Making Foundations More Transparent

Whether you think they're relics from another era, or vital actors for a more just 21st century, most people can agree that foundations have been relatively slow-moving when it comes to engagement with social media. Larry Blumenthal of the Robert Woods Johnson foundation, for example, wrote last year about how it's like pulling teeth to get foundation officers to get on the interwebs.

But the new era of social media is about more than chatter, it's about transparency. For that reason, it's great to see the Foundation Center's new initiative, Glasspockets, push foundations down the path of openness.

Glasspockets is basically an interface that helps break down the information that foundations make about themselves into more easily navigable and comparable chunks. A Glasspocket profile of a foundation includes links (or reveals the conspicuous absence of links) to the different social networks the foundation is on, as well as to whistle-blower procedures and searchable databases of past grants. Most of the information comes directly from foundation websites, but this tool makes it much easier to get to exactly what you want and need.

One of the reasons I think this is important is that even when the nonprofit sector collects data (foundation grantees are a good area), it's usually extremely hard to find, navigate and manipulate. This project takes a first step toward making that information more accessible.

Governments face the same problem with information accessibility, though likewise, there are signs of change afoot. The other day, I was talking with a friend who's taking a job at the World Bank to help them figure out how to unlock and re-format the immensity of their data about international development to make it more generally useful. There are also projects going on in the social sector like the Social Entrepreneurship API, which are meant to explicitly provide common formats for some of the data about nonprofits and social ventures.

For me, the really exciting stuff occurs when people can use information to solve real-life problems. Far too many of the nonprofit technology projects I see are cool initiatives that are trying to solve a problem that people just don't have (i.e. creating another platform for funding projects), or aren't thinking in terms of problems at all. This is an area in which deep review of the consumer web world, with a particular eye to what makes data-driven applications successful or not, could be good for the field.

Still, though, we're in an early place with mass availability of nonprofit data, and I do think there's a natural process of experimentation that has to occur. One of the obvious implications of developments like open foundation data is a more robust exchange of funder data, which could help social entrepreneurs and nonprofits get directly to the mission-aligned capital that's right for them.

All in all, I continue to be impressed with the Foundation Center's experimentation, and am excited to see if and how people use this new resource.

Photo Credit: optimal tweezers