Next Generation Philanthropy Forum: Advocacy and Philanthropy through New Media

The Legatum Institute held The Next Generation Philanthropy Forum in London yesterday (at an intriguiging venue, The Foundling Museum in Bloomsbury). It was an event that exuded the ambition that the title would suggest, full of ideas about how to galvanise philanthropy with market disciplines, measurement and the web.

I was involved in the last session of the day “Advocacy and Philanthropy through New Media” and had the job of doing some scene setting around the social web.

The slides from the presentation are below, but you can also see the session recorded as a very good quality webcast on the Legatum Institute website. My bit is followed by fascinating talks from Invisible Children, Ushahidi and Global Giving.

All are interesting, but for open source and general geeky interest, the Ushahidi presentation from Juliana Rotich (49 minutes into the video) is a must watch. Ushahidi is an open source platform for aggregating text messages, Tweets, emails and blog posts and making sense of them during a crisis, such as a war or natural disaster. It’s also been used for election monitoring and I expect others will find more innovative uses of it soon.

You may also find the previous session on measurement interesting. It was fascinating to hear how NGOs and philanthropists were tackling issues around metrics – I’m sure there’s a lot here brands could learn from too. I noted that one key measure was Cost Per Life Impact for projects.

I’d also recommend watching an interesting perspective from the US State Department’s Jared Cohen [Watch the web cast]. Jared’s spent some time travelling in the Middle East and developing countries and writing about the use of what the State Department call “connection technologies” (new jargon, which makes a nice change from social media.

Many thanks to the Legatum Institute for having us along – it was a fascinating day and an inspiring glimpse into the workings of the philanthropy community.