I wanted to share a report recently out from the Center for Strategic Philanthropy and Civil Society at Duke University
Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector
This report presents an overview of some of the impacts that the networked digital technology and data are having on the philanthropic sector. It’s very readable and is a good orientation to a few of the high-tech developments.
From the summary:
This monograph explores the immediate and longer-term implications of networked digital technologies for philanthropy. Our claim is that information networks are transforming philanthropy. Enormous databases and powerful new visualization tools can be accessed instantly by anyone, at any time.
[W]e examine how networked technologies are affecting five philanthropic practices:• Setting goals and formulating strategy: how funders and enterprises make decisions about what to do, where, and how.
• Building social capital: how funders and enterprises support one another, cooperate, and collaborate.
• Measuring progress: how funders and enterprises set benchmarks, measure outputs, and make course corrections along the way.
• Measuring outcomes and impact: how funders and enterprises know whether what they’ve done has made a difference.
• Accounting for the work: how funders and enterprises account for what they do, to the public at large and to regulators.
[W]e feel confident in predicting we’ll see an increase in the following three phenomena:
• New blendings of market-based and nonmarket solutions.
• Networked, boundaryless, and often temporary alliances that call for the creation of new ways of activating, coordinating, and governing cooperative efforts.
• More and better data, more readily available and at lower cost.
Ajah is an prime example of several of the trends mentioned in this report.
