Thinking about the Quixote Foundation’s “Spend Up!”

This is a big week for fundraising conferences, what with the Council on Foundations get together in Denver (MoJo’s own David Corn was out there talking about gun violence issues). Judging from the twitter stream from @QuixoteTilts, the gathering of Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy (#epip10)  just prior to the CoF meeting was a rollicking good session, with some pretty fundamental questions put on the table about the who’s, why’s and wherefore’s of philanthropy.

It’s no accident that the Twitter voice of the Quixote Foundation was there and delivering a pretty interesting comment flow for the rest of us. As even a cursory look at their website will tell you, Quixote points its lance at the big questions, pointing its grantmaking at what it believes are the key opportunities for change. Full disclosure: Erik Hanisch, who with his wife Lenore and their great staff run this show, sits on my board of directors; Quixote is a grantmaker for Mother Jones.

Asymmetrical power relations in the social sector: Lucy Bernholz’s “Disrupting Philanthropy”

Lucy Bernholz’s “Disrupting Philanthropy: Technology and the Future of the Social Sector” has gotten a lot of attention on the Intertubes and among the twitterati (hashtag: #disruptphil) the past few days – and rightfully so. Her plain-English portrait of how digital technology is already changing the face of philanthropy and NGO life is, I think, a foundational document for what comes next. It’s that good.  (BTW, it’s one of those weird Futurama disconnects that Lucy works at BluePrint R+D 2 blocks away from the Mother Ship, with Jack Chin, who was one of the first people I met in the SF NGO scene way way back – and we’ve never met in person. We’re promising coffee in the new year, right Lucy!?)

It sounds like philanthropy is approaching one of those “whoa, what comes next” moments that us folks in the media/journalism world have been living through for, well, years. It makes for a fun ride (if your livelihood doesn’t depend on old models that are shakier by the day) and is definitely food for thought and the young at heart. So with one foot in (30+ years of) nonprofit life and the other in journalism world with more than passing interest…

Katz’s 3 axioms of foundation funding for journalism

Last week, I shared a drink at Union Square with Michael Stoll, the project director for San Francisco’s nonprofit Public Press; he’d reached out to me after the Free Press online chat on “What’s the Future of Foundations and Journalism?” – and I’m glad he did.

One of the things we talked about was the significance of Geoff Dougherty’s recent announcement that the Chi-Town Daily News, Chicago’s Knight Foundation-funded experiment in nonprofit journalism, would be shutting down. The Chi-Town Daily was one of the first to receive Knight funding, and also one of the larger operations, so there’s been a lot of chatter about the shop’s closure over the past couple of weeks (here are 2 good ones from Jim Barnett’s NonProfit Road, and a video from Dave Cohn). I don’t know Geoff, and I’m not familiar with Chi-Town’s inner workings, but at the risk of misreading the tea leaves, herewith my Three Axioms of Foundation Funding for Journalism.

Clay Shirky’s “second great age of patronage,” foundations, and journalism.

I’ve written about foundation funding for journalism before (in fact, it was what got me started doing this thing in the first place). But Clay Shirky’s Cato-Unbound  piece (interesting choice of publication site) arguing inter alia that we’re entering “a second great age of patronage” got me thinking again about this topic.

Shirky writes: this new patronage is

“. . .either of the ‘one rich person’ model, as with Richard Mellon Scaife’s subsidy of conservative journals, or the NPR Fund Drive model, where the small core of highly involved users makes above-market-price donations to provision a universally accessible good run for revenue but not for profit.”

Your local journalism fundraiser says it’s actually got to be both at the same time – since that is what a successful nonprofit fundraising program almost always looks like. It’s a measure of just how far the new nonprofit journalism world has to yet to go, fundraising-wise, that Clay sets up a distinction where it’s actually a continuum. Of course, there are reasons for that: mainly, the way these new projects are getting started – with (relatively) big money, and little or no membership/community base.  And since journalists tend to be lousy community organizers, this could be a problem.

Friday dog blogging 3 July 2009

First things first: the main generator/switch at MotherJones.com’s Seattle “carrier hotel” (aka server farm) failed early this morning, which resulted in a fire, which triggered the sprinkler system, which took our site (and several others) off line. No indication of when it’ll be back up; we’re actively looking at a Plan B fix (if anyone has ideas for a quick solution, let me know). Silver lining, I guess: it’s happening over a low traffic holiday weekend.

That also means no Friday cat blogging from Kevin, no frog blogging from the MoJo interns. (It also means you can’t get a look at the digital version of the new issue of Mother Jones, which has a totally kick-ass special package, “Wasted,” on the failure of the War on Drugs (so go buy a hard copy over the weekend).

My (belated!) response to Digidave’s video on Spot.us and MoJo…

I’ve been a doofus:  Dave Cohn posted a video in response to this back at the end of May, and I promised I’d get a reply back to him asap. One hardware crash and MoJo board meeting later, I’m finally able to get into a conversation with him about Spot.us, Mother Jones, non profit journalism etc. (sorry Dave!) mainly because here I am 39,000 feet in the air headed to #PDF09, and finally have some quality time to do just that (although for the sake of my seat mates, no video…).

Friday Dog Day 19 June 2009: Squirrel! Plus: why money is like water.

Mingus the Super Dog and I took our lunch break out the door and up past Marin Stables along Wood Lane Creek – here he is doing his best imitation of Dug (“squirrel!”) from the Pixar movie, UP! – and then over the ridge and back down again along Deer Park Creek (these out-the-door hikes being yet another reason I love this town…).

Squirrel!

Those creeks got me thinking about today’s report from the conservative Philanthropy Roundtable (paid for by the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation), which disputes the right of “governmental authority to regulate the activities of American philanthropists.” (h/t to @sharonschneider – you can read her stuff here). This is but the latest salvo in a spitting war ignited by a recent report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which had the audacity to suggest that foundations ought to straighten up and fly right or risk greater scrutiny from the federales. Imagine that: a watchdog organization that committed the inexcusable philanthropic faux pas of being impolite! Quel horror!

Dukes, pretenders to the throne, and citoyens: 3 discussions on the future of journalism that need to come together

When I started this blog a little while ago, I thought I’d mainly focus on the (as I put it) “intersection of journalism, fundraising, and technology” – figuring that I’d eventually get lost in the weeds/arcana/geekdom of fundraising since that’s what I can bring to the larger table  chewing over the future of (biz models to support) journalism (aka FoJ). So I reached out to Dave Cohn at Spot.us here, here and here, because I think he’s doing something really interesting. And I’ll get back to you, Dave (I owe you answers to those 2 questions you posed for me).

But the past couple of weeks, when it comes to thinking about work-related stuff, I’ve headed in a different direction – and think I’ll probably keep doing that for a bit longer before I head back to the weeds. Reason being that there’s been some really interesting thinking/doing/arguing about the larger structures through which journalism – however we end up defining that term in the near future – will be organized.

Digidave talks about Spot.us and fundraising

Here’s Dave Cohn aka Digidave talking about fundraising and Spot.us. Keywords are “transparency, immediacy, and control” (for the donor, that is). Towards the end of the video (btw Dave, are you suffering from bad bed hair, or is that a hat you’ve got on?!) Dave puts a couple of questions on the table for me. I’ve got a day full of fundraising meetings (okay, that’s somehow completely if ironically appropriate), so I’ll get this up now and get a response up later today…Thanks Dave!

Vodpod videos no longer available.

(BTW Dave – it’s “May-mon-ih-dees.” Maimonides. Greek for Hebrew.)

more about “Viddler.com – Conversation with Steve…“, posted with vodpod

More on Rick Cohen and the charitable deduction fight

As I reported the other day, Rick Cohen at the Cohen Report took the NGO trade associations to task for their resistance to – and in some cases outright opposition to –  the Obama administration proposal to help pay for expanded health care by capping charitable deductions at 28% for households earning $250,000 and up:

Though the comments CR [Cohen Report] received here for posting have been uniformly supportive of issues raised in the article, I suspect that the majority of readers is staunchly opposed. Or are we wrong? In at least two forums I’ve been in recently, when I raised generic concerns about the shortcomings of foundation grantmaking, the audiences were pretty much in agreement.  But when this issue was broached, one could feel the change in the rooms.  It as pretty remarkable.  I guess I’d be curious regarding follow-ups about:  (1) the extent of pro and con discussion this proposal is getting versus either strident opposition or, as my article described, public reticence in favor of behind-the-scenes opposition; and (2) how people feel about Brooke’s point that for the very wealthy, the tax incentives is really of little consequence. I’d love to hear feedback from CR readers on these issues and more.

Re the first question: no idea. If anyone out there has thoughts/knowledge on this, would be really interesting in hearing about it.

Re the second question: I’m inclined to agree with Brooke, pretty much. My experience working with wealthy donors is that if it factors in at all the tax deduction plays into the amount they’ll donate but not into the more fundamental decision about giving in the first place.

And that’s for the most part the exception, not the rule: what’s much more important is the value of the pile of assets they’re sitting on, and (just as importantly) their perception of relative wealth at the time the gift is made. The tax deductibility – or in this case, a modest reduction in the amount of that deduction – is a second or even third level factor in a philanthropic decision making process.

I’m not sure about this, but I can imagine one big exception to this, which is when a donor is deciding to set up a donor-advised fund at one of the big firms like Fidelity, or at a communitiy foundation. Only because (and please let me know if I’m completely off base here) this seems to me to be a much more transactional relationship, where the calculus of tax benefits could be seen as a much more important factor. . .