Tom Watson

Time to Move On, Time to Get Goin'

Each of the last two years, I've found that the inevitable slow-down of business at end of the year has kick-started personal projects: two years ago, I launched the pop culture group blog newcritics.com over the break, and last year I signed a contract with John Wiley & Sons to write CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World and began work on the book, which is now in its third printing.

This year, it's something bigger: a new company.

Starting January 1, CauseWired Communications LLC is open for business. Susan Carey Dempsey, my longtime partner in publishing onPhilanthropy.com, is joining me in launching the new firm, which will assist organizations and campaigns in creating inspiring messages for causes that change the world.

In truth, the new company has been several months in formation. Susan and I are both original co-founders of Changing Our World, Inc., a national philanthropic services company that has grown from a small start-up to a global consultancy in less than 10 years, the last six of which were spent as part of the Omnicom Group, the advertising and communications powerhouse. That ride from a small start-up in a tiny, overcrowded office to key roles as part of a Fortune 100 multinational was exciting and rewarding. But when the offer of collaborating on a spin-off based on the success of the book and the need in the sector for communications consulting and thought leadership came our way, Susan and I knew it was time to move back into that small, crowded office and build something new.

And while we are leaving Changing Our World just as the company marks the beginning of its 10th year, we're not going too far. CauseWired Communications will be a close affiliate of Changing Our World, and Susan and I will continue to work closely with our old company on important projects. Indeed, we're temporarily housed at Changing Our World's familiar offices on 42nd Street and we've received a generous leg up in operations and business development from the firm, for which we're particularly grateful to the chairman, Mike Hoffman, and my brother Chris, the firm's president. We all believe the continued partnership will flourish.

So what will CauseWired Communications do? Two things:

1. We will work with nonprofit organizations, foundations, companies and individuals on communications and development assignments - using story-telling, social networks, strategic planning, management and communications expertise to turn great programs into actionable causes.

2. We will publish onPhilanthropy.com, the global resource for philanthropy professionals, and run the annual Summit onPhilanthropy conference in New York each year.

On the consulting side, Susan and I believe we offer a unique value proposition to organizations: we provide large firm development and communications expertise and experience at small firm fees. And in this economic environment, we saw a clear need in the market for that level of experience.

On the publishing side, we're committed to expanding the footprint of our network of outlets - onPhilanthropy.com, dotorgjobs.com (our employment site), CauseWired.com (our online social activism blog) and the Summit onPhilanthropy - and by extension, helping the social causes sector to exert greater influence during a time of great challenges and potential change.

Is there a better time to start a company like ours? We don't think so. A new American administration, a world economic crisis, and revolutionary changes in technology and media all combine to make January, 2009 a pivotal moment in world history. Sure, it's a heck of a challenge. But in the end, Susan and I asked ourselves what we'd most like to be doing at this time in our professional lives - and the answer was right there in a flash: working on great causes that can change the world when it needs it most.

So I'd invite you along for the ride. If you know of an organization that needs some help with its development program, with telling its story more effectively to supporters and donors, please have them email or call us. Our 2009 docket is not yet filled, and we are actively seeking business.

We also invite you to read onPhilanthropy's articles, get involved in a discussion, or browse the job openings - we have big plans for the site in 2009 and we'll let you know about those pretty soon.

CauseWired the book tells the story of online social activism and a generation of committed social entrepreneurs who believe in taking action to help others. CauseWired the company aims to support that urge for change, both online and off. We ask you to place your confidence in us, and we'd certainly like to hear from you.

Hacking Philanthropy

  _DSC4406 
  Originally uploaded by andrewparker915.

At some point I'll have more to say about this over at onPhilanthropy, but in between blog posts here at the Clinton Global Initiative, I wanted to put up a quick piece about a half-day well spent up at Columbia on Tuesday. Thanks to Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, a group of about 40 technologists, philanthropists, analysts, investors and entrepreneurs gathered at Casa Italiana to discuss new models for philanthropy. It wasn't all technology, it was systems and governments and story-telling as well and I came away with a lot of ideas.  Scott Edward Anderson does a great job setting the scene:

Imagine a room packed with a ton of brain power, knowledge, and expertise from the world of venture capital, technology, social change, and philanthropy and you've some idea what I walked into yesterday up at Columbia's Casa Italiana.

Yeah, he's right. It was great to be invited and the entire session pushed me on some of my own conventional wisdom on the sector. Fred has a post , USV's blog post is here. And there's a Flickr album as well. I'm still thinking about it...

Waldorf Salad

Yesterday, I was honored to be a speaker at the 2007 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Symposium in New York. I'll wrote about it for onPhilanthropy, but I've been mostly offline for more than a day. It was worth it: the Symposium drew a crowd of more than 300 leaders in philanthropy and provided a rare global perspective on the confluence of development work, government policy, and the world economy. The keynote address was delivered by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who saw the need for greater cooperation between philanthropic organizations and the world body - “Civilians continue to bear the intolerable brunt of crises not of their own making….and life-saving assistance cannot wait for the next round of peace talks.”

The Symposium was at the Waldorf. I figure I've spent several weeks of my life in that building over the years, from political dinners in my reporting days to the endless round of fundraising galas. The name comes from William Waldorf Astor, who built the original where the Empire State Building stands. The "new" Waldorf has been on Park Avenue since 1931 and it's as New York as it gets, even though it fairly crawls with tourists. The ballroom is essentially New York's parish hall, where the dances and fundraisers and more upscale, star-studded type of bingo night are held near-nightly.

The Waldorf's been a home for visiting movies stars and Presidents, as any walk down one of the back hallways will tell you in black and white photography, but my favorite Waldorf movie is The Out-Of-Towners with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as the Ohio couple who barely survive muggings, various strikes, and some bad 1970 New York attitude on the way to discovering that middle America is more aligned with their true selves. So okay, I hate the stupid ending. But I love the 1970 New York and the collection of character actors that inhabit it.

Would that AMC's Mad Men had gone a similar casting route. (Yes, that was a long way to get to what is essentially a reminder that I'll be live-blogging Mad Men tonight at 10 PM EDT over at newcritics.com). Outside of Robert Morse as Bert Cooper, there's more essential New York in almost any episode of Sesame Street (or any classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, for that matter). Still, last week's was the best episode to date and thanks to the fab MA Peel, well-blogged as well. I'll try to keep up my end tonight. Please show up.

Random Bits and Pieces

Some catching up is due, so here goes:

• I did radio bit on NPR when I was in Washington last week, and enjoyed the brief sit-in with Neil Conan on his Talk of the Nation show. An Imus replacement, I wasn't. But if you'd like to hear a discussion of social networking and its potential as a philanthropic instrument, click here and turn it up.
• Kudos are long overdue for the redesign of Joe Gandelman's seminal The Moderate Voice blog. Looks great, Joe!
• I was tagged as a somewhat intelligent blogger by Kid Sally over at Nightbird's Fountain. "Thinking Blogger," rather. It is now my turn to nominate 5 others for the Thinking Blogger Award (see the rules here.) I hate picking five because those not picked will, of course, hold it against me - nonetheless, I'm the "Thinking Blogger Award" on to: Claire, Brendan, Grasshopper, MA Peel, and the Siren. There, done.
• Can you believe it - newcritics is six months old. If you regularly visit here, you should also hang out there. I have a short post up, a virtual suggestion box of sorts. So fill it up!
• Congrats are due to the Right Honorable Tom Watson, my parliamentary namesake and long-time blogger. He's back in government as a whip under PM Gordon Brown. When he took me on a gracious tour of Parliament this spring, several members hinted (one with a wink!) that Tom would return. And so he has.
• Congrats are also due to the prolific blogger Barbara O'Brien, who makes five - count 'em, five - years of the must-read Mahablog.
• Sadly, condolences are due to our blogger friend Lindsay Beyerstein on the sudden passing of her father. They're also offered to the readers of the Rittenhouse Review, an old school blog whose founder-editor Jim Capozzola died this week after a long illness.

Facebook: Social Enterprise Machine?

The explosion that is the Facebook phenomena holds a major upside for so-called "social enterprises," those organizations and start-ups that aim to improve society, whether in the U.S. or abroad. Anyway, that's the case I make over at onPhilanthropy, where I'm the publisher by day:

Sites like Kiva and Facebook - well, let’s call them networks, not sites - hold the promise of connecting social entrepreneurship with mass markets of consumers: of linking the motivation behind philanthropy with the aspiration to bring about change. And the result may change how developed societies come to view charity and causes.

Kiva is particularly interesting to me. My 15-year-old and I have been experimenting with making microloans to small businesses in developing countries. My loans went to businesses in Ghana and Mexico. On Friday, I got some good news. María De La Luz Ramírez Sáenz began to repay the $25 loan I made to her a couple of months ago. María lives in San Juanito, Chihuahua, Mexico and runs the Dulcería del Centro in town. Here's a bit of Maria's story:

María is separated from her husband and cares for five children, who are 28, 27, 22, 18, and 8 years old. She began with her business when she separated from her husband because her children were studying and she didn’t have any way to continue educating them. It was for them that she decided to open a small business with the help of one of her children, who had begun working and was able to give her his small savings so that she could rent a shop where she could sell sweets. Little by little, things went well and her business began to grow. At the request of her clients, she began selling more things for children’s parties, like disposable items, piñatas, etc.

I'll be honest about the pay-off for a guy like me: being a small-time banker and reaching real people beats sitting on my ass and bloviating about changing the world from behind a keyboard. What's also cool about Kiva is the social network aspect; I can see who the other lenders are. And I can share the experience with my daughter.