This is an excerpt from a longer post on my blog, Tactical Philanthropy, about Day One of NetSquared:

What I’ve found interesting so far is the humbleness with which most of the projects present themselves. If you’ve ever seen for-profit companies pitch for funding, humble isn’t the word that comes to mind. But I’m not so sure that if I’m a funder who is thinking about making large grants to a startup, that I want “humble” to be how I describe the entrepreneurs. If you think that you have a transformational idea that will help with a significant social problem, it’s OK to have some self-confidence or even a little arrogance.

“Doing good” isn’t enough, funders want to know who is doing the “most good”. In a world with scarce philanthropic dollars, creating competitive environments is one way to allocate those dollars effectively. NetSquared is a good step in that direction and nonprofits need to prepare themselves to compete. So my advice to the projects for day two is don’t apologize for what you don’t know yet, tell us what makes you great. If you don’t think you and your project is an outstanding use of philanthropic dollars, better than all the other projects, you might want to consider a different conference to attend.

The panel judges seem to have no hesitancy to ask tough questions. For example, “Hasn’t company X been doing what you want to do for the last decade?” or “It doesn’t seem like you have any expertise in the area you are telling us is most critical to your success”. Make no mistake, today is a day for competition.

Being good at collaboration is a great competitive advantage. I’ve already seen a number of projects reach out to other projects publicly. That raises those projects’ status in my view (because they know how to play well with others, which is critical when they try to enact their mission). Collaboration is a good way to become more competitive. But you need to know when you are trying to make friends and when you are trying to win. Unfortunately, even if we’re all trying to do good, we can’t all win. There is a limited amount of philanthropic dollars and no matter how much you want to do good, if someone else can “do good better”, they should win and you should lose. The naïve belief that all nonprofits are “winners” steals food from the hungry, resources from the impoverished and valuable wisdom from those who need it.