Lucy Bernholz

White House

Civil Society and Big Data

The Dallas Museum has been overt in declaring the value of the data it collects from museum-goers - it exchanges membership for data. Most nonprofits are collecting data from their donors, the people they serve, people who attend their programs or sign up for information - but aren't acknowledging

Citizen U and SHARE Conferences

Citizen University, conference on citizenship and citizen problem solving, March 21, Seattle. WA. Register here. Impact Investing + Sharing Economy = SHARE. New conference from Peers and SOCAP May 13 and 14, 2014, San Francisco, CA. Information here.

Data Driven Philanthropic Strategy

The Knight Foundation and Stanford Social Innovation Review are hosting a free webinar on data driven strategy in the philanthropic sector. It will feature a discussion of the report done by Knight and Quid that used data analysis, networking, and visualization tools on investments to identify and frame the civic

Disruptive wealth hasn't yet disrupted philanthropic forms

My comments to Marketplace Radio on the Philanthropy 50 report are here. Twitterers picked up on my observation that this big money was being used in traditional ways. It's true, but you get only so much in a Tweet  - or a 60 second radio interview. The fact that

Twelve steps to transparency

Grantcraft* has a new guide for funders called "Opening Up: Demystifying Funder Transparency." It actually offers many more than 12 steps for foundations trying to become more open about their processes, decisions, goals, accomplishments and failures, but I'm all in for alliteration. Let's use

The heroism of data entry

Data science. Data visualization. Big data. Medium data. What about data entry? Clara Miller, President of the F.B. Heron Foundation warned in her cover email that her annual president's letter was going to be about "...how and why we are changing operationally, with some pretty nerdy

Unbundling the buzzwords

Seventy-one. Born in 2007. Featured on Marketplace for three years and now "revealed" each December in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. The Philanthropy Buzzwords lists that I've been keeping (with help from many of you) for all these years was the subject of a discussion at

Opening up DonorsChoose Data

(photo from http://data.donorschoose.org/open-data-unleashed/) DonorsChoose - one of the most established crowdfunding platforms - has opened up its data. And there's a lot of it - in 2013 alone the data set includes 130,000 school projects, more than 300,000 donors, and $60 million in

Net Neutrality and Nonprofits

My work on digital civil society includes arguing that policies far beyond the tax code matter to our ability to use private resources for public benefits, autonomously and voluntarily, in the digital age. My colleague Rob Reich and I even went so far as to offer up a complete guide

Lead us into digital civil society

Both Creative Commons and the Wikimedia Foundation are searching for new CEOs. These two organizations are "anchor institutions" of the emerging digital civil society that we're all busy inventing/experiencing/trying to understand. I've never done this before, and am only doing it now

From blog to book - MarketsForGood ebook now available

The Markets For Good initiative has released an eBook collection from their first year's blog posts called Markets for Good Selected Readings: Making Sense of Data and Information in the Social Sector. It's available for free download. Click here to get the eBook and here for

Ending the year on data and transparency

Two posts I'd like to bring to your attention before the year gets away from us. The Hewlett Foundation on their transparency efforts so far. This post points out that the foundation has begun sharing grant summaries as well as program officer memos to the board. The video

The Ethics of Data

In my role at Stanford's Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS) I am having a great time organizing a conference on The Ethics of Data. Our event, which will happen in September 2014, is a joint effort with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the Brown Institute of the

Big Data and Philanthropy

The Wall Street Journal ran this opinion piece, How Big Data will Change the Face of Philanthropy, by me on Monday.

Measuring ourselves and perceptions of progress

The Center for Effective Philanthropy just released a survey of foundation CEOs that asks them about their sense of progress on the issues their organizations work on. I was honored to be asked for my thoughts on their findings - which are posted on the Center's blog. The process

Blueprint 2014 Now Available!

I'm thrilled to announce the release of Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2014. Download yours for free from GrantCraft. It's fitting that I am in Annecy, France, at the annual meeting of the associations of French and Swiss Foundations, as this year's Blueprint

Philanthropy Buzzwords - Full list

The list of top ten buzzwords is intended to capture the gist of the jargon in the year gone by and serve as a guide to terms you’re likely to hear in the next twelve months. Some are meaningful; some are satirical. Some may have lasting implications and be

Close the Loop - $10,000 for feedback ideas

One of the hallmarks of digital civil society is the low cost access to mobile conversations. This technology - mobile, SMS based - has the potential to disrupt how we think about evaluation and performance management. We - nonprofit leaders, activists, funders, residents, evaluators - can provide direct feedback and input on needs, capacities,

Crowdfunding and philanthropy

A colleague at The Monitor Institute pointed me to this "research" on crowdfunding. Some of it just blew my mind. (Photo from http://www.crowdsourcing.org/editorial/crowdfunding-industry-trends-and-statistics-infographic/25662) If these numbers are even close to correct, "social causes" (undefined in

Interactive tools for collective work

GrantCraft has launched a new interactive tool finder for funders interested in collective work. This grew out of research and analysis by the Monitor Institute (now part of Monitor Deloitte) and the Foundation Center and their report called Harnessing Collaborative Technologies. The tool finder lets you search by type of

Dollars, Data, and Democracy

Thanks to Tom Watson at Forbes for this article on the new Digital Civil Society Lab I'm co-leading at Stanford. He's exactly right - we're looking at dollars, data and democracy.

Get what you deserve when you give

I've been on a bit of break from my years of pointing out the foibles of #embeddedgiving - or what the industry calls cause marketing. Two things bring it back to my attention: 1. Amazon's gotten into the game. This is huge because Amazon is, well, Amazonian.

Inventing Digital Civil Society

Every time you text a donation, use open source maps to help inform disaster response, or donate blood samples for medical research you are helping to invent digital civil society. Civic technologists, nonprofits, foundations, open data and open government advocates, mobile phone-toring activists - we're all a part

Metadata for #Good - the Digital Public Library of America

Libraries are core institutions of communities, of societies, of democracies. I had the great pleasure of spending the last two days at a festival hosted by the Digital Public Library of America (dp.la) - one of the many efforts that I see as being at the very heart of digital

Data-informed resiliency

I grew up in New York. Every time the weather man predicted a hurricane my mom would order us to "fill the bathtubs." On a few memorable occasions during my childhood that action proved useful as the tubs became our only source of flushable water. Most of the