( - promoted by Mike Lux)
New Progressive Coalition and Democracy Alliance have both sent very thoughtful and interesting responses to my recent post on bloggers and donors, and I encourage folks to read them and respond. I like both of the posts a lot, and I think their ideas about how to move forward are useful. I have also gotten a lot of other constructive feedback from individuals in the donor, and plan to do another post soon on this topic. -Mike
In response to Mike Lux's recent post "Bloggers and Donors":
"I believe that bringing these donors into a mutually beneficial relationship with the progressive blogosphere will happen, but that it will take a different kind of strategy and some patience before things change."
We couldn't agree more that it will take a different kind of strategy and patience to see real political change. The New Progressive Coalition (NPC) exists to solve some of the challenges of this broken, political capital market by helping to cultivate a new generation of progressive donors that want to be more strategically engaged in politics.
"The movement needs to show its long-term, tangible value-added to donors. A pitch to donors needs to be more than `we're really good people, and we do lots of great things, and we don't have enough money.'"
NPC has spent the past year developing our proprietary Political Return on Investment (PROI)™ framework. This framework quantifies data submitted by organizations across the sectors that make up a political movement, an approach aimed at breaking down traditional issue silos and encouraging political innovation. The metrics and indictors developed for the PROI™ framework were evaluated and rigorously tested by a group of leading political investors and organizations.
So how does someone measure the impact of their donation to a think tank or a blog? The PROI™ methodology delivers a greater transparency so that donors feel more comfortable investing in innovative political organizations and are able to understand the impact of their political contributions. It also allows organizations to better articulate the value of their work and gain insight into the process of how investments decisions are made.
NPC will be using this unique PROI™ framework as the methodology behind our flagship product which we will be launching this fall. We continually keep our supporters updated on our product releases through our monthly Marketplace Report. We also send out occasional updates on how to contribute more strategically through products like our Investor Guide to Not Reinventing the Wheel and our NPC Sector Brief on Idea Generation & Dissemination.
"This is the life of a big donor. They get hit up constantly by just about everybody they know, including big name politicians, other donors, celebrities and heads of well-known organizations on a very regular basis."
Yes, the traditional major donors of the world are clearly overloaded with requests for donations and many are tired of being treated like ATM machines. The Democracy Alliance is doing an excellent job at engaging this group. NPC operates with a network philosophy and believes that it will take a variety of solutions to solve our complex political challenges. Our focus is not on these traditional major donors, but instead on growing and engaging a new generation of political donors.
"Another key thing to understand about the donor community is the typical demographic profile. They tend to be older, they tend to be extremely busy and they tend to have staff people (either for their work or for their philanthropies) hand-feeding them things to review: not exactly the profile of your average blog reader."
While the majority of the current funding comes from this small group of donors, there is a new generation who wants to become involved (or has tried to be involved in the past) but isn't being spoken to or engaged in a way that resonates with them. They are overwhelmed by too much information and don't have a strategic way to make decisions beyond getting recommendations from their friends.
By helping this demographic target their political and charitable time and money more effectively, we can engage and grow this new generation who can fund political organizations based on their merits and not just whether or not they have the right rolodexes.
Kirstin Falk
CEO, New Progressive Coalition
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