New Media Enabling Armies of Citizen Donors

I'm in Dallas this week meeting with colleagues to talk about, among other things, the ways that new media can and will enable all sorts of new philanthropic behaviors.  While here I read David Carr's "Media Equation" column on the front page of the yesterday's New York Times business section.  In describing how new media is changing fundamentals like the ways families interact, Carr's perspective captures trends that also point to the end of philanthropy as usual:

Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the (TV) remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers' attention.

The threat isn't new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program. When we took the 2,000-mile road trip to drop the girls off at their respective campuses, we switched between my iPod and theirs rather than flip fruitlessly through radio channels that had been aggregated and formatted into musical sameness.

In the coming years, donors are bound to benefit from the same types of pesonalization to fuel the ways they give back.  While some of these enabling technologies took hold during the dot.com boom (VolunteerMatch, Network for Good, Kintera's tools to help friends ask friends for their walkathon money), Web 2.0 technologies are emerging to fuel armies of citizen philanthropists who "make, forward, link and program" all sorts of new ideas for bettering communities and helping others.

P.S. Check out Netsquared, a community of TechSoup, which is gathering the types of passionate, geeky folks who are "remixing the web for social change."

Susan Herr