Do the Word

Truth:

“Giving” today is less and less synonymous with “giving to a nonprofit organization”.

This is the challenge for groups like Holden Karnofsky’s GiveWell and Charity Navigator, which dream of a day when donors can consult objective rankings of charities’ real world impact (and, presumably, invest their charitable dollars accordingly).

The challenge, simply put, is that to start with nonprofits as a “given”–the de facto social impact vehicle–is an increasingly dicey proposition.

That’s because there are so many gradations of cause-focused networks today that donation-driven nonprofits are but one of dozens of organizational structures seeking to change the world. Asking the question “Which nonprofit should I give to?” presumes that giving money through a nonprofit is of course the way we impact causes.

But is it?

Check out the Synovate study of people’s changing attitudes towards money in the recession. 80% of the global survey respondents “believed their generation had a responsibility to leave their country better off for the younger generation, even if it involves dramatically altering their lifestyles”.

Before we nonprofits start salivating too much, keep in mind that nothing in that response indicates that those 80% believe that the best way to leave their country better off than they found it is to give to a nonprofit organization.

Astonishingly little research has been done to quantify the amount of giving that happens outside of nonprofit organizations…but in your heart of hearts, do you really doubt that it dwarfs the most optimistic calculations of the money that clinks and clatters through 501(c)(3)s?

Thus, I want to introduce the concept of the “cause cloud”. Drawn from the concept of cloud computing, “cause cloud” is an image that suggests that in the future, the concept of meaning mediated by discrete nonprofit organizations will be seriously outdated, replaced by the notion of individuals, informal associations, and nonprofits clustering around causes and making their impact irrespective of organizational boundaries.

This will happen precisely because individuals are increasingly seeking platforms to impact causes directly and personally, not nonprofits to which they write checks in order to impact causes indirectly.

Check out this description of cloud computing from wikinvest.com, blur your eyes, and see if you can see in it the cause clouds of the future:

Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth. Cloud computing is broken down into three segments: “applications,” “platforms,” and “infrastructure.”

Cause cloud applications? Participation projects.

Cause cloud platforms? Nonprofit organizations.

Cause cloud infrastructure? Participation/Engagement/Ownership charts.

Get ready for the cloud.

While we’ve been hacking through the Engagement underbrush in the last half month’s series of posts, the rest of the philanthroblogger world has been grappling anew with the questions of social impact and personal impact as giving motivators (the four posts here, here, here, and our favorite post here from Katya Andresen ought to get you nicely up to speed, as will Bronfman and Solomon’s new book,  The Art of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan, which is being nicely profiled on Sean Stannard Stockton’s blog).

In short, the question under discussion is this:

• Which is the greater spur to philanthropy–personal feelings or the desire for outcome-based impact–and what if anything can and should be done to change that?

The disdain on the part of many bloggers for personal feelings as the trigger for giving is not hard to detect, which leads to a fascinating follow-up question:

• Do donors rely on personal feelings because they lack outcome-based impact data, and would (and should) they become more oriented to outcome-based motivations for giving if such data were available?

Katya Andresen and I are working on reframing the debate as necessarily a both/and rather than an either/or, in the form of an “impact index” that contends that asks that chart high on both axes, social impact and personal impact, are (and should be) preferred to asks that chart high on one or the other. Perhaps I am foolishly optimistic, but I take that to be such a straightforward and simple proposition that I think we’ll be able to carry the day once the terminology dust settles.

But that’s only one side of the coin.

The other–and, in my view, much more intriguing–side of the coin isn’t related to giving motivation at all. This second coin side is all about the role of the individual and the nonprofit in relation to the cause, and here the issues aren’t terminological at all.

The question at issue on this reverse side of the coin:

• How can individuals make the greatest impact on a cause–by being trained to impact the cause directly, with the nonprofit serving as impact platform/convening mechanism, or by impacting the cause indirectly, giving money to the nonprofits judged by experts as the most effective in making a difference?

My suspicion is that most of the people involved in the personal versus social impact debate will find this question preposterous and even spurious. The consensus of our age (among charitable foundations and nonprofit execs, anyway) is that nonprofits impact causes and donors support nonprofits. The only question being discussed is whether, in the end, donors are flibbertigibbets or hard-nosed impact calculators who will vote responsibly for the best nonprofits with their giving dollars.

Such a view is hardly flattering to individuals. And it’s far too kind to nonprofits.

As I’ve noted previously, we live in a day when a multitude of examples exist of individuals and informal networks of amateurs beating the pants off of big, credible nonprofit organizations when it comes to making a deep, direct, lasting, measurable, critically important impact on the cause. The phenomenon has reached the mainstream so much so that even FEMA has to acknowledge it:

The critical role of local organizations and their ability to reach community members in need cannot be ignored. While these small nonprofits and faith-based organizations do not have the resources for national public service announcements and billion dollar fundraising campaigns, they need access to some of the donated dollars that flow into the coffers of larger organizations able to broadcast commercials across the country. FEMA might consider exploring ways that donated dollars can be split proportionally or that even a small percentage (5-10%) can be used to support the important work of local organizations.

Distributed computing–“in which anyone with an Internet connection can participate and in which results benefit everyone”–is such a well established phenomenon in the technology fields that it’s simultaneously surprising and disappointing that the concept of distributed causing–in which individuals join causes rather than just giving to them (as “donors”)–is little discussed in philanthropic circles.

As Angela Eikenberry points out in her must-read book, Giving Circles, nonprofits have become exponentially more formal in their efforts to tackle causes in a matter of but a few generations; consequently, they are more and more exclusive, less and less participatory…and less and less democratic. They no longer even feel to need to justify their causal elitism; causes and cures are, you know, so complicated that the heavy lifting is so obviously better left to the professionals that the role of so-called “donors” is whittled down to little more than reading newsletters, embracing new tools (created by the nonprofit sector itself, of course) to better judge which nonprofit does the best and most efficientwork..and then writing a check.

Eikenberry’s killer observation is this:

• Voluntarism is now viewed less as a duty of the citizen…and more as a “privilege granted by philanthropic agencies to those who accepted their discipline.”

Ouch, do we need to hear that. Let the games continue.

We’ve spent more than half a month now on posts detailing the Engagement level of Transformational Giving (TG). And E deserves every bit of the attention–it truly is the heart of TG.

I’m going to give the subject a rest for now until we teach it in even greater detail in our free January Mission Increase Foundation workshop, after this concluding post courtesy of World Gospel Mission‘s Tim Rickel which details one of the most vital and yet least well known P to E moves in US history:

Stephen Mather got 15 wealthy industrialists together—prominent publishers, politicians, industry leaders, and railroad  builders—and took them on a long camping trip in the wilderness out west and called it The Mather Mountain Party. They stood before stunning beauty and reflected on the amazing treasure God has given us in our wilderness places. They saw where people had trashed an area camping out, and Stephen had them work together to clean it up. They dined on 5 star cuisine prepared by top chefs and served on linen tablecloths under a canopy of trees or next to a beautiful wilderness view throughout the whole trip. At the end he gathered them together. He told them that now they owned this cause. That this wasn’t the end, it was the beginning, of using their influence to move congress to preserve these spaces for generations to come. In the commentary on the series, one man says, “He didn’t preach to the choir, he took people who didn’t even go to the church and showed them the wilderness beauty and urged them to take up the cause.”

Talk about CMS [Champion Migration Strategy–WGM’s term for Transformational Giving] in action. There’s some reference material for you, no charge. Does CMS work? Go to a national park!

The perfect P to E move, Tim–thanks for a fitting conclusion to our Notes in the key of E series. May the Lord bless you with a vacant RV space during your next camping trip!