Continuing on my TED kick, in case you missed it, here’s an inspiring talk given by Katherine Fulton in 2007 on how philanthropies need to change, entitled You are the future of philanthropy.

It’s easy to criticize charities and foundations as being dinosaurs from another era, limited in funding, reach and risk. I was very surprised to learn that this was not the case at the turn of the century when philanthropies were emerging to solve the pressing social issues of that time.

Katherine talks about five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy and pave the path for philanthropies to adapt to today’s environment and social challenges:

• Mass collaboration: think Wikipedia
• Online philanthropy marketplaces: think DonorsChoose.org
• Aggregated giving: think Warren Buffet and how he didn’t start his own foundation.
• Innovation competitions: think X Prize
• Social investing: think xigi.net

… what’s really interesting here is that we’re not thinking our way into a new way of acting. We’re acting our way into a new way of thinking. Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don’t yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected. And, let us also hope, long.

She also has a report on the future of philanthropy called Looking out for the future.

Clay Shirky, TED@State, June 2009

I’ve recently been reading Clay Shirky‘s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody and found he gave a talk at TED@State last month, hosted at the State Department in Washington DC .

He talks about how rules have change in the games of communication. Where before the internet, organizations would send the same message to everyone they are trying to reach. But all that has changed. Not only are they talking about but they are talking to each other about you:

We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global. social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that’s a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.

But that’s not the really crazy change that we’re living in the middle of. The really crazy change is here. It’s the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other. The fact that former consumers are now producers.

There is an additional Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (June 16, 2009):

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.

Here’s Clay talking at TED2005 on Institutions vs. Collaboration, which interestingly is before the rise of Twitter as the communication tool of choice.

Health and gaming industries have recently seen a closer relationship. Dance Dance Revolution got people sweating for points and it was only time before people began to realize the potential of the Wii as exercising device, and for Nintendo to capitalize on it with the Fit.

Reuters has an article Health games become serious business drawing on the recently growth of serious games:

“Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term,” said Ben Sawyer, co-founder of The Games for Health Project.

“If you add up the 18 month sales of “Wii Fit” and the sales of “EA Sports Active,” Konami’s “Dance Dance Revolution” and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion.”

IDEO Human-Centered Design Toolkit

IDEO partnered with International Development Enterprises (IDE), Heifer International, International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a toolkit for applying Human-Centered Design to inspire new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need.

Fast Company has the story behind the creation of the toolkit. The toolkit is free and downloadable here.

Amnesty International Website

Smashing Magazine recently posted an article entitled Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices

The tips they provided are:

1. Make Your Site Donor-Friendly
2. Make Your Site Media-Friendly
3. Make Your Site Volunteer-Friendly
4. Make Sure Your Organization’s Purpose is Immediately Apparent
5. Make Sure Your Content Takes Center Stage
6. Make Sure Your Website is Consistent with Your Other Promotional Materials
7. Know Your Site’s Purpose Up Front
8. Include a News Section or Blog

What’s nice is that they include 20 examples of great non-profit website designs. There include:

• Greenpeace USA
• Kiva
• New York City Coalition Against Hunger
• ASPCA
• One
• The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research
• Save the Children
• Oxfam America
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• Amnesty International
• The Nature Conservancy
• Witness
• Product (Red)
• Susan G. Komen for the Cure
• Take The Walk
• Change.org
• charity: water
• The Breadline Africa Worldwide Blogger Bake Off
• Blog Action Day
• Ducks Unlimited