Six Degrees of Bill Gates

As a prospect researcher, I'm asked about once a week by a fundraiser how they might be able to get in touch with Bill Gates. Or Oprah. Or the King of Sweden. It's a legitimate question. Anyone who does fundraising knows that there are the donors - the passionate folks who want to make a difference with their financial currency - and then there are the connectors - often completely different folks who seem to know everybody and are willing to help out by using their social currency. One of the keys to successful fundraising is being able to collect and utilize both kinds of currency.

For years, we researchers in Arizona relied on what was known as "The Red Book". (Not related in any way to Mao Tse-tung. Honestly.) Our "The Red Book: A Community Directory" is a hardback book bound in bright red velveteen, which lists the Who's Who of Arizona business and society. Fundraisers and social climbers and others have been using it for years. In 1978, for instance, if you wanted to find out who might know somebody that worked for Governor Rose Mofford, because you really needed to catch Ms. Mofford's ear about an important project - you, as a prospect researcher, would go to the Red Book and start thumbing through it, trying to find anybody who might work in the governor's office, and hoping to heck you recognized a name.

Now everything's been simplified, of course. Or made more complex but also more accessible. Facebook lets you request a friendship with anyone in the world, almost, although that request might be ignored. And LinkedIn can tell you just how many "nodes" or connections lie between yourself and Bill Gates. (I just checked. I have no Links between myself and Bill Gates. Bill Gates and I are not connected. I don't know him. I don't know anyone who knows him, or anyone who knows somebody that might know him, ad infinitum.)

But the most exciting advance in social networking for philanthropy is the practical, proactive implementation of network science. At the University of Arizona, we've recently started using a network analysis tool that helps us uncover the relationships between our most important "social currency" philanthropists and the "financial currency" philanthropists we wish to meet. Nowadays when we're asked by a fundraiser how they might be able to contact Bill Gates, we type Mr. Gate's name into the network tool and we can see exactly who in our organization knows him, or who might know someone who knows him. (I just typed my name and Mr. Gates' name into our network analysis tool, and see that we have two degrees of separation. I could call somebody who could call him. Pretty nifty.)

So for me, this week has been one of the most interesting of all our modules in MIS 587, since I'm starting to understand how the visualizations in our new research tool at my job actually work, how the nodes and vertices give weight and meaning to the connections when we enter a name into the search box. 

But I think there's still much more to explore in terms of philanthropy and network science. For instance, nonprofits have recently flipped the model around and have started to band together to effectively increase the size of their node and also their connectedness, bringing their potential donors together into a larger common pool. And crowdfunding has drastically changed the landscape for smaller donations, making it easier for a person to donate to any given cause, but harder for the cause to stand out in a crowded field. And I'm willing to bet that, sometime in the next year or two, some network scientist somewhere will most likely write a paper or create an app or a tool that will change the face of philanthropy once again. And I can't wait to see what happens next.

Additional reading:

'Give It Back, George': Network Dynamics in the Philanthropic Field (.doc warning)

Networks, Money and Meaning