I’m late in announcing this here (on my own site – the cobbler’s children run barefoot, I know) but I’ve signed to write the new Social Ventures blog over at Forbes. I admire what Forbes is doing in terms of bring in a variety of new voices, and I’m enjoying engaging a new audience there [...]

Last week, the La Pietra Coalition launched a major new global initiative, the Third Billion Campaign, aimed at expanding women’s employment, access to finance, markets and education. A coalition of business leaders, NGOs, former government officials, economists and commentators (I’m proud to be in their ranks) is spearheading the decade long campaign to galvanize corporations [...]

This year, I’m honored to be team-teaching a new course at New York University with my friends Marcia Stepanek and Howard Greenstein. The class is “The Wired Nonprofit 2012: Social Media Strategy and Practice” and it’s a new elective in the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising Master’s program. The overall goal is to help [...]

I’m a story teller by nature and by vocation, so I shivered a little bit when I read this sentence in Mario Morino’s excellent Leap of Reason: Managing to Outcomes in an Era of Scarcity, released earlier this year by his Venture Philanthropy Partners: Public funders—and eventually private funders as well—will migrate away from organizations [...]

In its early years, the Clinton Global Initiative often seemed to present a kind of Democratic administration in exile – a gentle yet important correction to the Bush White House. The former President acted as a dealmaker supreme, bringing together big corporate interests, major philanthropists, heads of state and their governments, and global nonprofits in [...]

The video for a panel I moderated in April at NYU’s Heyman Center is up, and I thought I’d share it here. It was quite an interesting discussion. Here’s the description: Social media and the resulting mass philanthropy movement are bringing rapid and often destabilizing change to the nonprofit world. This panel discussed how some [...]

While the much-criticized “deal” to forestall the United States’ defaulting on its bonded debt obligations did avoid a take-down of the charitable deduction in the tax code, nonprofits and those who support them can hardly take comfort from the Tea Party’s grand bluff of the President and his Democratic allies in Washington. That’s because after [...]

What has the advent of social media – indeed, the networked worker – meant for corporate social responsibility programs and employee activism? That’s the topic of a new white paper I’ve co-authored with my friend and longtime collaborator Howard Greenstein. Sponsored by the JK Group and released under the auspices of New York University’s Heyman [...]

The La Pietra Coalition first gathered two years ago in a Renaissance villa outside Florence with a goal of putting the drive for women’s rights and economic growth front and center on the global leadership front. The Coalition’s platform, which I’ve been privileged to work on since that first meeting, advocates investing in women’s economic [...]

Today marks the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, a celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women around the world. I was reading some of the coverage in anticipation of attending the second annual Women in the World summit later this week in Manhattan, when I came across this quote in Gayle [...]

Four years ago, when I met Muhammad Yunus for the first time, he was still on the big media tour stemming from his 2006 Nobel Prize for the pioneering work of creating the Grameen microfinance organization.  “I don’t think poverty has any place to hide any longer,” he told a group of New Yorkers that [...]

Here’s a new video for you on the four essentials of effective campaign fundraising – comments welcome, of course:

On Sunday night, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network will be one of the two or three betting favorites for the year’s best picture at the annual Academy Awards extravaganza in Hollywood. The film tells the (largely fictionalized) early story of Facebook, wrapped in the coming-of-age tale of founder Mark Zuckerberg and the compromises he chose [...]

I’ve had a few notes from friends over the last two weeks that all ran along the lines of “this is CauseWired coming to life!” meaning Egypt and seemingly-spontaneous January 25th uprising, which deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak today. Yet I hesitated at accepting congratulations for the foresight of my 2008 book on the rise of [...]

Did you happen to catch the Groupon ads during the Super Bowl? In one of the most wrong-headed displays of cause marketing ever to find a national advertising stage, the Groupon spots managed to offend human rights supports of Tibetan freedom and environmentalists trying to save the Brazilian rain forest and diminishing whale populations. I’m [...]