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RSS Grants Channels
A New Model for Grantmaking News
By Michael Gilbert, November 2004
This week's meeting of the Technology Affinity Group of the Council on Foundations presents an opportunity for me to offer a suggestion for a modest, but high impact initiative that could be taken by the technology staff of grantmakers. I'm not referring to their technology funding decisions. I addressed that issue back in March of 2003, when I made three recommendations to funders of nonprofit technology about how they might be able to improve the strategic impact of their grantmaking. Today however, I concern myself with the technology used by the grantmakers themselves.
Grantmakers are as susceptible to the lure and confusion of new technology as anyone else. During the dotcom boom, The Gilbert Center surveyed 40 foundation extranets and found that most of them were expensive failures, having been based upon an "if we build it, they will come" form of technological wishful thinking. Program officers are continually having new resources developed for them, many of which feel like yet another thing they have to do. And, despite some growing interest in email over the last few years, grantmakers remain very focused on the web, PDFs, and anything else that feels like a tangible product.
The strategic recommendations that I make to grantmakers when I consult with them about new technology is that they focus diligently on the actual behaviors of their users and that they make their most important technology decisions based upon communication planning. I have written about both of these recommendations elsewhere. For more information about this approach I recommend my report on Commmunication Centered Technology Planning.
Instead of large, strategic recommendations, in this article I want to focus on a few specific ideas that I think could deliver enormous value to the philanthropic community. I keep a folder full of these ideas on my laptop, but I'm going to limit myself to one idea that, because of network effects, would benefit from widespread adoption.
I am proposing the publication, through RSS channels, of structured announcements of grants made. My casual review of a couple of dozen grantmaker websites showed little or no use of RSS at all and certainly no distribution of grantmaking activity through that medium. Before I explore why I think it's a good idea, I'm going to explain what it is, technically, that I am proposing.
An RSS channel is an XML file or feed that is ideally suited to the distribution of news items. Unlike HTML, an RSS channel can be read by specialized newsreaders. The most common use for RSS is for reading weblogs in aggregate through a newsreader, rather than visiting each web site. Imagine if, in order to get your email, you had to visit a web page for each person who might have sent you a message. You don't do that. Instead, you download your email and read it all in one place. You can learn more about RSS at the WebReference page on the subject. The technical specification, maintained by the Berkman Center at Harvard, is quite accessible.
Each grant made by a foundation becomes an RSS news item. The body of the news item would be an announcement of the grant in a predictable format (probably in an XML specification that already exists). Therefore the channel would be a reverse chronological listing of grants made, in a machine readable form.
Why do I think this valuable?
The real time flow of grantmaking decisions is the barometer of foundation activity. Program officers pay attention to the decisions of their peers. Associations of grantmakers look for evidence that their support is having an impact. And even after the fact, thousands of grantmaking professionals, grant seekers, researchers, consultants, and others look for patterns and knowledge in the archives made available by The Foundation Center.
Certainly an individual would derive some simple benefits from subscribing to channels published by a foundation or a set of foundations whose grantmaking decisions interested them. Indeed, I think some of the value would even come from a certain simplicity of notification within a foundation itself, at least for the larger ones. But the really interesting stuff happens when associations and others start aggregating channels.
The affinity groups and regional associations would find it easy to take the pulse of their members. Grantseekers, of course, could see right away the new directions that their supporters are taking. (Upon reflection, that may or may not be a good thing.) The growing network of foundations, consultants and support organizations who are working to help grantmakers share knowledge as easily as they share financial resources would have a powerful, almost real time data mining tool at their disposal.
It's possible that this is only exciting to someone like me, who is something of a data junkie. I suspect there are as many data streams to cross as there are people. But if you think this idea might be of value, or if you know of grantmakers who are already doing it, please write to me with your ideas.
I want to thank the W. K. Kellogg Foundation for the opportunity to think about this proposal.
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