No matter their missions, nonprofits across every sector are experiencing heightened pressure. Democracy Fund’s Kalpana Simhan and Dan Gurmankin explain how we’re charting new territory to reduce the grant reporting burden from an average of 15 hours to 5 hours.
Topic: Innovation
Blog
How Political Ad Transparency Can Help Fix Democracy’s Cybersecurity Problem
Without sufficient transparency and accountability, online platforms have become hotbeds for disinformation that manipulates, maligns, and disenfranchises voters, especially people of color and women. The Online Political Ads Transparency Project is critical to Democracy Fund’s Digital Democracy Initiative’s goal of providing greater transparency and oversight to combat coordinated disinformation campaigns, minimize misinformation, and define and defend civil rights online.
There is nothing new about misinformation, dirty tricks, and voter suppression in the history of democracy. But as political campaigns – like much of the rest of public life – have moved online, so have tactics to subvert election outcomes. Political ads and messaging are micro-targeted at voters who have no idea who is paying to influence them or what their motives might be. Or, as Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy, researchers for the Online Political Ads Transparency Project at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity, would put it, democracy has a cybersecurity problem.
In May 2018, Edelson and McCoy found a perfect opportunity to study this problem: they decided to look at Facebook’s newly public, searchable archive of political ads. Facebook had released this archive following criticism that it was profiting from political ads while not disclosing information about them to the public. Unlike TV and radio broadcasters, who are required to report political ad buys on television and radio to the Federal Communications Commission, online platforms like Facebook — to this day — are not legally required to do so. But while Facebook’s lack of transparency was technically legal, that doesn’t mean it was right. The democratic process is harmed when Americans don’t know who is attempting to influence them via political ads.
Diving into Facebook’s archive of political ads, Edelson and McCoy scraped information and used the resulting data to publish an analysis that showed that from May 2018 to July 2018, Donald Trump was the largest spender on the platform — a key insight into political influence on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook eventually shut down the NYU team’s ability to gather information by scraping — but this was only a temporary setback. Facing mounting pressure from the research community, Facebook soon after created a way for researchers to obtain these data programmatically, via an API interface. This made it simpler to do an ongoing analysis of the ad library corpus, versus a one-time scrape covering a limited time period.
In doing all of this work, the researchers’ goal was to push Facebook to adopt better transparency policies — by presenting them with the evidence of how inadequate their current policies were. But Edelson and McCoy were learning that was an even more difficult task than they had expected.
“When you are battling a traditional cybersecurity problem like spam” explains Edelson, “the honest actors – whether it’s a bank, an insurance company, or something else – have incentives to change their behavior, because their customers will reward them with increased profits. But in this case, online platforms may have a long-term interest in being good citizens, but their short term interest is in making money off of ads and targeted content, precisely the tools the bad actors are gaming. So it’s hard to get them to change.” In other words: social media platforms have competing motivations.
But the team did have one advantage: the power of public pressure. And they uncovered plenty of things that would worry the public. When they conducted a thorough cybersecurity analysis of how well Facebook was adhering to its own policies on political ad disclosure, they found numerous problems. More than half of the advertising pages they studied – representing $37 million of ad spending – lacked proper disclosure of which candidate or organization paid for the ads. Even when names of sponsors were disclosed, the information was sloppy and inconsistent.
They also identified “inauthentic communities” — clusters of pages that appeared to cater to different racial or geographic identity groups that do not adequately disclose how they are connected to each other.
Rather than going straight to the public with this information, Edelson and McCoy reached out to Facebook to share their findings, letting the company know that they planned to present their research publicly in May 2020 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. And it did have an impact: in response, Facebook made internal changes that addressed some of these issues.
This was a victory for the researchers, but the work continues and many obstacles and mysteries remain. Sometimes the Facebook API stops working. Sometimes researchers find ads that are clearly political, but are not included in the official ad library. And sometimes the reports that Facebook releases that aggregate ad data don’t match the raw data they’ve collected.
But despite the difficulties, Edelson and McCoy persist. “I’m proud of the fact we’ve moved Facebook on transparency,” says Edelson, “but there is always more work to do. Voters need to know who is targeting them and how — and how much they are spending — to help them make informed decisions when they fill out their ballots.”
In 2020, the researchers are continuing to work on projects aimed at making Facebook and other platforms safer for our democracy. They have launched AdObserver, a browser plugin that allows Facebook users a way to volunteer data on the ads they are seeing. This will yield valuable information on whether ads are missing from the Facebook Ad Library, as well as information on targeting that the social media platform does not make available. And they are creating a new tool that will help civil society organizations – who represent people who often are targeted by such ads – to quickly identify problematic ad campaigns. While there’s no doubt democracy still has a cybersecurity problem, the NYU researchers are working hard to protect it from threats.
Cover Photo: Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy of The Online Political Ads Transparency Project at New York University’s Center for Cybersecurity. Photo Credit: New York University.
Report
Nationscape Insights Dashboard Launches in Partnership with USA Today
Now researchers, reporters, and armchair pundits have immediate access to America’s diverse views on 40 top policy issues.
Blog
Collaborations, conversations, and COVID-19
The coronavirus pandemic has shaken much more than the ground beneath us: it has rocked every aspect of our society. This norm-shattering situation has shown us the value of a local news ecosystem in keeping our communities informed, healthy, and safe. A robust local news ecosystem means that communities have the flexible foundation they need to receive and share life saving information, connections, and support, pulling in collaborations from newsrooms, neighborhoods, and more.
Cover Photo: A thank-you sign to helpers in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood. Photo by Raed Mansour
An Open Letter to Our Grantees About COVID-19
Dear Colleagues:
We know this is an unsettling time as the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to progress around the world and throughout the U.S. The health and safety of all of our grantees, partners, and the communities we serve are top concerns for all of us at Democracy Fund. Now more than ever, our country needs champions for a more open and just democracy. We’re committed to doing what we can to continue to support you and your organization during these uncertain times.
We know many of you are facing difficult decisions about canceling or participating in events, transitioning your staff to remote work, and addressing new challenges to our democracy created by this public health crisis. As your partner, we want to assure you that we will be as flexible and helpful as possible as you make these adjustments in the coming weeks and months. Grantees will not be penalized in any way for cancelling events or travel related to grant deliverables, shifting in-person events to online forums, or making other changes to planned work to protect the health and safety of your staff and communities. We also recognize that none of us yet fully understand the ramifications that COVID-19 will have on our collective work. As you continue to evaluate the situation and modify your organization’s strategy, we invite you to reach out to your program officer to discuss any broader shifts to your goals and objectives that may be necessary.
On our end, grant payments will continue to go out as planned and we will be flexible with respect to deadlines around grants proposals and reports to free up your time to focus on your organization’s critical short-term needs. If your organization needs additional assistance as you navigate the uncertainty around the spread of COVID-19 and the accompanying economic challenges, please reach out to us. In the immediate term, we are exploring what technology and tools we could make available to grantees to help them better manage working remotely. If your organization is interested or has other ideas of ways we can be helpful, please let your program officer know.
Thank you for your continued commitment to the important work of strengthening our democracy and for your commitment to the safety and health of your staff, partners, and the communities you serve.
Sincerely,
Joe Goldman
President
Democracy Fund
Additional Resources:
Brief
What We Should Talk About When We Talk About Risk
Whether you’re in the for-profit or the nonprofit world, we all seem to be talking about risk. No one wants to “play it safe” or “hedge their bets.” Instead, we’re launching moonshots and embracing failure. The problems we face are so big and complex, the thinking goes, that the only way to tackle them is to put everything on the line and fully commit. But this “risk is good” mantra glosses over the fact that some risky decisions are just bad decisions.
So how should philanthropic organizations leverage risk in a more sophisticated way to achieve the kind of change we seek? The first step may be to acknowledge that much of our most consequential decision making happens in information-poor and ambiguous contexts, and risk taking is simply a strategy for managing this uncertainty. After all, when we describe a decision as “risky,” what we are actually saying is, “I am not sure what will happen if we decide to do X.”
The idea for this paper began with a conversation at Democracy Fund about how we, as a foundation, could take more and better risks. As we got further into this work, however, we realized that the conversation about risk was really rooted in the nature of decision making itself — in particular, what it means to make a good decision in a low-information/high-uncertainty context.
This document lays out the philosophical foundations of the approach we intend to take and what we think it means broadly for Democracy Fund’s work. We hope that by looking at risk taking through a broader lens of decision making, we can open up the conversation both internally and externally about what it means to be an organization that takes smart risks. This approach also provides an opportunity to look more critically at all of our internal processes to see whether they support good decision-making habits and how we might refine these processes to better leverage and mitigate risk to maximize our impact. In the coming months, we’ll be taking a deeper look at these processes — from the decisions we make about the systems we work in and what strategies will lead to the impact we hope to see, to what investments we make, to how we use evaluation and learning to assess and revisit those decisions, and everything in between.
New Guide: How to Get Started Funding Local News in Your Community
Asking Questions and Listening are the First Step
By Teresa Gorman and Fiona Morgan
How do people in your community get news and information about what’s happening where they live? You might answer newspapers, TV, radio … but how about social media? Libraries? The community center bulletin board? The church bulletin? The neighborhood listserv? The neighborhood bar?
Our news and information ecosystems are complex and evolving as media and technology change, while at the same time local newspapers consolidate and disappear. They are important to learn about if you want to make a positive impact on your community. Whether your goal is raising awareness about clean water, improving community safety, increasing civic participation or any number of other goals, you won’t get far if your community lacks quality information and equitable ways to communicate and engage.
This week, we’re excited to share that we’re launching a new tool that can help you map your media ecosystem to help find and support this information and engagement.
Across the country, foundations and philanthropists are coming to realize that local news and civic information is a critical element of a healthy community and democracy, and that they have a role to play in its future. Local news organizations have faced a catastrophic economic downturn, as well as increasing questions about how well they do or do not serve the diverse communities that make up our country. This erosion in local news is tied to drops in civic engagement, weakened connections in communities, and escalating costs of government due to lack of accountability.
We’ve heard many funders, philanthropists, and community foundations who are familiar with the problems say that it can be challenging to figure out the solutions — how can they get started supporting the future of news and information in their communities?
That’s why we created “A Guide to Assessing Your Local News Ecosystem” — to help answer this question.
Dive in for Lessons From Across the Country
We’ve learned a lot through the assessments and funding choices we’ve undertaken in North Carolina, New Jersey, New Mexico, Colorado, Chicago, and beyond. Landscape analyses we commissioned in 2016 helped us decide where best to put our dollars, and have resulted in the establishment of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, the New Mexico Local News Fund, and the New Jersey Local News Lab Fund, as well as the support of the Colorado Media Project, the Field Foundation’s Media & Storytelling Program, Center for Cooperative Media, and more. Each of the places and organizations are working in unique and powerful ways to rebuild local news in their region.
The toolkit brings together some of this work we’ve done, along with the work of others we’ve learned from who are funding innovative and collaborative news efforts. We share case studies from funders we’ve learned from in Colorado, New Jersey, Detroit, and the Mountain West, and will share more in the months to come. This step-by-step guide will help you gather the information you need to take informed, effective action to improve your local news and information ecosystem, just like these funders have.
Undertaking this type of assessment is important because at Democracy Fund we know there isn’t one solution to figuring out the future of local news, but many solutions together. Funding with an ecosystem lens acknowledges that local news and information is interconnected and ever-changing. We don’t learn about our communities from any one source but from multiple sources and networks of trust. We learn valuable information from neighbors and listservs and community meetings as well as newspaper stories and radio programs. The makeup of those sources and networks depends on where we live.
Credit: Detroit Public TelevisionWhen we keep people at the center of our thinking — not news organizations per se, not the journalism industry — we begin to see ways we can strengthen what already exists and determine which gaps need to be filled. Rather than grounding solutions in any one organization, Democracy Fund chooses to evaluate the big picture and find whether there’s possible infrastructure and supports to fund that can take on the task of supporting an entire news and information ecosystem.
Get Started Using the Guide
This guide can help you take a look at that big picture and chart a path forward. It starts with understanding what makes up a healthy news ecosystem, then walks through the ways you can get to know your community, including research and engagement methods you can tailor to your goals. Our “deep dive” section includes a trove of free and low-cost data sources as well as some simple scavenger hunt-style assignments to help you see what those sources have to offer. We talk through ways your organization can act on what you learn so that your assessment will inform collaboration and ongoing engagement. And since we know budgets and bandwidth vary, we offer ideas for ways to right-size your assessment to the resources you have.
We’ve also included four case studies to flesh out our how-to guidance with concrete examples. These case studies show that each community is different, so what works in one place may not always work in another. This guide will help you find what the people in your own community need and how to make the greatest impact with the resources you have.
“Putting the people first was the most important element to our work. We didn’t do this because we thought we could save newspapers or newsrooms. We found it important that people in small towns have access to information to help them become more engaged citizens, so they’re able to make more informed decisions and they’re connected with the national conversation, the regional conversation, and the local conversation.” – LaMonte Guillory of the LOR Foundation, on their work in the Rural Mountain West.
While this guide is primarily designed for philanthropic organizations, anyone interested in improving local news and information is invited to adapt it to suit their own research.
The story we often hear about local news is dire, but it doesn’t have to be. We can face the realities of what we’re losing and the impact on our democracy while also seeing the assets and opportunities that exist. By being thoughtful, informed, inclusive and by sharing what we learn, we can make local news more resilient and sustainable.
- Subscribe to the Local Fix for even more useful resources and information about local news at tinyletter.com/LocalFix
- Hear more from Molly de Aguiar of the Independence Public Media Foundation and LaMonte Guillory of the LOR Foundation about their experience mapping their foundations’ local news ecosystems in a webinar on November 22 at 1 pm ET.
- Share your feedback, questions, and suggestions with us about the toolkit at localnewslab@democracyfund.org
Announcing the Legal Clinic Fund: Strengthening Legal Support for Local News
Most of the coverage of struggles in local news has focused on their revenue and changing business model. However, along with those issues, local newsrooms are facing new legal threats and challenges, just at the moment when they have fewer resources to fight First Amendment battles.
Today, we are announcing a new fund designed to support legal clinics at universities around the country that focus on strengthening and defending the first amendment, media access, and transparency. These clinics combine the skills of talented law students with legal scholars and practicing lawyers to take on legal challenges both local and national. Their university affiliations mean that they are geographically diverse, with the potential to cover areas that are comparatively isolated, while educating and uplifting the next generation of first amendment and transparency lawyers.
Democracy Fund has partnered with the Klarman Family Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation to launch the Legal Clinics Fund at the Miami Foundation and applications open today. The fund is looking for proposals from clinics that would benefit from increased capacity and infrastructure support, are pursuing a collaborative project, or are seeking to experiment with their model.
Applications are due June 7, 2019. Click here for more information and to apply.
There is a unique opportunity right now to invest in strengthening these legal clinics and building the networks between them in ways that buttress their ability to be a strong force for First Amendment litigation and a critical legal resource for journalists. We believe the fund can help achieve that goal, and we are committed to providing multi-year funding to grantees so that they have time to iterate, grow, and expand their impact, and so that the fund has the ability to engage in a robust evaluation and learning practice.
The needs of a free press are rapidly changing as the challenges facing it have grown and become more aggressive. We’ve written about the need for a modern conception of press freedom, and the role we believe we have to play in helping to meet the needs of the field. We believe that legal clinics can provide a new backbone for legal support around the country and are excited to expand their capacity to fight First Amendment battles on all our behalf.
Building a Team to Invest in Democracy
Following the 2016 election, Democracy Fund heard from many philanthropists seeking advice on what they can do to respond to the threats facing our political system. For some, the last two years have brought a newly pervasive sense that our democracy is under threat and that our political system is far more fragile than most of us assumed. We feel the same way, and we are humbled that interested donors and their advisors are turning to us and to our peers for guidance.
Through our efforts to support these new partners, we discovered that Democracy Fund can play a helpful role in providing advice and connections to philanthropists who are learning about the field. To that end, I am delighted to share that we are building a new team at Democracy Fund to help us be a better resource to philanthropists, advisors, and our peers. The team will be led by a newly created position, the Director of Partnerships.
This swell in philanthropic interest comes at a pivotal time. Despite a clear and pressing need, the level of philanthropic support for this field remains critically low. Whether you look at voting, journalism, or civic education, many of the most capable and innovative organizations in the space have struggled through multiple cycles of feast and famine and need more resources to meet the challenges at hand.
To make progress on issues that are important to the American people and to ensure the health of our democracy for future generations, the United States needs deep investment by philanthropists and advocates. Policy reforms ranging from the future of affordable housing to climate change depend on a political system that is responsive to the public. A more equitable society requires eliminating barriers to voting and reducing the influence of money on politics. And improving the ability of individuals and communities to thrive rests on a functioning government, fair enforcement of the rule of law, and stability in our politics. Despite the reality that progress hinges on a healthy democracy, the field receives less than two percent of overall philanthropic giving.
Building a healthier democracy together
Working with our peer funders, we hope the Democracy Fund Partnerships team can be a resource to donors and to the field. Our goal is to make the expert capacity of our staff and our collaborative approach available to interested philanthropists. We believe that enlisting greater philanthropic energy, ideas, and resources to the fields in which we work is one of the most effective ways for us to meet the scale of the challenge.
Our new team will educate and engage philanthropists who are new to democracy with the goal of helping them to enter the field. Led by the Director of Partnerships, the team will help donors and their advisors make strategic decisions to invest in our country’s democracy. It will take some time and experimentation to build this program, but there are a few things you should expect to see:
- Resources: Democracy Fund will work with our peers to develop resources that help new donors to better understand the space, including investment guides highlighting the most innovative and high-impact strategies and organizations in the field. The Foundation Center’s data tool for the democracy field is an excellent example of the kind of resource we have helped create in the past that can help philanthropists understand the existing landscape.
- Educational Events: Over the past 18 months, Democracy Fund has partnered with the Giving Pledge to educate members of that network about opportunities to strengthen democracy in the United States. We expect to organize more briefings and workshops like those we organized with Giving Pledge to inform new donors.
- Joint Funds: Democracy Fund participates in and has created several collaborative funds that enable donors to easily contribute to vetted, highly effective grantees working to protect the health of our government, elections, and free press. Our Public Square program, for example, works with other journalism funders through NewsMatch, the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, and the Community Listening and Engagement Fund. We aim to work with our peers to develop other similar funds that make it easier for new donors to enter the space.
Our Commitment to the Field
Our new efforts to build philanthropic partnerships will not slow our existing efforts to deploy our resources to support the field. Since Democracy Fund began, we have committed more than $100 million in grants and built a team of more than 45 people with deep expertise on issues ranging from journalism and elections to Congress and government accountability. Thanks to the generosity and leadership of Pierre Omidyar we intend to continue to invest at a similar level in the coming years.
At the same time, our commitment to our existing grantees will not limit our advice to new donors – we hope to help philanthropists find their own path into the field, whether or not it mirrors the path that we have chosen.
We are grateful for the mentorship and ongoing partnership of many foundations who have supported this field for decades, including the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. At such a deeply important moment for our country, we are excited to begin this important work and will continue to share our progress as the team grows and the program develops.
Democracy Fund Relaunches electionline
Today we are pleased to unveil a new and improved electionline — America’s only politics-free source for election administration news and information.
In January 2018, we announced that electionline had become a project of Democracy Fund’s Elections program. We felt then, as we do now, that it is a vital platform for finding trusted news and information about the people and processes that guide our nation’s elections, and for sharing tools, best practices, and innovative ideas for improving the voting experience. Our simple goals for redeveloping the site were to enhance its capabilities and expand content — but our long-term plans are to create a place where readers are exposed to new ideas, opportunities for continuing education, and relationship building.
To do this, we started by thinking long and hard about the site’s current audience and their needs. Starting today, election administrators, academics, voting advocates and other regular readers of electionline will find new items of interest on the site, including:
- A calendar of national, state and other field-relevant events;
- A directory of organizations and their areas of expertise;
- Reports, trainings, tools, guides, and other materials;
- A marketplace featuring job openings in the elections field and information on used election equipment for sale; and
- Better search functionality throughout
Electionline remains the only place on the internet to find state-by-state curation of daily election administration news. In addition to publishing the classic electionline Weekly newsletter, we will also begin sharing original reports and exclusive content from leaders and experts in the field — making the site a must-read for local election officials, civic organizations, and journalists who cover elections.
While redeveloping the site, we learned two really insightful lessons that might be helpful for others who are developing virtual spaces for information sharing and engagement.
First, collaborate with your audiences and include some “outsider” perspective. As our team weighed important decisions about the look and feel of the website, we were grateful to receive insight and direction from many readers who already trust and rely on electionline.
Second, reflect your values. Redeveloping or creating a new platform is an opportunity to reinforce essential characteristics that inform readers who your organization is, and what they care about. For us it meant focusing on authenticity (even if it means publishing unflattering stories about ourselves or our partners); transparency about who we support with resources in the field; and cultivating greater interest for under-covered areas of importance like voting trends for overlooked communities.
Through this process, we hope we were able to successfully incorporate the feedback we heard from current readers. We also hope that the new electionline website more deeply resonates with all those who are interested in elections in America. We’re excited to hear your thoughts and reactions as you explore the new website. Please visit www.electionline.org and let us know what you think!