MFG Archive

Bradford K. Smith, President of the Foundation Center, talks about what philanthropy can do to gain the right kind of visibility in the conversation on big data: Philanthropy’s Data Dilemma – by way of the blog, Philantopic. He argues that philanthropy isn’t getting the most out of the signature assets  being applied in this space, […]

As noted in our introduction to this topic, You Knew It Was Coming…, we’ll spend this month with a mix of original content and curated posts of existing content from anywhere, the latter because there is a lot of good information out there already. We start with a review of a blog post by Jacob […]

Here’s a discussion on big data and analytics and their potential application within the social sector. Sunand Menon walks through the landscape, adding further comment on analysis (the skills we’re using to make sense of data) and analytics (the tools being developed to help that work.) This kind of exploration is important given that the […]

Think of the different ways certain tech phenomena have reshaped the world: intermodal containers in the 50’s, the digitization of music in the early 80’s, the web of the early 90’s. Today, big data is a type of summary event, an omnivore fed by the old and new, the physical and the digital. Jerry Nichols […]

But we’ll let C.S. Lewis start this conversation, not the social sector or the data scientist: “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out […]

The Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) is a new collaborative project that aims to revolutionize information sharing, in order to better understand the flows of philanthropic dollars and enhance transparency and effectiveness in the global social sector. Recently, Victoria Vrana, senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, sat down with […]

We could stop at this title and be bored silly as each of those words has its own familiar set of images, definitions, and stories that immediately come to mind – even when we use them together. (Maybe, by using them together, I’ve finally stripped them of meaning in the same way yet another product […]

If we focus long enough on a topic and attempt to uncover what is really going on, themes should emerge in the midst of differing perspectives. Melinda Tuan takes the topic of evaluation right up to that point, one at which we should stop and reflect. In the post just prior to this one, the […]

Rounding out our conversation on evaluation is this view from the standpoint of technology, by David Henderson, founder of Idealistics. If technology is a tool, then we might reframe the new fixation on data and tech by recognizing that tools don’t build houses. People do. David goes deeper on the topic to argue for a […]

Steve Wright, Vice President, Poverty Tools and Insights at Grameen Foundation joins the discussion we raised yesterday on beneficiary insight. There, we addressed an article published in Alliance Magazine by David Bonbright, expressing the concern that Markets For Good may go wrong, arguing that “beneficiaries are not part of the enterprise in a direct or […]