White Courtesy Telephone

The Problem With The Internet, Part 2: The Internet and Social Change

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With all due respect to my WCT colleague, Albert Ruesga, I don’t believe the Internet is currently the best place to build a social change movement rooted in deliberation and consultation.

Deliberation leading to shared understandings that subsequently inform action; consultation broadening a social change community beyond a few committed elites—I’m convinced the brunt of this work can best happen offline.

I’m not denying that the Internet has provided communities of social activists new tools for collaboration.  It clearly has.

I’m saying there are many characteristics of the Internet and its use that get in the way of transforming a group of loosely associated individuals into a community with shared understandings about the world and how to change it.  The story of Joe Sector, described in an earlier post, begins to name some of these barriers, but there are others.

Consider the state of our critical thinking and reading skills; our general lack of media literacy; our inability or unwillingness to penetrate what some critics have called the Illusion of News.

We carry all of this baggage and more with us on our travels through Cyberspace, though we convince ourselves that we’re fleet of cyber-foot, dancing effortlessly from site to site and blog to blog.  We fill with frenzied points and clicks the time we might otherwise spend banging our collective heads against a shared problem.

The Problem With The Internet, Part 1: The Story of Joe Sector

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Joe Sector, an environmental activist, wants to develop an advocacy strategy for the upcoming presidential election season. He longs to engage other activists in an extended discussion of the candidates and their views; tactics for engaging the media; and other election season issues. Unfortunately, the next conference for environmental activists is months away.

Joe goes online to his favorite blogs, listservs, message boards, and networking sites in search of wisdom, but the results are less than satisfactory. Here are just some of the challenges he faces:

1. Light’s on but nobody’s home   Joe submits a question to a listserv here, a message board there, but can’t depend on getting a timely answer (or any answer at all). Sometimes it takes days to get a response. In any event, Joe wants something that feels more like a real discussion.

2. The wrong people at the right time   Joe has to contend with the usual trolls, flamers, and ninnies who throw discussions off-topic. He visits various chat rooms and networking sites for activists, but, as is often the case, few people are present and contributing, and the best minds and moderators are absent.

3. Drive-by commenting   Joe finds a few warm bodies willing to engage in a discussion of the upcoming election, but they keep straying off-topic. Because nobody really “owns” the discussion, it gets sidetracked easily.

4. A million vases for a thousand flowers   Nancy, a communications wizard, likes to hang out at Omidyar.net, but Mary, a master strategist, would never darken Omidyar’s cyber-door. She much prefers Change.org. And so it goes. Joe has to visit twenty sites to have a prayer of finding the best wisdom on the upcoming election.

What’s a wired, networked, discussion-starved social activist to do?

Coming up: The problem with the Internet, part 2

Some Hard Truths About Evaluation

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Sean Stannard-Stockton, our blogger colleague at Tactical Philanthropy, poses these very difficult questions for his latest Giving Carnival:  How should social impact (or nonprofit effectiveness) be evaluated? How can we best understand the output of nonprofit or for-profit social enterprises? It is not enough to simply say that an organization is “doing good.”  How much good are they doing and how effective are they at turning “inputs” (donations and/or investment dollars) into social “outputs”?

I offer this modified version of an earlier post in reply ...

We seek a kind of scientific or moral certainty from a formal evaluation.  But it can provide neither.  The questions that funders most often bring to an evaluator—Was this program worth our $25,000 investment?  Should we continue funding it?—are questions only they can answer.  There’s simply no absolute scale against which an evaluator can measure the value of a philanthropic investment.

Here are some of the typical moves in the evaluation game:

WE:	Was this youth development program worth our $25,000 investment?
EVALUATOR:	Dunno. What are the kinds of outcomes you’d like from a youth development program?
WE:	Better grades in school.
EVALUATOR:	Hmm. Don’t see any of that. Would you settle for a lower dropout rate? I see some of that.
WE:	That sounds good. How much lower?
EVALUATOR:	I see a 15 percent lower dropout rate. Is that worth $25,000 to you?
WE:	Don’t know. Let me think about it.

The evaluator’s first job is to determine who is asking the evaluation question, and his second job is to discover what that person values.  Then and only then can he design an evaluation that attempts to detect those values.  An evaluator isn’t measuring the effects of a given program willy-nilly.  He can suggest various outcomes that we might look for from a given program, but, for the most part, he’s trying to detect the outcomes we think are worth seeing.

And so we’re at the stage where we’ve detected a 15 percent lower dropout rate for youth participating in our program, as in the example above.  Assuming it’s not an effect of how the young people were selected for the program, is the outcome—together with other secondary outcomes—worth what it cost to run the program?  We can try to compare this program with other programs we know, but they appear to be very different from one another.  Some have a mentoring component, others don’t; some include leadership training, others focus on academics.  The annual cost per student is $5,000 in one program, but $10,000 in another, but there are significant differences in the quality of program delivery.  At a certain point, the annual cost per student starts looking ridiculous—but what is that point? And is it the same for you as for me?

And so it goes.  What then is the value to society of a given nonprofit program or organization?  The simplest answer is that it’s whatever the market is willing to pay for it.

For those of us in the nonprofit sector, one of the hardest truths about evaluation is that the value to society, in dollar terms, of nonprofit work is as much determined by market forces as is the price of cheddar in Manhattan.  And we, the people who ask the evaluation questions—the funders, the donors, the board members—are that market.

Good evaluators know this.  They would gladly tell us, but often they intuit that we’d rather not know.  Frequently their role is to describe all the potentially valuable outcomes of a given program or organization and then retire from the scene, leaving us to ponder what kind of investment it might be worth.

The counsel most useful to us at that point might come from a priest or a philosopher, or, if we’re on a very tight budget, a Ouija board.

Cyber-Donors: If You Cut Them, Will They Not Leave?

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Because our online encounters are mediated by servers, cables and radio waves, and because they happen in a virtual space defined by 1s and 0s, they often have a gauzy, unreal quality.

We use pseudonyms to preserve our anonymity.  We leave drive-by comments on blogs and other online meeting places, seldom deepening our relationships beyond one or two exchanges.

We’re there one instant, gone the next.

Unfortunately, many of us who work at nonprofit organizations carry these same Internet habits to our encounters with online donors.

In a recent article titled “Cyber Journey: A real-world look at online fundraising,”* Tom Gaffny describes how he went online and donated $15 to each of the 66 largest charities in the United States.  He wanted to know how today’s charities are treating online donors, and his results were eye-popping and, frankly, heartbreaking.

Only nine of these charities saw Tom’s gift as an opportunity to establish and begin nurturing a relationship with a new donor:

While the “Yep, we got [your gift]” crowd dealt with me at arm’s length, and the “Thanks, we’re grateful” organizations reached out to shake my hand, this group [of organizations] wanted to give me a hug and a pretty big pat on the back.

I strongly recommend Tom’s article for some great tips on how to follow up on a gift from a cyber-donor.

It’s been well established that online donors tend to be more generous than their off-line counterparts.  Given the cold cyber-shoulder we so often present them, is it any wonder they’re also less likely to continue contributing after their initial gift?

_____

* The NonProfit Times, March 15, 2007, pp. 20-21.

Let's Just Skip the Election

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It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.

I suppose that’s what was on the mind of Mr. Hohensee, pictured at right.  His flyer reads:

[email protected] for President by Constitutional Amendment # Senator Feingold for VP # my pre-Murtha Iraq withdrawal plan endorsed by Col. Ann Wright # incarcerate and prosecute GW Bush # decommission the CIA # real 9-11 investigation # real recovery in the Gulf region # real intervention in Darfur # the GW Bush regime is an emergency …

Rick also has a  website. 

I wish Mr. Hohensee well.  However good or bad a governor he may turn out to be, I appreciate it that he, like all good citizens, sticks his nose into matters that are properly his business.

Introducing Democracy to Our Nation’s Capital

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This past November, the official website of the multinational force in Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, told the story of Sargeant John Eldridge, 372nd Military Police Battalion, 89th MP Brigade, who had been deployed for a second time and would miss sharing Thanksgiving dinner with his family.

This story about the Washington, DC native concealed a great irony.  He had been sent overseas, according to official reports, to fight for the cause of democracy, but back home he and half a million fellow Washingtonians would be barred from full participation in the democratic process: residents of our nation’s capital have been denied a voting representative in Congress since 1801. 

Perhaps, as one wag suggested, the U.S. Marines should have invaded the District of Columbia.

Those who live in the seat of American democracy pay their taxes, are called for jury duty, and serve in the armed forces, but are denied the most basic of democratic rights.

Representative Tom Davis (R-VA) was part of a congressional delegation that went to Hong Kong and pressed leaders there to allow democracy.  Davis said a senior Hong Kong official told him, “Give your nation’s capital the right to vote and then come talk to us about democracy in Hong Kong.”

Big props to my peeps at DC Vote for their recent voting rights victory in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a first step toward righting a great historical wrong.

DC Vote is sponsoring a Voting Rights March on Emancipation Day, April 16, 2007, starting at 2:30 p.m.  For more information visit the DC Vote website.

WCT Deemed “Not Unfunny”

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A shout out to the blogger at Gonzojournalismus im Netz who wrote, “WCT succeeds with Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy.  With very beautiful design and not unfunny.”*

This makes all of us contributors at WCT not unhappy.  Thanks GIN.  Here’s Google’s translation of your site’s raison d’être:

Media?  We shank enterprises with new values, editorships and ethics.  To do not forget political guidelines, reader connection and other conformalisms.  We do not swim also.  The journalism is dead.  It lives the journalism!

Shankalicious!

_____

* “WCT reüssiert über Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy. Mit sehr schöner Zeichnung und nicht unwitzig.”

Woof Woof Woof Woof

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Chickpea is an occasional contributor to White Courtesy Telephone.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she loves to play ball and swim.

Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof.  Woof woof woof woof, woof woof woof woof woof woof.  Woof woof woof woof woof woof.  Woof woof woof woof woof?

Woof.

Woof woof woof J. Alva Scruggs a-oo woof woof UFO Breakfast a-ooo.  Woof woof woof, woof woof woof woof woof: woof woof woof woof.  Woof woof Hillary Clinton grrr grrr woof woof woof.  Mr. Scruggs woof woof woof woof Vichy Democrats grrr grrr—woof woof woof woof—woof woof.  Woof woof woof et alia woof “snup snup” woof woof woof woof? Woof woof woof, woof, woof woof (woof woof woof woof).

Woof Katrin Verclas a-oo woof woof NTEN a-oo woof woof woof “aggregator” woof.  Woof woof woof.

Woof woof, woof woof woof woof Phil Cubeta a-oo woof woof GiftHub a-oo woof woof woof.  Woof woof woof woof woof woof?  Woof.  Woof woof woof Ornette Coleman woof Anna Nicole Smith ;-)

WCT Technology Roundup: Squares, Globes, Webs, and (Pilotless) Drones

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NetSquared Innovation Award   There’s still time to submit your project for the second annual NetSquared Innovation Award.  This competition is open both to nonprofits and private sector projects that:

• Use the power of community and social networks to create change
• Use existing, or newly developed technology tools for social impact
• Have a plausible financial model
• Have a clear way to measure success
• Exhibit extraordinary leadership, passion and resourcefulness
• Exhibit a passion for social change

For project guidelines and application materials, click here.

Online Giving   Donors are increasingly learning to value the safety and convenience of online giving.  The GlobalGiving site enables donors to support grassroots charitable work around the world.  The site’s sponsors guarantee that “85-90 percent of your donation gets to local project leaders within 60 days” and that all supported organizations are US PATRIOT Act-compliant.  For giving in the United States, try visiting Network for Good.  The Network for Good site has some outstanding fundraising and communications resources for nonprofit organizations.

Web 3.0  In case you missed the ticker-tape parade, Web 2.0 is officially here.  It’s the Wikipedia web, the web of Flickr and Del.icio.us.  It’s characterized by greater interactivity and introduces features like tagging and social networking.  The wait is over.

There’s a nascent Web 3.0 that will look very much like the iWeb of Zerbina and Zork.  According to the March/April issue of Technology Review, Web 3.0 will be “a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data.”  Some identify it with the so-called Semantic Web.  You can read more about it here and here.

The Future of Audio Blogcasting   There will always be an audience for audio podcasts.  People with long commutes, for example, can use their podcatchers (a kind of media aggregator) to load up their .mp3 players with music, radio programming, and other content that will see them through many a long traffic backup.

It’s been my experience, however, that the audio podcast is not the best medium for blog content.  You can scan a written blog in seconds, skipping those passages in which the author indulges himself; but the consumption of an audio podcast is painfully linear.  If you hit the fast forward button, you run the risk of missing that one gem, that key idea that makes the whole podcast worth the investment of time.

An interesting 2006 study by TDG Research suggests that more than 80 percent of downloaded podcasts never make it to those .mp3 players.  They’re either consumed on the PC, deleted, or entirely forgotten.  You’ll notice that, music aside, very few audio files “make the rounds” of the Internet.

There are notable exceptions.

This January 29, 2007 posting by the San Francisco Chronicle titled “Correct Me If I’m Wrong” combined winning content and delivery with the irresistible conceit of listening in on a private telephone message.  It makes for an extraordinary listening experience and it spawned an entire industry of Internet commentary: “Never say ‘pilotless drone.’ Ever. There can be consequences,” wrote Mr. Johnson at Seeing the Forest; Stephen Dubner at Freakonomics wondered whether the irate message might be a hoax perpetrated by Simpsons creator Matt Groening;  Craig from Albany pointed out that the drone in question was not pilotless at all but rather a Remotely Piloted Vehicle.  Much ado.

Old schoolmarm that I am, I took issue with the irate caller’s claims about English usage.  I can write, for example, “The smooth-coated Pharaoh Hound is a good breed for people with allergies,” even though all Pharaoh Hounds are smooth-coated.  I would mention their smooth-coatedness if I suspected my audience wasn’t aware of this property of Pharaoh Hounds.  Likewise, because “drone” is a technical term used by the armed forces, I might choose to emphasize its pilotless-ness to a general readership.
 
Drone is a technical term, technical, TECHNICAL, get it Mr. Irate Caller? a technical term as in requiring that it be explained to a general audience, technical, technical, TECHNICAL, TECHNICAL …

Tractatus Homo Mercatus: Notes on the End of Civilization

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Sally Wilde, a retired philosophy professor and frequent contributor to White Courtesy Telephone, lives in Colorado where she blogs, tends to her six beautiful grandchildren, and earns beer money at the Naughty Bits Internet Café.

1.  Susan Herr at PhilanthroMedia* writes:

Myriad messages now confirm that you don’t have to give up your life of comfort to make the world better. You don’t have to go to the convent or work at your local nonprofit. Neither donors, nor corporate employees, are immune to this emerging gestalt.

This massive PR campaign is something we could never have afforded but the result is that our troops are growing. Highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements are being sent to the front lines in this convergence of profit and social good.

I have to respectfully disagree.  I believe the game is essentially lost unless we begin to question and, in some cases, challenge the structures that lead to unequal opportunity—to joy for some and misery for others.  This might indeed entail giving up our lives of comfort.  I’m especially concerned about the implication that unchecked consumption might be sustainable.  Worse still, the highly-resourced and skilled reinforcements Susan mentions will attempt to answer the questions, “What is wrong with the world?” and “What can we do about it?”, but they’ll leave unanswered the most fundamental question of all: “Who really cares?”

2.  The great liberal theorist Isaiah Berlin championed what he called a negative conception of liberty, one that left unconstrained the actions of citizens.  The state was to remain neutral on questions regarding the ultimate Good, providing a framework of rights in which individuals would be free to pursue their own visions of the good life.  He imagined, perhaps, a society of knowledgeable and engaged citizens, deliberating, arguing with one another, holding their political leaders accountable.  Their deliberations would inflect the teachings in their schools, the conduct of their businesses, the prayers rising from their houses of worship.  Did he ever imagine that the Great Axiological Machine—the generator and clarifier of values—would not be the polis but Madison Avenue, funded by powerful interests to maintain the value of their investments?

3.  Our ability to deliberate as citizens has been lost.  We’re no longer citizens but consumers who identify ourselves to one another by the products and services we buy.  I’m a Macintosh kind of woman, you’re a Starbucks kind of guy.  The checkout line has replaced the Forum as the primary nexus of citizen participation and expression.

4.  The American Dream is a dream about ownership.  And in this dream, the home represents not a base from which we set off to engage the world and make it better, but a place that we pack full of the crap we unceasingly purchase.  We’ve harnessed technology not to provide us lives of enhanced contemplation, but of greater consumption.

5.  We’re consumerist sheep vaguely aware of the cost to others of our American way of life.  Poorly educated about our own history, anesthetized by marketing, beguiled by the illusion of news, we slip inexorably into barbarity.  The civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s—those great efflorescences of human consciousness—have not been able to save us from ourselves.

6.  We don’t exercise democracy in the voting booth: We purchase a product shaped as much by polls and focus groups as the flavorless bran flakes in our cereal bowls.

7.  The health of our state is measured not by the growth of our GDP but by how many times each night, across this country, we’re moved to shout angrily at our television sets.

_____

* Thanks to Phil Cubeta at GiftHub for flagging this post.

Fear and Loathing in Philanthropy

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I am dictate these words to my assistant, Paolo (he is one on left), as special favor to good friend, Albert Rezga.  Albert asked that I write article for his blonk.  I pity him because he is foundation drone with bad haircut, but please understand that Apraxina does not blonk.  Blonking is for indiscrete people who buy clothes from catalogues and work in cubicles.

I am never forget day I first meet Albert at Tolstoy Foundation reception.  He was very sad, barely nibbling crab cake hors d’oeuvre, and, also, I must say, very dull. So earnest!  But Apraxina gets—how you say?—weak kneels when handsome man quotes Turgenev.

To continue: Albert was concerned philanthropy’s image had been tarnished by scandals, that it lacked vigor and was often “unstrategic.”  Such big word from such little man!  But I understood because I had been to philanthropy conference.  I saw men and women with bowed heads carrying small sacks filled with papers.  Very sad.  And so much talking!  People in uncomfortable chairs, opining in cold rooms, inducing narcosis-like state in listeners.  “Alë, garázh!” I shouted, “Rasskazhí éto komú-nibúd drugómu!”*  I would rather spend afternoon with Uncle Sergei listening to description of most recent colonoscopy.

I thought I could help Albert by drawing inspiration from very dear friend, Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzoi journalist.  He started foundation** before he committed suicide (perhaps he attended same conference I did?).  But I was disappointed when I visited—how you say?—Internets.  You will look at this link, please.  I want tell Mr. Ralph Steadman that this is no tribute to Hunter S. Thompson.  What is big arm in desert?  Did it turn man with suitcase into big chicken?

_____

* “Hail, citizen [an ironic address]!  Tell it to someone who cares!” — Editors

** “A Legacy for the Godfather of Gonzo” by Michael Anft, Chronicle of Philanthropy, November 10, 2005.

A Convening of Stake Holders

The Four Fundamental Questions of Philanthropy

The Ford Foundation, the second largest foundation on the planet, with assets of $12 billion, is about to hire a new CEO.  What will the new CEO do with all that money?  How, among all the possibilities available to her, will she decide to focus the foundation’s grantmaking?

The new CEO will want to honor the foundation’s previous commitments.  She won’t want to make any sudden moves.  But having exercised the necessary prudence, and having consulted her board, toward what star will she steer her course?

Granted, if you took all the giving in one year of all the foundations in the United States—approximately $34 billion—the sum would barely equal three percent of all nonprofit operating expenses.  In fact, it wouldn’t even cover the expenses of the 70 largest nonprofit hospitals (and there are 3,000 nonprofit hospitals in the United States).*  Nevertheless, with an annual grantmaking budget of $600,000,000, the new Ford Foundation CEO will be able to move the needle significantly on any number of issues.

Imagine that it fell to you, dear reader, to invest $600,000,000 each year in charitable work.  How would you do it?

I can’t imagine anybody doing this successfully without first attempting to answer the Four Fundamental Questions of Philanthropy:

1.  What are we living for?  What does human flourishing look like?  What is my vision of the Good?  Is it the greatest happiness for the greatest number?  When does the Categorical Imperative trump the Greatest Happiness Principle?  Is life little more than moving things from one place to another until we die?  Is it simply a long series of credit card purchases marked by some poignant, half-remembered moments with friends and family?

2.  How do I understand (social) justice?  What’s our responsibility to one another in a complex, industrial society?  How much suffering at “the bottom” should be tolerated if the overall statistics look pretty good?  Is the notion of a social contract at all coherent?  If so, who gets to shape it and how?

3.  What is the role of a foundation in society?  What is the appropriate role for private (viz., foundation) capital in addressing social needs?  What’s the proper mix of public and private funding for social goods like the arts, job training programs, health care, or education?  Should foundations take up the slack when, under pressure to reduce taxes, governments cut funding for social programs?  What should be the relation between a foundation and other institutions? between a foundation and individual citizens? 

4.  Apart from my board, the legal authorities, and God Herself (not necessarily in that order), to whom should I be accountable and in what ways?  Are things getting better or worse, for whom, and how quickly?  When should a current need trump a possible future need?  How did we get into the current mess in the first place?  If “systemic” issues are involved, how far can or should we go in attempting to change the system?  Is it my foundation’s responsibility to keep the issue—whatever it is—from becoming an issue again?  To what extent should I risk great failure in an attempt to obtain a great social good?  What’s the received wisdom** I need to question?  Do I know the history of my own field well enough to say what counts as failure and what counts as success?  Do I understand what contributed to these failures and successes? 

_____

* According to nonprofithealthcare.org.

** E.g., ‘The primary purpose of education is to prepare young people for the work force,’ ‘A nation’s health is measured by the growth of its GDP.’