This is an excerpt from an article in the Huffington Post today:

One of the many results of technological advancement is that nonprofits can no longer ignore the world outside their doors. Nor can they realistically expect to survive if they are unwilling or unable to embrace the developments around them…

I don’t know how profound this is; I’m not sure that non-profits have necessarily had their heads in the sand, historically, but I think there is evidence that suggests that organizations that maximize social networking and new media outlets to associate their brands with something more impactful and novel (an updated way of solving an old problem; maternal mortality, e.g.) are more successful than those that do not. This is to say nothing of the actual program work – it’s all about presentation. And, ideally, with this new emphasis on public presentation comes more transparency and accountability. We (the philanthropic public) start asking harder questions if we don’t find the information in the public realm; requests that “successful” programs are predicated on data, for example. This results in more transparency that then helps weed the lesser out from the superior solutions to social problems.