“We desperately need new ways to reach out and get people to support charities,” warns Steve Moore, the CEO of the Big Society Network, pointing to the impact of the dire economic circumstances on public spending . Yet the fiscal gloom cannot keep the irrepressible Ulsterman from seeing the bright side. “There’s a vibrant network of people using new technologies to get people to give”, he enthuses. “We are issuing an invitation to join us in this conversation.”

Much of the success of this initiative will depend on the nature of that conversation. We believe that a “mass philanthrocapitalism” which harnesses social media to mobilise and organise ordinary givers has enormous potential, as evidenced by the success of organisations such as Kiva.org and DonorsChoose in the United States. But getting this right is not proving as straightforward as many charities had hoped, as Bridger noted. If Spring is to figure out how to unleash the full potential of online giving, the conversation needs to have three characteristics:

First, it must not shy away from tough topics. There is certainly a lot of experimentation taking place with online giving in the UK (check out local giving, seethediffeence.org and givey, for example). All, no doubt, dream of becoming the eBay or Amazon of giving. But, whereas for-profit dotcoms are the children of a ferociously competitive market in which failure comes thick and fast, donor-backed projects tend to fail slowly. Spring needs to dig out the lessons of what does and, perhaps more importantly, what does not work.

Second, it must be imaginative. A lot of giving websites are just that, using the internet to get the public to give through a new medium, rather than changing the way in which people support good causes. Spring needs to explore completely different ways of raising money for new causes, for example through gaming. Just last week, the PlayMob, one of the tech companies at silicon roundabout, launched a new platform to use online gaming to raise money, not through donations but by getting gamers to buy products that support a good cause. For those of us mystified by the joys of Farmville and bemused that any Old (Apple)MacDonald would pay real money for, say, a digital cow for his digital farm, this all seems pretty odd. Yet gamers are expected to spend more than $2 billion this year on virtual stuff. The PlayMob‘s ‘Giverboard’ platform is there to try to skim off some of that for good causes, starting with selling a Soup Can Hat (price $5.50) in the Parallel Kingdom game to raise money for feeding programmes in Africa run by SOS Children. Easy money? Not at all, says Jude Ower, the CEO of PlayMob: successful fundraising in these virtual worlds must go with the grain of the games and will only work if it enriches the gamers’ experience. But if the forces of fun can be harnessed to doing good, the potential could be enormous.

Finally, Spring must be ready to be disruptive. Kiva and DonorsChoose have been successful because they offer the giver a completely different experience. They connect donor and recipient and help donors see what their gifts have achieved in a way that is not possible when giving to a traditional charity. (Kiva, in particular, has also made a virtue of transparency, which is not always the strong suit of nonprofits.) Maybe the potential of online giving is going to be fulfilled not merely as a fundraising tool for charities but, rather, as a disruptive technology that disintermediates charities and creates new networks for doing good. Spring needs to be ready to ruffle a few feathers. to help that happen.

Here’s to a great conversation!
 
*Disclosure: Michael will be one of the advisers to this project.

“Waiting for ‘Superman’,” by Karl Weber and Davis Guggenheim. The book accompanying the campaigning movie of the same name, an attempt by the makers of “An Inconvenient Truth” to have a similar catalytic effect on the debate about how to improve America’s faiing schools. This spells out the extent of the problems and what is being done, and could be done, to fix them, at far greater depth and length than could be crammed into this extraordinarily powerful movie (see our earlier comments on its message and strategy here and here). The latest activist project by Participant Media, the for-profit social business of philanthrocapitalist eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, the book comes with an added bonus: a free gift worth more than the price of the book that can be given away to help teachers pay for classroom projects through another of our favourite philanthrocapitalistic organisations, DonorsChoose.org.

“MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World,” by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. This is a great, must-read book about how connectivity is changing the world, and needs to do so even more if we are to come out of this current economic mess in significantly better shape than we went into it. The authors look not just at what business and government should do, but also at how the new tools of connectivity can drive social change. For example, some important lessons are learnt from two of our favourite philanthrocapitalistic organisations, Kiva and Ushahidi. Watch Matthew interview Mr Tapscott over Tea With The Economist.

“Citizen You: Doing Your Part to Change the World,” by Jonathan Tisch. This is one of the better inspirational books of recent years about how each of us can make a difference – both in work and outside it – because it is informed by the practical experience of an author who has run a big company as CEO of Loews Hotels as well as being intimately engaged in the venture philanthropy movement through his association with New Profit Inc. Watch Matthew interview him over Tea With The Economist.

“Sustainable Excellence: The Future of Business in a Fast Changing World,” by Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell. This is as good a statement as you will get of what activists focused on corporate citizenship and social responsibility will demand of business in the years ahead. Lots of practical examples from the battlefield, and a convincing argument that increasingly the better firms treat their workers and the world, the more likely they are to succeed. Mr Cramer, who runs Business for Social Responsibility, a non-profit, is particularly good on the need to improve the ethics of supply chains, not least through partnerships with civil society organisations.

“The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men: Inspiration, Vision and Purpose in the Quest to End Malaria,” by Bill Shore. This is a fascinating insider’s account of the extraordinary global campaign now under way to eradicate malaria, by one of America’s top social entrepreneurs. It is at once inspiring and challenging, in that it shows how philanthrocapitalism can make a difference but also how far there is to go, and how many lessons remain to be learnt. In discussing the belated realisation by the Gates Foundation that “disease-specific wars can succeed only if they also strengthen the overall health system in poor countries,” for example, Mr Shore reminds us all that “those fighting diseases as intractable as polio or malaria – or taking on any other task of that size – have to ask whether even their most ambitious efforts lack vision and imagination.”

The Network is the brainchild of ex-McKinsey consultant (they’re everywhere) and serial social entrepreneur Nat Wei and former ad man Paul Twivy, who was behind campaigns to get Brits to ‘change the world for a fiver’ and even to talk to their neighbours over a big lunch. The Network’s launch came with the personal endorsement of David Cameron, Conservative Party leader and would-be Prime Minister. (While the ‘big society’ is a Conservative slogan, Wei and Twivy – and Cameron – took great pains to say that the new Network is non-partisan. Hmmm.)

So what does the big talk of a big society mean? It’s a bit hard to tell, since the launch was all about raising the money to get the thing started. Yet it is fair to say that they are taking on a real challenge – how to mobilise Brits to start giving back more  – since the tax breaks for philanthropy and exhortations to volunteer of recent years have not caused much of a change to public attitudes so far.

The power of the Big Society Network, as Twivy explained, will depend on its ability (or not) to show how thousands or millions of individual ‘micro’ actions can have a real macro impact. This, indeed, is the thrust of the mass philanthrocapitalism that we discuss in a new chapter in the paperback edition of Philanthrocapitalism. Online giving sites such as Kiva and Donorschoose, as well as Facebook causes, are opening up new opportunities for engaged giving and activism, so that many people acting together can have the same demonstrable impact and leverage as rich philanthropists. These tools are evolving and changing rapidly, making new connections and meeting new needs all the time, mobilising a new generation of givers and activists.

Indeed, one sceptical thought about the Big Society Network is that it feels a bit too top-down. Back in 1993 US Vice-President Al Gore famously set out his vision for building an ‘information superhighway’, just as the internet was taking off without the billions of dollars of public investment that he was calling for. Could the Big Society Network turn out to be an equivalent civil society superhighway that is over-taken by grass-roots networks of changemakers? If so, as with the emergence of the privately-funded internet, that would be a cause for celebration.

Those words, written by the great British economist Adam Smith, seem strikingly wide of the mark at the moment, as millions of people around the world respond with generosity to the terrible misfortune that has befallen the people of Haiti. Twitter and Facebook are churning with tips on how to give and to whom to give.  Governments, businesses and individuals the world over are all opening their wallets to help.

Although sometimes caricatured as a champion of selfishness for extolling the power of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, Smith’s quote comes from his lesser-known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argued that it is our sympathy for others that motivates our good deeds. In the world without telephones and televisions that existed when he was writing, catastrophes on the other side of the world were abstract stories; today, we can see the suffering of others and do something about it. For that reason, Smith would not have been surprised by the way the public has responded to this latest crisis, and would have celebrated this as progress for humankind.

Smith would also have noted with pleasure that a massive earthquake in China in 2008 led to a dramatic change in attitudes to giving there, where the government had previously been hostile to philanthropy. Yet he might also have worried that the economy’s invisible heart led to philanthropic funds being misallocated by the surge of sympathy after high profile disasters, which often attract more money and in-kind gifts than can be used effectively on the ground, at the expense of less compelling but more effective uses of the donations.

In general, we are all better at responding to human suffering caused by dramatic, telegenic emergencies than to the much greater loss of life from ongoing hunger, disease and conflict. Charity fundraisers know that they need to grab the public’s heart with powerful images, so they tend to exploit these emergencies to raise more money. This raises a difficult question: does how our natural human sympathy works in this modern, multi-media age skew our moral compass?

There is a real danger of images of suffering becoming a sort of “poverty porn”, argues Ethiopia-based aid blogger Owen Barder in a recent post. His immediate target was child sponsorship, a particularly popular form of fundraising to help kids in developing countries. “Why should children be forced to write letters describing their lives in return for money to eat or have an education?” he demanded. Asking poor children to write letters to sponsors is, in Owen’s view, one of many examples of poverty porn, which demeans the beneficiaries and distracts donors from what really matters.

While Owen’s indignation is understandable, we think it is misplaced in its other-worldliness.  Rejecting emotional appeals for sympathy would probably mean less giving, rather than better giving. The real question for philanthrocapitalists – even at heartbreaking moments like today, as the pictures from Haiti move us to give – is how to ensure that appeals to the heart do good and don’t do harm.

At least in Haiti there is no question that the shocking images are real. In Victorian Britain there was great controversy when the child welfare pioneer Thomas Barnardo was forced to admit that his highly successful marketing images of children ‘before’ and ‘after’ they had entered his care were faked. We tell Barnardo’s story in the new chapter of the paperback edition of the book (which comes out in Britain this week) in our discussion of the mass philanthrocapitalism of online giving sites. The online microfinance site kiva.org has recently been under attack, in the same way as Barnardo was, for misleading its donors. This has largely been a storm in a teacup although it has helpfully forced Kiva to explain better what it does. Yet even with these changes, do Kiva and other online giving sites that connect donors to individual recipients cross the line into philanthroporn?

Kiva’s defence is probably the most straightforward. Even the most successful corporations in the rich world have to pitch for financing from banks, the bond market or the stock market. Kiva’s clients may be poor businesspeople in poor countries but they are businesspeople and pitching for money is part of business, so it is hard to see any abuse here.

Donorschoose is a more difficult case, since the beneficiaries of these online donations to classroom projects are American schoolchildren. In this case, however, feedback to the donor is required from the teacher who has bid for the money, not the pupils. True, donorschoose does have a facility for the children themselves to post messages to the donors and it is just about conceiveable that an unscrupulous teacher could force his pupils to produce degrading or obsequious messages. If that were the case, however, it is pretty likely that one of the kids or their parents would blow the whistle – that is the power of the internet.

Giving to development causes may be different because poor African children don’t have the same options to speak up for themselves as poor American children. Though this is starting to change. One of the leaders in mass philanthrocapitalism, globalgiving.org, has started to experiment with handing out phones with cameras to the communities that benefit from their projects. We are not there yet, but the truly exciting potential of online giving is the possibility of harnessing the spread of mobile phones in the developing world to allow the beneficiaries of charity to finally make themselves heard and start a conversation with donors about what works.

Effective giving needs the head and the heart. As all our hearts go out to the people of Haiti, we offer three thoughts about how to give. First, give money. This may sound obvious, but aid agencies are swamped at this time with offers of food, clothing and other goods. Even when these goods are needed, it is far more cost effective for charities to buy and ship exactly what they need than sorting out gifts in kind. Second, give it to an organisation with a track record of effective action. Thanks to the internet, it has never been easier to find out who those organisations are. Third, why not match fund what you have given to Haiti with a gift through kiva or globalgiving to someone suffering just as much, but less dramatically, elsewhere in the world?

Gazing into our crystal ball, we see philanthrocapitalism continuing to surge ahead as givers and governments realise that philanthropy is going to be the driver of much of the social innovation that tackles the symptoms and causes of our current economic mess. This surge in activity will be increasingly controversial, as philanthrocapitalists take on more challenges that are inherently political, at home and overseas. So, recognising that most of these forecasts will be wrong (though we can only hope!), here are our specific predictions for the year ahead.

1) A wave of mega-gifts from a new cohort of American philanthrocapitalists. In the United States, the IT sector has created scores of billionaires, some of whom have got the giving bug but there are still plenty who haven’t, yet. We think Apple founder Steve Jobs is ripe to join the movement: the icon of cool is starting to get some bad press for his lack of generosity (something that happened to both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett shortly before they made their first big gifts); he is a cancer survivor, which as well as giving him a sense of his own mortality, is also an experience that has motivated the giving of a number of other wealthy donors such as Michael Milken and Lance Armstrong; most of all, he is a born problem-solver, so would probably love it. 

An outside bet for a new tech philanthrocapitalist is Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer – yes he’s still busy with his day job and has no time for philanthropy but why not follow Warren Buffett’s example and hand a slice of his fortune to someone he trusts to give it away.

2) New giving by American billionaires will be outstripped by donors from emerging markets. 2010′s biggest donor will probably be a Chinese billionaire that none of us has yet heard of. Or maybe one of India’s super-rich, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal perhaps, will leap to the top of the giving tables. Perhaps Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim will start to do something really substantial with the $10 billion he has already pledged to give away. We’re not sure where exactly it’s coming from but something big is going to come from the emerging markets. It would be great to see a new wave of philanthrocapitalists in Africa. Sudanese mobile phone guru Mo Ibrahim is looking a bit lonely at the moment, so here’s hoping that the super-rich of Africa decide that it’s time to do their part – 2010 would be a great opportunity for South Africa’s billionaires as the eyes of the world will be on their country due to the soccer World Cup.

3) Malaria will be the cause of the year, centred on the World Cup in South Africa. The Malaria No More campaign, backed by Bill Gates and a bunch of corporate sponors including Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, has been gathering momentum in 2009 and its publicity is due to peak around the global media event of the year in the summer of 2010. With the world focused on Africa, political leaders and the continent’s super-rich will be under pressure to show that they are committed to the fight to stop this preventable disease that kills a million people a year.

4) Football may be the big sporting event of the the year but the big celebrity philanthropist of 2010 will be a golfer, as Tiger Woods redeems his reputation by spending far more time with his foundation – which is already quite impressive, but could be far bigger. His private life may be a mess but Tiger is certainly a fighter, so we expect him to come back in 2010 with some big giving to rescue his reputation.

5) On the theme of redemption, we’re expecting a bumper year of giving from the financial sector. Goldman Sachs made a good, but far too small, start in late 2009 by pledging half a billion dollars to help small businesses in America. But far more is needed if the reputation of bankers as a force for good is to have any chance of being restored. The public outcry over financiers’ pay isn’t going to go away and the bankers need to show that they’re doing their bit, corporately and personally, to take on the challenges of the economic crisis.

6) 2010 is the year when for-profit philanthropy and social investing goes to scale. 2009 saw the creation of Global Impact Investing Network, bringing together philanthropists, ethical banks and mainstream banks to push the cause of social investing. 2010 will see the flotation of Indian microfinance company SKS, a landmark in the development of ‘bottom of the pyramid’ businesses that serve the needs of the poorest and turn a profit for investors. More philanthropists are likely to focus on how to take the lessons of microfinance and apply them to supplying other services demanded by the poor. Watch this space.

7) Another major celebrity will join the list of those known as much for their commitment to giving as for what made them famous in the first place. In the book we profile Bono, Angelina Jolie, Shakira and Chinese film star Jet Li as examples of effective “celanthropists”, who are allying their celebrity with professional philanthropic support organisations in partnership with mega donors, big business and even governments. Our top tip to go big in 2010? Matt Damon, who lately has been spending a lot of time getting to grip with the details of what is going to be one of the biggest issues facing the planet in the coming decades, access to water.

Mass philanthrocapitalism will go from strength to strength. Kiva.org will get over its recent difficulties and sites like GlobalGiving will find new ways to enrich the donor experience to stimulate giving. But the big story in 2010 will be Facebook Causes as millions of people use their social networks as a force for good by, say, ‘giving’ their birthdays – celebrating another year by getting their friends to donate to charity rather than buying them a new pair of socks.

9) Philanthropy will start to take on tougher foreign policy challenges in 2010, increasingly in partnership with government. Afghanistan and Pakistan are top of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s ‘to do’ list next year but have so far received little attention from philanthrocapitalists. In 2009 this started to change as the State Department hooked up with social media gurus to think about how to use the internet to take on extremism in the Middle East. Afghanistan and Pakistan are crying out for aid that actually gets kids educated, supplies villages with water, gives people jobs, empowers women – the list goes on. Here’s a cause that’s ripe for innovation from the philanthrocapitalists.

10) Getting involved in the ‘war on terror’ is going to be controversial but so will much of the best philanthropy in 2010. From Bill Gates’s efforts to reform America’s schools that are annoying the teaching unions to George Soros’s new initiatives to remake economics, philanthrocapitalists will increasingly court controversy. But if it helps create a better world, that is the sort of controversy worth having.

Happy new year!

He had a point – the simplicity of their mission has certainly helped each of these relatively young philanthrocapitalistic organisations grow at a rapid pace. The same is true of another favourite of ours – which we profile with DonorsChoose in a new chapter in the paperback of Philanthrocapitalism – the microfinance lending site, Kiva.

Harrison has applied a marketing instinct honed as a nightclub party organiser to raising money. A particularly effective idea was to ask friends to make donations rather than give him gifts on his birthday – starting by requesting a dollar in donation for each year of his life. The mybirthday campaign has caught on fast, with celebrities now competing to raise the most – the sort of healthy competition the world needs right now. A particularly fierce battle is taking place between new Silicon Valley venture capital, in the form of Sean Parker, and old Silicon Valley, aka Ron Conway, to raise the most for their respective birthdays. Parker, who co-founded Napster and later co-founded Causes on Facebook with Joe Green, is one of a growing number of people who are giving up their birthday gifts via the Causes application, which has put behind it some initial sluggishness and started raising some serious money.

Though their mission may be simple, in true philanthrocapitalistic style, though in different ways, the three organisations represented on the panel are innovative and surprisingly complex in how they set about trying to maximise their leverage. One example is their use of cutting edge technology. Charity: Water has spread through astute electronic viral marketing, friends telling friends, applying peer pressure and so on. It also posts pictures of completed wells and their location using Googleearth, so people can see the direct impact of their giving. DonorsChoose takes that even further, with direct feedback from teachers and thank you letters from students, as well as clever software that identifies and shows first the projects most likely to appeal to a particular donor.

Both DonorsChoose and FEED have formed innovative partnerships with some big for-profit companies. (Indeed, like a growing number of philanthrocapitalistic organisations, FEED is itself a for-profit company, though Bush says most of the profits are given away via the UN Food Programme’s school lunches initiative – which cleverly both feeds children and gets them to attend school in the process.) Prices for FEED bags – $20 feeds one child for a year – range from $60 online to $195 in the super-swanky retailer, Bergdorf Goodman. One of FEED’s latest partnerships is with bookseller Barnes & Noble, in tandem with the terrific library-building non-profit Room to Read (featured in our book). Buying bags at Barnes & Noble not only feeds children but also gives them books – which is also helping to catalyse local childrens’ books industries in some developing countries.

DonorsChoose has tapped into two trends – attempts to make corporate philanthropy more effective and the growth of customer loyalty programmes – through partnerships with firms such as retailer Crate & Barrel, which use some of their foundation dollars to give money to loyal customers to donate via DonorsChoose. These customers seem to feel that giving them the chance to be virtuous is a better reward than a discount in the store, and DonorsChoose benefits not just from the corporate donation, but also from the fact that once people visit the site they tend to get hooked on the satisfaction of giving directly to projects which they can see are making a difference.

Indeed, DonorsChoose took this insight a step further at the Janera event by giving everyone who turned up a card with $25 to give away on its site. Giving potential donors money is an unusual fundraising strategy, but it seems to work. The idea was inspired by the comedian Stephen Colbert, a DonorsChoose board member, who gives every guest on his Colbert Report a $100 DonorsChoose voucher.

The three social entrepreneurs had other advice for those who would follow in their footsteps. The first is simply to start, and figure things out as you go along. Another is to keep at it even if no one else gets it. The third, judging by their actions, is to set crazily ambitious goals. DonorsChoose has already raised $50m for classroom projects. FEED says it has delivered over 50m meals. Charity: Water says it is providing clean water to 1m people. Yet these achievements seem to have made them raise the bar still higher. Harrison says his goal is to provide clean water to 1 billion people within ten years, and that his organisation’s success so far represents only one-tenth of one percent of its target. We wish them all a great 2010.

Credit where credit’s due, Barron’s put eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, at the top of the list, in his case a welcome rehabilitation for a donor who has had some wobbles institutionalising his philanthropy but has now moved on to really apply the principles of philanthrocapitalism to his do-gooding. Nor do we object to Barron’s decision to pick ‘usual suspects’, many of them featured in our book, such as Bill Gates (number 7 on the list), George Soros (19), Eli Broad (4) and Bill Clinton (13), all of whose philanthropy has broken new ground in 2009. Yet, with no disrespect, it is hard to say that 2009 has been a big year for Sir Richard Branson’s (10) giving. Similarly, the Tribeca Film festival (14) is a great event but does an impact of “5,000 teens danced at one outdoor screening in Manhattan”, really count as world-changing?

So, today, we would like to honour five philanthrocapitalists who should have been on the Barron’s list – the Philanthrocapitalism Forgotten Five:

1) Mo Ibrahim: the Nobel Peace Prize committee couldn’t think of anyone to honour this year, so they gave it to a guy they hope will achieve something – Barack Obama. (See our comments on how Obama should have responded to that decision.) No such timidity from Sudanese telecoms tycoon Ibrahim when he couldn’t find a suitable recipient for his annual prize for the best African leader. His foundation didn’t just refuse to make an award, they also explained why. Take that Thabo Mbeki! Bad politics is behind so many of the development challenges in Africa – Ibrahim’s effort to create a debate about political leadership is real smart, strategic philanthropy.

2) Jet Li: the once curiously American habit of giving is going global and film star Li is leading the charge in China. His One campaign is working to make giving an integral part of Chinese society for the first time by getting those who have benefited from the country’s spectacular economic growth to start giving back to help others less fortunate than themselves. Bill Gates thinks that emerging economic powers like China could become the new big players in philanthropy – Jet Li is making this happen.

3) Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN): it isn’t a person and it isn’t just about giving but GIIN, which was launched in September 2009, is looking to have impact that would dwarf all the giving in the world. This network of foundations, like Rockefeller, and banks, from the socially minded Shorebank to the red in tooth and balance sheet Citigroup, is trying to get more of the money sloshing around the world’s capital markets to be invested in projects that do social and environmental good. As they say, if just 2% of the world’s capital were used in this way that would be $500 billion. Now that would be impact.

4) Jerry Hirsch – the philanthropist behind the Lodestar Foundation (slogan: “seeking happiness through philanthropy”), which this year awarded its first “collaboration prize” for the best non-profit collaborations in the US. Hirsch, who sees his mission as encouraging effective philanthropy, understands the need to leverage money by addressing the inefficiencies in the non-profit world, one of the greatest of which is the “not invented here syndrome” that leads many non-profits to go it alone rather than collaborate, let alone merge (as many of them should). The first winners were a YMCA that merged with a Jewish Community Centre in Toledo, Ohio, and three museums in Dallas that merged. This is a vital trend to encourage in a year when, more than ever, “the name of the game is to make your dollars go far – very far”.

5) You: the rise of mass philanthrocapitalism has been the biggest trend of 2009. At the end of October online microfinance site Kiva.org announced that it had broken the $100 million barrier, just five years since it started, and is on track to $1 billion in the next five years. That is unheard of growth for the nonprofit sector. Donorschoose, globalgiving, Facebook causes – the list goes on – the internet is mobilising and empowering givers like never before. Yes, Kiva faced a bit of a backlash towards the end of the year, with accusations that it was misleading its members. These criticisms were rather overdone, although Kiva’s speedy response has improved how it works, and also signalled how quickly expectations and ambitions are changing. You don’t have to give and just hope that you’re doing good these days – internet giving has empowered you to know where your money is going. Use it!

Well, there ends our retrospective of 2009. Watch out for our predictions for philanthrocapitalism in 2010, coming soon.

Comment from Trevor Neilson of Global Philanthropy Group:

Thanks Matthew and Michael for weighing in. The goal of the Barron’s ranking was to begin a lively, global debate about outcomes in philanthropy. We feel that philanthropic impact is more important than philanthropic process – and yet most reporting on philanthropy does not address the impact it achieves. As noted in the Barron’s piece, the process of ranking philanthropists is extremely difficult and by its nature requires a great deal of subjective decision making, primarily because quantitative analysis is difficult across issue areas that do not share common metrics. We welcome everyone’s criticism of the list and hope that you and other leading thinkers will offer your own lists of the most effective philanthropists.

We want to give away one of our copies before publication next month, and have decided to hold a competition. Go to our new Facebook fansite, join up and simply answer this question in one sentence (or so): will the Gates Foundation or Kiva.org have a greater impact on poverty and why? Post your answer as a comment and we’ll choose a winner on Sunday. Good luck!

Kutcher, the “other half” of Demi Moore, is now the leading celanthropist when it comes to using the new media to promote a cause. (Point of information for those who think philanthrocapitalism is an ugly word: “celanthropist” was coined by Time magazine, whilst the winner is surely celebrity-baby’s Twitterlebrity.) However, if Oprah starts to “tweet” on a regular basis, she will soon overtake him.

Ray Chambers, the billionaire philanthrocapitalist who helped found Malaria No More, was excited about the potential of Twitter and other interactive technologies to help change the world, when he
spoke on April 17th at Georgetown University’s well-attended and strikingly upbeat Global Forum on “Profit, Policy and Philanthropy: The Keys to Global Development” (at which Matthew also spoke).

Malaria No More is fast emerging as one of the most innovative and effective partnerships in the world of philanthrocapitalism, with a coalition spanning News Corp to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and best-selling purpose-driven evangelical minister Rick Warren to, well, Ashton Kutcher. Read Matthew’s account of the entertaining goings-on at its first White house Summit here.

Whatever happens to the economy, we expect doing good to be transformed over the next few years by interactive technologies. Among other things, this will enable all donors – not just the super rich – to have greater confidence that their money is having an impact. It will also enable one of the most frequently ignored groups to have more of a voice – the needy people who philanthropy, large and small, is trying to help. We are big fans of internet-based organisations such as Kiva.org, DonorsChoose.org and globalgiving.com - but we also think they are only the beginning of what will be a revolutionary change. For a good read on the potential, we recommend “Causewired” by Tom Watson.

For anyone bemused by Twitter, check out this naughty Stephen Colbert moment as well as this how-to video on youtube. Matthew will start to “tweet” more frequently under the alias @mattbish. Help him beat Oprah to the two million mark by signing up to “follow” him here.