Supporting people in addition to institutions is only the beginning of ways that foundations can help bring about social change in the Connected Age.

Foundations need to invest in training and support to enable people to become “network-ready”— fluent in the use of current social-media tools, curious enough to learn about new tools, and excellent in connecting skills like openness and listening.

Activists spend more time and energy doing, thinking about, and worrying about fundraising than any other task. As a community, it is critically important to our success and long-term sustainability that we come to a more natural place for both givers and receivers of funds.

Activists need to ask themselves hard questions about their own fundraising: What do I need to do versus what can others in the network do? How much can I raise from my community and how much needs to be supplemented by foundations and other grant makers? Where and how can I involve people in building my base of support?

Donors also need to become increasingly transparent and forthright about what they will and will not fund. Like a good baseball coach, we’re not asking for perfection, just consistency.

As we have discussed, the catalyst for significant social change in the Connected Age will continue to be individual activists. Foundation grants are a perfect vehicle for seeding, supporting, and encouraging these efforts.

Think of Joshua Rosen of justvote.org. Joshua created an enormously successful website for voter registration but found that his fundraising road was blocked unless he found a tax-exempt organization willing to sponsor him. Individual donors are highly unlikely to give to an unincorporated individual effort, not only because of their unease about the stability of the effort but also because there is no tax reward for doing so. Foundations, however, already benefited from their tax-exempt status when their endowment was created and have no restrictions on providing individuals with grants such as individual scholarships or fellowships.

Foundations are the best source of seed funding for individual efforts that can have big results in short time periods, like justvote.org’s many registered voters. It also costs a lot less than supporting institutions, which have offices and significant overhead expenses. The only downside to supporting individuals is that the effort can disappear overnight, but funders can make their expectations that some institutional memory will be stored somewhere clear in their funding agreement.

Echoing Green provides seed grants to social entrepreneurs (known as fellows), a significant percentage of whom do not have an institutional home at the time of the grant. They do need a great plan to become a fellow, but the rest is left to their ingenuity and entrepreneurial flair. According to its website, the results are impressive: Echoing Green fellows raise three times their Echoing Green grant by the second year of their fellowship. Since inception, Echoing Green organizations have raised approximately $930 million against a $21 million initial investment.

We have clearly seen that networks that use social media ignite social change. These networks will attract a variety of people and organizations with various kinds of expertise and their own connections. The basic infrastructure of these networks needs to be funded to keep them functioning smoothly. The good news is that funding the facilitating mechanisms that make networks work is much less expensive than funding a single entity that does all the heavy lifting alone.

For instance, increasing civic participation in Hispanic neighborhoods requires more than funding voter-registration drives. People with many struggles in their lives need more support than simply registering to vote. People need civic education, voter protection, and access to working voting machines. A foundation does not have to fund each of these groups individually; it can instead fund the networking infrastructure, like a website with an online organizer to facilitate conversations and post information relevant to the network in order to reach the overall goal of civic engagement.

When foundations move from a sun-centric view to a network-centric view, they will realize that they can make contributions in addition to their grants; these donations can be part of a whole series of resources that activist networks need to be successful. Money fuels the network, but so does information and connections. Foundations can help to foster the connections needed to keep networks vibrant and growing by recruiting other funders, researchers, and public officials into the network.

Funders can also become creative about how to fund networks that self-organize. One of the difficulties that activists in a crisis campaign face is getting funding fast enough to fill the immediate need. Foundations can create special funds, ideally pooling their resources with other funders that can be triggered and activated for specific self-organizing needs. For instance, a natural-disaster fund available to feeding or housing networks could be triggered by a declared state of emergency.

Foundations should aid not hinder activists on the road to self-determination. They need to become learning partners not punitive overlords. Proposals are guesses as to what is going to happen in the future. They can be educated guesses or pieces of fluff depending on what foundations make clear they want. The hardest question for foundations to answer is what their reaction will be when results are not what they hoped for or expected. Will they automatically cut grantees off or help them to understand what happened?

Unexpected results, being on a different road to perhaps the same end, should not be lumped by foundations into the same category as malfeasance or incompetence. Funders and activists must form a learning partnership in order to make social change sustainable. News is not good or bad until we label it as such. But activists are not exempt from accountability; there is an alternative to sweeping bad news under the rug. Without an emphasis on learning, good ideas can turn into bad proposals that end in a tangle of activities.

We have focused on how funding works, now we can focus on what is funded. Money talks, we all know that; but money is only part of the equation. Money needs good ideas and good people and good systems to be successful.

An enormous challenge for institutional funders in the Connected Age is that some of the results of integrating social media into efforts may become lost in the ether. Exactly how many e-mails were sent to encourage advertisers to pull their ads from Sinclair Broadcasting is unknown. We know the ultimate results, Sinclair’s stock price fell precipitously, but we will never know precisely how much activity occurred to make it happen, particularly because the effort focused on friends connecting with friends. Ironically, this is the opposite problem from the one we had with old-style organizing, when we knew exactly how many people were called or showed up for a rally but had difficulty connecting those activities to concrete results.

The fact that many activities in this new era are not traceable can be unsettling for funders accustomed to counting the results of their investment. Rather than funding a set number of activities, foundations in the Connected Age would be better served funding the process of connectivity for organizations and, more important, for networks. We may not be able to see and count everything that is going on, but we will be able to assess how it was done. We must invest in the increased ability of people and organizations to use social media with ease, to connect with their communities, to be open with information, and to become great listeners who are able to create winning campaigns in an instant. As our examples in Momentum have shown, investing in connectivity will lead to good results.

Change is already happening with younger donors. Our discussion of the Net-Gen in another chapter of my book describes how wary young people are of large institutions and the likelihood that they will be less institutionally loyal than their parents are.

These attributes are showing themselves in their philanthropy. For instance, DonorsChoose is a website that creates a marketplace for the specific project needs of teachers. A donor can choose a city or a grade level and a specific project and make a contribution to meet all or part of the project costs. Projects tend to be in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands. Donors giving at least $100 receive a package of photos and thank you notes from the teacher and students.

We have seen that how we work, the process we use to get results, is just as important in the Connected Age as the results themselves. Foundations will find the Connected Age unfriendly to them unless their processes change to meet the expectations and opportunities of the times.

They need transparent decision making and short time frames. For instance, using letters of inquiry, as many foundations now do, is an efficient way to whittle potential grantees down to a manageable number for final decisions by trustees. If you can get your glasses fixed in an hour and send 100,000 protest e-mails to the governor by noon, then you do not want to wait six months for a foundation to make a funding decision.

Staffed foundations represent only a small fraction of the total number of foundations, but they control the lion’s share of philanthropic dollars. Increasing the number and size of staff discretionary grants will create a much more efficient and effective system than the present one. Program officers are on the ground and interacting with activists much more than trustees are, and presumably they have been hired in large part because of their good judgment.

Accountability still counts. If program officers are making ill-advised or disastrous grants with their discretionary funds, they will not be program officers for long.

We began Momentum with a discussion about the importance of being our best selves in order to take advantage of the values and rhythms of the Connected Age. For foundations being their best selves means sticking to seed funding and funding of short-term projects. If they do, grantees will be able to stop bemoaning the short-term nature of foundation funding because they will expect it. When the best selves of foundations become clear to both foundations and their grantees their relationships will be much more constructive and positive. Activist organizations will be able to at last put foundation funding into perspective. Grants should be project-focused and short-term. Activist organizations should build a broad base of individual donor support and earned income to be sustainable.

Given this orientation, the Connected Age can positively affect giving in a variety of ways. The growth of giving circles is a wonderful example of ways that donors can increase philanthropic giving through networks of friends and colleagues. Giving circles are groups of people who come together—some casually, others more formally—as networks of like-minded people, to pool their philanthropic dollars to give to causes. A study by New Ventures in Philanthropy in 2005 analyzed seventy-seven different giving circles, most of which had been started since 2000. They range from informal gatherings of friends sharing a potluck dinner and deciding where to donate their hundreds of dollars, to structured organizations like Social Venture Partners, legal entities with bylaws. Seventy percent of those surveyed conduct site visits to potential grantees. Giving circles are attractive to women donors who like the social-network opportunities as well as the increased clout of their giving. The circles create trusted networks of friends who talk and learn about activists and activism, a boon for women interested in philanthropy.

Connected philanthropy mirrors the trends and values of connected activism: agility, openness, and networks. Those who choose to change will find a large number of options for engaging their potential and current grantees.

Complaints and trends have encouraged foundations to provide long-term general operating support for grantees. For a long time, I was a member of this chorus, urgently insisting that foundations give longer, larger grants in order for activists to be successful. We were wrong.

Remember foundations operate by choice. They are required to do little by law, simply to give out 5 percent of their assets annually, averaged over three years, and that amount includes administrative expenses. How they give and who they give to are entirely up to them. Making fundamental shifts in the ways that foundations think and act is a tall order for entities that do not have to do anything in particular. If you were sitting with a pot of money that you could give to thousands of different groups, each of which would thank you profusely and honor you, would you give to the same ones over and over again, or would you want to spread it around? Most people are inclined to spread their wealth around.

Examples of artificial behavior, like keeping information proprietary and making distinctions between political activities and charitable activities because of the tax code, have been explored in my book, Momentum. Add to this list the unreasonable expectation that foundations should behave in a way that is counter to their best selves. Foundations do not often give long-term support, or they change their minds in the mid- term, causing tremendous disruption, because giving long-term is not natural for them.

Like a sprinter trying to become a marathon runner, funders giving long-term tend to run out of steam quickly.