nonprofits, but with the economy continuing to struggle, this year is likely going to be harder than ever on many. Some are trying to address this by participating in contests like America's Giving Challenge; others are sending me direct mail trying to guilt me back into funding (sorry - it's not happening). Others are discovering their DNA as collaborative, 21st century nonprofits who, when times get rough, ask how partnership and the skills of those around them can help.

Catapult Design is a startup nonprofit based out of San Francisco that, in the tradition of leaders like Paul Polak, are using engineering and design solutions to help people out of poverty. Embracing the notion of human-centered design and community partnerships for appropriately designed technology, Catapult is a group that has collaboration at the center of their social mission.

More than that, however, their collaborative DNA extends to their work in the states. Like many collaboration-oriented organizations, they have a fiscal sponsor, share office space with others, work to harness the power of engaged interns, and embrace openness in the form of things like their weekly open sessions where anyone can come and learn more about the organization.

Catapult are not the only example of nonprofits that have real collaboration embedded in their DNA. Creative worldchangers like All Day Buffet, the mobile technology for good folks at organizations like Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS, and the whole new generation of social startup incubators like Unreasonable Institute, GlobeMed, Global Engagement Summit, Starting Bloc, Think Impact, Sparkseed, and a half dozen more I haven't included - all of these groups are programmed for partnership.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a collaboration fanboy. I think that many times, the nonprofit sectors infatuation with the idea of collaboration and its general antagonism towards the notion that competition could improve organizations stand in the way of building the most effective groups and achieving the greatest change.

That said, I do think we're going to be in a moment of massive nonprofit consolidation. For the first time in a long time, some organizations are going to be forced to shut their doors, or at least dramatically scale back their work.

An impulse to collaborate often comes from a recognition of one's own imperfections and weaknesses, and an ability to find individuals or groups with complementary needs. I do think that the ability to recognize one's own weakness and plan accordingly is a sign of having a high capacity for resilience. In times of crisis, there is nothing more important than resilience and adaptation.

So does that mean that Catapult will hit its $50,000 year end fundraising goal? That GlobeMed will come from behind to win America's Giving Challenge? That all of these organizations I identified will meet their goals? The hard answer is that partnership and an instinct towards collaboration alone may sometimes not be enough. What I am sure of is that whatever happens, they will learn, those around them will learn, and that they will adapt.

Watch TEDIndia Live Tomorrow

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-04T21:11:00-08:00

The first ever TEDIndia conference is streaming live tomorrow (well, in a few hours, to be precise), and you can get all of the details on their site: http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/

There are some amazing folks speaking at the event - more in fact than I can tell you about, as the reality is that I'm just not as familiar with many of those they have from around India. Some notables that you might know already, though, who are speaking tomorrow include Hans Rosling, who has wowed TED before with his completely nontradtional statistical visualizations, and Tony Hsieh, the renown (at least over in this part of the world) CEO of Zappos, the online shoe company that has built its brand around innovative customer service.

In addition to watching, it's worth your while to check out the TEDIndia fellows, whose project range from Samasource's computer based work for the poor to CellBazaar's marketplace for mobile users.

(Photo: VS Ramachandran speaks at yesterday's session of TED U. See more pics of TED U. Photo: TED/ James Duncan Davidson)

Victors & Spoils: The Entirely Crowdsourced Creative Agency

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-04T17:07:00-08:00

There are few industries as impacted by the onslaught of social media as marketing and communications. Whereas companies once were able to craft carefully controlled brand messages, they are now subject to the whims of the collective conversation. This can be a good thing, as exciting new products or ideas can spread in ways never before possible. Yet at the same time, it also means that the angry, the frustrated, the haters can find eachother much more quickly.

Victors & Spoils is a new creative ad agency trying to harness the best power of crowdsourcing to discover talent. Just launched in the last week, the group will carefully manage client projects - just as they would in a traditional ad agency - but all of the design, concepting, and other elements of the branding, marketing, and other creative processes will be carried out by a mobile dynamic group of creative professionals as well as average folks.

The announcement has caused quite a bit of buzz, including this post by frog design marketing head Tim Leberecht, who says that while it may be the "jump the shark" moment for crowdsourcing, it is also a bold experiment that's worth watching closely.

Do I think it will work? The people behind it are certainly talented, having come out of renown agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. What's more, the best part of crowdsourcing is that it allows one to discover talent and ideas from a far broader range of places. The downside is that the "wisdom of the crowds" isn't always so wise. What it sounds like, however, is that their model involves the sort of curation that can maximize the benefits while minimizing the downside.

Interested folks can participate right away, as the company is starting by crowdsourcing its logo and other brand elements. To see what's come up so far, check out their contest on crowdspring. Visit their website to learn more.

(Photo: One of my favorite crowdsourced entrants to the V&S logo contest)

Self-Less vs. Self-Aware Giving

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-04T11:50:00-08:00

Is there such a thing as selfless charity? That's the question being debated in the comments on a great post on Tactical Philanthropy. Inspired by the new book "The Art of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan," TP author Sean asked about motivations and why people give? While I don't believe there is such a thing as selfless giving, I do believe that giving can be much more self-aware - and in the process, much more fulfilling, sustainable, and effective.

This notion of selfless acts is fascinating not only from the standpoint of philanthropy but from economics, psychology, and faith as well. Economists might think of this from the standpoint of utility. If a $10 gift to charity gives you more valuable feelings than $10 spend on a CD, you're going to give to charity because we're utility maximizers.

That idea of maximizing utility brings up psychology - or more specifically the idea that reward is emotional and not necessarily monetary. Perhaps even more profound, emotional reward can come even at the expense what is psychically or financially good for us.

The thing that's profound about this for me is that it is the quintessential story embedded in human culture is our social self over coming our biological self. Sacrifice - as embedded in every movie, novel, and story in human history - is about doing something for others that costs us greatly in terms of our own biological imperative to survive and thrive. This is, of course, the story at the heart of Christianity, among other traditions.

The question is whether, in our day to day lives, sacrifices that cost us monetarily cost us emotionally as well, or whether in fact, the emotional reward tends to be much higher in terms of our utility. My general feeling is that people give because they feel a sense of obligation or commitment, and the utility is the personal satisfaction and social affirmation that they receive in return. This may be at great "cost" to them, but it's not "selfless" in pure terms.

Given that, why would someone want giving to be selfless? There are many reasons, but the one that I think is most worth considering is the notion that giving and philanthropy must be to the ends of actually creating change for real people, and sometimes the particular emotional reward that people are looking for can get in the way of creating change in the most effective way. What's more, it can create false expectations about agency. Put more plainly, people giving money to causes want to feel like they actually did something. They want to feel like it was their money, individually, that had a specific, calcuable, knowable impact.

This is the emotional desire at the core of the recent Kiva marketing controversy, and at the core of the controversy around child sponsorship programs in the past. As I wrote before, I don't think that insisting that people be selfless in their giving is the answer.

I ran philanthropy and social change education programs at Northwestern University for the last four years before moving out to San Francisco to start Assetmap. What I found in that time is that while people weren't ever going to be self-less givers, they could be self-aware givers, and this could be even more powerful.

As I wrote in the comments on Sean's post:

One of the things we always did with students at our programs at Northwestern was start by examining motivations.

We did this NOT to convince them that their motivations were wrong, or needed to be a particular way, or even to get them to shift their behavior, but because our M.O. was to get people hooked on contributing to the greater good for their whole lives.

In that context, “sustainability” becomes about finding a way to contribute to the world that is sustainable with your individual aspirations – career, style of life, etc. Not everyone can or should be a social entrepreneur. Not everyone can or should be a international development practitioner. Everyone can and should figure out what their commitment to the world means for them.

I’ve never really believed in “selfless” acts of giving. I do, however, believe in self-aware giving. What we’ve found is that when you ask people to examine their motivations, they get better at giving. The reason is that what most people are looking for is the feeling of having made a real difference in a tangible way. If you can break it down to that level, you can help nudge them towards experiences where that desire can be manifest in the most effective ways possible.

(Photo: liewcf)

Distribution vs. Promotion and The Rise of the Email List

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-03T17:05:00-08:00

Nonprofits are increasingly a fan of Facebook and a flutter with Twitter. Yet there is a new old medium that is poised to make a comeback as a key vehicle for interpersonal communication: the e-mail list. The launch of the new All Day Buffet project TBD provides an interesting occasion to examine the power and problems of the medium.

For many of us, e-newsletters have always been a part of the online experience, for better or worse. I find myself hunting for the 'unsubscribe' button at least once a week. Nonprofits I've worked with, companies I've accidentally signed up for information from, or worse, who have purchased my information from third party sellers - it all becomes a little much. So why proclaim (and acclaim) the medium?

The difference between a good email list and an annoying newsletter is, often I think, the difference between treating the list as a distribution channel for great content versus as a promotion channel for your brand.

The reason most business or even nonprofit newsletters don't matter that much to us is that even if we support their mission, we're just not invested in them. Occasionally it may be interesting to read a profile of one of their staff members, but honestly, we've got limited time and a lot of things to read (not to mention do).

Compare this to something like Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis' email list, started about a year ago with 600 subscribers and which is now up to 25,000. Every couple weeks, Jason emails out the equivalent of a set of blog posts on some specific topic he finds particularly relevant or compelling at the time. I don't know the guy, but he writes great, compelling stuff that is always interesting to read, and even when I decide I don't have time, I wish I had.

This site is actually another example of a "newsletter" that is really just a delivery mechanism for top weekly content and actions. At the end of each week, I get a burst of traffic that comes from people who may not be regular visitors to the site but who have had their interest piqued by the overview of the story in the newsletter.

Ever the experimenters, All Day Buffet has launched a new weekly email list for good called TBD (standing for "to be determined"). Each week the newsletter features some interesting world changing organization and then provides an idea for how readers can take action. It's focused in it's scope and accordingly, is high value with limited commitment. The bet they're making is that people will come to see it as an opportunity to check into a particular social change focused side of their lives once a week and reconnect with some larger collective action. It's only been a couple weeks but the first editions have been great and I won't be unsubscribing any time soon.

These examples demonstrate the interesting blend between personal and company brands. Jason's list is obviously about his personal brand, but he both acquires new readers and, on the flip side, drives new traffic to his company through it. TBD is working to establish a voice and trust with people as a brand in it's own right, but a lot of that success will be based on how people resonate with Jerri Chou and other ADB staffers voices.

But I think it's an interesting communications experiment that fills an important niche. I've started a bi-monthly email list to share interesting and relevant content about social entrepreneurship, the web startup world and more. You can sign up here, and as I see how it evolves over the next few months, I'll keep readers posted.

(Photo: Manchester Library)

PEPFAR Gets In On Mobile Health

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-03T10:39:00-08:00

mHealth is big these days. As the public health debate rages in the USA and the conversation around global health grows in the general consciousness, the idea of using mobile devices to help improve the quality, speed, and convenience of care is becoming increasingly important. In a keynote at last week's mHealth Summit, the US Coordinator for AIDS Relief Ambassador Eric Goosby announced that the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) would be joining the mHealth Alliance.

The alliance was first announced earlier this year at the GSM World Mobile Congress as a partnership between the United Nations Foundation, Vodafone Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Like all "alliances," the mHealth Alliance is an evolving platform that will theoretically do some combination of best practice sharing, support for scaling, and cross-sector partnership building.

From the folks I've talked to, there is a lot of tempered optimism around this. PEPFAR is a major funder that can add significant direction and momentum to the field. The influx of resources could reduce competition and provide new incentives for collaboration that can take what are currently mostly niche applications of very promising tools and help them scale in new ways.

At the same time, some have questions about how different approaches to development will gel together. On the one hand there is the small, networked, let people use tools how they will ethos. On the other is the sort of top down, comprehensively planned intervention that government agencies traffic in. Beyond that, mobile is fast and rapidly evolving while bureaucracy moves painfully slow. Of course, there is always room for balance.

For more on the announcement, check out the full press release here.

Photo: DavidDennisPhotos.com

Kellogg Foundation Pumps $75K More Into America's Giving Challenge

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-02T16:58:00-08:00

At the end of last week, the Case Foundation announced that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation had just anted up an additional $75,000 to support the second annual America's Giving Challenge. The new money is really awesome, but the real story is China kicking the crap out of everyone else.

The new money will be used to fund five additional awards, including another $25,000 prize and four more $10,000 prizes. Additionally, it will fund additional $1,500 daily prizes between now and the end of the challenge.

The challenge has had a big response so far this year, with almost 70,000 people donating $1.3 million to about 7,500 different nonprofits. This a great example of a leveraged model, where just under $250,000 in ultimate award money has produced almost five times that in user-generated donations.

The leader board is honestly a bit crazy. Two groups I've never heard of - the Overseas China Education Foundation and Save Chinese Children - have over 5,000 donations. Compare that to last year's winner, Atlas Corps, who are extremely good at organizing for this and have an extremely compelling project, who are in 6th place with just under 2,000 donations.

The next few days will definitely be interesting - particularly as the four or five groups that have between 4,500 and 6,700 donations currently pour it on. Stay tuned.

What Entrepreneurship Has To Do With Gay Marriage In Maine

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-02T11:30:00-08:00

Tomorrow, Mainers go to the polls to affirm or reject a state law allowing gay marriage. If they vote "No on 1," Maine will become the first state in the country where voters have ratified the right to marriage equality. It may not seem like something I would cover on this blog, but I believe that Maine's struggle with this question surfaces the core elements of social entrepreneurship that make it such an appealing approach to change.

Social entrepreneurship - indeed, entrepreneurship in general - are about agency. They are affirmations of the notion that people have the ability to create - to create value, to create wealth, to create meaning. Unlike charity (which I still believe is important), the actor whose agency is realized in social entrepreneurship is the doer, not the giver.

Questions of marriage equality are also about agency - the agency of two people who love each other to recognize that union legally, and receive the attendant legal benefits. Opponents of gay marriage might argue that their opposition is also about agency - the agency of the church to determine who is does and doesn't recognize. That may be fair, but it's also not primarily the concern of government what a religious institution thinks. In fact, it is it's job to preserve equality regardless of religion, or any other demographic difference for that matter.

Social entrepreneurship is also about dignity. Indeed, for many who believe in the power of markets to end poverty, their primary excitement about social enterprise is that by helping people exert their own agency to improve their station in life, it affirms their ability to control their own destiny, and in the process, affirms their dignity. Charity and aid can often reinforce the opposite assumption - that people don't have control of their own lives and need others to help. By creating dependency, the dignity of the poor is often undermined.

Now dignity and charity are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In some eastern philosophical traditions, mendicants - holy people who beg for alms - have just as much dignity as any other group. What's more, it's dangerous to take the relationship between dignity and purchasing power too far. All that said, the autonomy and dignity that social enterprise can engender are major elements of the excitement around the field.

Marriage equality is most certainly about dignity. It's about moving beyond the falsehoods, assumptions, and slander that characterize and demonize homosexuality. Marriage is not - nor should it be - the only path to dignity for the gay community, but the rest of society's denial of that right is an undeniable affront to their dignity.

Finally, social entrepreneurship - like all efforts for social change - must eventually come down to a question of justice. Justice is undermined when an individual or group is systematically denied the ability to live their lives to the fullest because of accidents of birth like where one happened to be born, or because of a characteristic the broader society has decided to label abnormal.

Social entrepreneurship is an attempt to remedy the injustice of unequally distributed opportunity. Put more plainly, people are talented everywhere, but people do not have the ability to fully use their talents everywhere. Social entrepreneurship is about finding ways to extend opportunity to talent, wherever it resides.

Marriage equality is an attempt to remedy the injustice of prejudice that impacts not just social perception, but actual legal rights. At the end of the day, marriage equality has to matter not because the government needs to regulate what individuals believe, or what institutions like churches decide about who they accept, but because the job of government is to insure that the common rights of all citizens are protected and held as equal under the law. Period.

I have a lot of faith that advocates of marriage equality will prevail in Maine tomorrow. Having grown up there, I know that these characteristics of entrepreneurship - dignity, agency, justice - and moreover the simple notion of living and letting live and doing unto others as you would have done to you are deeply, deeply embedded in the collective psyche. Even when Maine doesn't agree with the way someone lives, it tends not to be its instinct to believe that it's anyone else's businesses - and certainly not something that should be regulated.

Still, the forces against marriage equality have poured money into the state and run a campaign that would suggest that affirming the rights of gay people to marry would be equivalent to signing the execution papers for modern society. Who wins will be based entirely on who decides to turn up.

Tomorrow, stay tuned to our Gay Rights blog for the latest news.

Kiva Hits $100 Million in Loans

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-11-01T20:47:00-08:00

Just in time for their big 4th birthday celebration this week in Berkeley, Kiva announced yesterday that they had officially hit $100,000,000 in loans. In a blog post on the site, President Premal Shah said that the group had hit the milestone with donations from 584,189 lenders.

This is a huge accomplishment. The level of engagement that Kiva has engendered and the excitement around the model are a major force for good in the social entrepreneurship space. Despite recent questions about marketing practices, Kiva has helped average people participate in a newer model of international development that, if no panecea, has much to recommend it.

What's more, Kiva has helped make real the power of the internet for social engagement. While many in the nonprofit industry have understood for a while the significance of this technological innovation, Kiva has demonstrated the democratizing power of the internet to help people - not to supplant old actors, who remain important - but to participate in change in extremely compelling ways.

What's more, Kiva has been a touchstone for the social entrepreneurship movement, in more ways than one. Microfinance itself helps people understand the idea of using business practices to help people lift themselves out of poverty. The way the site harnesses the distributed power of the internet and couples it with diligent on the ground partners and practices seems like a model for 21st century change. And finally, the stories of founders and high level staffers like Matt Flannery and Premal Shah, who incubated their talents in the for-profit startup world to then reapply them to social change has become a personal model for many.

People participate in change first out of a deep human instinct to contribute to the good of others and second because opportunities arise (or, perhaps more rarely, are sought out) that harness their instincts and talents in compelling ways.

The controversy around Kiva's marketing has struck a nerve with some because it cuts to the heart of what makes that experience compelling. For me, the reason that I'm convinced that Kiva will come through this just fine is that their experience is deeply engaging and different for people in more than one way, and they have a trust and commitment to public evolution that few can match. I'm hoping that this $100 mil is the first of many more.

(Photo: bfick)

Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Importance of Social Density

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-31T13:41:00-07:00

Despite the power of the internet to accelerate communication and connect people across greater distances than ever before, social density - the depth and diversity of connections in a geographically concentrated area - still has incredible power to determine business innovation and success.

Yesterday in my post about the Huffington Post's Philanthropy Game Changers, I noticed that six out of the ten participants were based in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is a selection bias towards technology in the nominees, which explains the concentration to some extent, but that just brings up the question of how the Bay Area became the place where technology innovation is concentrated in the first place.

There's a great historical piece today on TechCrunch about how Silicon Valley became the leading light that it is, and in particular, why Boston - arguably the technology leader for most of the second half of the 20th century - slowly slipped behind northern California as an innovation hub.

The author's contention is that while Boston still has incredible resources, the decentralized networked community of innovators in Silicon Valley gave it an edge that allowed it to leapfrog the more top-down, 20th century industrial organized technlogy of the Northeast.

There are fascinating lessons here for social innovators about how to foster the sort of social density that gives certain regions significant comparative advantage. This is what the Hub is all about; and it's also what will or won't make things like the Unreasonable Institute work.

Photo: oskay

Vote For Philanthropy Game Changers on Huffington Post Today!

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-30T17:47:00-07:00

The media network Huffington Post is identifying the folks in a variety of fields who are changing the shape of their industries. In ten different areas, they've nominated 10 "game changers," and it's up to the masses to decide who is really changing things.

They've just opened the voting on the Philanthropy game changer and there are some familiar faces:

Matt Flannery: founder of microlending portal Kiva

Perla Ni: founder of Great Nonprofits, a rating and review site for people to share their feedback about civil society organizations

Ben Rigby, Jacob Colker, Sundeep Ahuja: founders of The Extraordinaries, the new platform for translating spare time into social action

Lucy Bernholz: Philanthropy blogger and expert who is constantly pushing the field

Kushal Chakrabarti: founder of Vittana, the platform for peer-to-peer education loans

Charles Best: the founder of DonorsChoose.org, the platform for peer-to-peer donations for classroom programs

Bill Drayton: the godfather of social entrepreneurship and founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public

Jeff Skoll: the other godfather of social entrepreneurship and co-founder of eBay whose foundation has invested heavily in the movement

Sean Parker: co-founder of Facebook Causes (and before that Facebook, and Napster), the online giving platform

and yes, Michael Bloomberg: Mayor of New York City who has invested in making it easier for New Yorkers to serve their community

There are a couple interesting things about the list:

1) Preponderance of technology-focused organizations. Part of this could be a selection bias, as Huffington Post is at the forefront of News 2.0, but a full 7 out of the 10 nominees are using the internet to build new types of philanthropic platforms. Jeff Skoll isn't doing that, but made his money there.

2) Geographic concentration: This perhaps follows from #1, but 6 of the 10 are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bloomberg and Best are in New York City; Chakrabarti in Seattle and Drayton in D.C. Even in the internet-era, physical proximity matters.

3) The two more "institutional" actors are social entrepreneurship foundation types.

Who are you going to vote for? Who isn't on this list but should be?

Photo: Philanthropy blogger guru Lucy Bernholz

Unreasonable Institute Launches $150,000 "Village Fund"

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-30T10:08:00-07:00

The Unreasonable Institute has just updated their website with an announcement that they are partnering with First Light Ventures to launch a $150,000 fund for participating entrepreneurs at the upcoming social innovation incubation program. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the money will be allocated not by the venture investors but by the entrepreneurs themselves.

I've been following UI for a while. They're one of the most complete social incubator models I've seen, explicitly taking best practices from programs like Y Combinator and TechStars, which use mentorship, training, and investment to launch new technology startups.

This funding marks a major milestone for the viability of this idea. After spending some time with the folks behind the project, I've been confident about their model of curriculum and mentorship for a while, but there is something fundamentally different about the value they can provide to their entrepreneurs, and in turn, the investment the entrepreneurs are likely to invest in their community.

And community is the operative word. The boldest experiment with this money is that it's to be allocated by the entrepreneurs themselves. The funding will come in a combination of forms from larger unrestricted monies to smaller amounts allocated throughout the program for things like building a website. The precise structures through which the allocation will happen are yet to be announced, but it's clear the emphasis is on putting the power in the hands of people who have intimate knowledge of their peers and their projects.

I think it's a big experiment. I resonate deeply with the notion of redestributing power in the funding equation, and the idea of building deeper community bonds. I also worry about how the introduction of financial resources and the power to allocate it brings out the more competitive, tenacious and destructive tendencies.

No matter what, it's going to produce an incredible amount of learning. I would venture that regardless of what happens, our field will be better off for having tried something new.

New Twitter Lists Function A New Way To Discover Social Innovators

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-29T11:01:00-07:00

Twitter has started rolling out it's much anticipated "lists" feature for all users today.

Twitter lists give any Twitter user the ability to create a sub-group of the people they follow based on some specific affinity, such as "social entrepreneurship." The list then acts as a filter for that user, so they can just see updates from that group, rather from all of their followers.

Importantly though, lists are public. What this means is that when I create a list of social entrepreneurs, other people can see and even follow that list. Anyone who follows the list has the ability to see the full stream of tweets from people on the list, even if they're not following member of the list.

For people interested in the social enterprise space, the list function provides a great way to find new interesting social innovators without committing to follow them right away. Already, my @socialentrprnr account is on something like 25 lists - each of which ranges from 25-150 or so members and most of which are focused on the social entrepreneurship field.

Check out these lists to find some great new people:

http://twitter.com/EmilyTav/social-entrepreneurship - 100+ social entrepreneurs

http://twitter.com/solarafrica/social-entrepreneurs - 200+ social innovators

http://twitter.com/ivanpa/innovation - 50+ focused on innovation more broadly

http://twitter.com/dewittn/social-entrepreneurship - almost 400 diverse social enterprise

Read more about the new feature on this TechCrunch writeup. Thanks to TC for the photo above.

How Your Leader's Expertise Can Become Your Company's Weakness

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-29T09:36:00-07:00

What's for sure is I'm a web guy. I run one technology startup, I manage a big chunk of another. I spend a huge part of my time keeping track of what's happening on the web, and I even do front end web design.

So why is it that one of the major weaknesses of my old Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern was our crappy web presence? I think It's a lesson in how the individual strengths of a leader can become the organization's weakness.

First the back story. I graduated from Northwestern in 2006. That year, I founded the Global Engagement Summit (GES) - a student run community development and social entrepreneurship training program - and the Center for Global Engagement, a study abroad program design center. I spent the next three years building CGE (CGE) and helping GES take root as a student organization.

Throughout all of this, I always had huge schemes for the websites. Functionality, design - it was all quite innovative. Unfortunately, for some reason we never really got past the "our website is just a blog" stage. It was fine, it delivered the information we needed, and we did a good job not spending money on something that wasn't going to be great. But it was still pretty lame.

Fast forward to today. I left NU a few months ago at the beginning of the summer. The student leadership of GES has been largely independent of me for a while, but this was the first time no one involved in the original founding of the organization was physical proximate. After a long recruitment process, CGE had new staff as well.

Despite the fact that none of the new leadership for either organization had any experience or even particularly a lot of interest with the web, one of their first orders of business was to update the web presence. In the last couple weeks, both have relaunched their websites. Both totally kick ass.

The website for the CGE's Global Engagement Summer Institute program:

The website for the Global Engagement Summit:

So if I'm supposedly the "web guy," why did the new, non-technically oriented staff just make my total web outputs for my former organizations look silly?

I think that, ironically, the strength of an individual organization leader can become that organization's weakness. The reason for that is that strong leadership - particularly in the nonprofit sector - is a lot about coordinating the good work of others, making sure that other leaders have agency, authority, and responsibility for big chunks of duty.

The temptation for a leader is to horde those responsibilities that relate to their own interests and skill areas. It makes sense from the standpoint of harnessing the assets of everyone involved, so no one things twice.

What can happen, though, is that those things which are natural and most comfortable for the leader slowly move further and further down the priority chain. Particularly if the leader in question is in a CEO or founder role which requires a lot of juggling, executing around specific concrete tasks - even those tasks directly in line with their skills - can become challenging.

What's more, unlike other areas in which smart leaders are comfortable asking for help, leaders who have a particular expertise tend not to want to ask for help in that area. They tend to be less comfortable to trust others to execute as well as they could, even if their nature is to trust in general.

The lesson for leaders is to think soberly and humbly about the nature of the commitments they have to their organizations. Every leader's arrangement is different, but to execute specific tasks as well as to coordinate the work of others requires investing a large amount in the leadership of others. What's more, I think the lesson is for leaders to think about how they arrange support around themselves that's related to their expertise, even if that feels counter intuitive when they're trying to save resources for elsewhere.

And finally - and this is the one piece of this that I think I got right with Northwestern - leaders need to not be afraid to hand over the reigns to new people with different skills, fresh ideas, and perhaps even different long-term goals.

Organizations, like people, evolve. I am all for strong entrepreneurs, but to keep organizations tethered to a single perspective forever is a conceit to vanity.

(Photo: subcircle)

For-Profit Social Startup Capital: The Missing Middle?

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-28T15:38:00-07:00

In a post on the new Huffington Post Impact section, Catchafire founder Rachael Chong laments the lost opportunity of the US Social Innovation Fund to support for-profit social entrepreneurs. The post begs the question of where the "missing middle" of capital for for-profit social entrepreneurs will be found.

Rachael points out the irony that the Social Innovation Fund isn't currently conceived to support for-profit social ventures , considering that a number of the advisers to the fund and the parallel Office of Social Innovation are high profile proponents of the good that business actors can do.

From my understanding, the decision to focus the government's foray into supporting social ventures on the nonprofit sector has a lot to do with what legislator's were comfortable with. It was a compromise made in order to get the necessary support and buy-in to pass the legislation authorizing the Social Innovation Fund.

When I'm honest with myself, I understand why a legislator who feels obligated to his or her home constituency would be worried about committing to direct government investment in for-profit actors. There is a real question of accrual of benefit that remains quietly contentious; should the value of a social innovation be primarily focused on societal or individual gain, and what's the balance?

Still, Rachael's frustration resonates with me. Regardless of whether it's the government's job, there is a dirth of seed stage funding for primarily social startups. There are some in the new crop of social venture firms that deal with them, and groups like Investor's Circle do provide some formal channels, but it's still a very young space.

One of the impacts of this is that young people developing innovative socially-focused organizations tend to be nonprofit-by-default because that's where the seed money is - or at least appears to be. When you're taking a big risk to start something, it's hard to see more than a few steps down the line. I think if there were more for-profit capital for social startups, you'd see more people giving that a running shot.

(Photo: cmpalmer)

Equations for Failure

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-28T14:17:00-07:00

[Editor's Note: This guest post was contributed by Shalyn Hockey, VP Operations at Assetmap. Shalyn had the chance to spend yesterday learning lessons about failure and success from some of Web 2.0's big names and has summarized what she learned below.]

Entrepreneurs throw around ideas, all over the place, all the time. It's necessary. Some ideas are brilliant, but most are not. Some come too soon, others too late. All entrepreneurs hope to find the idea that is the rose among the thorns, the one that will launch them to virality and an IP0.

But the key is discerning the difference between the truly disruptive ideas and the ideas that are simply bad. Disruptive ideas flip the status quo and write new industry rules. Facebook, Twitter, Google, PayPal, Amazon, all seeded with disruptive ideas. At the onset disruptive and bad ideas may look similar, so the value for entrepreneurs is recognizing fail prone ideas at their onset.

Yesterday 25 seasoned entrepreneurs gathered at FailCon in San Francisco, and bravely took the plunge into vulnerability and shared their experiences of failures. Sounds depressing? Not quite. In reality it was fairly inspiring because people can make failure work for them. They learn and adapt and do it better next time. But that's the wisdom that you can find in any inspirational self-help book. FailCon showed something different beyond how to turn failure into success - it evidenced patterns in all these stories of failure. And as mathematics teaches us, where there are patterns there are equations. And where there are equations, there may be some method to the madness. Knowing when things fail may make it easier to notice and avoid fail prone ideas. So here are my ten equations for failure:

1. 3 Business School Grads + 0 Technical Talent = Tech Company FAIL
2. Right Idea + Wrong Execution = FAIL Every Time
3. Compelling Start-up Story + Lack of Control of Storytelling = Brand FAIL
4. Experimentation with Product + Lack of Experimentation with Process = Organization FAIL = Company FAIL
5. Passion for Your Idea + Inflexible Mind = FAIL Every Time
6. Overly Aggressive Financial Forecast + Un-detailed Financial Model = VC Round FAIL
7. Preparation for Downsides + Lack of Preparation of Upsides = Scale FAIL
8. Craving of Media Attention and Respect + Lack of Strategic Agenda = Focus FAIL
9. Promising Initial Idea + Pushing Product with an ASAP timeline = Product FAIL
10. 5 Great Ideas + Trying to Do Them All at Once = Company FAIL

FailCon in its exploration of failure ended up pointing to success. Some of the entrepreneurs who shared their failure: Max Ventilla the co-founder of Aardvark, Mark Pincus the CEO and founder of Zynga and Max Rafael Levchin the co-founder and former CTO of PayPal, for example, are now wildly successful. But they all credited their success to their failures because they learned and adapted. And in their stories I saw patterns too. And again patters, lead me to think of equations....

1. Understandable + Useable + Useful Product = SUCCESS
2. Lots of Ideas + In the Right Places + At the Right Time = SUCCESS
3. Failure + Learning + Adaption + Failure + Learning + Adaption.....= SUCCESS
4. Good Style + Compelling Voice/Story + User Focused Product = SUCCESS
5. Compelling idea + Diverse and Dynamic Team + Mental Flexibility = SUCCESS

Now of course, the fact remains that most start-ups fail, so success is still surprising.. But it seems like failure does not need to be. There is clearly a huge amount of grey area - the wild card start-ups that vacillates between success and failure. But at least in part, failure can be more predictable than success. It's just a matter of knowing the variables.

Shalyn Hockey is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she majored in Learning eand Organizational Change and International Studies. At Northwestern, she directed the largest undergraduate-run conference on human rights in the country. She is now based in San Francisco as the Vice President of Operations at Assetmap Strategies.

Learning How To Fail

Nathaniel Whittemore — 2009-10-27T08:41:00-07:00

One of the most important aspects of being a successful entrepreneur is learning how to fail. Whether it's a messed up grant proposal, shifting team dynamics, or dealing with different stakeholder expectations, perhaps the most vital skill of a successful entrepreneur is adaptation. Today in San Francisco, the SNAP Summit is convening to ask how leading tech entrepreneurs have failed, and then put the lessons they learned back into practice.

The tech industry is an interesting one to learn from. In many ways, it's more structured to deal with failure than any other field. Venture capital expects that most of it's investments just simply won't pan out. Founders who have a failure or two under their belt often times have a much better ability to get people to support them, because the learning from failure is respected.

Of course, the stakes of failure are somewhat lower in the web 2.0 world then they can be in the international development space. When an organization begins to create an expectation of a certain resource, and people start to plan their work and world's around that resource, the results of failure can be extremely damaging.

Still, it will be interesting to see what lessons from a "pro-failure" industry like the internet can be applied to the social enterprise space. I'm still in Maine post Pop!Tech, but we'll have a guest post later from one of my team at Assetmap, who has herself lots of experience with human rights and social justice issues. Stay tuned.

Photo: Twitter's famous "Fail Whale" - displayed whenever the site goes down.