Drupal 6 Released!

Drupal 6 has been released! Totally awesome, but slightly misleading. I'll be able to use Drupal in a few months when many key contributed modules have been upgraded.

This is the truth about Drupal. You can do a bunch with the core modules, but the vast majority of sites require contributed modules... plus who wants an un-cool drupal site? The community generally bangs out the upgrades of the contributed modules rapidly, but the D6 release announcement is the start of the process. It will take a few months for the contributed modules to catch up.

(there might be a startup business opportunity in there... I wonder if anyone has ever thought about that ;)

The Drupal community has been doing a bunch of planning around marketing, but I wonder if the big push for blog posts and messaging should happen a few months after the D6 release. The time for me to write this post for a broader audience is when someone can build a production Drupal 6 website.

This is the conundrum of open source marketing... many audiences, many messages. Everything needs to line up just right.

Nonprofit Competition

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of competition recently. In the nonprofit sector, folks often share the same goals... helping the homeless, improving nonprofit effectiveness through technology, etc.

They also find themselves competing for funding, mind share, partners and other resources.

Yet the concept of coopetition really hasn't been well developed, IMHO. In Silicon Valley, they concept of cooperative competition is relatively established... and the calculations are fairly straight forward. Will I make money? If the answer is yes through cooperation, then coopetition is a perfectly good way to go. If the answer is no, then coopetition is a definite no.

But asking the question "will I help the homeless?" maybe shouldn't lead to the same calculation. The homeless might be helped a lot by coopetition, but I as an individual actor might not be doing a lot of the helping. In that situation, I as an actor shouldn't bail out if I care about the goal... my ego should be able to take the bruising of not being able to take credit.

This yields an interesting optimal outcome.... many actors all helping the homeless. They are competing for credit and "market share." They are cooperating on policy and standards (which helps the "market" making the pie bigger).

The key is that no one out competes anyone else. In fact, the fiercer and more equal the competition, as long as there is cooperation on policy and standards, the better the overall social outcome.

So how do you bring institutionalized coopetition to a set of actors?

NetSquared wants you for mashups

The NetSquared team is working on viral videos to catalyze involvement and support. Is a video really viral if it doesn't involve a cut furry animal or stupid people injuring themselves?

Anyway,

Need some powerful software to run your nonprofit, social enterprise or green startup?

I'm happy to announce an opportunity to apply for a NetSuite product donation. Please spread the word!

NetSuite is launching a pilot program to donate NetSuite software and NetSuite employee volunteer assistance to charities and for-profit firms that generate positive social impact. NetSuite (www.netsuite.com) is a public company with over 5,4000 customers-- you might have seen NetSuite in the news recently for our Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Our software is a web-based platform for running all aspects of a business from ERP to CRM to ecommerce. It is a modern, flexible ERP/CRM/ecommerce platform so it can be customized and extended to meet a variety of needs.

Things our current customers use it for that might be relevant to potential grantees include:
- Running an ecommerce store.
- Organizational accounting / general ledger.
- Fundraising / donor & donation management.

We have some great grantees up and running like Special Olympics and Goodwill, and some great partners helping us with this initiative including TechSoup, NPower Michigan and the Tech Museum Awards.

We are looking for three types of applicants:
- Registered charities in the US , UK and Canada .
- Social Enterprises, specifically fair trade organizations.
- Green Startups.

Competitive applicants will:
- Have the capacity to implement an ERP/CRM/ecommerce system.
- Be able to articulate and provide at least one metric for their social impact.
- Be a good match for NetSuite functionality.

To learn more, download our guidelines, or apply for a product donation, visit http://shopping.netsuite.com/giving.

Acquia Valuation- Wow

Acquia, a Drupal start-up from Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal was funded for with a $7M seed round. Actually there might have been a smaller seed round and Acquia has been in stealth for awhile, but that is unclear.

The more interesting thing is to speculate on Acquia's pre-money valuation. Basically (I think) you have Dries, a CEO and a business plan. Maybe you have Dries, a CEO and the core team already committed (seems like the core team has been on board for many months from their posts on the Acquia blog).

So some quick math. Assuming they want to keep the founders stake around 50% for a series A, that means VC equity + option pool (lets say 30%) = 50%. Therefore $7M is should be ~20% of the post-money valuation. Putting post money at $35M.

Sounds super high, so maybe they kept founders + option pool at the 50% level and sold the VCs 49% (lets estimate 50% for the math). Of course this means that in a B-round founder control goes away, though we have no idea about what they've done with preferred stock. But $7M is a bunch of money (15 people for 2 years using a $200K per head per year back of the envelope), so that B round is probably not much of a concern.

So the math is $7M equals 50% post-money putting post-money valuation at $14M.

Whatever the case, two guys, a business plan and maybe a team, were worth something in the neighborhood of $7M-$28M pre-money. If I were betting in Vegas, $7M or perhaps less.

Still, a few guys + a business plan is worth $7M? Where did all that value come from? It might be the revenue model, but I suspect it really comes from the Drupal community.

This is the far more interesting part of the Acquia story. Drupal has "spun off" (insert more precise term here) a number of consulting forms that have been growing wildly. Valuations of the CivicActions, Advomatics, Trellons, Lullabots, etc. of the Drupal community are probably pretty good-- general rule of thumb for a profitable consulting firm should be $150K revenue per employee per year, but consulting firms have a hard time growing beyond $3-5M in annual revenue. These guys are feeding their families well, but they aren't making what I would consider "real money" off Drupal.

I think the VC's bought into the idea that Acquia's product has already been mostly developed. They have bought into the idea that customer acquisition costs are low because the customers are aggregated and accessible in a single community.

Now lets look at exits. Acquia is to Drupal as RedHat is to Linux. RedHat's exit was via IPO at a valuation around $3B at ~$40M annual revenue with annual revenue growth '95-99 running around 100%. Red Hat's product strategy was pretty retail there and now is far more services/ enterprise related. Not sure how much they raised.

Someone believes there can be a multi billion dollar exit on Acquia, and their press release blurb gives a good story:

The Drupal web platform has been downloaded over 2 million times since its inception, and project growth doubles annually. Drupal is used to deliver a wide variety of Web 2.0 application types including single or multi-user blogs, wikis, community networks, digital media portals, and core web content management.

What if a single company could sell all kinds of web 2.0 applications without having to pay for the software development? Anyone what to bet on how many times Ning was brought up with VCs (with their rumored post money of $214M in their recent $44M funding round) ? But that might confuse the VCs, since Ning's an eyeball and advertising dollar play, it appears.

I am really curious how Acquia projects revenue. It is distributions and services, but are the customers existing Drupal community members (i.e. a little more retail)? Is it the enterprise players that come into the community and drive the revenue at the consulting companies? By making Drupal easier, how do they project community growth and what percentage of that community growth do they project capturing?

Do they have a Ning story and a Red Hat story? Whichever plays best with investors?

Bottom line though, is that huge pre-money valuation is driven by the strength of Drupal and, very likely, the inability of Drupal to grow its consumer user base as fast as the Joomal community (i.e. Acquia can capture customers the Drupal community simply is not pursuing and cannot reach).

If I were pitching the VCs I would lead with the Red Hat story, then pose the question, "What if a single company could capture all the revenue you see in the Joomla community?"

I'd invest in that company.

Lucy asks for an opinion...

Lucy Bernholz is on the board of GiveWell, subject to a recent firestorm (or maybe a small birthday candlestorm), and has asked for some advice. Never one to shrink away from offering free advice,

As I watched this all unfold, I kept thinking that it is so appropriate to the organization-- openness means you get to see both the good and the bad. And more irritatingly for the board and staff, everyone gets to comment on it.

I also kept thinking about how far worse happens, but would never make it to the light of day in traditional organizations.

So how does one decide between the options you present? I suggest a few criteria:

1. The magnitude of the offense. It is easy to imagine yourself a saint on the net and hold people to your saintly expectations. How bad is the offense?
   
2. The quality of the idea. People tend to join start up boards because they believe in the idea behind the organization or the founder or better yet, both. So is the belief in the idea strong enough to wade in there when you no longer have confidence in the person?
3. Rehabilitation. Some of us believe in locking up the criminals and throwing away the key. Others believe in rehabilitation. Seems like your own beliefs are a pretty big driver. The other angle of this is whether you believe the staff in question can be rehabilitated.
4. Personal energy. Do you have the energy to clean up the mess?
5. The rest of the board. No matter what decision you personally make, if you are the only one for rehabilitation or shutting the place down, then there is not much chance of a positive outcome.

That a guy in his mid-twenties got a little rambunctious after seeing his picture in the New York Times and started to believe his the whole "quit a hedge fund" marketing storyline is not a very big deal to me personally. So for me the magnitude of the offense is small. [Edit: This is not a defense of what was done or a suggestion that it is any way acceptable. I am a big believer there needs to be clear consequences for dishonest actions.]

The quality of the idea is extraordinary, IMHO. No one has done openness and transparency well or modeled it for others. You guys are doing a great job. Unfortunately, you are doing such a good job we get to see the bad as well.

I'm a big believer in rehabilitation. The antics really have me believing the whole ex-hedge fund storyline (I have a low opinion of the ethics of most big money players). But I don't know the man, so I'm not sure of the rehab-ability. But from what I've seen from afar, I would rehabilitate and brace myself for the next 1 or 2 of these and then watch some really extraordinary accomplishments roll out. Too often in the nonprofit sector, IMHO, we discount the high driven, high-performance, outcome oriented crowd because their methods and culture are so different ... and with social responsibility so sexy, lets take advantage of the 10 years we have these guys before they look around and see their peers all driving BMWs into the driveways of their 4 bedroom suburban houses and go out an make a couple million before they have to retire (OK, that was a little cynical).

If this was my only board, I would invest the energy. If I was on more than one, I wouldn't have the energy required and would hope other board members stepped up. An alternative might be to recruit a few additional quality people to the board since the idea is good, but the organization clearly can't be a personality driven creature.

So basically, were I on the board, appropriate sanctions and controls would be put in place and an opportunity to reform offered as long as the whole board stepped up and devoted the hours it was going to take, but that is just me.

PS Know that among the vitriol you have folks out here that are about as supportive as it gets. Keep up the good work :)

Quotes from the public

This whole GiveWell thing is killing me. But it provides such good blog fodder. So I think I'm going to do a series of quotes out of the morass because people are fascinating.

Come on, people. In business this can be dismissed as sleazy shenanigans, but in charity this should not be dismissed.

This comment literally made me laugh out loud. Charities, especially private foundations, IMHO exhibit some of the most sleazy shenanigans ever conceived by corporations . This specific example so doesn't even rate among executive compensation, employing foundations as conduits of money to friends and business associates, etc. If we want to clean house, lets start with something important and systemic.

But it should make Independent Sector shake in its boots. If this represents the popular opinion of charities, then some really ugly stuff could come out of congress in the name of charity accountability.

Luckily, rich and powerful people use foundations so I suspect the lobbyists at work on this issue are far better than the ones 501-c-3 public charities alone could muster. (OK, I might be a little cynical)

Givewell: Tested by their own values

The Givewell firestorm (actually more of a small birthday candle) continues.

My reaction: Givewell is Naive, Inspired and Arrogant. But that does not detract from what they are trying to accomplish. Transparency is not the same as Saint Hood. I've seen private foundations and major nonprofits do FAR more unethical things than trying to generate publicity under false pretenses.

Heck, I wish all the MetaFilter busy-bodies that keep emailing me and posting comments to this blog would turn their attention to the far more egregious behavior in the sector. But since their attention span isn't long enough to do investigation, they need intermediaries to queue up issues or folks like Holden to do stupid human tricks.

For the record: I already know Holden is pissing people off and exhibits poor social skills... now I can add exhibits poor judgment to the list. But that doesn't take away from the fact GiveWell is doing something valuable.

Which brings me to the point. Givewell is starting to feel the impact of its own principles. The Metafilter candle storm is what happens when you open up your operations to the masses. It will make the Givewell staff make better decisions in the future.

Hopefully the next candle storm can happen in an online community with a bit more civility and a bit more background knowledge... rather than just mindlessly spanking Givewell, the community will leverage Givewell's openness to make it better.

PS Sentiments like this piss me off: "My sincere hope is that GiveWell is irrevocably tarnished by this behavior." Check the Metafilter thread for 100s of examples. Why wouldn't someone think that my sincere hope is that GiveWell is irrevocably transformed by the reaction to this behavior and turns into an organization I'd be willing to support.

PPS I kinda like the soap opera aspect of this whole thing. I sincerely hope that after spanking Holden the board can look at this episode as evidence that the idea behind the organization is solid. Then everyone can go out and have a beer and a laugh.

What sector do you work in?

I love Michelle, but I must take umbrage.

201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. I don’t think that’s possibly representative of the sector (especially since in the survey, the most popular CRM was CiviCRM.)

In a sector where 80.8% of registered nonprofits have budgets under $100K per year and 50.9% 990 filers have budgets under $100K, OF COURSE these data make sense (2007 NCSS data). Who can possibly afford the commercial alternatives? Open source, free and accessible solutions are the obvious choice.

And obvious and used CRM solutions like Giftworks, MS Excel and post it notes weren't even in the survey (see dotorganize survey).

IN FACT, only 30% of NTEN CRM satisfaction survey respondents had budgets under 100K compared with the 50.9% in the sector .

And I'm not just saying this becuase CiviCRM emphatically spanked the huge commercial competitors. ;)

Too bad capacity building is passe

Funny quote from a small foundation:

The foundation I work for, along with every grantmaker I have spoken with, complain about the same thing - "The grant applications we have to review are horrible. Organizations don't follow directions!" About half of these horrible applicants get their grants. Even though we continually ask for what we need from charities to evaluate their requests, are we partly to blame for the problem of horrible applications?

My thoughts for the program officer:

(1) You are giving horrible applications grants. What have you just taught the grantee? Kinda like the parent that tells their kid "no" 5 times and then gives in. The kid just learned that the parent didn't mean it when they said no. Nonprofit know that the grant application is seldom the key determinant in whether you get a grant (see Larry Lessig's new work on corruption).

(2) How much money are you giving these grantees to improve their ability to respond to grant applications? If the answer is $0, then clearly this is not a problem you think is significant enough to invest in. Again the charity understands that the application isn't very important.

Givewell: Naive or Inspired

Probably a little bit of both. Rather than get into the debate about GiveWell, I'd like to point out a basic principle that the traditional philanthropic sector just doesn't get:

Openness. I've pointed out the different interpretations of openness before, but in the nonprofit sector, here we are pursuing charitable missions, where we want to help people, it sure seems like a no-brainer to be open about what you are doing.

Givewell exhibits two important pieces of openness:

(1) Publish what the charity submitted to Givewell. I'd be curious to know how many of the documents that charities submit to funding agencies can be found on their own web sites. If the material toots your own horn, publish it!

If you are bankrolling an organization, have them share their knowledge with the rest of the sector- more people will be helped.

We all know how backward the philanthropy sector is... we can't even get an aggregated RSS feed of grants made by foundations (Grantsfire seems stillborn). But what if you could get that RSS feed with a link to the application itself? A very powerful research tool for donors.

(2) Publish the selection methodology. My experience in the private foundation world was that the methodology we usually extraordinarily good. However, since there were always grants made that were clearly not motivated by the methodology, publishing the methodology just encouraged people to figure out which board member's in-law was on the board of the organization that got a big grant even though the methodology suggested they were a less effective candidate.

I tends to come down on the side of publish the methodology and don't feel embarrassed that there is favoritism. A foundation should be able to say, we have a relationship with this organizations and choose to fund them. End of story.

But having the methodology out there is huge for the sector.

Constructive debate can now happen. The metric of "Cost per significant life change" is, in my opinion a pretty bogus figure. But someone has bothered to put a methodology out. Now others can offer alternative methodologies. Hopefully the wisdom of crowds comes up with some better metrics.

Other thoughts that I don't have time to flesh out:

Givewell does something similar to the Sunlight Foundation in politics. See Larry Lessig's switch from copyright to corruption. By bringing philanthropic efforts into the light (openness) you reduce the dominance of corruption in philanthropy (which IMHO is almost as corrupt as politics, in Lessig's definition of corruption).

The nonprofit sector is almost architected to stifle innovation. Of course brash outsiders with poor social skills are the guys that innovate.

Charity Navigator (administrative costs are everything) and Givewell ($ per life saved) are probably both wrong. But the fact they are open means eventually they or someone else will get closer to getting it right.

Update:

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the sector to confidently critique anything but the lack of transparency and public discussion. And it's this problem that stops any other problems there might be from getting addressed. -Holden Karnofsky

OK, just this quote alone makes me want to send them a check.

Highly questionable

I've been looking at a lot of social enterprises lately and I am not surprised to find that there are a fair number of wolves in sheep's clothing out there. Or, perhaps worse, they basically just don't get it.

Take Giving Tree. Their mission is to bring philanthropy to the masses. And to make sure that they are the only ones that can bring it to the masses (at least using the word microphilanthropy).

Or so it would seem from their trademark on the term "microphilanthropy^TM" Do they intend to sue nonprofits that support microenterprise for trademark infringment if they use the term microphilanthropy?

If your mission is to bring philanthropy to the masses, then do it, engage with others, create a bigger pie rather than using old and tired legal strategies for hamstringing the competition.

Give me a break. Tacky. Tacky. Tacky.

The term "open source" officially meaningless in the nonprofit sector

http://www.nptimes.com/07Nov/npt-071101-3.html

So I'm reading this NP Times article. The word open source is used 20 times.

Gene Austin (Convio) has a fairly hilarious quote:

"I think the confusion in open source in our market is that people look at vendors like us that have proprietary applications, and say that they're not believers in open source, and that cannot be further from the truth because we use those technologies to assemble and build a great application," Austin said.

First, technically, he is right. Second, few in the NPO sector probably gets the hilarity. :( And third, give me a break. Using open source tools and software to build proprietary products doesn't mean they are believers in open source.

The Open Source Initiative has a great quote on their home page:

The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

I would venture that Convio believes in open source because it helps them lock in customers for a lower capital outlay. Simple as that. P.S. ANY SaaS (software as a service) vendor's EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) gets better the better as they lock in more and more customers.

The beacon of light in the article is, as ever, Holly Ross.

The question isn't really about open source, but about openness.

And this is the crux. Open source and openness (e.g. open APIs) can both contribute to lock in. Open source by giving proprietary vendors cheaper ways to build their solutions, and openness by making making other applications dependent. Salesforce is an absolute poster child for the lock in strategy (for their commercial customers)... to use AppExchange applications, APEX, or any of the other stuff in their ecology, you must pay Salesforce.

None of this is bad. Customers are getting better products that do more things that they need. It's just the concept that proprietary vendors would cloak themselves as supporters of open source software that irks me. :)

Convio and Kintera APIs... we're excited why, exactly?

My life in nonprofit technology continually gets defined by this moment in 2001 where a major technology company schooled me on why nonprofits didn't need open source... you see technology adoption runs on a five to seven year adoption cycle, they said, in 5-7 years, the innovations that are unique today will be commonplace and adopted throughout the sector, driven by the commercial market.

It is 4th Quarter of 2007 and Convio and Kintera announce APIs. Adoption can begin in their customer base. Mmmm... maybe the nonprofit sector is different.

Don't get me wrong, APIs are important, these announcements should be encouraged, only one more major vendor needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into 2002 (yes, 5 years out of touch). But please people, raise the bar a little. One has to wonder how long we would have waited for the vendors to release APIs if Salesforce hadn't flooded the market with modern software.

The real golden nugget is Convio's Facebook application based on the concept of extensions. This is where APIs need to move in the nonprofit sector if regular groups without 5 figure development budgets are going to use APIs. People need to be able to download applications, drop javascript into their web pages, not write code.

That said, looking at the 13 nonprofit applications on SalesForce's AppExchange, and knowing how many great things have been built by consultants and nonprofits but are not available, it may just mean that the benefits of open APIs are available only to those that can write a $10K+ check in addition to the cost of their commercial software. Hopefully Convio has more success distributing the innovation unleashed by their APIs.

P.S. APIs have been available from the beginning from open source tools focusing on the sector. The problem is that we still haven't come up with a distribution model that gets the tools in the hands of nonprofits without that darn five figure consulting fee.

Facebook is yet another step..

As much as I love Deborah, I think she is missing the point...

at this moment it feels like every self-respecting 501(c)3 is going to need to develop an application that integrates with Facebook.

Facebook is yet another step in the path to allowing non-programmers to do cool programmer things. A nonprofit doesn't need to create a application to raise money from Facebook users... they have lots of choices (causes, etc.). Advocacy campaigns have lots of choices. I'm sure in another few years they'll have apps to do all kinds of things we can't imagine.

The point here is all the NPO is doing is using their browser to click and configure. This started with widgets, is moving on to Facebook, and who knows where in the future.

The far more interesting item comes from the comments, where Caroline Meeks (a most excellent technologist) notes that the real magic comes when Google chooses to crush Facebook by "out opening" them.

But in the end, a human of average intelligence, a mouse and a keyboard can do things today that it took millions of dollars and special training to do yesterday. Nonprofits don't have to build Facebook widgets, but they do need to understand how to use tools in the new online jungle.

For those of us that have been in the technology game for awhile, basic technology literacy is still paramount to using technology sucessfully. Where we used to say "is it plugged in" we now say "are you logged in".

Google.org uses open RFP process

Google.org announced a $10M grant program via a Request for Proposals (RFP) process.

We realize that this type of open call for proposals is not the usual model for investment, but we wanted to use a process that was open to new ideas and new entrants.

They are exclusively focusing on entrepreneurs and companies... they already made some grants to nonprofits.

Does this suggest that unique, entrepreneurial innovation doesn't happen in the nonprofit sector? Is t true that only the biggest, best-reputation nonprofits should be invested in? Did they think that there wouldn't be any interesting folks popping up in an RFP for nonprofits?

I'm a firm believer that nonprofit funding is biased to funding winners, not innovators. Something like the Netsquared investment process (kind of an RFP) creates space for those small innovators to emerge. Interestingly enough, however, the Netsquared winner was a bigger, more established organization... not a scrappy start up.

Ack people! Technology adoption *cycle*

Lucy Bernholz, who I am sure is joking, says,

I suppose you know something has gone totally mainstream when its portrayed in Doonesbury.

I guess its time to look for the next new thing.

The strip mentions donorschoose.org and Secondlife. But these technology tools are still VERY early in the adoption cycle.

I remember sitting down with a big technology company and being educated that the cycle takes about 5 years to convert the skeptics. Though even today 50% of small nonprofits use Post It notes and excel as their databases. Maybe that adoption cycle is a bit longer for nonprofits?

I suspect we in the nonprofit technology sector will have a far greater impact on real things... people fed, poverty alleviated, etc... if we focus on moving existing technology to the conservatives rather than figuring out what the next big thing the technology enthusiast will start playing with.

Trapping users' data

From the good idea, but gotta-wonder department:

We think it’s time for socially-enabled web sites to stop competing over who can build a higher wall to trap their users' data.

This from the folks that bring us the open social web bill of rights.

(1) Duh. Of course this is better for consumers and better for the social web. My virtual world is tied up in Linkedin, Facebook, Plaxo, Technorati and a million other places. Each of these locations tries to connect me with other people I know. Far better if they all connect with one another seamlessly behind the scenes.

(2) What is the economic model? For profit technology firms are driven by investors looking for very high returns on investment or by corporations looking for high revenue plays. This goes back to the concept of does a company care about the size of their slice of the pie or the entire size of the pie?

A totally open social web creates a very big pie where all actors compete equally for user attention (and from there revenue). What corporation in their right mind is in favor of low barriers to entry in their market? The lower the barriers the lower the profits.

The angle that gets me jazzed is that many small actors, facing high barriers to entry, really do have an opportunity to create an open social web. Facebook might have already cracked the door.

Facebook is now a platform of social applications. Think of it as a private network... they control the cables, switches and routers. Open standards comes along. No one controls the network and you can create a virtual private network. More importantly the virtual private networks all follow the same basic rules.

It will be interesting to see this play out over the next few years.

Productize the Social Web!

Britt Bravo and the NetSquared crew have a cool idea... pose a question and a cool background report from the Overbrook Foundation and get people to pontificate ;) The better idea in this is that anyone can pontificate, further proof that the audience often has far more interesting things to say than the speaker. Go to the site and answer for yourself!

What is needed to facilitate more nonprofits' adoption of the social web?

A clear value proposition and simple, achievable models.

This approach pre-supposes there are few innovators and far more followers. To achieve volume (i.e. more nonprofits) you need to "comdify" the social web.

The first angle is always a why question. Given the choice between calling a donor or filling out a grant proposal, why am I going to invest my time in the social web? An answer that is always good is an ROI answer. Do happy, engaged constituents give more money? Are their demographics more desirable than my regular donor pool? Does the cost effort I invest today to figure this all out exceed the benefit I may get?

So to answer the why question, I would love to see a 2 page case for why the social web helped the Overbrook grantees that were in the vanguard. Drop the academic analysis we are sometimes too fond of in our sector and make a clear case designed to sell the reader.

Now that we have nonprofits sold on the social web, we need to give them achievable models.

I find it interesting that in the Overbrook report, it seemed like no one had to be sold on the social web:

“I think I’m missing something really big, but I don’t know what it is or how to find out what it is.”

“We don’t know who can translate these things for our needs.”

In our sector, we seem to want to answer these questions by teaching the organization how to write an RFP. Because somehow, it makes sense that a human rights organization needs to be an expert in the social web to be able to use the social web... to write an RFP, select a consultant or 'do it themselves.'

The Overbrook report also notes "There was almost universal frustration voiced about using outside technology consultants." Why?

Probably because the human rights organization wanted some sausage and really didn't want to know how the sausage was made. Why can't we as nonprofit technology assistance providers deliver a satisfying outcome rather than a frustrating process?

So this leads us to the second point... where are the social web "products"? I'm a nonprofit and I just buy, off the shelf, a solution. I don't have to become an expert. I just reap the rewards.

(Easy to say, FAR harder to do... but that is for another post)

Enormous Reach and Power

Nancy White, whose blog I follow, got me thinking with her quote "Yahoogroups has enormous reach and power."

Very few technology companies systematically deploy their assets in support of social change. Yahoo and Google have amazing technology assets. Do they systematically deploy yahoo groups? Do they make specific partnerships to deploy Google Aps to small groups? Do they hire a couple of head counts to do the marketing and outreach? Do they designate social change groups as a targeted vertical in their product organizations?

Based on conversations with main line product management folks, it seems like they don't think this way. From their actions in the aftermath of Katrina and the rapid innovation it spawned, my conclusion is that these companies haven't gone about deploying their assets in a systematic way in support of social change.

On the other side are companies like Salesforce.com that have actively created a delivery system and ecology for deploying their asset in support of social change. Oddly enough, the investment required would be very insignificant for these much larger corporations.

My next job, which I start next week is about deploying the core competencies of a technology company (product, services and people) in support of social change. I'll be asking a lot of questions about how to craft a delivery system and ecology.

The one big question I already have is why bother creating company-specific ecologies? Wouldn't it be far more efficient to use an existing ecology and methodology to deliver the assets of technology companies in support of social change (i.e. people, products, services)?