Oh, Jason Mogus, thank you! This needed to be said! Although the point of his recent article on Why your non-profit won’t make a KONY 2012 has likely been obscured by other (weirder or more troublesome) stories about the most successful viral video of all time, that doesn’t make his points any less valid. Striking at the heart of the faddishness that drives much of what nonprofits take for innovation, here are his six points about why most organizations will never succeed in this way: (1) You’ve never met your supporters. (2) You don’t really have a twitter army. (3) You speak to too many audiences. (4) Your policy people would never let this get through. (5) You run 18 campaigns and your site has 35 calls to action. (6) Your organization isn’t aligned towards the social web.
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I have mixed feelings about the Knight News Challenge. The grantmaking program is a strange mix: It’s brave, innovative (as a funding program), transparent but still opaque in odd ways, brilliant and clueless, democratic but maybe in the same way as a presidential election. (Disclosure: I worry that my feelings are colored by having had two proposals rejected. I hope not.) Because Knight’s process involves open publishing of submissions, it’s a very interesting source of information for analysts. One of these analysts is Seth Lewis, who published a paper on his results: The Knight News Challenge: How it works, what succeeds, and why that matters for the shaping of journalism innovation (42 page PDF). His method is as interesting as his results. Similar to a project we worked on for a while, he analyzed the textual content of the grant proposals (5000 of them) to help him determine what content factors made a proposal more likely to be funded. At The Gilbert Center, we’ve always been interested in data. And we’ve always been interested in communication, of course. In the last several years, we’ve invested a lot of resources in how to bring those two together. Fortunately, so are a lot of other people. Even though he isn’t focusing on civil society, when Drew Conway asks What should a data visualization do?, that doesn’t make his answer any less applicable: Tell a Simple Small Truth. Read this (it’s short, but pithy) and if you like it, take a look at our Metrics Makeovers
We need more analyses like this. It’s not so much the alarming implications that concern me — I may disagree with the Gates Foundation on their unfortunate focus on technological fixes, but they are moving the standards of practice in the field of philanthropy forward. I think we all need to be aware of the patterns of influence in civil society. Power in our sector is often a taboo topic, except when it’s an explosive one. Neither is conducive to positive change. |
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It’s great to see Bill Ryan, writing at Nonprofit Quarterly, touch on the 
Laura Freschi and Alanna Shaikh, in their article: 