Social Ch@nge

Alex Steed’s recent connective predictions post got us at Social Ch@nge thinking about the future of technology and civil society. Here’s our predictions for 2009 and beyond, based on some of the trends we’ve been watching at Social Ch@nge this year.

1) Cells will save lives

One of the things you will surely see more of is the creative use of cell phones in conflict areas to bring aid.  Earlier this year, Poland pulled off evacuating its citizens from Georgia via cell phone. You can expect more cell use for governments to communicate with civilians in a hurry, and also cell phone use by civilians in areas with poor communication to map out violence, food, medicine and to share information about what’s going on in their areas. You can check out tools like Ushahidi and see how cell phone mapping has already been used to save lives during outbreaks of violence.  Finally, while it’s a bit early yet to assess the sustainability of cell phone hacks that let you do life-saving blood tests using only your trusty Sony Ericsson, expect more of these multi-use hacks, especially in developing countries.

2) You will learn to fix it yourself

Times are tougher. Non-profits and individuals will learn to fix their own computers, cell phones, mp3 players and bikes, and other people will donate to you to teach them to do this. If you’re in charge of a community non-profit and looking for fundraising ideas that are sure to be a hit in 2009, plan to host a skills fair where your volunteers’ practical smarts will be donated on behalf of your non-profit to eager bidders.

3) We will all get more competitive

Nothing brings out ingenuity like an economic crisis – the 1930’s saw a flowering of competitions in both Europe and North America as people got motivated to get creative – and earn some rewards for doing so. Expect more small scale and local competitions that will be used to get individuals involved in big organizations through collaborative and creative problem solving.  There will also be more competitions that reward individuals for activities like commenting on blogs or for mash ups of material – and you can expect more non-profits to hack these concepts for fundraising purposes. We also predict that this is the year that it will become main-stream to get small but motivating rewards from businesses for simply being tops in your online social group. So naturally, this is also the first year that non-profits will start asking you to help by donating these rewards, along with building on your social networking power to build their strategy and funding bases.

4) European non-profits will have to learn to fundraise

In North America, most non-profits don’t rely on government grants because the government is neither a reliable nor plentiful source of funding. But the EU is a different matter – any one of the EU grants available through their funding programs can easily triple your organization’s budget,  and their calls for proposals go out consistently and often. For this reason, a number of European non-profits have fallen into the trap of chasing funding by creating special projects tailored to funding calls, while disguising administrative costs inside these special projects in order to keep their doors open.

You can expect European non-profits based on this approach to funding to crash over the next year for two reasons: the EU is pulling back on the number of grants they issue, and at the same time they are raising the amounts these grants go for to co-funding levels that are absolutely inappropriate for the budgets of most non-profits.

The European non-profits that won’t crash are the ones who are systematically embracing fundraising and building individual donations as their core support. Expect North American non-profits to lead the way in improvising new and diverse ways to fundraise using connective technology – Europeans, get set to learn to fundraise.

5) Your board will finally go online

And when your board finally discovers collaborative and project management platforms for networking, planning, writing grants together and making funding databases (we recommend Comindwork)- they will wonder why they resisted going online for so long. One of the reasons your board will go online is that most non-profits are about to experience a near-complete board turnover, courtesy the economic crisis. Specifically: people will get frustrated at the notion that board fundraising will be key to your non-profit’s survival and they will leave; people will move; people will believe they need to work more and volunteer less, older board members will go back to work part time. Your board may look a lot younger after the turnover.

And if you’re trying to break into the non-profit job market in 2009?

Here are the skills that will be hot:

- hard business skills (accounting, marketing) and obviously any kind of funding development experience. Personal fundraising on platforms like Facebook will count on your resume, so get started now.

- soft internet skills – social networking, the ability to set up collaborative platforms for donors to get involved with your non-profits, searching/selecting info that non-profits need and figuring out how to get this information across to coordinators in a usable format. Example: most coordinators don’t have time to read all the new studies that come out in a given field during the year. If you’ve got ideas on how to make this info available, accessible and summarized for coordinators, you’ve got yourself some new best friends.

- any experience or knowledge you have that’s connected to alleviating poverty, the hot topic for 2009 because of how it aligns environmental and health issues with concrete actions people will be paying a lot more attention to in their own communities, such as food security.