Minnesota Council on Foundations Blog – Philanthropy Potluck

Imagine being able to map a disaster in real time. Imagine thousands of people with mobile phones sending texts that post up-to-the-minute data points as disasters (and solutions) unfold, whether it be the exact position of oil on the Gulf shore , where crimes have occurred in your neighborhood, or where to find resources to help your grandma to dig out of her snow-bound house in Washington, DC.

The Ushahidi platform allows users to do just that. Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a free, open-source web application that allows users to create real-time visualizations of data that’s sent to the system via SMS (texting), email or the web.  Originally developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the 2008 post-election fallout, Ushahidi has been deployed by dozens of organizations for a variety of applications from reporting on the Gulf oil spill, tracking voting in Sudan, and much more.

The potential of a tool like this for relief organizations is obvious and compelling — but I think there could be interesting applications for grantmakers as well.

For instance, a foundation could create a map to which grantees and even their constituents, the ultimate users of a nonprofit’s services, could post.  The geographic reach of a grant, as well as to some extent a representation of its impact, could be revealed in interesting, previously-difficult-to-visualize ways.

Other grants visualization tools exist. But current tools fall short in that the mapped data points apply only to the physical location of the grantee organization itself. Useful data — absolutely, but if the nonprofit provides services in other locations, the reach of that organization and its impact on those communities is not currently represented.

Imagine a nonprofit staff member using a tool like Ushahidi to send a text message to the system to map out different service locations, which would then feed back to the centralized database and be displayed. Grantmakers, policymakers and nonprofits could then use this data to identify gaps where communities are under served, and use that data to make more informed decisions about their work to support the common good.

This is just a taste of what philanthropic transparency may look like in the future. I’m looking forward to seeing what innovative grantmakers do with new technologies like Ushahidi and, most importantly, the ultimate impact the data unleashes.

- Cary Lenore Walski, MCF web communications associate

Thanks to Lara Hoke at NonprofitNext, whose post on the Ushahidi platform introduced me to the tool.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 4:23 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.