Amy Luckey's recent GEO article, "Grantmaking 2.0: Using New Technology to Enhance Grantmaker Practices," covers four ways foundations can use the social web:

1. Facilitate communication among grantees through tagging and facilitating connections before and after in-person gatherings. (She highlights the nptech tag here!)

2. Connect grantees with external experts.

3. Serve as information resources to the wider community, not only grantees, by aggregating and sharing community data, aggregating and sharing information about funding and learning opportunities, and supporting strategic community mapping.

4. Improve communication with grantees and increase transparency.

The article is chuck full of ideas and resources. I particularly like this comment from one of the experts she interviewed regarding how to choose the tools to use (my emphasis added):

"In our experience, if a need isn't clearly identified there's a big risk of inventing a solution in search of [a problem]. This is a message we frequently deliver to foundation staff interested in exploring this concept. In fact, we usually recommend that the project begin with a discovery phase process specifically to define the problem to be solved. Absent that, any technology solution is likely to fail. There are simply too many things competing for grantees' attention -- both online and off."

nptech