MFG Archive

The farthest-reaching open data legislation since the DATA Act highlights how open data will impact investors, regulators, and the financial industry.

    We are very excited at SolarAid at the creation of an impact calculator on our website where donors can type in the amount they wish to give and our calculator provides the impact it will have. Give it a go yourself here.   Most fundraising uses activities or items from a budget line […]

A little over a year ago, we set out to do something ambitious. We set out to build environmental sensors that would bridge an under-recognized digital divide: the environmental data divide. Most sensors require Internet signal to report data, as well as fixed power infrastructure. Much of the world doesn’t have either, meaning that we […]

  Donations received through text are increasingly popular as a way to fundraise effectively, especially as society as a whole moves away from cash and towards online and contactless methods of payment. In terms of insight and targeted campaigns for charities, however, the retention of donors and donor acquisition was challenging – until now.   […]

  Stanford computer scientists Jure Leskovec and Tim Althoff have analysed 14-years worth of online donations to help organisations systematise behaviours that can greatly boost the cash value of donations. Their analysis of anonymous data reveals insights into ways to increase donor retention, from the kinds of requests that perform well, to the timings of […]

  Digital technologies are connecting residents in neighborhoods, catalyzing community discussions, changing the way governments and citizens interact, and making government more transparent. This growing field of “civic tech” is aiming to harness technology to spur citizen engagement, improve cities and make government more effective.  The Network Impact team spent 18 months consulting with civic […]

  Foundations are increasingly investing time, effort, and money into building networks in order to better achieve their goals and leverage resources. In several instances, smaller foundations have been able to increase their funding by working with other funders as network partners.   In ‘Investing in Networks Grows Impact’, Madeleine Taylor examines this growing trend […]

  As the director of an organization that works with foundations across the country, I get to see remarkable examples of foundations working together and learning from each other about how to be more effective.   But sometimes we need to look beyond the field to get ideas of how to tackle our biggest challenges. […]

  The market engine behind our nonprofit service economy is the act of funders and donors “proxy buying” a service or program on behalf of a population. Analogous to “in loco parentis,” where a school plays the role of the parent while children are in their care, in the nonprofit sector, we have “in loco […]

  Art is as much about the technologies available to artists as it is the sociopolitical context in which it is created. A community of artists are creating conceptual works from data collected digitally, blurring the lines between what constitutes scientific data presentation and art. Data artists use large amounts of information to artistically represent […]