Foresight Predictions for 2014
What can we count on happening in the next 12 months? Here’s a list of predictions to watch over the next year.
Regulations, industry norms, and infrastructure
- At least one major nonprofit/foundation infrastructure organization will close up shop.
- Nonprofits and associations will experience new regulatory challenges from unexpected sources such as the sharing economy (for instance, from peers.org).
- Digital tools for humanitarian aid will be common in disaster response and will become part of disaster infrastructure.
- Donor disclosure rules will return to the media spotlight with the U.S.’s 2014 midterm elections.
- We will experience a major scandal in the crowdfunding marketplace.
- Beneficiaries of other services will begin to organize and be heard in the way that the “e-patient” movement is beginning to change medical care and research.
Data and technology
- One winner (at least) of the Gates Foundation’s Data Interoperability Grand Challenge will launch a widely-used new product or service for social sector data by December 2014.
- New ecosystems of service providers, consulting firms, and constituent management companies will evolve to help associations and foundations manage crowdfunding campaigns.
- More nonprofits and other associations will use MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) as professional development opportunities for their staffs.
- New mobile money tools that make phone-tophone, peer-to-peer payments easier will make informal networks of people even more visible, viable, and important.
- Mandatory e-filing for all American nonprofit tax returns will cause new backlogs at the IRS, ironically slowing the timely sharing of nonprofit data.
- Github will become a widely used, meaningful sharing platform for nonprofits. (And, you will learn what Github is.)
- Feedback Labs will gain real traction, and similar efforts to provide beneficiaries a voice will launch beyond development aid.
- Video will be the next infographic.
Privacy
- Humanitarian groups will develop codes of ethics and new standards for digital privacy.
- Americans and Europeans will make greater use of “personal privacy” protection services on the Internet; that is, they will use services that allow them to own and control their own data.
- A nonprofit standard for data privacy will develop.
Other
- American foundations will launch several new programmatic initiatives rooted in concerns about the polarized and paralyzed state of American democracy.
Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.
This takeaway was derived from Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2014.