The Year Ahead - Philanthropy and Digital Civil Society

The tenth annual Blueprint - Blueprint 2019 - went live in December. You can find it and the entire decade's archive here. 

On January 23rd we'll be hosting our annual "prediction-palooza" (free, online) discussion about philanthropy predictions. Information on that is available here.

In the meantime, I've just come off a conversation with a research group preparing a report for a big foundation on the future of philanthropy. I get asked to do a lot of these. I only agree to these conversations if there is going to be a public version of the report. I'm told that's the case - this report should be available in April. 

Some thoughts as I was asked to reflect on the last 5 years and then look ahead 10 years. 

Looking back: 

All the new products, platforms and ways to give (DAFs, impact investing, crowdfunding platforms, text donations, cause marketing, etc.) are not adding up to more giving by more people. As Indiana University notes, since 2000 we've lost 20 million givers - at least as recorded by data on charitable donations to tax exempt nonprofits. This is over the same 19 year time frame that brought us online/mobile donations, online data resources about nonprofits,

Perhaps we can stop assuming product innovation equals growth?

Where have the "missing millions" gone? I doubt people have given up on giving, after all we've been doing it for thousands of years. I think we have an "instrumentation" problem. Which is to say, we're measuring the wrong things. Changes in the tax code are expected to result in changes in giving to nonprofits (and to changes in how useful itemized tax forms will be for measuring giving behavior).

Perhaps we can ask whether we're measuring the right things?

We need new instruments to measure how Americans give and to whom. It should include measurements of person-to-person giving (e.g., as happens on crowdfunding platforms), political donations and contributions of time, investments intended to produce social/environmental outcomes, and money raised via product purchases (BOGO or cause marketing). I've been calling for this since at least 2015 - see here, and had intimations about it back in 2008 (see here). 

Looking Ahead:

Commercial platforms and nonprofit data:

Does anyone really think Facebook is going to be the same thing in 2029 that it is in 2019? Not even the folks at FB would say that. Every nonprofit and philanthropist that is managing their giving, their outreach, their donors, etc. on this single platform should beware. The rules are going to change, the compan(ies) will push back, there will be all kinds of ups/downs between now and 10 years from now - but in no imaginable future is doing right by nonprofits (in terms of their data and long term relationships with donors) in the growth plans of that company. If you can imagine either a different FB in 10 years or no FB 10 years from now, then it seems like a good idea not to put all your data eggs in a FB basket. (Or any commercial platform driven by a business model unrelated to how well it serves the social sector).

Charity and Politics:

The legal line between these two domains is man-made. It's changed over time. It's thin and it's fragile. The current presidential administration is determined to destroy it (see Johnson Amendment fight, as well as court cases on donor disclosure in politics). There's not enough manpower at the IRS to defend any boundary that might exist. Digital data and systems make defending the line even more difficult than they were in the analog age. Many advocates and advocacy organizations would like to see the line gone. Individual people may not care as much about separating political and charitable action as policy makers and nonprofit leaders want them to. Assuming the old boundaries between these domains function as intended is fooling oneself. We should put our attention into writing rules that protect our (often conflicting) rights (association, expression, privacy), sheds light on political corruption and the excessive influence of wealth, and assumes digital data collection and exposure, rather than nostalgically assuming that protecting a legal distinction established in the 1950s is the best (or only) way forward.

Shiny Objects:

Anyone but me noticing that the marketing hype about blockchain is starting to quiet down, just as people building digital systems that focus on digital security and encryption are growing in actual use? This is a good thing - stop gawking at the new packaging and let's focus on the values that particular activities require. In some cases, permanent records of transactions are a good thing (supply chain verification of objects, possibly). In other cases, distributed, immutable records may not be such a good idea (human ID, for example). It's the nature of the game that we'll chatter about the latest shiny object. What's much more interesting is how we embody shared values in new ways.