By 2020, Interactive Technology Will Change the World of Philanthropy

During the next decade, mobile phones and other handheld devices will become vital to nonprofit efforts, predict technology experts.

And with the new tools provided by technological advances, they say, will come increased public scrutiny of charities and competition from new players that will find it increasingly easy and inexpensive to rally people around their causes.

“In three to five years, every organization will need some application that works on iPhones” or similar devices, says Joaquin Alvarado, senior vice president for digital innovation at American Public Media and Minnesota Public Radio. “That’s where the social space exists.”

Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, predicts that fund raisers by 2020 will rely heavily on “leveraging micro-donations from large groups of people” through text messages sent on mobile phones.

At the same time, she says, nonprofit groups will use communications tools to find inventive ways to tell donors exactly how their money is spent.

She says the Vittana Foundation, a Seattle group that raises money to assemble loan packages for students in developing countries, is a sign of the future because it provides personal data about beneficiaries online.

“Vittana typifies a way in which philanthropy is changing by creating new paradigms for giving and offering donors a way to see that they are making a real and specific impact,” Ms. Huffington writes in an e-mail message to The Chronicle.

Ability to Adapt

The new communications, of course, will be a two-way street, with charities getting more feedback than ever before.

“We talk about how we need transparency in international aid. It’s not going to be too long before the recipients of that aid have a huge megaphone to be able to talk to the world about what’s working and not working,” says Sean Stannard-Stockton, an adviser to wealthy donors and a Chronicle contributor.

Mobile phones aside, the important question ahead is not what new devices will become popular but whether nonprofit groups have the ability to adapt to the world they create. Internet-savvy organizations like Vittana are going to emerge and change how charity is conducted, predicts Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology organization.

“An awful lot of innovation like that can now get going and make it because the barriers to entry technically and marketing wise have gone way down,” he says.

Another example of groups on the cutting edge is Nonprofit Mapping. The organization is run entirely by Google engineers, journalists, and other volunteers who are unsatisfied with the data available about American charities. The San Francisco group plans to collect timely data—and display it in a visually interesting fashion on its Web site, http://www.nonprofitmapping.org—to help donors make decisions about what causes to support.

Andrew Zolli, who leads PopTech, a New York charity that supports efforts to use emerging technology to solve global problems, says the nonprofit world will have to deal with the “rise of the amateurs” in philanthropy, comparing the situation to how unpaid blog writers have upset professional journalism. “A whole bunch of new people who have not historically been part of the conversation are about to show up,” he says.

He points to Kickstarter.com, a Web site that allows people to raise money for art projects, neighborhood-improvement work, or any other idea that strikes their fancy. Such technology allows for new charity ideas to blossom very quickly, bypassing the traditional forms of fund raising or starting a charity, he says. “It will spin off more innovation, and it will shorten the time cycles that everyone expects,” he says.

“Nonprofits,” he says, “are about to get an injection of new things.”