GlobalGiving screens its corporate partners in an effort to ensure corporate giving earnestly supports social change projects around the world, without causing harm to the same communities our nonprofit partners seek to serve. Corporate impact is not a simple metric to assess, leading us to ask:
How do we navigate partnerships with companies that do both good and harm?
GlobalGiving has been considering our corporate partner moderation responsibilities and we had an opportunity to use Ethos to support this process in the summer of 2020. Our team flagged a corporate partner—a technology company—due to concerns that the platform’s business practices and policies may cause harm to many communities around the world.
These questions circled amongst our team:
How should a corporate partner screening process weigh and compare the different metrics of positive and negative impact? Is this utilitarian approach even appropriate? Furthermore, how might we consider contextual and cultural factors that are making it difficult to see and assess actual net positive impact?
While GlobalGiving is a global platform, it is still a US-based business, and at that time was working in a very volatile climate which included negotiating:
These factors were very much at play in this case.
This corporate partner makes critical investments in GlobalGiving’s nonprofit partners—some of whom credit the funding and programming with giving them legitimacy and credibility as organizations.
“I’m very clear about how important they were in noticing people who weren’t being noticed, for their commitment and leadership. They trusted and gave us the freedom and they were willing to support the social innovation leadership process. Most funders want [to fund] the organization when it’s ready, like after 5 years. Who funds the first 5 years? They were a game-changer. I never saw an organization so big investing the money in an organization that was starting to be creative.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
At the same time, the company has been under public scrutiny for numerous issues, including privacy and data, content moderation, misinformation, and propagating hate speech.
Recognizing that we could not ignore the harm done by the company but also recognizing the need to bring diverse perspectives to bear, GlobalGiving launched an Ethos exploration. Ethos is a framework for addressing complex moral, ethical, and ambiguously legal challenges about partnerships and platform curation. It is based on practices of human-centered design and restorative/transformative justice. It identifies key stakeholders in a case, gathering their experiences and stories. This informs an Ethos Council—also made up of representatives from key stakeholder groups— who ideate creative solutions that go to the CEO for a final resolution. In this particular case, stakeholders included staff, nonprofit partners (globally), nonprofit partners who receive funding (globally) from this partner, and subject matter experts on the company’s practices, and on racism, ethics, and technology more broadly.
Most importantly, Ethos is a search for non-binary solutions; meaning, we hope that we can find creative resolution, or a third way, amongst our tensions. In this particular case, we were exploring two things:
From the Ethos exploration, several key insights emerged:
The issues raised in this case are not limited to the one company; they are fundamental to the sector and relate to other key corporate partners and ourselves. Thus, firing one corporate partner does nothing to address the underlying harms. Instead, it is important to deeply understand the practices that cause harm. In this case, that meant examining business models and technology practices (specifically, but not limited to persuasive technologies and algorithms).
“They profit off human weaknesses, their shareholders benefit from it. It’s a fatal flaw in the system. They profit on content that motivates anger, distrust. This will persist until [companies like this] reexamine their business model.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
“The problem is [technology] is part of the fabric of our society, and it‘s going to keep influencing. And I think for the time being, we all have to play in it. Use your [GlobalGiving’s] partnership to bring light to some of the problems because I think over time, some of the good is possible. You can provide tangible examples of what it takes to be successful. Don’t feel helpless in the system.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
It is through open relationships with corporate partners that GlobalGiving can focus on shared goals and build a common understanding of how technology companies like ourselves can collectively have a positive social impact.
Almost unanimously, the stakeholders felt that GlobalGiving should use its relationships (not necessarily partnership) to manage these tensions and challenges. Many pointed to how hard it is to influence strategy with a partnering organization, and also the extent to which GlobalGiving has already had influence and a positive impact.
“Trust and personal relationships are the most important tools.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
“Change comes through interpersonal relationships; GlobalGiving needs to work with [this partner] to address these things.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
One of the things we struggled with the most in this case was the opinion of the few. Utilitarianism, the belief that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, was questioned in this case. The view that we should hold the partner accountable for harm done was not a majority view. It was a view, however, that rightfully challenged supremacy culture and privilege, in a meaningful and important way. Adding to the complexity, conversations about racism, power dynamics, and inequity are different around the world and the Ethos Council was a global conversation that invited incredibly diverse lived experiences on those subjects.
“There is no good argument that can stand against their responsibility for hate, violence, discrimination, and death. For an organization that is by definition, global - you [GlobalGiving] serve a very colorful world.”
Social Entrepreneur & Ethos Case Stakeholder
This dissonance forced us to question how our internal practices (including utilitarianism) lead to greater inequity and greatly influenced the final resolution.
During their deliberation, the Ethos Council defined many ideas which could be categorized into the following Opportunity Spaces (which were not considered mutually exclusive):
Below represents the CEO’s final resolution, which blended multiple ideas:
GlobalGiving will continue to work with this partner in its existing capacity and focus on continued growth to maximize opportunities for our nonprofit partners. However, we need to develop a more robust understanding of emerging industries and business models—and we will start with technology. This is critical for ourselves and for the work of a global civil society. As new business models emerge, we lack a deep understanding of the negative impacts and ethical practices. This will be an area of investment for GlobalGiving.
Furthermore, GlobalGiving staff should actively look for opportunities to engage our partner contacts in our own investigations into the areas of concern listed above. The first of these opportunities will likely be the Ethos process, which pertains directly to moderation decisions. The next might be on data use and our own technology practices. In his decision, our CEO recognized that we also use many of the same business and technology practices that have been criticized, and we need to ensure our practices do not do harm and model what algorithms for good can look like.
We should:
The surfacing of dilemmas like this points to a potentially binary path: either we continue our partnership or we don’t. But as we discovered, the challenges are applicable to many technology companies and ourselves. Thus, the Ethos process provides us a third path, inviting us to consider more than if we continue our partnership, but also how might we partner well? What would a good / healthy / beneficial partnership look like? It forced us to add depth to our corporate partner moderation in a way that would add value to ourselves and various stakeholders. Rather than waving our hands through complex subjects, it invited us to dip our toe in those rough waters. It provided a foundation that would enable us to more confidently address sensitive topics externally while ensuring we were more confidently addressing these optics internally. Most importantly, it enabled our decisions to be led by our community—a core tenant of our mission and a core tenant of reducing inequity in international aid and philanthropy.
Elizabeth (Eli) MacLaren is a design strategist, storyteller, and innovator. She serves as Designer in Residence at GlobalGiving, a returning role after serving as part of GlobalGiving startup team 20 years ago as Director of Operations and Chief Program Officer.
Ethos was created and tested over two years by a collaborative team of platform leaders, nonprofit staff, and other social sector professionals led by GlobalGiving. We’ve made it free and easy to use so your team can benefit from our trials and errors.
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