Digital Impact was created by the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford PACS and was managed until 2024. It is no longer being updated.
The global pandemic gives new urgency to conversations about race, technology, and civil society. Existing inequities are exacerbated by the disease and exploited by the response to it. Technologies contribute to inequity, but also offer ways to restore justice. This crisis offers a moment to ask the types of questions that will strengthen our collective response and build resilience in our society.
As we depend on digital communications for every aspect of our daily lives, who is left behind? How are technologies being used to surveil communities of color—and how do communities respond to such surveillance? Why is it critical for people impacted by technology to have a voice in how that technology is regulated and employed by governments? How are activists, researchers, and policymakers seeking to create equity in this digitally dependent world? These questions are rooted in our histories, impacting our present moment, and critical to our futures. Join us for conversations with scholars, practitioners, activists, and policy experts to explore these issues and more.
April 27, 2015
As many of you know, we spent much of last week at the Skoll World Forum, enjoying remarkable speeches from the likes of Jeff Skoll, Jaqueline Novogratz, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and many more. Behind the scenes, we were able to conduct a private interview with the team behind The Resilience Exchange, a new online […]
April 21, 2015
For those of us who were able to attend the Skoll World Forum last week, there is much to be done in the way of reflection: what we learned, the wonderful people we met, and the possibilities of new business. For those unable to attend this year’s Forum, which was set to the theme […]
April 14, 2015
Africa offers a swathe of giving practices based on indigenous giving cultures through to sophisticated strategic philanthropy. We live in fast changing societies and they are often geared to change. It is imperative in South Africa, for example, to move beyond race and class to create an equitable society. This is the goal of […]
March 4, 2015
I pointed out in my previous post in Markets for Good that we now have the technology to seed an impact sharing economy, not unlike Uber and Lyft, where every service organization, funder, capacity builder, intermediary and researcher can serve as an impact learning “driver”. Our new Impact Learning Technology is best explained […]
February 23, 2015
We all know a wealth of useful data exists online, in various publications, or hidden away in public archives. Initiatives – often local or focused on a particular sector – have emerged over time to collect and report that data and apply the findings to particular areas of interest. But there’s a bigger story […]
February 20, 2015
In PndBlog, Mitch Nauffts takes a look at ‘The Millennial Wheel of Disengagement,’ a new infographic from Virtuali. The infographic highlights the data behind millennials in the American workplace, with key insights and takeaways for the global economy. Nauffts notes “the fact that every day between now and 2030, 10,000 baby boomers will […]
February 6, 2015
Barbara Ibrahim, founding director of the Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American University in Cairo, opened the discussion by reflecting that four years ago, as the Arab Spring uprisings began, there was initially strong international interest in supporting transitions in the region. As the transitions became more chaotic, ‘concern was not followed by investment’ – unlike the foundation response after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This was partly […]
January 26, 2015
Collaboration often drives the best of outcomes, and a recent partnership across three diverse sectors — nonprofit, industry and government — has resulted in the new prototype “Charity Match.” Here at Intuit, one of our core products is Mint, an online tool to manage your money, pay your bills and track your credit […]
January 14, 2015
We’ve been thinking a lot about nonprofit results data at Idealware. As part of a project for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we’ve conducted more than 30 interviews, a survey, and a huge amount of research to understand both how organizations think about results data—whether that’s outcomes, outputs, evaluation data, program management data, […]
January 7, 2015
3.5 million Baby Boomers across America are turning 65 this year. Countless retailers provide them and other older Americans discounts that some want and need and some do not. Our new organization, Boomerang Giving, is devising approaches that would enable discounts to be voluntarily redirected (Boomeranged!) to nonprofits at point of sale. This growing […]
