Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the foundations that support them, today the terrain of good also attracts social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks.
As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be against it?
As people cross borders, social classes, and professional boundaries with the swipe of a touch screen, we seem poised to unleash a whole new era of good—with renewed social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity.
The Brave New World of Good may finally be helping us escape failed and tired efforts to produce social change. Still, there are assumptions worth questioning and questions worth answering to ensure that the good we seek is the good that can be achieved.
Here’s a quick look at what to embrace and what to question as the following ideas and phases gain currency:
Markets. The potential of markets to expand efforts to do good is undeniable. The most successful nonprofit and foundation work is often copied in multiple locations, but markets routinely attain regional, national, or even global scale. Still, markets can’t do everything. That’s why even philanthropic investment firms like Omidyar Network, which was born out of eBay-inspired market zeal, also makes grants.
Perfect markets exist only in economic theory. In the real world, avarice, corruption, politics, and power conspire to exclude minorities of all descriptions from their share of market rewards. Social policy and philanthropy, for all their faults, persist precisely because market booms benefit too few and market busts hurt too many.
Open Data. An offspring of previous movements such as “open source,” “open content,” and “open access,” “open data” has come to mean data that are computer-readable, free to access, and free to use, reuse, and redistribute, subject to attribution.
When it comes to government, a rapidly accelerating movement around the world is furthering transparency by making vast stores of data open. Ditto on the data of international aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The push has now expanded to the tax-return data of foundations and other nonprofits (IRS Forms 990 and 990-PF).
Collection of data by governments has a business model; our tax dollars support such efforts. However, open data are not born pure.
Cleaning those data, making them searchable, and building and maintaining reliable user interfaces is complex, time-consuming, and often expensive. It requires a consistent stream of income of the kind that can come only from fees, subscriptions, or, increasingly less so, government.
Foundation grants can help nonprofits and other organizations experiment with open data and perhaps build an app or two, but they are no substitute for a business model that can work on a bigger scale.
Data that show long-term changes and are easy for computers to manipulate are vital to social, environmental, and economic progress. In a global economy in which government is retreating from supporting public goods, figuring how to pay for those data is one of our greatest challenges.
Innovation. Open-data purists frequently equate open data with innovation: opening up data to as many brains as possible simply increases the likelihood that something creative, unexpected, and truly innovative will be done with it.
We often hear about examples of transit apps, election-fraud maps, early-warning systems, and the like powered by open-data-fueled innovation. But it’s still too early to know if much will come of it in the long term, partly because we are often attracted to new, exciting things but then quickly move on to the next big thing. Meanwhile, most innovation with the power to make a difference is the stuff we never see coming because it is contained in patents purchased and protected in the intellectual-property vaults of companies like Apple, IBM, and Google. We need to build ways to identify, track, evaluate, and communicate sustainable innovation to assess the true potential of open data.
Hackathons. Hackathons are the tool of choice for transforming open data into innovation. Talented programmers are turned loose, usually on a volunteer basis, to create something cool, useful, and good out of data streams. This challenges traditional models in which expertise often lives in silos in individual businesses or organizations along with all the tunnel vision and bottom-line pressures that can stifle creativity. Hackathons are amazing, and the sheer brilliance, energy, and will of brainy programmers to do good is inspiring. But we should not kid ourselves. Relying on intense coding sprints by otherwise overworked programmers may be the “new necessary” in terms of tackling the world’s most pressing problems, but it is not sufficient. This highly qualified, high-value form of volunteering is fast becoming a key ingredient in producing lasting change, but seldom is it the entire recipe.
Disruption. Disruption has practically become synonymous with innovation. For those aspiring to emulate the success of a Sean Parker (whose Napster turned the music industry upside down) or a Mark Zuckerberg, venerable businesses and nonprofits are often seen as “ripe for disruption.”
What the economist Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction” has always been part of economic progress, as innovation in producing goods and services comes to replace old business models with new. But today, it is almost as if disruption is an end in itself rather than a means. Wait a minute: If we are busy disrupting businesses and organizations right and left, who’s going to pay the salaries and benefits of all the programmers required to turn open data into innovation through hackathons?
Transparency. My favorite example of good is the social enterprise that calls itself just that, “Good,” and bills itself as “a community of people who give a damn.”
I follow Good’s great infographics, enjoy its positive-vibe news stories on my mobile news reader, and really don’t have anything against the company except that I don’t know much about it. It’s privately held and says nothing detailed about itself on its Web site. Elsewhere on the Web, I was able to learn that Good has a dog-friendly work environment. That, in a nutshell, is my greatest concern about the Brave New World of Good—its lack of transparency.
For many who inhabit this brave new world, nonprofits and foundations are associated with the old way of doing things. Nevertheless, we have a very good idea of what such organizations actually do to create a better world because they are required to tell us in public-disclosure documents.
Those documents, the IRS Forms 990, though far from perfect, have served as the raw material on which entire information systems have been built by organizations like GuideStar, the Foundation Center, and the National Center for Charitable Statistics to classify, track, measure, and visualize how America’s more than 90,000 grant-making foundations and 1.3 million nonprofits work on everything from adoption to Zambia.
We know who’s on their boards and staffs, where the money comes from, to which organizations it goes, and what or whom it is destined to benefit. Foundations and nonprofits may not be hip, but they are more transparent.
There is no comparable information source for impact investing, social entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility, and the like. We have some data—rankings and ratings, standards, and partial information on impact investing—only some of which is open and, taken together, is nowhere near comprehensive. So, despite its promise, we are left to understand this Brave New World of Good through spotty data, case studies, the occasional evaluation, and lots of anecdotes (now called “storytelling”).
There is hope on the horizon in the form of Markets for Good, a nascent effort to create a kind of data and information “commons” for the nonprofit world. Backed by some 20 organizations—and paid for by guess who: foundations!—a platform now exists to bring together data streams that enable us to begin to piece together the world of good.
Several years ago, a Google employee told me: “I want to map all the good in the world.” At the time, I remember thinking how monstrously naïve that seemed (though if anyone could pull it off, it would probably be Google).
But today, I see that comment in a different light and find myself yearning for the same thing. If so much of the world is doing good, I want to know about it. I want to count it, measure it, and map it. Some will say—as they do of philanthropy—“I don’t care how much money is being spent on X; I want to know what’s effective.” So do I, but we all know that standardizing effectiveness is elusive at best. In the meantime, let’s follow the money. We know how much money the world is spending on pet food, weapons, and war; let’s try to prove we’re spending more on good.
