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Toward Network-Centric Philanthropy: Some Insights from the RSS Grants Survey
By Michael C. Gilbert, August 2006
With the kind cooperation of several other organizations, we recently completed a survey on the topic of foundations publishing their grantmaking decisions in RSS feeds. For a description of why this is a good idea, see RSS Grants Channels: A New Model for Grantmaking News, the article in which I originally presented this idea. For a description of how one foundation embraced RSS, see Streaming Grantmaker Knowledge, my explanation of six steps used at the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. Our recent survey represents the next step in understanding the market for this idea.
People Want Simple Open Sharing of Grant Information
We had a remarkable 614 respondents to this survey. Although we tried to avoid focusing on it, the underlying architecture of syndication is esoteric to most people. With the additional reach of the organizations who participated in recruiting respondents, this was twice as many as I had hoped. That's the first bit of good news.
The second piece of good news may also be the explanation for the high response rate: Nonprofit professionals are very interested in this idea. Of the questions we asked two were meant to gauge interest. First, we asked: "What level of interest do you have in the grantmaking decisions of individual foundations (other than your own organization, if you are a grantmaker)?" This yielded a predictable response. Over 90% of respondents have a professional interest in this, with 65% indicating that they have a "strong professional interest".
It gets more interesting with the followup question. We asked: "If the grantmaking decisions of foundations were aggregated in various ways (geographically, by issue, by keywords, and so forth), what level of interest would you have in the various flows and patterns of grants?" The number of respondents who have some professional interest in this rose to 95%, with 75% having a strong professional interest.
These results are not an artifact of my sample including a substantial number of organizations who are grantseekers. When restricted only to the funders who replied, the numbers were only very slightly lower. 60% indicated strong professional interest in individual feeds of foundation grantmaking information and 71% have a strong professional interest in aggregation.
In many ways these are not surprising results. Who could object to a simple, open mechanism for publishing and aggregating information about grantmaking decisions. Such decisions are among a handful of indicators of trends in the nonprofit sector. Despite their proportionally modest role in funding the sector, foundations wield significant influence over the direction organizations choose. They can take a different and important perspective from that of government or individual donors. As a result, they even serve as leaders on some occasions, leveraging the knowledge and the resources to make things happen that otherwise wouldn't. We would all want to make it easier to understand the philanthropic sector and a simple model for syndication and aggregation is very appealing.
Tiny Steps Toward Network-Centric Philanthropy
In general, the nonprofit sector is finally paying attention to network centric models of organizing and communication. We're starting to understand the power of sharing data in small and easily usable bits. The essential power of web-like structures is becoming clear to more and more people who are making decisions about how to do the work of civil society.
I was using RSS in various ways soon after its conception and I've been advocating for simple open standards of interoperability in nonprofit technology for many years. It caught me by surprise when, in the wake of the mainstream interest now being described as Web 2.0, our community finally began to take an interest. I'll admit to some frustration about how often we tend to wait until an idea has been made legitimate by the corporate world before we embrace it ourselves, rather than being willing to be the innovators. I wonder if this is a reflection of the phenomenon about which Paul Light and others have written: Nonprofits do not seem to hold their own vision and leadership in high esteem, at least when compared to the world of business. But here we are.
Just as some in the field of grassroots organizing have been advocating for network-centric advocacy, perhaps we are beginning to see the faint outlines of network-centric philanthropy. With simple concepts like publishing and aggregating grant information through RSS, we have a chance to test the waters.
Expect the Unexpected
I love reading the works of nineteenth century naturalists. As they travelled around the world, documenting what they saw in ecosystem after ecosystem, they were filled with an unending sense of wonder at the never ending creativity of nature. In a rich and healthy ecosystem, the one thing we can always expect is the unexpected. In the context of the information ecosystem that is now taking shape around civil society, I'm looking forward to being surprised.
Nevertheless, I'm going to make some predictions, comforted by the fact that in the event that I'm wrong, it will be because something even more interesting happened that I didn't foresee. I'm going to try to present just a hint of what we might be able to do with just this one small idea of grants information via RSS. I hope this will pique your interest in network-centric philanthropy in general.
Let's first take a look at what RSS has already enabled in other fields. It's been argued that personal publishing in the form of weblogs took off because of syndication. RSS is the glue that binds networks of bloggers together into communities. Without it, there is no way we would have the same rapid flow of conversation between a vast number of independent authors as we do now. Social bookmarking and the community building that forms around it is similarly empowered by RSS. The phenomenon that possibly comes closest to what we might see with grants is, interestingly enough, podcasting. A podcast is just an RSS feed with a specially formatted "payload" of information, in this case audio, that can be put to all sorts of flexible use on the receiving end. In many ways, podcasting is reshaping broadcasting as we know it.
If a critical mass of foundations start publishing their grants made in a timely manner as RSS, here are a few things I see happening: We will see aggregators framing their analysis in terms of the emerging interests of particular grantmakers and we'll see grantseekers becoming more savvy about who they send proposals to. We'll see tools emerge that allow you to describe a grant proposal in certain semantic terms and then tell you who is most likely to fund it. We'll see better and more timely predictions of grantmaking trends.
One thing is certain, the people who already make it their business to understand grantmaking patterns, will build tools and develop insights that I can't even begin to guess. And those tools and insights will be built upon a foundation of free, open, rapid, and simple distribution of the raw data of grantmaking decisions. I'm looking forward to being surprised.
Now it's your turn: What do you think could be built upon that foundation? Write to me with your ideas.
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