Non-Profit Tech Blog

These are heady times, lots of memes in the air and the two I’m going to talk about are actually facets of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. As you already know, Benkler’s main theoretical contribution was that he was able to present how the Internet lowers the cost of nonmarket transactions so that they become feasible to spread out over the free time of billions of people. You can build a pyramid of knowledge like Wikipedia by literally parsing out all the bricklaying and cement mixing over millions of hours of donated time. And that what is Economy 2.0 is all about – the migration of what was previously offline nonmarket activity to the Web. I’m not entirely sure if half the people who are making new sites under the Economy 2.0 rubric really quite understand what the hell they’re doing (aidpage comes to mind — frankly, it’s atrocious). On the other hand, the best practitioners of Economy 2.0 DO seem to get it. I’d choose donorschoose.org and modestneeds.org to be on MY Economy 2.0 kickball team.

Now there’s another meme coming from the philanthropy sector, I learned about it from Susan Herr’s blog, Philanthromedia. In her post, she refers back to Tom Watson’s entry in the Huffington Post of all places. Tom Watson basically talks about the size of the long tail in our sector and then goes on to discuss the commingling of corporate marketing with nonprofit goals. The RED campaign is not the last attempt at cause marketing. It’s only the beginning of an alliance between for-profits and non-profits. Basically, you buy this BMW and the proceeds go to [insert your cause] here.

But let’s take that whole notion of “consumer philanthropy” and put that back in the Economy 2.0 space. Wouldn’t it be possible to move the hardest social services cases in the nonprofit sector over to the Web? And wouldn’t it take just a little more thinking to get people to donate to those cases, in effect, becoming a consumer philanthropist? We’re basically applying the network effect to donations and ending up with another shading on the notion of consumer philanthropy. It’s not so much big-money philanthropy but online retail philanthropy. Unlike Tom Watson, I can’t proudly herald the notion that “consumer philanthropy” is here. However, I think I know what consumer philanthropy 2.0 might look like…