"

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 6 seconds

A Whole New Way to Drive Greater Social Impact in Giving

The landscape of charitable giving is about to receive a makeover with the launch of Posiba, a big data and analytics information service supporting foundations, governments, charities and donors, using the power of aggregated information. 


Foundations, philanthropists and nonprofit leaders are seeking to improve individual lives and societies, yet most are still seeking ways to measure their influence.  According to Posiba’s CEO, Elizabeth Dreicer, “Many recognize they need intelligent information to drive more positive impact and are ready to adopt solutions that are easily deployed and affordable.”

Posiba was created as a joint effort between Posiba CEO, Elizabeth Dreicer, and then COO of The California Endowment, B. Kathlyn Mead. Mead is now CEO of The San Diego Foundation. Through their experiences serving on nonprofit and foundation boards, the two were driven to better understand the influence of charitable giving. To do so, they needed better information—data and analysis. Not seeing these capabilities in the market, the two set out to explore what was possible.

Now it’s possible
“Posiba enables any size foundation, nonprofit or government organization to be empowered with information in a way that is actionable and focused on impact,” said Dreicer.  Historically, data on a charity’s impact has been difficult to gather and analyze.  Now, Posiba does the legwork by creating a hub of information for any requested community so organizations no longer have to collect information from scratch.

“While the private sector has been quick to understand and capitalize on the value of data analytics and visualization, nonprofits (including endowments and foundations) have not, likely due to resource limitations,” said Mead. “However, we knew if we could harness the right data and present it in an accessible way, the results could be game changing.”

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics, in the U.S. alone, public charities hold over $3.0 trillion in assets, with annual donor contributions and grant-making at approximately $350 billion.

State of the art data analytics
The vast majority of data relating to social programs such as obesity, violence, teen pregnancy, and vaccination rates is available on the Internet (big data).  The data can be scraped, analyzed with modern techniques (analytics) and used to figure out who’s funding what, where, for whom, and to what end. Posiba works by aggregating and fusing public and private data along with crowd intelligence to support the needed insight.  Posiba is also training its system through broad surveillance techniques (literature, Internet-sphere data, etc.) and natural language processing to capture and  understand the many interventions taking place in the sector and how those actions are perceived to be working by experts, practitioners and, eventually, recipients.

These aggregated data are then made available at scale on an affordable basis to system participants both on the funding and requesting sides.  According to Dreicer, “Combining the necessary information enables a more holistic view of the ecosystem environment (funders and indicators) and how this is changing over time. This knowledge enables all to quickly move to the understanding that is required to move with greater velocity.”

Interestingly, “individuals are the biggest contributors to charity and give about $220 billion in the U.S. alone—behind governments, yet outpacing foundations 5 to 1. Indeed, their support is also more stable and less subject to the ebb and flow of government and foundation policy shifts. So, getting information about individual support to funders and governments of all types, as well as supporting individual donors with information about impact is extraordinarily important.” In fact,according to Dreicer, “We have been challenged by one of our investors to capture and support individual donors more effectively.”  Posiba expects to make an exciting announcement on that front very soon.

Knowledge is power
Mead brought Posiba to The California Endowment and helped field the early Posiba platform in a real world setting. According to Mead, “Prior to this point, while there were goals, it was difficult for trustees and staff to understand the collective funding impact toward these goals.  It is rare that only one funder is supporting an initiative, organization or place.” Posiba was incubated at Kuity, an advanced analytics software company, and spun out earlier this year. Since then, it has been working with beta customers—foundations, nonprofits, academic and government organizations—while aggregating and organizing content from public and other data sources.

Nonprofits can now see what is working and can readily find who is funding their type of programs. Larger nonprofit organizations and foundations can afford to hire staff and build out data analytics capabilities.  This is not true for smaller organizations, which make up the majority of the sector. Surprisingly, most foundations, as well as charities, are very small. In fact, according to the Internal Revenue Service and The Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics, two-thirds of foundations and over 90% of public charities in the U.S. have less than $1 million in total assets.


Read 4456 times
Rate this item
(0 votes)

Visit other PMG Sites:

PMG360 is committed to protecting the privacy of the personal data we collect from our subscribers/agents/customers/exhibitors and sponsors. On May 25th, the European's GDPR policy will be enforced. Nothing is changing about your current settings or how your information is processed, however, we have made a few changes. We have updated our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to make it easier for you to understand what information we collect, how and why we collect it.