Real examples of foundations using social media to find more effective solutions to social problems.

1. Social Economy and
Philanthropy
Perla Ni, CEO GreatNonprofits
perlani@greatnonprofits.org

2. Social Economy
 New tools – social media.
 New structures and financial instruments –B-
corporations, impact investing, crowd funding.
 New approaches – human centered design.
 The new social economy, term coined by Lucy Bernholtz and
Rob Reich - is about deploying these innovations for public
good.

3. New Tools
 In every sector, the walls are coming down.
 The walls have come down between you, your grantees, and
the communities you serve. It‘s so easy to engage, listen and
respond.
 Web-based and mobile technologies used to turn
communication into interactive dialogue.

4. +
How are new technology tools used
in other sectors?

5. Exchange Information
 ―Whereas agricultural
brokers and traders once
spent hours conducting
telephone surveys with
farmers or embarking on so-
called windshield
surveys, in which they drove
down Interstate 80 during
harvest season to eyeball
crops, they can now gather
real-time updates on
planting intentions and
yields on Twitter. ―

6. Research
 Medical Research: Two John Hopkins University computer
scientists studied 1.5 million health-related tweets. "Tweets
showed us that some serious medical misperceptions exist out
there.‖

7. Monitoring
 Police Departments like
Boston: When people start
saying, ‗What‘s that smoke
coming from the Hancock
Tower?‘ or ‗Why is everybody
running around Copley Place
–- is something going on?‘ —
if two or three things come in
we look at
patterns, trends, something
maybe we should be paying
attention [to]. So it‘s sort of an
early warning system.‖

8. Responding and engaging users
 California DMV. Reaches 7,443 users per tweet sent
 Monitor their tweets to see who has problems.
 Provide answers about DMV to people.
 Remind people of driving rules

9. Resulted in ―extremely positive impact to customers by
changing their sentiment towards DMV.‖

10. Fascinating Facts about Twitter
1. Twitter has over 100 million global active users.
2. The first tweet went out on March 21, 2006, by Founder
Jack Dorsey after a mere 8 days of programming. It
read, ―just setting up my twttr‖.
3. 250 Million= average number of tweets per day
4. 47% of users have children (Quantcast).
5. African and Hispanic-Americans are more than twice as
likely to use Twitter than Caucasians (Pew Research).

11. Fascinating Facts about Facebook

12. +
Now YOU: how are donors adopt
the new Social Economy?

13. Foundations using Social Media

14. Help Your Grantees Fundraise
 The Pittsburgh Foundation‘s Day of Giving generated funding
for local nonprofits at the rate of nearly $75 per second over the
24-hour giving period.
 The total raised was almost double compared with Pittsburgh‘s
Day of Giving in 2010.
 Increase due to social media.

15. Help Your Grantees Fundraise
 Peery Foundation, a family foundation in Palo Alto, promotes its
grantees through its social media.
 One grantee based in SF, received a donation from a funder in
Virginia, as a result of a Youtube video that the Peery
Foundation posted on its Facebook page.

16. Involve your grantees in your
strategy
 Peery Foundation:
Uses a blog to open-source ideas about what
they should fund. They also use their blog to
be transparent about their grantmaking

17. Listen to Beneficiaries
―Do Nothing About Me
Without Me‖
Listening and engaging with
the community you are trying
to serve is essential to
effective philanthropy.

18. Separate Lives
For profit-world spends millions on market research. In
philanthropy, we assume that if we‘re smart, we‘re
educated, we‘ve read books, we‘ve spoken with the nonprofits in
the field, that we know what to fund and who to fund.

19. +
New: Human Centered Design
 designed based on a close engagement with end
users: the people who will be using the solutions.
 The approach to problem solving is about
practice, not about theory.
 Stanford d.school Kenya mobile water project

20. +
New: Human Centered Design
 Stanford d.school Kenya mobile water project
 Travelled to Kenya to assess the need, work
with locals on the programming, get user
feedback during the pilot
 Team included students from University of
Nairobi

21. Leading Tool Provider for
Beneficiary Reviews
 Syndicated and distributed
model for speed and scale
 National & International

22. Listen to the feedback of
beneficiaries
 Which nonprofits are having an impact on the ground? Which
nonprofits are well regarded by people in the
community? What are areas where your grantees could
improve?
 Craig
Newmark, Entertainment
Foundation, are just two
funders that read reviews
collected by GreatNonprofits
about the nonprofits they fund

23. More than
94,000
reviews written by clients or
volunteers about local, regional and
national nonprofits throughout U.S.

24. Crowd-Source Great Ideas

25. Let Your Community Find Solutions
 Birmingham Community Foundation: Provided $50,000
contest prize to transform this one city block into something
cool.
 It‘s the parking lot just to the right of the two tall chimneys of
Alabama Power Company‘s Powell Avenue Steam Plant.

26. Almost 3,000 contestants from 39
countries participated in the
contest, greatly exceeding expectations

27. +
Here‘s my challenge to you:
Are you still intellectually curious?
Do you want to make the most
impact with your dollars and
resources?

28. +
You could just go on doing things
the same way…
Or you can get
started on becoming the new
version of you.

29. +
grant·maker [grant-mey-ker]
noun
1. a person of high capacity to be open, to listen to the
beneficiaries and nonprofits in their community
2. a distinguished person with excellent persuasive abilities, able
to influence and champion support for their grantees
3. a leader who engages the community in the funding process
inorder to make the most effective grants
related forms
grant·mak·ing, adjective

30. Perla Ni, CEO GreatNonprofits
perlani@greatnonprofits.org