NetSquared recently received a $600,000 grant over three years from the Surdna Foundation, a long-time supporter of TechSoup. While at NTEN's 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference in March, I sat down with Vince Stehle, the Program Officer for the Nonprofit Sector Initiative at the Surdna Foundation. We talked about philanthropy, nonprofit technology trends, and Surdna's support of NetSquared. Vince is a NetSquared Advocate, and he was awarded the NTEN Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

Below is an edited transcript of the podcast interview with Vince. You can also listen to it on the little player below, or on the NetSquared Podcast.

Note: References to the evolution of NetSquared are mentioned frequently in this interview. For those of you who are unfamiliar with its history, here is a brief overview: TechSoup was originally founded as CompuMentor in 1987. TechSoup was created by CompuMentor in 2000. NetSquared, a project of TechSoup, was founded in 2005. The first NetSquared Conference was in 2006, the second NetSquared Conference (N2Y2) was in 2007, and the third NetSquared Conference (N2Y3) will be in May 2008.

Vince Stehle: Surdna is a family foundation that continues to be directed by, to a great degree, the members of the family. They are fourth and fifth generation descendants of John Andrus, the Founder. Surdna is the family name, Andrus, spelled backwards. People often wonder about that. It's been around for a long time. It started in 1917. Although it is a very long-standing foundation, we hope to really be on the cutting edge of the most important developments.

We are always looking for social innovation in all of our programs, and I think we're particularly lucky to be supporters of CompuMentor and TechSoup, and now NetSquared.

BB: Surdna has had a long-standing role with CompuMentor, and has provided some very generous support for NetSquared. Can you talk a little bit about that history, and how it led to supporting NetSquared?

VS: If you look at our support for CompuMentor, it really follows the evolution of the organization. Hopefully it has helped it move forward as an organization from its time when we first started, seven or eight years ago, to help it to move from a significant, and well-respected, regional technical assistance provider doing a lot of consulting and direct services, to becoming a national force in information technology through its TechSoup platform, and also, obviously, the TechSoup Stock donation platform.

We were lucky to get in on the ground floor of that one, and, I think, helped them to really focus on important things like business planning and making sure that it was a sustainable enterprise, without in any way undermining the organizational culture of CompuMentor.

As we've followed our funding through the years, we have tended to give CompuMentor a general support approach to its development of TechSoup, but in the last round we decided to focus on what's next for the organization as NetSquared has become an increasingly important part of the evolution of the organization.

BB: What are some of the trends you are seeing with nonprofits and technology? How does the social web fit into that, and should foundations be funding nonprofits' use of the social web?

VS: If you look at foundation support for technology, our support for technology, and also the fields' adoption of technology, it follows a similar trajectory. That is, that 10 or 15 years ago I think we were all familiar with the organizational divide that existed between nonprofits and for-profits. Most nonprofits simply didn't have the basic tools to run their organization: the back office, the internal communications, the accounting, the finance, the membership development software--all of the tools they needed just to run the organization.

Now, I think, through a lot of the organizations that are familiar to us through things like NTEN and the NPower networks; and, of course, first among all of them, CompuMentor through its TechSoup portal, we have really closed that gap. Now, everybody has the basic technology that they need to do their work.

I suppose that it's a job that is never finished because you constantly need more resources, but in terms of the huge gap that existed, I think it has been closed. At the same time, the frontier of using technology has shifted from back office and internal operations, to much more external activities: communications, advocacy, outreach. And so, for most organizations, the emphasis of where they are trying to develop new approaches to technology is more on that external function, more on the connections to the outside world.

Of course, the social web is the perfect venue for our investment, and also for CompuMentor's work. They are a natural for hosting the premiere event around the social web for nonprofits by virtue of all the client relationships, the content relationships, and the network of information providers in the TechSoup portal, as well as all of the constituencies who use it to take advantage of all the great resources and concrete products, as well as the guidance that it provides.

Given TechSoup's reach, CompuMentor was a great host for NetSquared as an event. Now it is evolving from an event, to a real community. Our current investment--a pretty substantial contribution by our standards certainly, $600,000 over three years-- is to build out the NetSquared community and to take it beyond an event, and to really keep it alive throughout the year, throughout the world.

BB: You've been to both NetSquared Conferences. Can you talk a little bit about your experience at both events?

VS: It's interesting because it's an event itself that is fluid and changing, which is only natural for the work that it's focusing on. The first NetSquared was more of a traditional conference kind of event with, I think, a very rich reflection of the community that it was serving. A lot of voices were heard from. Maybe too many voices were heard from. It was an overwhelming amount of information in a short period of time, with all these different perspectives.

I think there was a recognition then that we could focus more as a community on a set of particular activities, particular projects that could benefit from our collective wisdom. That was a great evolution to the second NetSquared [N2Y2] to say, "OK, all of us are now going to focus on these 21 Projects and help each of them grow and reach their full potential."

Reaching their full potential might mean a great expansion, or it might mean actually not going ahead and doing what it was the designers of the project hoped to do, because they learned through the process, the dialogue, that somebody else was doing it, and that there was no reasonable expectation that they could get the resources to do it effectively.

For whatever reason, you find in the NetSquared community both support for doing it better, and also an honest appraisal of the viability of the idea. Everybody wins when they either grow their organization, or they learn early that their organization isn't going to be viable, and they should move on to the next idea.

If I could just focus on the second NetSquared [N2Y2], it is, I think, a really interesting example for me. Often we think about foundations and grant makers as simply supporting whatever work is out there and coming from some sort of Olympian perspective: You bring the ideas to us, we sort among them, and then we choose them, and that's the best decision we can make. It's generally thought of as a detached process. For NetSquared [N2Y2], it was a great process in forming our thinking and our relationship with one of our grantees.

The Participatory Culture Foundation operates a software project called Miro. It's an online video player. You download the software to your computer, and it helps you to view any type of video file, and to organize those video files into channels. The Participatory Culture Foundation received Surdna's support the year before the last NetSquared [N2Y2]. It was at the suggestion of another funder who introduced us to the organization, and the idea. We made a modest introductory grant to the organization, but I did not have a very deep appreciation for the potential of this organization.

It was really only through my reintroduction to Miro at NetSquared last year, that I appreciated the full potential of what this organization and this project could achieve. Partly that was because the business mentor, Rick Hess, who NetSquared introduced to the project, was such a smart and effective advocate for the organization. And it was partly just through witnessing the growth of the organization in the context of the dialogue with both the plenary session, and also in the group sessions on technology, economics, and social impact.

That process, which was intended to identify the strongest organizations, was also helpful in shaping and informing both the organization, which I think has improved by virtue of its NetSquared experience, but also my own understanding of what it could be. The following year, we doubled our support, and increased it to a two-year grant, informed by the NetSquared experience.

BB: You were a writer for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and now you're directly involved with philanthropy. What excites you about how the social web can affect philanthropy, whether it's through new tools, or a change in ethos, and what do you think are some of the possible concerns?

VS: Mostly I think, there are great opportunities. And I think, what we're finding out is that there really is great knowledge in the networks. We may have said that over the years as some sort of blithe comment to make people feel comfortable with the power that foundations have, that we would pay lip service to the knowledge that is present in the field, but actually I think what the social web tells us is that a more democratic system of gathering information about the best solutions to problems is more effective. The technology and the social organizing empowered by the new technology actually allow us to achieve it much more directly.

BB: And what are some of your concerns?

VS: Well, my concern would be that we make sure that we're authentic about that, and that we don't just dress it up and make it a glorified popularity campaign. There are lots of ways of using the tools and the protocols that aren't truly taking advantage of the contributions of everyone in the network: all the choices are made up front, and then you give a kind of multiple-choice test in the process.

BB: What advice do you have for nonprofits who want to use social web tools and are trying to find funding for their initiatives?

VS: The first thing to think about is, rather than trying to build anything from scratch, always ask yourself if somebody has already built a tool. Is there a free, or much less expensive way of achieving this that's already been done, and has been built with the intention of serving needs just like your own?

As a long time supporter of VolunteerMatch, which we have supported over the years for substantial dollars, and I've also sat on the Board of that organization, I'm very familiar with what we've accomplished at VolunteerMatch. That's a great platform that anyone can use to obtain volunteer resources. Organizations can reach volunteers, and individuals can find volunteer opportunities. It seems to me that it would be redundant for a lot of organizations to try and create a local volunteer matching service online. We see a lot of them. The Internet invites more global solutions, and so, generally speaking, when you try to do global solutions at the local level, it tends to be an inefficient approach.

That would be one example. The other thing is, what we heard a lot about in the late '90s and early 2000's, coming from the dot-com boom, and what you're hearing a little bit more of an echo of in more recent days, is the notion that a commercial enterprise is going to achieve a dominant market position. That used to be called a winner-take-all approach to Internet enterprises. I think what we've demonstrated pretty clearly now through things like the TechSoup portal, and VolunteerMatch, and Idealist, and a number of really strong global platforms, is that there is an authentic desire to achieve market position on behalf of the sector. You attract a critical mass of audience, which is then available to any nonprofit to take advantage of that platform.

Network for Good is another perfect example of that, where any nonprofit can use their tools to find donations, to present their case. Really that is, I think, our highest aspiration, to build those tools that everyone can take advantage of. That's how we make a stronger nonprofit sector, by delivering those tools to the widest number.

Any individual organization that comes and seeks organizational capacity for their own technology purposes, for us, it's a very inefficient way of supporting the sector. But, if we can find those strategic points, those high leverage points where we can build resources that then can be used by hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of organizations, we feel much better about that.

I wouldn't believe, by any stretch, that all the tools that are needed have already been built. There certainly is room for additional innovation and development of tools for the sector. I'm not suggesting, "We've already got that, so you don't need to do any of this. You just have to plug in and take advantage of what we've already done for you."

No. There is certainly room for innovation and building, but I think, the principles remain that a lot of purpose-built, highly customized tools for particular purposes aren't really sustainable, certainly not with the funding environment that we've got right now.

BB: Is there anything else you want the NetSquared Community to know about Surdna's work, or anything else?

VS: You know, I think as a field, philanthropy needs to constantly be looking for opportunities to identify and nurture social innovation. All of us should be doing that. All of us in whatever field, whether it's the environment, or community development, or health education, whatever.

The caveat is, we shouldn't be so interested in innovation that we don't continue to fund good work on a sustainable basis, and to just run flavor of the month to the next thing. But, with that caveat aside, how do we find innovation? We have to be in the places where people are doing things differently.

The NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference is one great place to find innovation. NetSquared is another great place to find innovation. In the broader world, a lot of people talk about TED as a conference where this happens, too. Another great event on the East Coast is Pop! Tech, which is in Camden, Maine.

What I would suggest is that funders need to get out from behind their desks. They need to move beyond the site visits that they already have scheduled. They need to get to some of these events where innovators are coming together, and they need to experience the mash-up of ideas at any of these conferences.