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oal has always been the same i want to work on stuff i that s aiming to make the world better for ordinary people ii that is actually making the world better not just trying and failing and iii where i can personally be most useful i care about impact and scope and scale and effectiveness and so the question for me was pretty simple where were the biggest and most important problems that need help from someone like me gradually that answer started to come at least provisionally into focus by now we know that the internet shakeout is well underway with power and money increasingly consolidated among a tiny number of players as bruce schneier has famously said the internet s business model is surveillance most of the industry makes its money by tracking and stockpiling and monetizing information about its users of those who don t many have no obvious business model at all which is not reassuring that mountain of user data has turned out to be irresistible to state actors and other authorities who now find themselves able to know vastly more about the habits and activities of ordinary people than was ever previously imaginable this all sucks initially it looked like the internet would rebalance the scales and empower ordinary people but what s actually happening is the opposite so here s what i m going to do starting now and supported by the first look organisation i m beginning two projects related to anonymity privacy and free speech the first is narrowly focused on tor where i ll be developing a strategic plan for and with the tor project i m doing that because tor is important it s the most secure and widely used anonymity supporting software that we ve got tor is controversial because like phones and cars and banks its users include criminals but what matters more to me is its use by people like chelsea manning and edward snowden i want the organisation behind tor be as strong and effective as possible and so i am going to put some energy towards helping make that happen my second project will be to research the broader state of freedom tech all the tools and technologies that enable free speech free assembly and freedom of the press i want to figure out from a user centric perspective what kinds of freedom enabling technology products and services people have access to today what impediments they re running up against in trying to use them what functionality is needed that s entirely missing from the current landscape and what kinds of interventions would need to be made in order to start getting it built do we need easier faster funding and or other forms of support for individuals and tiny teams or bigger better funded organisations with expertise the space currently doesn t have what would move the needle that ll be my focus i m extremely grateful to pierre omidyar and first look for funding this and to the tor project for being so fabulously welcoming to me this is important work and i m super pleased to embark upon it tags anonymity first look free speech internet privacy surveillance tor wikimedia wikipedia categories internet what s wrong with restricted grants november 30 2014 i know a lot of people who re starting up new nonprofits and most don t have any prior experience with fundraising that was me back in 2007 when i took over the wikimedia foundation and so the purpose of this post is to share some of what i learned over the past eight years both from my own experience and from talking with other eds and with grantmakers i m focusing on restricted grants here because they re the most obvious and common funding source for nonprofits especially in their early stages of development restricted grants can be great grantmaking institutions fund work that s socially important that s coming out of organizations that may have no other access to funding and that is often risky or experimental they take chances on people and organizations with good ideas who may not yet have a track record that s necessary and important but restricted grants also pose some specific problems for the organizations seeking them this is well understood inside nonprofitland but isn t immediately obvious to people who re new to it here are the five main problems with restricted grants restricted grants can be administratively burdensome at the wmf we actively sought out restricted grants for about two years and afterwards accepted them only rarely we had two rules of thumb 1 we would only seek restricted grants from organizations we knew well and trusted to be good partners with us and 2 we would only seek restricted grants from organizations that were roughly our size by staff headcount or smaller why because restricted grants can be a lot of work particularly if the two organizations aren t well aligned big institutions have a big capacity to generate process forms to fill out procedures to follow hoops to jump through they have lots of staff time for meetings and calls and email exchanges they operate at a slower pace than smaller orgs and their processes are often inflexible people who work at grantmaking institutions have a responsibility to be careful with their organization s money and want to feel like they re adding value to the work the nonprofit is doing too often this results in nonprofits feeling burdened by expensive process as they procure and report on grants time that you want to spend achieving your mission instead risks getting eaten up by grantmakers administrative requirements restricted grants risk overwriting the nonprofit s priorities with the grantmakers priorities at the wmf we didn t accept grants for things we weren t planning to do anyway every year we developed our plan and then we would sometimes with funders we trusted seek funding for specific components of it with funders we trusted we were happy to get their input on our priorities and our plans for executing them but we weren t interested in advancing grantmakers goals except insofar as they overlapped with ours too often especially with young or small non profits i see the opposite if an organization is cash strapped all money looks good but it s not here s a crude example let s say the wmf knows it needs to focus its energy on mobile and a funder is interested in creating physical spaces for wikipedians to get together f2f for editing parties in that context agreeing with a funder to take money for the set up of editing cafes would pose a distraction from the mobile work the wmf would need to be doing an organization s capacity and energies are always limited and even grants that fully fund a new activity are necessarily drawing on executive and managerial attention as well as the organization s support functions human resources accounting admin legal pr if what a restricted grant funds isn t a near perfect fit with what the organization hopes to accomplish regardless of the funding you risk your organization getting pulled off track restricted grants pull focus from core work most grantmakers want their money to accomplish something new they re inclined to see their grants as seed money funding experiments and new activity most successful nonprofits though have important core work that needs to get done at the wmf for example that core work was the maintenance and continued availability of wikipedia the website which meant stuff like hosting costs costs of the ops team site security work and performance optimization and lawyers to defend against censorship because restricted grants are often aimed at funding new activity nonprofits that depend on them are incentivized to continually launch new activities and to abandon or only weakly support the ones that already exist they develop a bias towards fragmentation churn and divergence at the expense of focus and excellence an organization that funds itself solely or mainly through restricted grants risks starving its core restricted grants pull the attention of the executive director i am constantly recommending this excellent article by the nonprofit strategy consultancy bridgespan published in the stanford social innovation review its point is that the most effective and fastest growing nonprofits focus their fundraising efforts on a single type of funder e g crowdfunding or foundations or major donors that s counter intuitive because most people reflexively assume that diversification good stable low risk prudent those people though are wrong what works for e g retirement savings is not the same as what works for nonprofit revenue strategy why because organizations need to focus they can t be good at everything and that s as true when it comes to fundraising as it is with everything else it s also true for the executive director an executive director whose organization is dependent on restricted grants will find him or herself focused on grantmaking institutions which generally means attending conferences serving on juries and publicly positioning him or herself as a thought leader in the space in which they work that s not necessarily the best use of the ed s time restricted grants are typically more waterfall than agile here s how grants typically work the nonprofit writes up a proposal that presumes it understands what it wants to do and how it will do it it includes a goal statement a scope statement usually some kind of theory of change a set of deliverables a budget timeline and measures of success there is some back and forth with the funder which may take a few weeks or many months and once the proposal is approved funding is released by the time the project starts it may be as much as an entire year since it was first conceived as the plan is executed the organization will learn new things and it s often not clear how what s been learned can or should affect the plan or who has the ability to make or approve changes to it this is how we used to do software development and in a worst case scenario it led to death march projects building products that nobody ended up wanting that s why we shifted from waterfall to agile because you get a better more wanted product faster and cheaper it probably makes sense for grantmaking institutions to adapt their processes similarly but i m not aware of any who have yet done that i don t think it would be easy or obvious how to do it upshot if you re a new nonprofit considering funding yourself via restricted grants here s my advice pick your funders carefully focus on ones whose goals have a large overlap with your own and whose processes seem lightweight and smart aim to work with people who are willing to trust you and who are careful with your time don t look to foundations to set your priorities figure out what you want to do and then try to find a grantmaker who wants to support it tags execution focus foundations fundraising grantmaking grants leadership management non profit priorities revenue strategy the bridgespan group categories fundraising leadership nonprofits revenue how to help your event speaker give a great talk november 24 2014 i do a lot of talks and i ve worked with event organizers ranging from awesome to uh not so great i ve found that how the organizer handles me both before and during the event has a definite effect on my performance and so the purpose of this post is really simple it s to help you the organizer make it possible for your speaker to do a great job at your event the invitation in your invitation say why you re inviting the person and what you hope they ll talk about tell them how they d fit into the event e g would they be keynoting in plenary a workshop opening or closing are you flexible on the format how long would the talk be what s the expected audience size what s the date and location do you pay and if so how much how do you handle travel if you re inviting me you send all this to the lavin agency the planning stage once your speaker s accepted have a call or exchange some mails tell your speaker how many people will be at the event and what they re like demographically what kind of work they do what they know or don t know about the speaker s topic are they at the event to work learn or is it more of a junket or social experience why will they be in the room and how will they feel about it the most useful things organizers have ever told me everybody is very angry about x recent thing and it will be an undercurrent to all the questions really this is their holiday they will just want to enjoy themselves and we are very interested in this topic but we are finnish so nobody will ask questions the better your speaker understands the audience the better a job they will do then send one email with all the logistical information it needs to include the date and time and location of the talk including the full street address the talk duration including split between presentation and q and a formatting practicalities e g aspect ratio acceptable formats and contact information including cell numbers for anyone the speaker might need to reach during the event ideally it ll also describe the room and av setup e g what kind of microphone will there be a confidence monitor size of screen how the seating will be configured it s awesome if you can attach a photo of the room personally i m always really interested in screen size and room brightness because a big screen in a dark room lets me emphasize visuals but the opposite does not the mail should tell your speaker what time to arrive where to go and who to ask for if you re arranging travel it should include those details too even if the speaker already has them essentially you want this mail to contain all the practical information that the speaker might need then or later the more structured the better so it can be parsed by applications like tripit and google now then in the weeks leading up to the talk send your speaker a couple of reminder mails it s easy for talks to slide off people s radar and more than once i ve appreciated prompts that the day is getting closer day of the talk empathize with your speaker he or she has spent dozens or maybe hundreds of hours getting ready for your event they may have travelled a long distance they may be jet lagged or not yet caffeinated or distracted by something happening at home they may be nervous your job on the day of the event is to help them get into the right performative headspace to that end make sure there s somebody assigned to greet your speaker and get them settled that person should be present knowledgeable and friendly if they don t know the speaker s work it s polite to vaguely pretend otherwise i once watched a speaker s confidence visibly degrade when a stressed out stage manager asked him for the fifth time in five minutes how to spell his name ideally you want to let the speaker do a quick rehearsal onstage at least an hour beforehand this is the opportunity to sort out any glitches such as missing adaptors dead batteries or broken deck formatting it also gives your speaker 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