Philanthropy, 2020 - Post # 2

As foundation leaders, what will be the greatest opportunities and the most daunting challenges in the decade ahead?  The January 14, 2010 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy decides to take an educated guess. This is the second of three posts on the topic.

Technology Gets More Interactive

What will be the impact of technology on the nonprofit sector in the next decade? This article in the January 14 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy tries to envision this.

According to some United Nations research, 6.3 billion people, or a whopping 83% of earth’s population, will own a cell phone by 2014. This ever increasing connectivity and resulting networking and access to information will certainly modify the nonprofit world’s fundraising activities, communications with donors, and program evaluations. It will also enable donors to better understand how their dollars were spent.

Of course, there’s a predicted downside as well. There will be increased competition from other entities who will find it increasingly easy to attract resources to their causes.

I personally enjoy the challenge of staying on top of our technology communications game. But technology is just a tool. Like community foundations everywhere, the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia works hard to more deeply understand the needs of our community and focus philanthropy on them. It is our primary purpose. If we do that job well, then the technology tools we choose to communicate the resulting knowledge is just a question of organizational process.