Wired Philanthopy in the Foundation World

I have another guest post up on Tactical Philanthropy today, this time talking about a number of different foundations that are using technology in innovative and effective ways.  This post is essentially a recap of my favorite session from the conference I attended a few weeks ago.  It’s been a hectic few weeks, which is why my post is so delayed.

While I recognize that few of Tropophilia’s readers are involved in formal philanthropy or the foundation world, I think many of these tools and lessons learned should be interesting to a variety of folks in many different types of organizations or fields.

Here are a few snippets of my post, you can read the rest here.

Amy Luckey from Blueprint Research and Design pointed out a number of examples of foundations using technology well, including [...]

A personal favorite, the Packard Foundation’s wiki on nitrogen pollution and agriculture strategy

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Marc Osten, from Summit Collaborative, offered advice for those in the room who are facing an uphill battle bringing technology into their organizational culture OR are simply unaware of how to get started using these tools. First, he warned that getting caught up in specific tools (“We need a blog!”) without first carefully considering your organization’s goals—and what tools might help accomplish those goals—is a recipe for failure. This is a point that I think deserves highlighting, because it’s the reason (for example) that so many organizational blogs are launched with enthusiasm and then updated once a month or less. All the while, those (limited) resources could be more useful if deployed on other tools that better address the needs of the organization.