How to do it?

This past Wednesday, the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship at New York University hosted Ami Dar for a speaking engagement open to the public. Ami Dar founded Action without Borders/Idealist.org, a project that serves as a virtual meeting ground for non-profits. In operational terms, it's a giant database of do-gooders.

Ami spoke and then answered questions for an hour and a half. Much of what he had to say--and most of the questions put to him--concerned the functioning of non-profits. He offered advice of the following sort: if you want to do non-profit work, get comfortable with money. Non-profits are obsessed with money, precisely because they aren't out to make a bunch of it. Learn how to read a balance sheet; know your financials; get used to to thinking about bottom lines.

Later, at the post-event dinner at Negril Village (Caribbean! Not bad!), the talk centered mainly on the promulgation of ideas--not only on their dissemination, but on retaining credit for them. People have had their do-gooder ideas stolen and then been forced to deal with the disconcerting fact that the theft has led to some good being done in the world, just not in their name. All agreed that this amounted to an acceptable, if not a fine thing. Further, the discutants pointed out that the more widely and formally one presents ideas--opens them to theft--the more securely the public record identifies the idea's owner. It's almost Buddhist: the more you give away your ideas, the more you own them.

But all of this talk missed out on the one information issue that, I think, remains unexplored. It does all amount to information, really: contact information; guiding principles; ideas. Who's out there doing what? How do they achieve success? What's the next trend in non-profit work? Almost comprehensive, but there remains a whole field of information that, while not proprietary, everyone guards as closely as possible. This information, nobody puts on a website.

It's savoir-faire. Tricks of the trade. Professional experience. Inside knowledge. It's the true nuts-and-bolts stuff. Example: the Funded Transportation Program at the Department of Defense. The DOD has two programs that provide containerized shipping for humanitarian aid: the Denton Program and the Funded Program. Denton arranges shipping through the military. A humanitarian aid agency has, say, a 20' container of medical equipment to send to Darfur, but no money to shipt it. The agency applies to Denton. When a C-130 with some extra space heads to an airport near the agency's destination--Cairo, maybe--the DOD arranges for the placing of the container on the flight. The process plays out in myriad ways, but you get the basic idea of near total inefficiency.

That's where the Funded Transporatation program comes in. Here the aid agency applies through the appropriate DOD office, and a DOD agent books and pays for a container in the same way that normal human beings do it. Straight-up free shipping. Now, there's a list of restricted countries, of course, and inspections, and the DOD occasionally shuts down the program and the DOD employees who run it tend to be morons, but, when it works, it is free shipping.

And when you look at the list of agencies that have accounts with this program, you see what kind of insider information this really is.

That's the kind of thing we need a website for.