Deep Currents

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy.

Web 2.0 tools are now being used to organize ad-hoc activism, without the need for creating new organizations or involving existing nonprofits. The rise in this ad-hoc activism is happening at the same time as many traditional membership-based nonprofits are having trouble maintaining their membership rolls and even the total number of nonprofits had registered a rare year on year decline (as recorded by the National Center of Charitable Statistics). What follows is a set of information we’ve gathered that informs how membership organizations philanthropies could respond to these changes.

Why the rise ad-hoc activism?

One cause is technology: as we have heard from Clay Shirky, the recent crop of Web 2.0 tools reduce the cost of assembling groups and taking action to the point that, in his words, big things can be done for love (see page 142 of Here Comes Everybody). A second cause is demographic, as described in a report just released by the Case Foundation called “Social Citizens” (published online at http://tinyurl.com/4en7o8). The Millennial generation has grown up with today’s technology and considers it normal. Partly as a result, Millennials tend to value impact, immediacy, and short-term involvement:

[Millennials] value peer relationships over institutional loyalty. This has profound implications for activist organizations accustomed to support from their donors over long periods of time. Young people are unlikely to be lifelong donors to their local United Way or Sierra Club. They will engage enthusiastically in specific campaigns about which they feel passionate, but their institutional support is likely to vanish once that campaign ends (page 55-56).

Does it matter?

On the upside, Shirky describes how today’s technology enables a new class of ad hoc yet coordinated activities which would not have been feasible in the past given the high cost of coordination, and some of these activities are naturally geared towards achieving social change. For example Carrotmob is a San Francisco-based group started by Brent Schulkin whose goal is to direct consumer buying power as a “carrot” to persuade businesses to take environmentally-friendly actions that also benefit their bottom lines. Brent’s pilot effort involved recruiting a liquor store to pay for changes in its lighting and cooling systems from 22% of the sales on a given afternoon. He inspired enough people that a huge queue of customers arrived and made purchases of $9000, nearly three times the regular take. Schulkin also coordinated a free concert in a nearby park and secured corporate donations, all coordinated and chronicled using simple Web 2.0 tools: blogs, email lists, and YouTube. Watch the video here: http://www.carrotmob.org/kyte.html.

On the downside, the Millennials’ focus on new forms of activism may mean that organizations with a traditional membership relationship to their donors will become grayer and grayer over time as their relevance to youth declines. The National Audubon Society, similar to many conservation organizations whom we’ve spoken with directly, has an ever older membership and is concerned about maintaining its relevance.

Yet these organizations clearly still have unique value to contribute, as the Social Citizens report notes: “Institutions are necessary to offer expertise, focus efforts, provide institutional memory for communities, and lead issues.”  The Millennials generally don’t understand the means of achieving policy change and tend to leave policy goals off of their agenda for social change, presenting  established activist institutions an open invitation.

Membership-based organizations facing a graying base might respond in some of the following ways: (1) maintain their current structure, (2) find alternative sources of revenue (i.e. courting major donors or charging fees for service), (3) replace traditional outreach approaches with web 2.0 but maintain a traditional organizational structure and governance; or (4) adopt the new web 2.0 approach wholesale, phasing out traditional membership and the organization it supports in favor of simply facilitating ad-hoc action.

One set of general principles that such organizations could find useful are those set out by Peter Karoff in The World We Want as guidelines for “open source philanthropy,” the first two of which are discussed in detail on Philanthropy 2173 (http://tinyurl.com/5sbbe3):

1. Facilitate adaptation, don’t hinder it
2. Design for interoperability, local specificity will follow
3. Build for the poorest
4. Assume upward adaptability
5. Creativity and control will happen locally
6. Diversity is essential
7. Complex problems require hybrid solutions

What does this mean for philanthropists?

The two-step challenge these changes pose for philanthropies is first to understand ad-hoc activism and then to decide how to adapt their strategy in response. To understand this ad-hoc activity, philanthropies will need to observe its strengths and weaknesses closely. What can ad-hoc activism accomplish that traditional organizations cannot? Where does it compete? And, how are traditional organizations valuable in ways that the new form will probably never be? The answers to these and similar questions will naturally guide a strategy for engagement in today’s environment and provide the basis for forward-looking guidance to grantees.

Written: May 12th, 2008