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Thursday Feb 08, 2007
Fundraisers wreak their web 2.0 revenge
I picked up a very interesting online conversation highlighted by Beth Kanter on her blog yesterday.
The conversation started when Ami Dar from Idealist.org felt compelled to express his disappointment at the lack of consistency in terms of feedback and grants from the Omidyar Funding Network. As Ami points out:
“In meetings and conversations with colleagues across the sector, as well as in our own experience at Idealist.org, the story is always the same: organization X meets with people from ON (Omidyar Network), the ON people are invariably very nice, and make the organization feel that funding will be forthcoming, easily and quickly. The organization is ecstatic and counts on this (since when 99% of funders make you feel this way, they mean it), but then nothing happens. Emails and calls go unreturned, often for months at a time, meetings get cancelled, and people are led on for a year or two until they finally give up.”
The first interesting thing to note is that Ami posted this on the Omidyar Network Community site. I have to say I do have a lot of sympathy (as I’m sure all fundraisers do) with Ami’s point when it comes to funders in general.
What’s most interesting for me though, is as Beth points out on her blog, this is a great example of the era of transparency that web 2.0 has ushered in. It’s fantastic that someone is able to express their opinion on a sensitive subject, as well as have a conversation with others about it right where it counts – on the website of the very organisation that they’re commenting on. Posted by Sam Thomas ( 10:15 AM ) Link to this post Comments[8]