This is me not being cynical about nonprofit innovation
A comment I made about the newly launched Jumo platform for nonprofits, in response to much bellyaching on Facebook about it being duplicative and pointless:
I don’t get it either. But I’ve been increasingly thinking about a recent David Pogue column ( http://nyti.ms/id0kep) in which he says “Things don’t replace things; they just splinter.”
We have this idea in the nonprofit world that we must overly optimize the resources we have; cleanly transitioning from one model to the next with minimal duplication. That’s not realistic and probably wouldn’t be innovative either. Instead we just have this messy iterative process of broken models, half-starts and ignorant foundation officers—from which the next round of innovators can cobble together an itch-scratcher and pitch it as “Hotness-XYZ but for nonprofits”.
I think Jumo sucks so far, but the few million dollars it took to launch is a drop in the bucket. Unless it causes Omidyar and Knight to pick up their checkbooks and go home, I think it will help move the ball towards something more transformational to the sector.