Can games move people in ways that other forms of media like print, interactive websites and video can’t?  Some really smart people in foundations, government and media say it is absolutely true. However, if you are a skeptical communications professional, you probably have a lot of questions about that assertion.

A few weeks back, I came across a valuable piece on “social games” written by Marcia Stepanek in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The bulk of the piece was an interview with Games for Change chairman Alan Gershenfeld in which he made some very bold claims about the state of the social games movement, including:

“Today, almost every major foundation and major government agency is either funding games or looking at funding games.”

And…

“There are, certainly, a lot of examples of people who have created games that have created behavior change in the real world.”

Now, I believe that I am fairly well tuned-in to what philanthropic and nonprofit leaders are doing and what new forms of communication are gaining traction. I’ve heard a few examples of interesting social games that are indeed intriguing and I am very impressed that the MacArthur Foundation is investing $50 million in its Digital Media and Learning initiatives that have a strong emphasis on games. Still, I don’t think that that the vast majority of social-change leading organizations out there have given games a great deal of consideration.

That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be thinking about the potential of social games.  But we do need to provide more information about who is experimenting with social games, what are some concrete examples of success that point to the real potential of the medium and what are the factors that foundations and nonprofits considering gaming ought to think through before leaping forward.

Thankfully, two exceptionally thoughtful people helped me clarify my own thinking about social games.

First I talked to Jessica Goldfin, a Journalism Program Associate at the Knight Foundation who is immersed in the foundation’s growing commitment to social games.  She told me that Knight’s interest in the medium grew organically out of its Media Innovation Initiative after three of the 2007 Knight News Challenge winners were cutting-edge games that engaged citizens. That was three years ago.  There was no need to persuade Knight’s president Alberto Ibargüen of the medium’s potential, he was actually the major proponent of exploring what social games could accomplish.

While Goldfin herself is passionate about games and their ability to draw people into social problems and get them thinking and acting in new ways, she says that the foundation took an especially deliberate and studied approach to funding in this area.  As Knight sought to develop a strategy for funding games, Goldfin and her colleagues first gathered research and conducted interviews from a variety of sources including experienced game developers, leading academics in the field, the Entertainment Software Association, other funders and Games for Change. From their analysis they constructed a matrix of factors they felt were necessary to consider before funding a game, such as game genre, target audience, platform, time spent in the game, development costs, production length, necessary maintenance, marketing and distribution, and shelf life. “Game development is complicated,” says Goldfin.  “One of the most interesting things we learned is that sometimes the most compelling or successful socially-minded games don’t appear to be ostensibly related to the driving issue, but instead use design to engage people in new experiences. The best of these can create connections that lead to real world action.”

When asked about other foundations and nonprofits that are leaders in the field exploring the power of social games, Goldfin talked about MacArthur’s efforts, the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson’s Games for Health, ADM’s STEM education game, the UN World Food Programme, USAID and the Obama Administration.

“Games are becoming a dominant form of media,” she said, and then talked about Knight’s work in Macon, GA, and Biloxi, MS, where the Foundation is working with the game design firm Area/Code to create locative games to engage citizens and promote community problem solving.  In Macon, the game in development will use an alternative form of local currency to connect residents to each other and to their community. In Biloxi, the game will focus on increasing awareness and changing habits toward disaster preparation.”

According to Goldfin, there are lots of innovative social games that are getting traction.  She named the multiple games being used effectively in educational curriculum by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics initiative; an initiative of the World Wide Web Foundation that teaches kids how to create their own games; the World Bank Institute’s Evoke and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Budget Ball game, among several that foundation has created.

She also talked about several of the leading game development companies doing innovative work on social games including Area/Code, Filament Games and Persuasive Games.

Next I talked to Games for Change’s new Co-President Asi Burak. He says that games have the power to bring people into a social condition that other forms of media cannot, that they “allow people to make real, meaningful choices and to get feedback on those choices.”  He described media like print and video as “linear/passive media” and said that those forms mostly project from a single, scripted perspective, whereas games allow people to explore multiple perspectives in an immersive way.  “It is quite powerful to put a person in another’s shoes. And, you can let people experience failure in a safe environment that allows for solution creation they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”

He noted Alan Gershenfeld’s previous comments on how several foundations that are funding games are becoming “accidental publishers,” and may not be aware just how complicated game development can be. It’s not like producing a video, which is fairly straightforward and the product can be played on many platforms.  Games production is exceedingly complex and the technologies for every platform are different – so you can’t produce a single game product that runs on the web, on a game console and on the various mobile platforms for iPhone, Android, etc.  Therefore, foundations and nonprofits interested in doing games need to take the time to really think through who they are trying to reach, what platforms the audience uses (and in what context) and what concrete social change they want to move toward.

In the coming months, Games for Change is going to be putting on their website a lot more information and advice for foundations and nonprofits looking to get into games, including a list of developers, case studies and key issues to consider.  They are also going to offer consulting services to those who would like more hands-on guidance.

He gave a very helpful list of “Eight Steps” in the game development process that any serious organization should discuss and detail before even beginning to reach out to potential game developers:

1. Audience. You should define your audience in very fine detail.  What is the age of the audience? What is their geographic location? What language do they speak? What is their socio-economic status? What is their gaming ability?
2. Context. Where would the audience be playing the game, in front of a computer, on the subway, on a mobile phone in Tehran? Would the player be assisted by a moderator or a teacher?
3. Goals. This is all about the impact you want to make.  What do you want users to take away from the game? Do you want your audience to take action in the real world? Donate? Learn specific information or skills? Have a change in perception?
4. Platform. This is strongly tied to audience, context and goals.  A game that runs on iPhone will appeal to a certain audience.  If you’re trying to reach young, poor African men, then an SMS-based game is more realistic.
5. Financial model and sustainability. You can’t just budget for the cost of creating a game. You need to budget for ongoing maintenance and upgrading of the game itself as well as costs for dissemination and publicizing the game beyond its launch.
6. Game Design. Not until this point can you fully consider the actual construction of the game and what “gameplay” will be taking place on the screen.  All the other decisions in the steps before should feed into the action on the screen that might be appealing to users and drive the impact goals you defined.
7. Execution. Given all the decisions that have been considered in the previous steps, who might be the best development team to partner with?  Plus, who are the other partners that would be key to distribution efforts and other aspects of sustainability?
8. Assessment. Developing concrete metrics of desired impact is important and obviously should be strongly linked to the goals of step 3.  Discussing the metrics is important, but so is planning how information will be collected and the costs associated with evaluation.

I asked Burak about some of the best examples of leaders in the field.  He also named MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the World Bank Institute, and iCivics, but added USAID, the European Union and a host of U.S. government agencies.

At this point, I felt like I had heard a lot of really important information about what to consider and what some of the leading organizations are doing. But I still had questions about demonstrable impact.  I had asked both Goldfin and Burak to name an example of a game that had really created some significant social improvement.  Burak talked about how the “Darfur is Dying” game had generated “50,000 actions” (in the form of letters to legislators) and about an organization in India that had partnered with mobile carriers to embed an HIV awareness game on 64 million devices that had actually generated 10 million sessions.

Both Goldfin and Burak are strong believers in the importance of dedicating funds to evaluate the impact of games and are confident that research and experience will eventually substantiate the power of social games.

Goldfin and Burak also both said that the future of social games is surely in mobile platforms – games that are played on phones and other small devices.  More and more nonprofits and foundations are indeed creating iPhone and Android “apps” that provide consumers quick access to programmatic information, so perhaps social games are the next wave.

In the end, I came away from these conversations even more intrigued by the possibilities that social games present.  The complexity of the process for creating and disseminating them is daunting, but I think many nonprofits and foundations are up to the challenge.  I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for examples of success in this medium and maybe even playing a few social games myself to get a feel for what works.

This is the first in what is to be a series of posts for Communications Network, and appeared originally on its site.  It is also appearing on the Foundation Center site.

I just read an interesting case study about how to engender more substantial media coverage of foundation activities and it helped me think more deeply about both the challenges and potential for helping reporters see that there is a story that goes beyond ”x foundation gave x dollars to do x.”

The case study was written by Theodora Lurie for the Philanthropy Awareness Initiative, as part of its ongoing work with foundations and philanthropy associations to improve communications and outreach to influential Americans.  In the first of what PAI calls its “Moving Beyond the Money” series, Lurie presents an example of a successful foundation effort to garner news coverage that “conveys a broader vision of how foundations make a difference – and identif[ies] the strategies that brought such coverage about.”

It is a short, engaging read that highlights the communications efforts of the Ford Foundation around the announcement of its $50 million program related investment (PRI) in the National Community Stabilization Trust. The large low-interest loan to the Trust will be used to acquire and renovate houses, which will then be sold to moderate and low-income buyers.

The large dollar amount of the Ford investment was probably enough to get the attention of many journalists.  But Ford took advantage of the opportunity to use the attention-grabbing announcement – in May 2009 when the U.S. real estate market was still spiraling downward and the problem of empty houses adding to blight in neighborhoods had many Americans worried – to go beyond the dollars and speak more broadly about Ford’s long-term work in this program area, the potential societal impact of the investment and the nimble, experimental role foundations can play in solving complex problems.

Halfway through reading the case study it occurred to me that only two stories in outlets that have a particularly sophisticated audience (The Wall Street Journaland National Public Radio) might seem like not a particularly stellar achievement if the idea is to communicate the role of foundations to a broader swath of influential Americans. But the amount of coverage (which may be more extensive than the two pieces discussed in the case study) and the composition of the two outlets’ target audience aren’t really the point of the case study.  The point is about how foundations should take more responsibility for – and can find success in – getting more substance into media reports on philanthropy. The case study provides details on how Ford Foundation staff pursued its communications strategy for the PRI announcement and how its well-crafted messages resulted in stories that, though brief, effectively illustrated the foundation’s role as a creative, knowledgeable and influential shaper of societal change – not just a “grant maker.”

The case study makes clear that “there are opportunities to help shape coverage if you prepare well, crystallize your key message points, and train staff who will be speaking with reporters to stay on message. It also helps to get a credible outside endorsement of the value of a grant or project.”

This wise counsel reminded me of a July 2006 opinion piece by Grant Oliphant and Bruce Trachtenberg in The Chronicle of Philanthropy titled “Let’s Not Focus Simply on Size of Buffett’s Gift.” In that piece, the authors, president of the Pittsburgh Foundation and Network executive director, respectively, advised, “when foundations announce that they are supporting new efforts, their news releases should routinely be more explicit about the goals, expected achievements, what success will look like, and when they will be able to demonstrate whether that effort is working (or not). By doing that, reporters might be encouraged to focus more on the potential results of a grant, rather than the fact (or size) of the award itself to the exclusion of all else.”

I am quite interested to read the next in the “Moving Beyond the Money” series. This first one got me thinking about the actual process of harvesting more substantial coverage of foundation impact.  Of course, for foundations to really do this, they need to seed the field with clear statements on medium- and long-term objectives of the projects they support, and take some risks in saying specifically how success will be judged.

Before going into the substance of the discussion, it should be noted that this was the very first event held in Atlantic’s new conference center in Tribeca.  Atlantic has promised to make the space available for the use of its grantees and partners. So if you are planning an event in New York City and have a relationship with Atlantic, keep that space in mind.

The panel was comprised of E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post, Judy Feder, Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at Center for American Progress, and Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America NOW!

Moderator Marcia Smith started off the discussion by asking the panel to reflect on what had been learned in the process of watching health care reform efforts unfold.

Richard Kirsch began by saying that his organization had functioned as a “midwife” to the birth of reform legislation and helped make it happen by telling the stories of people and how they were being adversely effected by the system. And, they worked to get large numbers of legislators to sign onto their stated principles. He said his main take-away was that they “had made grassroots and net-roots the basis of their work – and that’s what works.” He added later that bringing together the largest possible coalition of progressive organizations to advocate for reform had been essential and that “you could never win health care from inside the beltway.”

Judy Feder said that she had several take-aways.  One was that a major challenge in the process of getting to reform success was convincing those who already have health care coverage that reform was indeed in their best interest, “and that has yet to be done, really.”  Another lesson is that legislators will respond to the message that “you have more to lose from allowing the status quo than in taking action.”  And also that “every progressive fight is going to require absolutely 100% effort because the margin of victory is for the foreseeable future going to be so very close.”

E.J. Dionne said that he came away thinking the lesson is simply to “keep comin’ at ‘em!” You have to have patience and hang in there in the fight, you need to have a “formula ready” to start with, but accept that there will be some defeats along the way, and keep on going. He added later that there is something to keep in mind about polling on health care and that is that “most people in polls say they are happy with their health care insurance because at the time they are being polled they aren’t experiencing any health crisis that requires them to deal with their insurance companies, aren’t being denied coverage or having to put out large outlays. Wait until they aren’t healthy, then the polling results would be different!”

As the conversation unfolded, Judy Feeder reflected on the significance of what was passed. “What we passed was a national commitment to make sure everyone is insured, we expanded Medicaid, and we set a floor of coverage for everyone with subsidies. AND, we have established a public system for long-term care – that’s HUGE!”

The discussion then moved toward “what next” and Feder said, “the opponents of reform are not going away, so we really need to deliver on implementation.

She said cost containment remains the most challenging thing that hasn’t really addressed.  “For one thing, Medicare needs to become a more effective player to force cost containment, and then the rest of the system will follow.” She also noted that for people who previously had health insurance coverage, premiums are going to keep going to go up, and since the Obama Administration now “owns” health care in America, they better do something to address that. Additionally, she said actually enrolling people in the plans will be a challenge, since things will be different from state to state. And yet, having the federal government engage in aggressive enrollment efforts while simultaneously avoiding the perception of “federalizing” health care is very important. She also warned that “we didn’t get enough money in the legislation for the subsidies, and that’s going to be a big problem.”

E.J. Dionne said that he is hearing a lot of Republican strategists advising their ranks to “stand down” from opposing health care reform now because they aren’t really able to identify particular pieces of the legislation that people want to repeal (except the mandates and the taxes, which are basically the keys to sustaining the popular aspects of the legislation).

Richard Kirsch said that, even after the passage of the legislation, his organization will continue its campaign to highlight the injustices and bad practices of the insurance industry because it is important in the continuing fight for improving the system.

One audience member asked what was being done about the $50 million campaign of the insurance industry to undermine reforms.  Judy Feder said it is essential to engage now on cost containment.   Another participant asked a related question about whether or not we were ever going to move away from the fee-for-service model of health care delivery that does so much to maximize payments rather than improve care.  Richard Kirsch said that Massachusetts is now the place to watch for debate on cost containment. He said, “Everyone agrees that the delivery system reforms need to happen, but the challenge is fighting the entrenched special interests.” There are many possible ways to go about cost containment, price controls, benefits limits, changing the payment/delivery system.  “We know the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors and others in the healthcare delivery system will fight against cost containment, but we need to figure out who has an interest in cost containment and bring them together to fight for it.  Obviously employers, business coalitions, taxpayers associations, municipalities, states all have an interest in cost containment.  We need to broaden our thinking about who else has an interest in cost containment and organize them.”

As the session drew to a close, E.J. Dionne provided a bit of philosophical advice to progressives for future efforts based on the lessons of health care reform: “In every fight, you need both patience and impatience.  But you need them in different measures at different points in the struggle.  I wish I had a secret formula for when and how much.”

The Atlantic Philanthropies has said that it will post video of the session to its site.  We’ll post a link here when one is available.

The link is now live at: http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/atlantic-events

The folks at the blog Nonprofit Tech 2.0, A Social Media Guide for Nonprofits have written a very helpful blog post on this topic that I would like to recommend.  Titled “HOW TO: Effectively Manage Hate and Anger on Social Media Sites,” the post provides important insights and concrete advice on how to manage social media applications to address gross negativity and hate speech.

Here is some thinking about offensive “contributors” from the post…

These folks are rare, but they sadly exist. They are not interested in discussing the issues. They only join your page to rant and incite. They want a fight. The more people argue with them, the more active they will get on your page. Not only will they bring you down, they will bring the entire community down. I can’t stress that enough. Giving such a person their freedom of hate speech will ruin it for the rest of your community. More people are reading your Status Updates on Facebook than you might think (I have discovered). The vast majority are silent.

When asked, your fans want you to block the haters and racists because at a certain point your fans become so disgusted that they disengage from the Page to avoid seeing the hate. Out of 8,600 fans, I have now had to block a little more than 30. They were blocked for either really foul, hateful language full of 4-letter words, for uploading obviously racist images, or for being repeat offenders

The post goes on to give exact instructions on how to deal with those sorts of people on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and your own blog.  It also suggests posting “community guidelines” to your online sites and provides a link to an example.

It is a very thoughtful post and essential, quick reading for anyone who is managing an organization’s online presence and monitoring online discussion.

And on this topic, I want to recommend that folks who follow PPC-NYC consider adding to their RSS feeds a blog called On Social Marketing and Social Change. I’ve been reading it for the last several months and learning a lot from it.  They’ve been doing a lot of posts on health issues in particular.  There are three posts in particular I’d like to highlight.

In the first post I’m highlighting, “The Dragons of Behavior Change,” the author lays out some of the key concepts of behavior change related to health and takes on those whose communications have only the modest goal of “awareness.”

Behavior change is the hard part, and why people seem to be so comfortable with ‘just’ building awareness of problems and possible solutions. Advertising and public relations agencies have said for years “Hold us accountable for awareness or brand image, not sales.” Their rationale is that it is the sales people who need to ‘change the behavior’ of the consumer to make the purchase – advertising and promotions can get people into showrooms, stores and other places where you stock the product, in sufficient quantities, at the right place in an appealing way, but that last step… that’s someone else’s responsibility. Unfortunately social marketers don’t get to pass off to others the responsibility for behavior change.

That post provides a strong argument for the need for planning communications around behavior change and not just “awareness.” It also makes the case for being clear about budgeting for communications around behavior change — especially since the forces against good health behaviors often have massive budgets for influencing behavior (advertisers for cigarettes, junk food, etc.)

The second post I’m highlighting is “MINDSPACE for Behavior Change.” This post distills a report that details the specific elements of behavior change that we should all be clear on.

Messenger: We are heavily influenced by who communicates with us.
Incentives: Our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts, such as strongly avoiding losses.
Norms: We are strongly influenced by what other people do.
Defaults: We tend to ‘go with the flow’ of pre-set options.
Salience: Our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant for us.
Priming: Our actions are often influenced by sub-conscious clues.
Affect: Our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions.
Commitments: We seek to be consistent with our public promises, and reciprocate acts.
Ego: We act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves.

That post differentiates between “rational” and “cognitive” approaches related to communications and behavior change.  Again, a very strong case is made for focusing resources on getting to the ultimate behavior change rather than necessarily trying to change people’s thinking.  You may think that it is impossible to change behavior without changing people’s thinking, but this post provides a lot of food for thought on that matter.

The third post, “National Objectives for Health Communication and Health Information Technology,” was written BEFORE the final health reform legislation was signed and details some of the actions around health communications that the Department of Health and Human Services was taking to change public behavior independent of the reform legislation. DHS’s newly adopted social marketing objectives are:

Increase social marketing in health promotion and disease prevention.

a: Increase the proportion of state health departments that report using social marketing in health promotion and disease prevention programs.

b: Increase the proportion of Schools of Public Health and accredited MPH programs that offer one or more courses in social marketing.

c: Increase the proportion of Schools of Public Health and accredited MPH programs that offer workforce development activities in social marketing for public health practitioners.

All three of these posts are worth reading in full to get your thinking going about the importance of behavior change in communications around health issues.  I want to make a strong case for the need to do a great deal of communications around what citizens need to know and do about health reform.  Just because the legislation has been passed and it has gotten a lot of press coverage doesn’t mean that people know what they’re supposed to do now.  When a person looses his job, no one tells him all of the benefits that he is eligible for and how to go about getting them. There are already lots of health benefits that families are eligible for that they don’t take advantage of because of the inadequacy of our nation’s outreach to vulnerable populations.  I am afraid that a similar situation will occur with the new benefits and requirements associated with health reform. We need to be investing in telling people what they need to know and do about the new healthcare system.  Yes, the legislation has passed and President Obama has signed it.  But it’s no time to sit back and celebrate.  It’s time to design a system for communicating to the American people — especially the most vulnerable — what they need to know and do to take full advantage of the new reforms.

Between 2004 and 2008, Los Angeles County nonprofits engaged in advocacy and organizing generated nearly $7 billion in benefits for local residents, a new report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy finds.

Based on a study of fifteen nonprofits in the county, the report,Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impacts of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement in Los Angeles County(76 pages, PDF), found that every dollar foundations and other donors provided to community organizations engaged in advocacy and organizing generated $91 in benefits for the communities they serve. Over the five-year study period, those benefits included $2.6 billion in higher wages, $2.2 billion in healthcare savings, and more than $2 billion from the increased use of public transit, construction of new schools, and expanded affordable housing. The report also looked at non-monetized benefits provided by the groups, including the protection of voting rights, improved working conditions, and expanded service delivery to marginalized populations.

Based on the findings, the report recommends that foundations increase their support for advocacy and organizing, help educate donors about the benefits of advocacy funding, support effective collaboration among community organizations, collaborate with other grantmakers to leverage resources, and invest in the infrastructure and organizational capacity of grassroots organizations over sustained periods of time.

“While high-profile commentators decry ‘community organizing,’ this report clearly demonstrates that such activity delivers enormous benefits to communities,” said NCRP executive director Aaron Dorfman. “On every issue of concern to residents of Los Angeles County, from clean air to immigration, from equality to education, foundation support for community-based activist organizations yields positive results. Foundation support turns indifference into democracy, and the benefits of a thriving democracy are indeed substantial.”

I’ve started reading through the report and I’m finding it exceptionally valuable.  I think I will be referencing this report a lot in the future.

The lessons are pretty basic (like giving your “fans” or constituencies a name that makes them feel special, developing shared symbols, and making your members feel like they are part of something bigger than just the organization itself).  But as I read the piece, I started thinking more about how I could apply the ideas to the organizations I work with.

And remember PPCers, when it comes to building loyalty and support among members and fans, it’s all about the LOVEGAME.

Both Miller’s post and the Foundation Center Glasspockets site are important to check out and incorporate into our thinking about public policy communications.  I have my own thoughts/critiques, which I share below.  But first, a bit more on the Miller post and the Glasspockets site.

The Glasspockets site (in its own words) hopes to…

Inspire private foundations to greater openness in their communications.

Increase understanding of best practices in foundation transparency and accountability in an online world.

Illustrate how institutional philanthropy is relevant to the critical issues of our time.

Highlight the many stories of philanthropy that show how private wealth is serving the public good.

Illuminate successes, failures, and ongoing experimentation so foundations can build on each other’s ideas to increase impact.

It’s most important contribution to truly advancing those objectives is the development of a metric for actually gauging transparency.  It includes 28 specific elements demonstrating foundation transparency.  And, the site has begun to post examples of individual foundations and how they stack up on those 28 factors.  They’ve started with some of the foundations with reputations for being very transparent.  This is a GREAT start in fostering greater openness among foundations, even if the examples focus on foundations that are pretty far along in the transparency curve.  I think that creating a real set of metrics, however debatable, is the key first step in moving the transparency movement forward.

Most of the 28 elements that are part of the Glasspockets metric are very basic things that you would think EVERY foundation would do, like making publicly available mission statements, lists of boards of directors, lists of key staff, basic financial information that is reported to the IRS anyway, and having a website.  But some of the elements are efforts that most foundations still avoid, like assessing the foundation’s performance, making those performance evaluations available for review, gaining grantee feedback, and many aspects of modern 2-way communications through social media.

Elizabeth Miller’s Communications Network post takes up some the more “advanced” transparency issues, especially social networking and web 2.0 communications.  There is much of value in her piece and I think that it is great that Overbrook Foundation aims to do more than just what is minimally required in the foundation community.

That said, I think both Miller’s post and the Glasspockets initiative sort of skirt around the crux of the transparency issue.  That is, very few foundations are courageous enough to be openly introspective, to wonder aloud if their grants and programs are actually having the impact they intend.  Almost every foundation puts forth a constant stream of “success stories” that mask the truth.  It’s all happy news.  Don’t get me wrong, stories of success are important — to say what is working is good.  But very few foundations even take the time to evaluate how effective their programs really are, let alone reveal publicly the learning that comes from those evaluations.  I think that the efforts outlined by Miller and the elements highlighted by Glasspockets are great.  But until foundations are willing to simply open themselves up publicly to examination and critique, they will never truly be understood or accepted as leaders in social change.

Think about the politicians and social activists you trust.  Are they the ones who always say everything is going great and that every idea they’ve ever put forth was the right one?  No.  Real leaders are those who can talk candidly and with honesty about what didn’t work and why.  That is the heart of transparency.  Putting a foundation’s Form 990 online so people can get at that information more easily is great.  But until foundations go beyond constantly putting out the endless stream of “happy news” about themselves, they will never be trusted or understood by the public.

Now, in his impassioned new book “You Are Not a Gadget,” Mr. Lanier expands this thesis further, looking at the implications that digital Maoism or “cybernetic totalism” have for our society at large. Although some of his suggestions for addressing these problems wander into technical thickets the lay reader will find difficult to follow, the bulk of the book is lucid, powerful and persuasive. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace.

The topic that I am most interested in reading into more is his examination of the wisdom of crowds. Having spent a lot of time in public engagement circles and trying to develop better forms of online engagement, his questioning of whether or not it is such a hot idea to take the lead from the crowd rather than thoughtful, creative or even deeply unpopular individuals is definitely worth thinking about more:

Decisions made in the formative years of computer networking, for instance, promoted online anonymity, and over the years, as millions upon millions of people began using the Web, Mr. Lanier says, anonymity has helped enable the dark side of human nature. Nasty, anonymous attacks on individuals and institutions have flourished, and what Mr. Lanier calls a “culture of sadism” has gone mainstream. In some countries anonymity and mob behavior have resulted in actual witch hunts. “In 2007,” Mr. Lanier reports, “a series of ‘Scarlet Letter’ postings in China incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers. In 2008, the focus shifted to Tibet sympathizers.”

Mr. Lanier sensibly notes that the “wisdom of crowds” is a tool that should be used selectively, not glorified for its own sake. Of Wikipedia he writes that “it’s great that we now enjoy a cooperative pop culture concordance” but argues that the site’s ethos ratifies the notion that the individual voice — even the voice of an expert — is eminently dispensable, and “the idea that the collective is closer to the truth.”

I am attracted to this book in part because it is written by a Silicon Valley insider who is deeply questioning some key assumptions about our modern era.  It seems to cover a lot of territory that communications professionals should be thinking about.  I’ll let you know what my own review is later.

According to Philanthropy News Digest:

The initiative, which is designed to deepen the foundation’s focus on fostering informed, engaged communities, will help community foundations enlarge the donor-advised funds that support the work of local nonprofits. Between 2000 and 2007, Knight provided a total of $69 million to create donor-advised funds at twenty-five community foundations… “Information is an essential community need and community foundations were established to meet core needs,” said Knight Foundation president and CEO Alberto Ibargüen. “They also only exist and thrive because of community engagement and contributions. That makes them ideal partners to help us understand and advance local community engagement, focused on ensuring that these communities have the information they need to manage their affairs in our democracy.” (read the full story here.)

More and more foundations are recognizing the need for more sophisticated two-way communications with their communities.  Social media are great, but they are not a substitute for the real hard work of systematically engaging communities — bringing people together in moderated settings to have meaningful, structured conversations on pressing issues that drive toward workable solutions.