Mashable Funding Decisions: Who Profits?

06:30 PM Aug 29, 2006

N-TEN Connect yesterday dropped a tantalizing suggestion -- complete with screenshot -- that it's working on an application to aggregate RSS feeds of grants data.

A great deal remains unsaid in the post: it's not clear where this application is on the spectrum from brainstorm to code, and it's not clear how plausible is the "hope" to turn funders onto the idea.

That's the real trick here -- the code is a cinch. But it'll need some critical mass of buy-in from funders to make it into a useful tool.

On its face, this is a great idea and if N-TEN intends to carry the standard for it, it would be an amazing benefit for its community and indeed all nonprofits. Play out the thought-game and imagine a free online web application where all funders pipe their grantmaking history through real-time metadata. That would free up enormous resources burned in needle-in-the-haystack grant researching and outlays to funder-searching ASPs employing armies of clerics to turn foundation annual reports, press releases and 990's into proprietary tables of indexable data.

Hallelujah.

As I mentioned last week when Michael Gilbert published his RSS grants survey, I'm curious -- and skeptical -- about adoption by funders, as opposed to the stated gee-whiz factor of program officers negotiating SurveyMonkey. (And don't forget the selection bias: who would take the survey except people already interested in grants by RSS?)

And the reason is that that's an awful damn lot of transparency. Sex, religion and money are supposed to be the great American taboos, but in an age when neighbors can chat over the hedge about getting blowjobs and embracing paganism, lucre remains an ever-so-delicate topic.

Though funding decisions are formally public in the sense that you can get a 990 and dig through the grant decisions, or subscribe to the Chronicle of Philanthropy and squint through the small print, the inconvenience of so doing gives an occult quality that the field may not be keen to release. Real-time grant streams hold the prospect of inviting the hoi polloi into the holy of holies, and in direct proportion to the extent such streams realize the hoped-for benefits.

Turning a snapshot of organizations' grant funding from journalistic research into instant online access potentially hands A-list political bloggers (on either side) ready-made attack material on advocacy organizations -- "they're funded by the Rooster Foundation, which also supports the Council on American-Islamic Relations! We call on them to denounce jihad!" Next thing you know, the ADL is weighing in on what you thought was a health care debate.

And "worse" yet: it practically begs to turn the spotlight on the funding entity.

Like the post-Durban hit piece on the Ford Foundation whose legacy was a preposterous disavowal-of-terrorism contract Ford demanded of every fundee, or the invented-from-whole-cloth Pewgate affair. Multiply that by a few hundred funders and a few thousand bloggers -- enemy bloggers looking for ammo, friendly bloggers with an idea that they're no less qualified than a fourth-generation descendant of Andrew Carnegie to decide who in a cause they care about gets backed -- and you get a sense of why a foundation might be a little reluctant to grease the skids.

Who evaluates the evaluators? Are foundations -- many slow to implement web 1.0 efficiencies like online submissions -- braced for mashups that map their child poverty giving by location vis-a-vis the actual change in child poverty statistics over time ... and then publicly call out inefficient donors? For dissatisfied service recipients to punch up the nonprofit's donors and send their beef straight to the folks with the pursestrings? For viral campaigns aimed at getting a board to fund, or de-fund, particular projects?

Are nonprofits ready for those things?

All these matters of authority and accountability are no less urgent now in the absence of such fungible streams of data, but they're very difficult to grapple with because those most knowledgeable of the field tend to be those most invested. It takes power to criticize entities that pay one's rent ... power, or else freedom in the Janis Joplin sense. It strikes me that the people with the most at risk in altering that equation are also the ones who get to decide whether to make their grantmaking into metadata.

Small wonder that some of the best bloggers from the inside were/are anonymous -- and that blogs like "Hail, Sons and Daughters of Carnegie" abruptly close up shop citing the proverb, "tell the truth and run." The invaluable Wealth Bondage appears to have followed suit this month. (Fortunately, the respective principals, and others, do continue to converse on other blogs such as White Courtesy Telephone.)

What's that web mantra? Power to the edges?

Heck, it's doing just fine here in its six-story glass atrium.

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