Online Giving Marketplaces

Raw notes from the SSIR conference on Online Giving Marketplaces. I’ll (try to) make sense of these for my JustMeans post on Friday.

Online giving marketplaces (OGMs) operate in the ecommerce space – these sites (eBay, Amazon, etc) have an average 3% conversion rate (percentage of site visitors that make a purchase). This conversion rate applies [...]

Making sense (or trying to)

Here is what today’s news brought:

Economic stimulus package in the U.S. – – $600 check is in the mail for American taxpayers.
Additions to the list of private universities recalculating their own rules for financial aid and deploying a percentage of their endowments to provide tuition discounts and grants to lower and middle income families.
News from [...]

Devolution to nonprofits and the markets

Photo Credit: Center For Environmental Health Photo, via Washingtonpost.com

Devolution – the shifting of responsibilities once met by the federal government to state or municipalities – is nothing new. Nor is devolution to nonprofits anything really new. Devolution to market entities also isn’t new, its just called “privatization.” So, this post isn’t new, its just [...]

Moving the conversation to xchangexchange

The Green Skeptic responded to my post about environmental blogs and the need for cross-sectoral solutions with this post. Here’s the basic gist of the discussion:
My claim:
“…we can only solve social challenges through the combined contributions and creativity of all sectors. There is no reason we should expect any single sector to ever solve our [...]

Philanthropy and the law

Lots of news on the legal front for nonprofits and philanthropy. Namely, three rather big moves in the courts and an interesting new nonprofit development.
1) Robertson V Princeton case moves to court – big win for donors. 1a) Note that this last month also saw the launch of a new nonprofit that [...]

Green and black

I’m on my way to a discussion with Majora Carter, creator of Sustainable South Bronx and the woman who taught my seven year old how to take action against environmental racism. Here’s a clip of Carter speaking at the New School:

I also just found this essay by Marcellus Andrews, an economist, on being Black and [...]

Back to the future

Scrolling through the archives of this blog – which has been live since July 2002 – I found this post:
Tuesday, July 09, 2002 [...]

Money chasing ideas or ideas chasing money?

Three of America’s largest foundations are trying new ways to get ideas in the door. This is a good thing. These are all in early stages – and all worth watching.
The Rockefeller Foundation requests your ideas. As the site says – “we know we don’t have all the answers.” Check out the Foundation’s online idea [...]

Research on philanthropy

New Aspen Institute Nonprofit Sector Research grants were just announced. They are:
Angela Eikenberry, Assistant Professor, Virginia TechProject: Giving Circles and Their Impacts on Donor Attitudes and Behaviors
Cynthia Gair, Director, REDF (formerly Roberts Enterprise Development Fund)Project: Stepping Out of the Maze: Aligning to Improve the Nonprofit Capital Market
Marybeth Gasman, Assistant Professor, University [...]

Wiser Earth

Paul Hawken and the Natural Capital Institute are setting out to apply good old fashioned crowd-sourced and open-sourced technologies to bring together what he calls the largest movement ever on earth – the sustainability movement. This will happen through WiserEarth. The lead technologist on the project (Oz Basarir) will be speaking in San Francisco on [...]