The concept of development helps rationalize the position of autocrats by postulating an unstoppable transition toward a bright future. This is why donors call all poor countries “developing.” Once the donors started paying lip service to democracy, they could label undemocratic aid recipients as “democratizing.” Let’s call this the Gerund Defense for supporting dictators. Thomas Carothers, an expert on the connections between aid and democracy, described the Gerund Defense in a classic article [Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, 2004), p. 169]. He quoted a USAID description of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2001 as a country in “transition to a democratic, free market society.” (Such “democratizing” is still notably weak in 2010.)

The World Bank’s response to Helen Epstein’s article in these pages accusing the bank of supporting Ethiopian tyranny is a classic Gerund Defense. The World Bank’s country director for Ethiopia and Sudan, Ken Ohashi, replied:

We start…with a belief that in every country people want…to develop a transparent, accountable…governance system. Ethiopia is no exception. Our task…is to support that innate tendency.

However, building institutions… takes a long time…. Changes are incremental, and at times they may suffer serious setbacks….

The Gerund Defense has the attraction of being irrefutable. We don’t know the future, so we don’t know whether a particular event is a “setback” to “building institutions,” or whether the “building” is a myth. We could of course observe the actual trend in “democratizing”—but this has been discouraging in Ethiopia, where parties and politicians that seriously challenge the government risk prison. Donors could conceivably overlook anything, even the 1994 Rwanda genocide, as a temporary “setback” to an “innate tendency.” Such a view is not as easily dismissed as you might think.

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Little by little tax and legal professionals are coming to see that the wealthy very often want to have impact beyond self and family. How to have a conversation about aspiration and impact? Not easy for those whose training is limited to facts and figures. The skills needed are those of Socratic dialogue and thematic listening. Those who have such skills are generally found in public relations, advertising, proof reading, teaching, social work, fundrasing, or walking the streets looking for a job. We have, as a culture, subordinated wisdom to profit and now our best hope is to teach "discernment" to tax, legal, and financial professionals. The strategic part of philanthropy can be taught by MBAs, and often is. The wisdom part? We are still treating giving as a consumer preference or proclivity. Questions like, "What does the community need? To whom are you responsible? What must we do to be saved? If not now when?" are syptomatic of a mind gone mad. I know it and accept it.

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In every domain in life, the questions we ask shape the responses we get. Our questions reveal our frame of reference and impose that frame on our answers. As a result, much is revealed by examining the assumptions, the reasoning, and the logic models of our questions.

I believe that most practitioners of nonprofit technology planning are asking the wrong questions. Because their questions are largely about technology, the results of these questions are answers dominated by the logic of technology itself, rather than by the mission or methods of the organization.

Many observers will agree that common complaints about technology projects -- resistance to change, long sales cycles, inappropriate technology, unexpected costs, unused tools -- are often the inevitable result of this technocentric planning. The only way to unravel this problem is to go to the source and challenge the questions we ask.[...]

What Should Planners Ask?
It's useful to look at other domains for inspiration about what the right questions might be. Although a proper examination would involve a much larger set of domains, for our purposes today, let's look at eye doctors and shoe sales-people.

Eye doctors don't determine how to correct your vision by looking at what kind of glasses you have been wearing recently. They evaluate your vision directly and possibly they investigate some lifestyle or workstyle issues, such as the typical distance of objects that you need to see. Even though your current glasses might reveal something about your eyesight, they don't use that as a form of assessment. Eye doctors rely on questions about eyes and about seeing, not questions about eyeglasses.

Shoes sales folk don't do an inventory of your shoes in order to sell you a new pair. Even though it's true that such an inventory might help them sell to you, even people with such a solid sales agenda focus instead on other things. They measure your feet, for example. They investigate your walking habits and contexts. They watch you walk. Shoe sales folks rely on questions about feet, fashion, and walking (or running or standing), not questions about shoes.

From these two examples, we can start to learn what kinds of questions planners should be asking. In both of these cases, the questions that allow the professional to offer the right technology are not technological questions. Instead, they ask questions about behavior and context. The behavioral questions are often goal directed and look at practices which, though they will likely be served by the technology, are not about the technology. The context questions, being both personal and practical, give the professional an understanding of the systems into which the technology will be introduced. Those systems include other technologies, but are in no way limited by them.

What Are Nonprofit Techies Asking?
[...] I started with the TechAtlas Basic Interactive Technology Assessment & Technology Project Recommendations. To their credit, TechAtlas asks you to describe your organization's mission. They promise to include that mission statements at the top of the documents produced. Unfortunately, there is very little in TechAtlas that actually tries to connect the technology plan to that mission, other than technology vision statement. Instead, the Basic Assessment asks about hardware, networks, virus protection, backups, databases, email, the Web, the Internet, training, and software.

What's missing? It doesn't ask about communication practices, business processes, stakeholder relationships, or anything else that might actually lead to meaningful requirements. The questions of the Basic Assessment provide a classic example of the determinism inherent in technocentric inquiry. In essence, each question takes the form of "Are you doing ______ (insert tech we think is good)?" If the answer is no, then the recommendations are more or less "Well, you should!"

The title for this post comes from our RFP for organizations requesting the support of the Digital Arts Service Corps; it is an effective bellwether for overall project success.

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Google just announced a new national technology service corps, in partnership with the HandsOn Network and AmeriCorps*VISTA---not unlike the Digital Arts Service Corps I have managed for the past 4.5 years and will be shutting down this August as our funding expires. Google describes their program thusly:

These AmeriCorps*VISTA members will work full-time for one year developing introductory seminars and involved in-person trainings for smaller nonprofits that are working to lift people out of poverty. The Tech Corps will start in September with a one-week training at our campus in Mountain View, learning about both our nonprofit tools and cloud-based offerings from other technology companies like Salesforce.com and LinkedIn. Once they are armed with tech know-how, they’ll spend the rest of the year in three-person teams serving nonprofits in the Bay Area, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Our response:

Google’s commitment is certainly a step in the right direction. However, we wish Google and HandsOn would place the particular needs of organizations at the forefront of their new initiative. Google mentions that its Tech Corps members will be trained in its own nonprofit tools. Although familiarity with these tools may prove helpful to some, the solutions its Corps will be able to offer organizations after this kind of training are still highly prescriptive and techno-centric. Nonprofits need and deserve to have a voice in determining the nature of the project that will presumably transform their organizations. For Corps members, much more important than technology skills are the skills to collaborate with organization staff and work toward a solution. For organizations, a technology solution that is well planned-for and has the support of staff is more valuable than a predetermined set of technology practices. Rather than prescribing specific practices, the Transmission Project serves as adviser during the project design process, so that organizations are prepared to maximize the impact that the addition of a Digital Arts Service Corps member makes.

The above was written by Howie Fisher and the top collage created by Billy Brown---both Digital Arts Service Corps members serving with the Transmission Project whose value far exceeds any training seminars they can deliver.

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For the Progressives, many of whom had roots in Republican reformism, charity was an ineffective and insufficient system for promoting the general welfare and for ameliorating perceived economic and social injustice. At the heart of the Progressive diagnosis of the problem was a view of charity as an unsystematic, temporary, and superficial ointment that failed to address the root causes of problems. Many commentators thought that charity might improve conditions for the individual but left undisturbed the diseased social order that contributed to poverty. Some commentators went further in their critique, arguing that charity not only failed to assist even its recipients but left them increasingly in a state of pauperization, dependent on the handouts of others. For other reformers, the voluntary decentralized nature of charity administration led to needless duplication and waste.

[...]

Contributing to the diagnosis and prescription for charity reformation were several currents that further eroded more traditional views that rooted charity in the soil of religious obligations and the practices of mutual aid and charity. The emerging Social Gospel movement merged secular and religious concerns into what was perceived as a “higher” form of Christianity and demanded more wholesale remediation of social ills. The moral fulcrum of aid was no longer to be the personal discretion of givers about the moral fitness of a recipient but was to be anchored in a postmillennial pietism that sought to build the kingdom of God on earth.

Defining pauperism and justice in broadly social terms required looking for environmental and structural, as opposed to moral, causes of pauperism. The pursuit of structural problems and solutions eliminated the need for distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor that had not only guided Victorian philanthropists but had also been a useful tool for mutual aid and other cooperative societies that depended on expectations of reciprocity among deserving, if occasionally unfortunate, peers.

The movement from the moral world of charity to the moral world of social activism displaced the virtue of liberality expressed in gift-giving and traditional forms of mutual aid and voluntary association. By elevating the state as the central agent for the distribution of welfare goods, the Progressives paved the way for the displacement of dispersed, conscientious, personal judgment of citizens by the centralized, rationalized, professional administration of civil servants.

[...]

III. Social Science and Modern Philanthropy
The Progressive-era confidence in social scientific technique as a means of social control informed the changing view of the role of philanthropy in society. The quest for a more “scientific philanthropy” shared the Progressive desire to diagnose and treat through orderly systematic means the “root causes” of poverty. Government was seen by many as a benign and appropriate partner in this pursuit.

As early as 1899 it was common to define as philanthropists not merely those among the wealthy who endowed foundations but “all persons who have devoted themselves in any systematic way to charitable or educational work.” Joseph Lee argued that philanthropists had “a duty to perform in the systematic study and promotion of progressive social legislation.” For Lee, this “promotion” could include calling in experts to advise on the implementation of beneficial legislation and to develop rational programs and measures for the “cure of all social ills.”

Writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900, Charles Richmond Henderson suggested that the application of science in philanthropy required greater “practical coordination of the special knowledge of economists, lawyers, physicians, [and] educators.” This coordination would be best realized by centralizing supervisory power over charitable institutions in state level boards and by promoting the principles of civil service reform in charitable and correctional institutions to ensure that they were in the hands of trained administrators.

Edward Devine surveyed the field of “voluntary philanthropy” in 1913 and identified three principal strands worth considering: “those programs which have to do with making governmental action more effective, or extending its sphere,” “foundations for the study of and improvement of social conditions,” and “these philanthropic agencies which our generation has inherited, such as hospitals, relief societies, orphan asylums, and the like.”

Devine identified the latter class of organizations as those that would preserve “the ideal of an independent citizen of an industrial democracy, earning his own living, providing for his own emergencies, and relying for support even in old age on the accumulated savings of his productive period.” By contrast, the bureaus of research and various reform agencies falling into the first class of organizations were those that sought to improve conditions not primarily for individuals but for society as a whole. Participants in these organizations “looked toward better government as a prime means of securing social welfare reform.” This did not imply paternalism but reflected “the deliberate intention to use the governmental machinery for the doing of those things for which experience shows it to be more efficient and more economical than any other means yet devised.”

Interestingly, Devine was agnostic about the future of the emerging foundations and believed that for the most part they were conservative institutions that were more comfortably aligned with traditional charity organizations than with emerging reform agencies. Devine suggested that the foundations for the most part represented the vested interests of old wealth more than the well-being of future generations and claimed that “their natural attitude toward state action for the social welfare is one of distrust, or at least of hesitation about greatly enlarging its functions.” Nevertheless, Devine acknowledged the strong influence of their founders on the foundations’ approaches to solving social problems, and believed that future foundations would have to stake their ground either with “the Bureau of Municipal Research type of philanthropy” or with “the type of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.”

Devine’s characterization of Carnegie as ultimately more sympathetic with the ends of charity organization than more bureaucratic social reform seems apt. While Carnegie shared the “scientific” desire to address root causes of social problems and saw traditional charity through alms as injurious to individuals, examination of his giving practices reveals a comparatively traditional focus with the emphasis on administration of gifts at the local community level rather than through national bureaus.

What was unique and unfamiliar about the newly endowed foundations was the potential magnitude of their philanthropy and the fear that the application of such great wealth would allow for personal influence and control “beyond the legitimate boundaries implied in their benefactions.” Devine, for example, was critical of Carnegie’s pension fund for teachers for trying “to eradicate sectarian control of colleges.”

Another challenge faced by foundation philanthropists was how to effectively manage the disbursement of large amounts of money. Undoubtedly the industrialists who founded the endowments hoped to enjoy some form of psychic satisfaction from their beneficence, whether by realizing a desire for fame, fulfilling a sense of indebtedness to the public, or perhaps implementing a hopeful program of social reform. Nevertheless, the administration of grant making on this scale entailed special challenges. George Iles commented on the problems of “large giving” in The Century in 1897: “It is hard for rich and forceful men to learn that they must rein their instinct for command when they enter an unfamiliar field. The tactful adjustment of relations between men who have and do not know, and men who know and do not have, is familiar enough in the sphere of business. The same adjustment arrives, sometimes after sharp conflicts, in the administration of large gifts.”

Clearly, the stage was set in the Progressive era for “men who know” to exert their influence not only in the field of civil service but in the administration of philanthropic and charitable institutions as well. The professionalism and presumption of technical expertise of the emerging administrative class, however, could often exist in tension with the express intent of donors, the insights of grassroots, local knowledge, and the common sense of American cultural and legal traditions.

[...]

VI. The Progressive Legacy in Philanthropy
In the end we are left with the challenge of evaluating the Progressive legacy for modern philanthropy. Progressive-era foundations emerged from the confluence of several streams. Industrial organization enabled the creation and accumulation of vast wealth by entrepreneurial individuals. Industrial urbanization and immigration generated widespread social dislocation and the transformation of labor. Legal developments in corporate organization made possible the creation of endowed foundations with corporate status, despite a continuing ambivalence toward the role of endowments in a free society. The rise of formal social science disciplines fostered a new ethic of public service and a newly placed hope in the social scientists as pilots of the national course.

Many ideas and attitudes from the era seem to persist in the self-understanding of foundation philanthropy today. Here we simply highlight some of these:

• Public-private partnerships are not a bad idea
• Hope and idealism — progress is possible
• Faith in the power of organization
• Foundation focus on institutional change
• An almost unmitigated faith in the power of reason and an equally strong faith in “science” and technical expertise, with the result that today’s philanthropy is often seen as a matter of expertise, organization, and effectiveness rather than of a richer, deeper social conversation
• A distinctive interpretation of American history, a la Croly, embracing Jeffersonian democracy and Hamiltonian centralization. A suspicion of “interests.”
• Belief that a middle way could be found between state socialism and a laissez faire republic
• An absence of constructive humility
• A European perspective on America marked by the importation of the European “social problem” and the pursuit of European, especially Prussian, solutions
• Pragmatism unrestrained by healthy skepticism
• Weak attention to the unintended consequences of institutional change
• A belief that centralized, large scale solutions were feasible and necessary and the attack of problems (such as the conquest of communicable diseases) that lent themselves to this model
• A largely instrumental approach to local, grassroots organizations leading to the pursuit of economies of scale often without attention to the key elements of real success

[...]

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If I were to take the best amalgamation of words, I would go with "Social Media Community Architect and Manager"---which is somewhat awkward. I think you want the words:

1. social (which is the buzzword of online social networking);
2. community (which is both online and offline and has a certain fuzziness to it); and
3. something that describes the process of creation... and management.

I would shy clear of the word technology... "media" definitely has more hotness right now. Maybe "Social Media and Community Architect".

What about "Social Media and Community Entrepreneur" (everyone loves an Entrepreneur and I would say you qualify more than anyone I know... though it is somewhat heartless)

I went through my contacts on LinkedIn and picked out some words/phrases they use to describe themselves:

• Community Technologist
• Online Community Manager
• strategic planning for your online social network initiatives
• Building and Executing Social Media Business Strategy
• Rich Media Developer
• Interactive Marketing Executive
• Technology Coordinator
• Community Architect
• community & communications coordinator
• New Media
• hybrid social media
• collaboration technology
• listening technology
• Emerging
• Link Development
• Interactive

I think he went with something sensible like "Community Alchemist".

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If institutions of higher learning want to maintain their tax-favored status, they should abolish legacy preferences. If they don’t—if they go on practicing white people’s affirmative action—they deserve to be knocked off the comfortable perch on which they now sit.

... I left this comment

I’m sympathetic to the overall sentiment, but I’m always worried when an organization’s activities are judged against an arbitrary measure of “nonprofitness”. The strength of the sector—hard fought over 150 years of legislation and case law—is the breadth of allowable activity. The danger of reform is codifying subjective and contemporary distaste as unlawful behavior, thus limiting the ability of truly transformative organizations to form or function. How might Howard University, for example, find egalitarian social benefit in favoring legacy students?

When an organization’s status as a “nonprofit” is the basis for allegations of hypocrisy I find that the outcome usually furthers the goals of those who wish to do away with the nonprofit sector by doing away with taxes entirely (and by extension their social and redistributive benefits). Which is not to dismiss all nonprofit reform (I am quite in support of transparency and reporting), but the real issue here is not “How can we get more poor kids into Harvard?” but “Harvard should not be your only or best option.”

And I agree with the response I received back from the Nonprofiteer---which goes to the strength of dialogue as tool for navigating between two extremes:

Fair point–and I may have overstated my own (so new?). I certainly am not part of the group you describe which opposes taxes–far from it. But the nonprofit community has long regarded itself as above criticism, and I think the portions of it which foster inequality should be called to account. Perhaps depriving those institutions of their nonprofit status is using a sledgehammer where a scalpel would be preferable–I’m certainly open to that possibility. But that there is an ailment to be addressed strikes me as indisputable.

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Sec. 8079. In addition to the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available elsewhere in this Act, $65,200,000 is hereby appropriated to the Department of Defense: Provided, That upon the determination of the Secretary of Defense that it shall serve the national interest, he shall make grants in the amounts specified as follows: $20,000,000 to the United Service Organizations; $24,000,000 to the Red Cross; $1,200,000 to the Special Olympics; and $20,000,000 to the Youth Mentoring Grants Program: Provided further, That funds available in this section for the Youth Mentoring Grants Program may be available for transfer to the Department of Justice Youth Mentoring Grants Program.

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Predominantly female occupations pay less than “male” jobs, even after adjusting for skill demands. The devaluation perspective sees sex composition to affect wages; it says that gender bias affects employers’ decisions about the relative pay of “male” and “female” jobs. The queuing or relative-attractiveness view sees occupations’ sex composition to be affected by their reward level, with less attractive jobs going to women because employers prefer men and can get them in jobs that pay well. Past longitudinal research on how changes in occupations pay and sex composition are related has employed the cross-lagged panel (lagged-Y- regressor) model, generally finding support for the devaluation but not the queuing/relative attractiveness view. We argue that a stronger statistical approach to assessing causal dynamics is a fixed-effects model with lagged independent variables. Using CPS data from 1983 to 2001, we test these two perspectives. We find support for neither idea. That is, generally, the feminization of occupations does not lower their wages, and a fall in occupations’ relative wages does not lead to feminization. We conclude that in earlier historical processes, as occupations and organizations originate, there was a causal relationship between pay and sex composition, but that the continuing relationship is due to institutional inertia freezing in that early relationship, rather than to ongoing causal dynamics.

Emphasis mine.

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This past week, it was revealed that Apple would no longer allow charities to take donations through iPhone apps. Their rationale is that they can’t verify the donations are actually going to the charity they claim to be going to, and while that seems logical on the face of things, it presents a major roadblock for nonprofits seeking to build their donor bases. So if your app’s primary purpose is to solicit donations, you may want to rethink your strategy, and consider creating something that encourages volunteering, activism, or awareness-building instead.

In that last sentence, you can replace "app" with nearly any other activity and it still is good advice.

From my reading of things, Apple allows you to solicit giving ("Give the maker of this app 5 dollars"), it just doesn't allow you to solicit charity ("Give the maker of this app 5 tax-deductible dollars so that they can give it to a nonprofit who will give it to the poor minus administrative overhead."). I don't particularly blame Apple, since verifying 501(c)3s is a pain... or at least PayPal seems to think so since they make me fax our IRS determination letter about every 6 months.

Update (12/3/2010): Looks like Apple is being more of a jerk than I originally thought.

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