Ken Berger & Robert M. Penna, Ph.D., Charity Navigator

As calls increase for charities to be more open and accountable in their management and reporting, it is natural for many of them to ask, considering the extra work involved, "What’s in it for us?. Is there a connection between more transparency and more successful fundraising?"

One answer to that question today is:

1. There probably isn’t an overwhelming connection at the moment; but...
2. There should be; and eventually...
3. There will be.

To appreciate the change we anticipate will come in the next few years, it is important to recognize how things are changing regarding how charities justify themselves and their appeals for support.

Flickr Photo: h.koppdelaneyTransparent. Participatory. Collaborative.

Those are the values President Obama cited last December in his Open Government Initiative. Are those words you usually associate with your government? Even non-conspiracy theorists would likely have a hard time summoning up "transparent" as one of the top three adjectives to describe our government. We would all likely agree that it's a shame: our government should be transparent.

Now let's think about our sector. 

Transparent. Participatory. Collaborative.

What do you think? Do those words describe the nonprofit sector? How about your nonprofit? 

Flickr Photo: FaysterNow that the stimulus package -- or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, if you're keeping score at home -- has been signed into law, the work of making it all happen begins. No matter what you think of the law itself, everyone in our sector needs to pay very close attention to Recovery.gov.

You've heard a lot on this blog, and many others in the sector, about the power of social media and the web to bring more transparency to our work. I know that as good, smart people working at good, smart organizations, we believe in the power of transparency. But it's difficult to put the theory into practice.

When data is stuck on servers, web publishing is slow and centralized. When your stakeholders can't chew on, discuss, and disseminate your data and messages, transparency can't happen.

But the hurdles to transparency are vanishing rapidly. More and more of our data is in the cloud, or accessible via APIs. Publishing to the web is now, in the worst case scenario, easy, and in the best case scenario, automagic. Social media tools give your stakeholders ways to interact with data like never before.

That's where Recovery.gov comes in.

Obviously, there's not a lot on the site yet. But it could be a very good model for how nonprofits can use the web to open up all the way and be as transparent as possible. On the site, you can already read the bill, see the big breakdowns of how the money is being spent, and explore the projected timeline for implementation and impact. My favorite bit so far is the jobs map.

Obviously, you aren't overseeing a stimulus package -- but you can use the same set of tools and ideas to show your stakeholders exactly what you're up to. That's what turns a one-time donor into a long-term supporter.

Here's what I think we'll see on Recovery.gov that nonprofits should think about:

Flickr Photo: Duane StoreyJames Carville helped keep the Clinton campaign on message in 1992 by hanging a sign on Bill Clinton's door that read, in part, "The economy, stupid." That now-famous catchphrase is widely credited with giving the Clinton campaign its win. Although we don't know if it was ever taped up on any doors, I think the winning strategy for the Obama campaign was "Transparency, stupid!"

In this election, Obama rode a tidal wave of youth vote to the presidency, with 66% of voters under 30 casting their ballot for the Democrat. What the campaign realized, early and often, is that the under-thirty crowd communicates differently from the rest of us. As Allison Fine writes in Momentum, this group is "... likely to engage in two-way conversation with staff, volunteers, and clients, rather than in one-way broadcasts, the style of communication most often used by organizations now."

This meant two things for the campaign.

Flickr Photo: GreencolanderI'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer without thinking.

Let's say you had $100 you had to give to someone else. It doesn't matter who you give it to, just that you give it away to a single person. Who would you give it to?

Is the first person you thought of a family member? A close friend? It probably is.

So, why wouldn't you give it to the first person in need you encounter on your way to get a latte in the morning?

The answer is trust.

You have a relationship that indicates to you that your $100 gift will have some meaning to that person, and that it will be used in a way that is satisfying to both the recipient AND you.

We know trust is a key ingredient missing in our sector these days. Paul Light of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, conducts a regular survey about public trust. The summary of his latest study shows that trust is still declining: fewer and fewer individuals think that nonprofits are doing a good job, and more and more individuals think nonprofits are doing a bad job.

Evaluation is clearly a sticky wicket. Now that we're smack dab in the middle of the information age, it's easier than ever for nonprofits to track all kinds of data that help them measure and evaluate their performance. We know down to the minute how many people are downloading reports, signing up to volunteer, sending emails to decision makers, visiting our clinics, etc. Pervasive Internet access and ever-shrinking hardware mean that we can collect and store more data than ever before. And we can publish that data more easily than ever before, increasing our transparency as we increase our measurements.

No one will argue that this is a bad thing. But are we really measuring what matters? Do all these numbers really tell us if we are meeting our missions? Take this number. Tell me what you think this number says about NTEN:

• 7158: September site visits to date at http://nten.org.