What's Next for Philanthropy report released
The Monitor Institute has released What's Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World. The piece updates our 2005 report, Looking Out for the Future, and represents more than a decade of work by the Institute in exploring the evolving “future of philanthropy.” It highlights the changing context in which funders now operate, and identifies ten emerging next practices that can help funders of all sorts increase their impact over the coming decade. What's Next for Philanthropy argues that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaption—acting bigger and adapting better. The report was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and was written by Katherine Fulton, Gabriel Kasper, and Barbara Kibbe.

 

Working Wikily featured in SSIR
The Monitor Institute's work is featured as the cover story of the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) 2010 summer issue in an article entitled “Working Wikily,” by practitioners Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, and Heather McLeod Grant. The article explores the use of online and offline networks for social change, and examines how social media tools are driving more connected ways of working—what we call “working wikily”—characterized by principles of greater openness, transparency, distributed effort and collective action. Research for this article came out of our work over the past three years with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and other clients exploring these new networked ways of working. More information about working wikily can be found on our blog (www.workingwikily.net), and Diana and Heather will be hosting a webinar related to the SSIR article on Tues., June 8th, at 2pm ET; please click on the link for more info or to register.

 

New case study on KaBOOM! released
Breaking New Ground: Using the Internet to Scale, written by the Monitor Institute's Heather McLeod Grant and Katherine Fulton, focuses on KaBOOM!, an award-winning national nonprofit that helps build playgrounds in low-income communities and advocates for children’s right to play. Rather than taking a typical approach to scale, KaBOOM! put its model online, and made it available to anyone, free of charge. Through a suite of online tools—including social networking, online training, codified content, and a Google-map mashup—KaBOOM! has empowered more than 6,000 communities to self-organize and build local playgrounds (far more than the 1,700 it built directly in its first 15 years). In so doing, it has had far more impact and reach, for far less cost. The case study allows readers to learn more about KaBOOM!'s strategy and the lessons they've learned along the way.

 

Working Wikily 2.0 report released
The Monitor Institute has released Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset. The paper examines how networks and working with a network mindset—embracing principles like openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action—can help funders and activists increase their impact. Written by Diana Scearce, Gabriel Kasper, and Heather McLeod Grant, Working Wikily 2.0 draws on more than two years of experience managing network-related experiments with the Packard Foundation. The report builds on the original Working Wikily report, a descriptive account of how networks are changing social change, published in the Spring of 2008.

 

Lessons from the Social Capitalist Awards released
The Social Capitalist Awards was a five-year project (conducted in partnership with Fast Company) to assess and publicize the impact of leading non-profit organizations. Monitor's objective was to use the awards as an experiment in developing and applying an arms-length assessment of non-profit performance. The awards recognized 62 unique organizations as winners, with 10 organizations recognized as five-year repeat winners. After concluding the five-year experiment, Monitor worked to codify what it had learned and to share it with others in the field. Lessons from the Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards, authored by Institute consultant Tammy Hobbs Miracky, provides an overview of the awards and a summary of the key lessons identified through the assessment process. It also shares the highlights from a call hosted by the Hewlett Foundation in which the Monitor project team discussed the awards and their broader implications for the nonprofit information marketplace with a group of more than 25 practitioners.

 

Investing for Social & Environmental Impact report released
The Monitor Institute has released a new report on the growing group of investors around the world seeking to make investments that generate social and environmental value as well as financial return. Entitled Investing for Social & Environmental Impact: A Design for Catalyzing an Emerging Industry, the report examines how impact investing has developed and how it might evolve. It also provides a blueprint of initiatives that could help catalyze impact investing so the industry delivers on its promise for addressing global challenges. The strategy, for which Jessica Freireich and Katherine Fulton were the lead authors, was completed in January 2009 with lead funding and support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Funding was also provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and JPMorgan Chase Foundation.

 

Working Wikily blog launched
The Monitor Institute has launched the Working Wikily blog (www.workingwikily.net), which explores how networks and network principles such as openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action are changing the social sector. The blog tracks emerging tools, strategies, and practices—from collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and social network mapping to coalition-building and crowdsourcing—through quick updates on new developments in the field and short synthetic reflections on overarching trends. The site, developed out of a two-year exploration in partnership with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, also links users to key resources we've uncovered in our research.

 

Intentional Innovation report released
In partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Monitor Institute and Clohesy Consulting have released a new report, Intentional Innovation: How Getting More Systematic about Innovation Could Improve Philanthropy and Increase Social Impact. The report, written by the Institute’s Gabriel Kasper and Stephanie Clohesy of Clohesy Consulting, shares the findings of a year-long project with the Kellogg Foundation that aimed to understand the growing body of literature and practice on innovation processes and to help funders and activists more systematically and deliberately nurture innovation in the social sector.

 

Heather McLeod Grant joins Monitor Institute
Heather comes to the Institute fresh off of the speaking tour for her new book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Nonprofits (co-written with Leslie Crutchfield), which was named a Top Ten Book of 2007 by The Economist. Heather has more than fifteen years of experience in the social sector as an executive, founder, board member, and consultant. She is a former McKinsey & Company consultant and a co-founder of Who Cares, a national magazine for young social entrepreneurs published from 1993-1999. She also teaches at Stanford University and serves on the advisory boards of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the National Civic League, and the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

 

Paul Carttar Joins Monitor
Paul joins Monitor as part of a long and diverse career that has spanned sectors and geographies. Paul has served as executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas and as chief operating officer for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and he was a co-founder of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit management consulting firm in Boston. Prior to dedicating himself to the nonprofit sector, Paul held executive positions in two private venture-backed healthcare companies, was a vice president in the San Francisco office of Bain & Company, and served as special assistant to the ambassador in the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, Germany. Paul will be splitting his time working for the Monitor Institute, New Profit Inc., and other Monitor projects.