Great panel at the Washington Post yesterday, as America’s Charities convened its #GivingUndertheInfluence symposium to discuss trends in workplace giving and growing roles of millennials and digital networks. I was honored to join Marc Johnson, vice president of digital strategy in the Studio/Online division of APCO Worldwide; Heather Lofkin Wright, national director of community service [...]
Very nice for CauseWired to be included in this guide from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Written by Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, the post focuses on key strategic imperatives for nonprofits and causes as they consider the social graph. Here is CauseWired’s contribution: It’s very easy to jump into [...]
In 1731, a 25-year-old Philadelphia printer set out to solve a problem – one that affected the future of his industry and the social good. Despite innovations in technology, popular books still cost too much for the average citizen. Yet getting more books into circulation would clearly increase interest in his own craft, and lead [...]
Cross-posted from my Forbes column: Flip the calendar, start a new tax year. Double down on changing the world. That’s about the simplest New Year’s resolution for a social entrepreneur or nonprofit leader. Every January doesn’t require a new strategic plan. Sometimes you need to just keep things on track. But I’d still urge everyone [...]
Here are some excerpts from the speech I gave at the America’s Charities annual membership conference at Georgetown University in Washington DC two weeks ago:
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 [...]
What began as a bold global initiative to challenge the information hegemony of governments and open them to wider, better-informed participation by citizens in the digital age is trickling toward irrelevance and outright shame in the cramped quarters of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, as the leader of the once-revolutionary secret-exposing site Wikileaks uses the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tom Watson @Forbes
CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World is now available in paperback. Order yours now.