The China Foundation Center was established to help increase trust and public confidence in Chinese foundations. The center’s website will at first provide data on 1,800 Chinese foundations and it is hoped that doing so will help to spur donations and improve the efficiency of these foundations. Chinese citizens have been donating larger amounts to nonprofit organisations in China. In the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake Chinese individual donors gave $8 million in total to help with relief efforts.  This has aided the push towards improving transparency and accountability of the Chinese nonprofit sector, which is growing as China becomes more wealthy and income disparity also increases. You can read more about the establishment of the Chinese Foundation Center in the Wall Street Journal blog. It may also be of interest to read The Evolution of Philanthropy in China–Recent Reflections, a blog post by Grace Chiang of Social Venture Group, which gives some insight into the gradual cultural and social shift towards individual and institutional philanthropy in China.

London, 24-25 August 2010.

Organised by Article 19

This conference was convened in anticipation of the United Nations High Level Plenary Meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) +10, being held in New York from 20-22 September.

The backdrop to this meeting was the substantial progress needed to meet the MDGs and that transparency and the free flow of information are critical principles that must be fully integrated into the development agenda at both international, national and sub national levels if this progress is to happen.

Full details of the conference can be found here http://www.right2info-mdgs.org/conference/. It was an incredibly rich two days with some remarkably thoughtful, wide-ranging and inspiring presentations. Needless to say, it’s impossible to do justice to them but I’d like to provide my immediate reflections on the meeting.

Firstly, there was a very real sense of a growing ‘transparency movement’. This movement brings together right to information, anti-corruption, human rights, budget monitoring, social auditing and development effectiveness experts and activists, among others. Generally these groups work in silos but are starting to recognise the common themes of their work and are seeing that together, we can move the agenda forward and embed access to information in development debates and practice.

Of course, when it came to writing a joint declaration for the UN meetings during our final session, it was harder to reflect all these different interests and concerns, but there was a genuine sense in the room of the complementarity of values and objectives that could be powerful if harnessed properly.

Aruna Roy, of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in India, the social movement well-known for spear-heading India’s Right to Information laws set the tone for the meeting in her opening plenary remarks. She noted that many in India have never heard of the MDGs or understand what they are. If you don’t know, how can you demand your rights? That said, although they might not be able to articulate the 8 goals, poor people do know what makes and keeps them poor. And much of this is caused or exacerbated by corruption and the arbitrary use of power. Access to information is critical to ending this vicious cycle. There was common agreement in the room that budget transparency, is key for proper accountability – “Our money, our accounts”.

• Who gets the money?
• How is it received?
• Who controls it?
• Are we getting what we’re paying for?

For me there were some key issues raised from these discussions. Of course we need to make sure that access to information and anti-corruption agreements and laws have teeth. But to even achieve this, there is a real need for proper infrastructure and capacity building so that civil society has the expertise and tools to demand and make use of the information it requires.

Also, civil society itself must expect to be ‘walk the talk’ and practice the principles of transparency that they demand of others. There was much concern expressed, and rightly so, about the “counter -associational revolution” that is occurring in countries around the world where civic space is shrinking or threatened through regressive laws and practices. This is undoubtedly a cause for concern and transparency can indeed be a risk for some organisations and individuals. However, to pick up the refrain of the conference “transparency costs, but lack of transparency costs more”. Information on who’s doing what, where and how, is vital to the growth, influence and impact of the sector and must be expected and enabled.

There is however, a real risk of approaching civil society as a homogenous group, when of course this is simply not the case. International NGOs for example are remarkably influential and are donors themselves – receiving money from both governments and private sources. Where do these organisations see themselves in relation to the IATI work on aid transparency, for example? How can they promote information demand and supply? What can they do to help their partner CSOs report effectively? This, I felt, wasn’t addressed in any detail during the conference but I hope will rise in prominence as the ‘movement’ grows and progresses.

For more, keep an eye on the Right2Info website http://www.right2info-mdgs.org/ also on twitter @right2info_mdgs.

This announcement was originally published on the NetSquared Blog.

The French American Charitable Trust (FACT) and NetSquared are pleased to announce the second annual FACT Social Justice Awards. Submissions are now open for innovative projects that leverage web and mobile technologies to foster collaboration around social justice issues. Learn more about the challenge and how to participate below.

About the FACT Challenge

FACT is committed to addressing the fundamental inequalities and injustices in  society by helping develop and sustain networks of community-based groups in the U.S. and France that educate, organize, and empower people to actively participate in developing public policies that directly affect their lives.

The Challenge theme this year is “Collaborate for Social Justice.” We chose this theme because beneath all the new platforms, widgets, tools, social media, and innovative products lies the potential for people to collaborate in new ways with one another.

How to Participate

Share: Let your friends, colleagues, and networks know about this opportunity to profile ideas and find collaborators!

Submit: Submissions are now open — submit your project today!

Support: Even if you don’t have a project to submit, your feedback and comments will help other projects improve — get ready to share!

Learn More

Visit the FACT Challenge pages below for more information:

• About the Challenge
• Rules and Guidelines
• FAQ

This geocoding is enabling the visual tracking of aid flows and is also providing information on the kind of aid that each area receives. It is hoped that the project will go a long way towards ensuring that aid goes to those that need it most. This interesting and innovative project is a great illustration of the important role that technology and transparent information can play in helping to connect communities with donors. With 12,000 specific geographic locations already geocoded, the World Bank is now investigating the possibility of implementing standardised location reporting into future project documentation. It is also hoped that more donors will provide information and support the project in the future. Have a look at the perspectives of those involved in the project in the video below.

JERUSALEM (3rd August 2010) GuideStar Israel (www.guidestar.org.il), an online database aimed at making Israeli nonprofit organisations more transparent was launched on Tuesday during a press conference at the Ministry of Justice in Jerusalem. For the first time, financial and operational information on Israeli non-profit organisations (NPOs), numbering some 29,000, has been made transparent to the public online. The GuideStar Israel portal, which is in Hebrew, Arabic and English, lists each nonprofit organisation registered with the National Registrar of Non-profit Organizations in Israel.

The combination of this official information, approved by the Registrar, together with more in-depth information provided by the NPOs themselves, creates the most comprehensive and qualitative database of nonprofit organisations in Israel. It also provides an Internet presence to all non-profit organisations in Israel, since it includes the country’s smallest NPOs that have not been online before.

GuideStar Israel is a joint nonprofit project of the Ministry of Justice, Yad Hanadiv and JDC Israel, and is operated by NPTech – Technologies for Nonprofit Organizations Ltd. (CPB). NPTech is a public benefit company that helps nonprofit organisations (NPOs) in Israel to utilise information communications technology to better reach their goals. It operates for the benefit of the philanthropic sector, in the belief that public transparency is important for the development of the Israeli NPO sector.

Nonprofit inclusion and public access to the website is free. Anyone interested in the nonprofit sector, including individual and institutional donors, volunteers and the general public can use GuideStar Israel to find official information reported to the Registrar about the activities of each non-profit organisation operating in Israel.

GuideStar Israel has been established in full collaboration with GuideStar International (GSI). GSI seeks to illuminate the work of civil society organisations across borders and facilitate better communication among NPOs, donors and related stakeholders. Read the entire press release.

This is welcome recognition from the new coalition government of the responsibility of donors to be transparent in how they disburse aid and builds upon the concerted efforts of the UK under the previous government, in cooperation with other bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors, to respond to demands for transparent, coherent and harmonized aid policy. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) www.aidtransparency.net is leading the charge in this respect.

This is not just a bureaucratic exercise. The recently published Millennium Development Goals Report for 2010 indicates that there is still plenty to be done if we are to realise the development targets agreed 10 years ago. And although transparency and accountability will not in themselves see the achievement of the targets signed up to by governments worldwide, these principals are key if we are to understand the effect aid is having and hold both donor and recipient governments to account for the promises they make.

In a fiscal year that will be full of severe budget cuts across all departments, the coalition government’s commitment to overseas development aid is noteworthy, as is its attention to ensuring that the processes for disbursing it are transparent, accountable and results focused. This is important from an accountability perspective but also to ensure that the countries receiving aid are able to make the best use of it to meet their own development objectives. As Mitchell stated in his speech, “The philosophy of empowerment will be central to our approach.  We want poor people to be masters and owners of the international development system, not passive recipients of it”. He also said that “The UK Aid Transparency Guarantee will help to create a million independent aid watchdogs – people around the world who can see where aid money is supposed to be going – and shout if it doesn’t get there”. Many people at home and abroad have an interest in ensuring this money is well-spent.

In his blog ‘Tony German (Director of Development Initiatives) analyses the Secretary of State’s speech saying “Parliamentarians, civil society organisations and citizens in developing countries want information from all donors – government, foundations, NGOs and private sector – in a form that they can access, compare, aggregate, consolidate, and mash up with their own information (especially information about their own budget). They are not going to get that from a plethora of different donor websites; nor is it possible at the moment for information intermediaries to aggregate the data from many sources. That’s why the data published by donors must be standardised, detailed, comparable and reusable, which is what the Secretary of State promised.”

Such databases on development financing must inevitably include CSOs. We at GuideStar International hope to do our part in helping CSOs to be not only transparent, accountable, responsible and fair but very importantly empowered!

Daniel Ben-Horin (Founder and Co-CEO, TechSoup Global)

This post comes from Daniel Ben-Horin (Founder and Co-CEO, TechSoup Global). Originally published on the Tactical Philanthropy Blog.

This is a condensed version of a panel presentation I gave at the European Foundation Center conference in early June. The panel topic was: “Social Media: Threat or Menace?” No, I made that up. The panel was called, Social media: A fad or the future?

I decided to take a personal tone. People of a certain age, and/or a certain techno-anxiety level feel a lot of pressure to ‘operationalize’ social media in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds. Nothing much good comes of this, and one of the worst things that can occur is a kind of passive-resistance, or not so passive. People block what they can’t understand. Or make poor decisions. Read more …

The audience was about 80 ‘early adoptors’, actual or would-be, from European philanthropies across the continent.

1. Social media is not a ‘tool’.
Social media is about  choosing whether or not to operate in a different way in the world, a way of looking at innovation, collaboration and communication that can’t be left at the office overnight.  That doesn’t mean that if you tweet at work, you have to keep tweeting compulsively at home! But either you are truly excited by the possibilities and embrace them, or you are rolling a stone uphill.

2. Social media mileage will vary.
Most of my friends think that the values of social media and of effective philanthropy — values of transparency, innovation and collaboration—merge to form a completely compelling unified proposition.
But communications cultures vary and the social media norms of the States are by no means universal. What is most important, I think, is distinguishing between the personal and institutional stance toward social media. On a personal level, can you explore social media in an open enough way to discover if it meets any intrinsic needs of yours?

On the institutional level, it is true that since philanthropy is a key player in the public sphere, you should indeed, on some institutional level, join the conversation. But if you don’t find yourself engaged personally, find  people you trust and who do enjoy the process and allow them truly guide your social media practice.

The good news is “you can stumble if you’re humble,” which is a phrase I didn’t coin but really like. You can make mistakes, accept correction, do better next time and, in the process, achieve your goals… as long as you do it in plain view.

3. Social media flattens.
A cat can look at a king, as the saying goes. There’s not much point in standing on ceremony 140 characters at a time; it is a waste to take a command and control mentality into the social media arena. The opportunity here is to push out ideas in real time and see how the marketplace of ideas responds. The opportunity is to respond in real time to others’ ideas… ”others” whom you don’t necessarily know. The opportunity is to observe and interact with others as they interact with each other.

The social media context encourages mass participation by lowering the barrier to entry.  This results in a scenario where there is much more signal and much more noise. What does happen, amidst all the noise, is that the people who contribute the greatest perceived value are able to grow their network of followers without the permission of a single entity (editor). It is very democratic, very much including the messy parts of democracy.

4. Collaboration, innovation and noise
No one is forced to follow anyone or friend anyone. Think of the numbers in context. What does it mean to have 200,000 Twitter followers? Are they the kind of followers who follow a thousand other Twitterers (which is the same as following no one at all)? And, always, come back to what do you yourself enjoy and find meaningful in interacting with others using new tools.

Configuring your social media practice to your interests and personality is a dynamic process; at the beginning, it feels overwhelming but soon you find your way.  As the popular metaphor goes, social media is a rushing river; your words, wise or foolish, will disappear (only to be resurrected when you run for the Senate). What will truly build and what may last are relationships and ideas.

When Facebook and Twitter came along, email — my palette! — became passé on a certain level. So when I entered the new waters, I did so grudgingly and instrumentally.  It took me a while to see that (a) I could have fun by just being myself; (b) lots of people I care about—personally and professionally—are in the new waters; (c ) If I just relax and trust that I have something to offer, it all works.

Social media and philanthropy share this: They are, at the core, about people. The SM field is advancing so rapidly in response to whatever people want to do, trivial or profound.

So, as philanthropists, what do you want to do and how do you want to do it?

Keep an open mind.

Punch at your own weight.