The junk drawer experiment

My house has a junk drawer, somewhere for keys and phone chargers and pens and post-its…and whatever other random things seem like they should be around but don’t have an obvious home.
For the last two years, it’s been almost impossible to close the drawer.
For a while I’d grudgingly clean it every few months, painstakingly sorting [...]

Kiva Customers Don’t Receive the Loans you Give

If I wanted to get your attention, that’s the headline I’d write.  Strictly speaking, it’s true.  And when you only have a minute to grab someone’s attention, isn’t it your job to grab their attention?
That in essence is what’s at the core of the conversation that’s swelled up over the last two weeks about Kiva.  [...]

Real giving conversations

I had a fascinating, far-ranging conversation today with a friend about philanthropy, touching on giving, donor accountability, what an individual gift means in the context of larger pools of money, how people really make philanthropic decisions…the works. Out of the blue, he says, “this is highly emotional, this business of giving.”
In another conversation today, [...]

Raising investment capital…that ought’a be easy

I was speaking today to the executive director of a small and growing NGO that’s in the grant-giving business – they’re interested in getting into the loan-giving business.
I asked him why they wanted to make the shift, and he explained: to create a sustainable revenue stream; to create more accountability on the part of the [...]

Let’s trade in these old stories

Roll the tape from my childhood TV screen: image of a 4 year old Ethiopian girl, ribs visible, distended belly, flies on her face, and a voice over, “For just 50 cents a day, you can feed this child.”
This story is  emotional, concrete, personal…and effective.  It accomplished its goal (getting people to donate).  But the [...]

A ’sustainable’ revenue stream?

Hats off to Nell Edgington at the Social Velocity blog for a post titled “The Critical Alignment of Mission, Money and Competence,” which kicked off an interesting conversation between Nell, me, Sean Stannard-Stockton who writes the Tactical Philanthropy blog, Nathanial Whittmore who writes the Social Entrepreneurship blog for Change.org, and Kjerstin Erickson, the CEO of [...]

What do philanthropists care about?

Continuing a conversation from last week, I again have to acknowledge Seth Godin for understanding as well as anyone how REAL buying decisions (philanthropic, b2b software sales, you name it) are made.  You should read the full post, “The rational marketer (and the irrational customer).“  Here’s the punchline (Seth is talking about when you, the [...]

Are we dropping the bag in the lost and found?

Sean Stannard-Stockton, author of the wonderful Tactical Philanthropy blog, made a characteristically insightful comment on my “Create your own reality” post.   It is in a similar vein as Nathaniel Whittemore’s comment here, so I feel like I haven’t been nearly clear enough in some recent posts.  So here goes.
Sean writes:

Sasha, it seems to me that [...]

Create your own reality

A few weeks ago my wife and I took a cab at night in New York city.  As we were leaving we noticed a black bag on the floor in the back seat.  It contained a Lonely Planet Guide to the USA, two pairs of ticket stubs (a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden and [...]

Should foundation program officers be more like venture capitalists? (Part 2 of 2)

(This post first appeared on the Tactical Philanthropy blog, as part of a conversation Sean Stannard-Stockton kicked off on creating a ‘capital market’ for philanthropy.  It is the continuation of my earlier post on whether foundation program officers should be more like venture capitalists.)
One of the big problems we need to solve as a sector [...]