White Courtesy Telephone

Nonprofits and the Semantic Web

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Consider this scenario from a previous WCT post:

The year: 2235. Zerbina, a successful interplanetary trader, and her holohusband Zork, are waking up to their first cup of Andromedan coffee. They have their central communications unit tuned to Intergalactic Public Radio, and host Robert Siegel-backslash-12 is relating the top news story of the day. An extended Martian drought has left tens of thousands of poor migrant settler families with diminishing supplies of food and water, he reports. One of their spokesmen urges legislators to pass the Emergency Relocation Bill that has been stalled in the World Senate for weeks.

Zerbina is moved to take action. “Computer,” she says, “Who’s helping the Martian settler families?” Instantly her hyperbrowser searches the iWeb for organizations that are providing relief to the beleaguered families, displaying a list of names and profiles on the smartsurfaces of her apartment. She scrutinizes the list: there are 790 different organizations headquartered on six planets and three moons.

“Which of these organizations has the strongest advocacy record?” Zerbina asks thoughtfully.

Her hyperbrowser once again springs into action, instantly sorting through and interpreting tens of thousands of press releases that have been posted to the iWeb. The Intergalactic Immigration Forum jumps to the top of the list.

Zerbina smiles: she knows this organization well. Responding to a small donation she had made to them a while back, they had been sending her holographic newsletters for several months, keeping her apprised of their work. The Forum had long ago applied for and received iWeb Charity Accreditation, enabling the organization to accept secure subspace money transfers.

“Computer,” she says, “Transfer twenty teracredits to the Intergalactic Immigration Forum. Mark the transfer ‘for support of the Martian migrant families.’”

“Transfer confirmed,” replies the machine in a soothing albeit somewhat metallic voice.

In 1986 Tim Berners-Lee, the actual inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote an article for Scientific American Magazine titled “The Semantic Web” heralding a new set of tools for the internet that would enable browsers and other automated agents to more easily understand web content. Items encoded in a semantic web page would provide hints about their meaning, bringing us closer to the day when Zerbina and other donors would consult and interact with the internet as they might with a trusted advisor.

The Semantic Web has yet to be realized as Berners-Lee envisioned it. Web pages are not being marked up with semantic clues in significant numbers. A more transparent web might nevertheless be coming to us from a different direction: web-interpreting agents like Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson are getting better at drawing their own conclusions about the meanings of web pages and their contents.

A striking aspect of these new agents, one that holds substantial promise for e-giving, is the degree to which they might be able to reduce donor “friction”—the many steps and processes that interpose themselves between a donor’s initial desire to give and her consummation of a gift. A donor might be moved to tears by a story about homeless children on NPR, but by the time she switches on her laptop, waits for an internet connection, fires up her browser, finds a worthy charity, fills out an online form, and enters her credit card number, her generosity might have dwindled significantly.

Web-interpreting agents like Siri are most likely optimized to extract information from commercial websites. But nonprofit organizations can maximize their online success by doing much more to accommodate human agents. I’ve visited the websites of many charities and been stumped by enigmatic mission statements written in impenetrable Nonprofitese. I’ve been unable, without many clicks, to determine what, exactly, a nonprofit does, or what an advocacy organization would like me to do. Too few charities feature a “Give Now” button prominently on multiple pages of their websites, and some neglect to provide a snail-mail address altogether.

Rather than worry too much about an inchoate future, we might do better to attend to our woeful disregard for the demands of the present.

Innovations in Fundraising: Spinning Straw Men into Gold

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The October 20th New York Times brought us this item*:

After Rush Limbaugh referred to Iraq war veterans critical of the war as “phony soldiers,” the CEO of Clear Channel Communications, the parent company of Mr. Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, received a letter of complaint signed by 41 Democratic senators. Mr. Limbaugh decided to auction the letter, which he described as “this glittering jewel of colossal ignorance,” for charity, and he pledged to match the price, dollar for dollar.

On Thursday night, Mr. Limbaugh, the conservative radio talk show host, said he thought the letter would bring in as much as $1 million. He was wrong.

When the eBay auction closed yesterday afternoon, the winning bid was $2.1 million. It is the largest amount ever paid for an item sold on eBay to benefit a charity.

The money will go to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Inc., a nonprofit organization in New Jersey that provides scholarships and other assistance to families of marines and federal law enforcement officials who die or are wounded in the line of duty. Mr. Limbaugh is a director of the organization, which had total revenues of $5.2 million last year.

Having made his own fortune by underestimating the intelligence of the American public, it was only a matter of time before Mr. Limbaugh would explore new markets.  People will pay top dollar, apparently, for the artifacts of boneheaded self-righteousness.

Mr. Limbaugh’s action suggests a new frontier for fundraisers.  Can the indicted members of nonprofit and foundation boards  make it up to their disgraced organizations by auctioning off their arrest warrants, for example, or their prison dungarees?  Suppose the housekeeper who dusts Alberto Gonzalez’s empty office (Mary, are you reading this?) were to donate to the ACLU the series of memos establishing the United States as a nation that tortures.  How much would these fetch on eBay?

Some of you will recall that several years ago, Mr. Limbaugh’s housekeeper, Wilma Cline, approached Florida authorities to reveal that she had acted as his drug buyer for years, illegally purchasing more than 30,000 painkillers.  Perhaps Mr. Limbaugh would consider auctioning off the court briefs that helped him avoid prosecution, or the master recording of the radio show in which he called defenders of medical marijuana “potheads.”

My advice to fundraisers: Hop on this gravy train as quickly as possible.  The bottom will fall out of the market once consumers realize the tokens of human folly and vice are in liberal supply.

_____

* “Critical Letter to Limbaugh Fetches $2 Million,” by Stephanie Strom.

Online Giving in 2017

Fellow blogger Gayle Roberts is hosting this month’s Giving Carnival.  She’s inviting all comers to write on the future of fundraising.  Here’s WCT’s contribution ...

One of the most significant barriers to online giving is all the stuff that needs to happen between the time you’re moved by that National Public Radio story about homeless children and the moment you confirm your online credit card donation to Helping Homeless Children, Inc. 

You’re required to start your computer, launch your browser, do a Google search for the appropriate charity, click the “Donate Now” button on the charity’s website, wait until you’re transported to the appropriate giving page, fetch your credit card, fill in the required fields, and confirm your gift.

Ten years from now, sensors surgically implanted in your brain by the Department of Homeland Security will automatically register your intention to give and send radio signals to your government-monitored bank account.  A donation in the appropriate amount will be transferred to one of the DHS-approved organizations on the Patriot’s List of Market-Based Solutions to Social Problems.  Finally, to confirm the transaction, a wireless signal will stimulate your pleasure center.

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Image source: [email protected]

Five Tips for Building Stronger Relationships With Foundations

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It’s difficult to make generalizations across the 71,000 grantmaking foundations in the United States.  There are nonetheless enough family resemblances among them to make it worth hazarding a few words of advice to fundraisers.

At bottom, fundraisers are in the business of raising money, and foundations are in the business of giving it away.  Happy are those whose relationships with foundations can move from the transactional to the transformational.

Here are the tips; your results may vary:

1.  Attend to the basics.   There’s no substitute in any working relationship for simple human decency.  Be honest in your dealings with foundation staffers—they don’t like surprises any more than you do; and be merciful—like you, they’re busy and face their own institutional pressures.  If a foundation provides detailed application guidelines, follow them closely.  Submit a proposal that shows a regard for the values, priorities, and general practices of the foundation.  If you’re funded, thank the people involved in making the funding decision.  And always keep the communications channels open.  You should expect the same decency to be shown to you and your organization.

2.  Get personal.   Move from a paper relationship to one of flesh and blood at your first opportunity.  Foundations, like many individual donors, fund people not organizations: the heart of their relationship will not be with an entity, but with individuals they believe are capable of doing good work.  Often the most accurate predictor of nonprofit success will be the qualities of your executive director: his or her vision, passion, management skills, and ability to marshal resources for the common good.  Your executive director should not only inspire but also know his or her way around your organization’s financial statements.

3.  Focus on the so what.  If you’re given a site visit, try to schedule it at a time when your program officer will see children being cared for, people being fed, families being housed.  When you make your pitch, focus less on the what than on the so what. Are you the first, the largest, the best, the only …?  What’s important about your work beyond what your program officer can see?

4.  Do your homework.  What can peer organizations tell you about their funding relationship with the foundation in question?  Try to anticipate a foundation’s unspoken questions: You’ve gotten along without our funding so far, so why us and why now?  We’re already funding ABC, Incorporated: Why does the city need two children’s theatres?  Use your Google searches to get a fix on the foundation’s obsessions and turn-offs.

5.  Share what you learn.   Relationships go both ways.  What does your organization have to offer people in the foundation community?  You likely have expert knowledge of a particular field (immigration, say), or of a neighborhood that’s of interest to funders.  Perhaps you’ve recently done a study or survey of a key community.  Offer to meet with foundation staff to share your knowledge, or better yet, collaborate with other nonprofits to organize a funder briefing on the subject.

Fundraising 2.0: How to Get Really Big

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To help nonprofit organizations grow and sustain their operations, well-meaning fundraising professionals and foundation program officers often urge them to diversify their sources of support.

An important new study from the Bridgespan Group turns this conventional wisdom on its head:

Diversification may seem like a good idea, but in practice most of the organizations that have gotten really big over the past three decades did so by concentrating on one type of funding source, not by diversifying across several sources of funding. Bridgespan obtained solid financial data for 110 of the 144 high-growth nonprofits we identified. Of the 110, roughly 90 percent had a single dominant source of funding — such as government, individual donations, or corporate gifts. And on average, that dominant funding source accounted for just over 90 percent of the organization’s total funding.

Bridgespan studied nonprofits founded in the U.S. since 1970 with $50 million or more in annual revenues.  Some, like Habitat for Humanity and the Make-a-Wish Foundation, are household names, others less so.

But caveat lector (let the reader beware): Be sure to read the study’s fine print before throwing out that old fundraising manual.  The authors of the study remind us that “[s]ecuring large-scale funding generally involves some programmatic trade-offs. And large sources of funding appear to be more readily available for—and appropriate to—some missions than others.”  Try raising large dollars from individual donors for prisoner re-entry programs, for example.

I would add that:

1. The authors provide a snapshot in time   The funding mix appropriate to a mature, $50 million organization might not be appropriate to a community-based organization on the starting edge of its growth curve.

2.  Small can be beautiful   Don’t equate scale with effectiveness, or efficiency, or benefit to society, or any other good you can imagine.

3.  Know your organization’s business   To borrow a page from Clara Miller, take time to understand the capital structure appropriate to your nonprofit.  (Here’s a pop quiz: Why is a nonprofit youth theatre more like an airline than a youth soccer league?)

And finally ...

4.  Secondary funding sources are still important   The authors of the study give the example of the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership, which receives less than one percent of its funding from unrestricted foundation and corporate donations: “[A]ccording to Executive Director Julia Kehoe, those funds ‘allow us to do critical prevention work that is not currently funded by government programs.’”

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.

E-Philanthropy’s Brave New World

The year: 2235.  Zerbina, a successful interplanetary trader, and her holohusband Zork, are waking up to their first cup of Andromedan coffee.  They have their central communications unit tuned to Intergalactic Public Radio, and host Robert Siegel-backslash-12 is relating the top news story of the day.  An extended Martian drought has left tens of thousands of poor migrant settler families with diminishing supplies of food and water, he reports.  One of their spokesmen urges legislators to pass the Emergency Relocation Bill that has been stalled in the World Senate for weeks.

Zerbina is moved to take action.  “Computer,” she says softly, “Who’s helping the Martian settler families?”  Instantly her hyperbrowser searches the iWeb for nonprofit organizations that are providing relief to the beleaguered families, displaying a list of names and profiles on the smartsurfaces of her apartment.  She scrutinizes the list: there are 690 different organizations headquartered on six planets and three moons.

“Which of these organizations has the strongest advocacy record?” Zerbina asks thoughtfully.

Her hyperbrowser once again springs into action, instantly sorting through and interpreting tens of thousands of press releases that have been posted to the iWeb.  The Intergalactic Immigration Forum jumps to the top of the list.

Zerbina smiles: she knows this organization well.  Responding to a small donation she had made to them a while back, they had been sending her holographic newsletters for several months, keeping her apprised of their work.  The Forum had long ago applied for and received iWeb Charity Accreditation, enabling the organization to accept secure subspace money transfers.

“Computer,” she says, “Transfer twenty gigacredits to the Intergalactic Immigration Forum.  Mark the transfer ‘for support of the Martian migrant families.’”

“Transfer confirmed,” replies the machine, in a soothing, albeit somewhat metallic, voice.

We’re not quite there yet, but a number of initiatives are giving us glimpses of the future of web-based philanthropy.  To paraphrase George Burns, we should look to the future because that’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives …

According to a press release I received from a company representative, PRODEGE is helping nonprofit organizations raise funds by giving them their own private-label search engines.  A nonprofit simply signs up with PRODEGE and encourages its supporters to do web searches on its dedicated search engine.  Each search generates revenues for the organization.  PRODEGE automatically tracks, reports, and distributes proceeds to its nonprofit partners on a monthly basis.  (If any WCT readers have used this product, please let me know.)

Our brilliant colleagues in the UK have dreamed up the One Million Masterpiece website.  The site invites visitors to use their mouses to paint or draw pictures while onsite.  Each visitor-artist is then asked to contribute £3.50 to have his or her masterpiece become part of a giant canvas that will be unveiled at a major London landmark (the birthplace of Jennifer Saunders?) in July 2007.  The group hopes to raise £3.5 million for a number of UK-registered charities including Oxfam, Save the Children, and the World Wildlife Federation.  Visitors can also use the site’s tools to create and post videos.  Pneumatic!

TouchDC introduces the people of Greater Washington to outstanding charities they might otherwise never hear about.  Powered by Network for Good, TouchDC enables donors to search for giving and volunteering opportunities by neighborhood and by program area.  The site provides donors a safe and convenient way to donate funds online.