Challenges of the Virtual Meeting Era
📷 credit: Sonja Hansen
I had an experience last week that is familiar for too many organizers and educators.
I was preparing to cohost a Zoom call where it seemed like the stars had aligned – a timely topic with a strong set of speakers and an engaged co-host had led us to almost 50 RSVPs. For us, this was a strong turnout for a somewhat niche philanthropic strategy conversation.
Sadly, only six attendees logged on who were not connected to one of the organizers or speakers. It was still a powerful call, and we got very appreciative feedback from the participants…and a bunch of requests for the recording even though this was an off-the-record call with no recording.
A few days later I saw a TikTok about tsundoku, the Japanese word that refers to the practice of accumulating books without reading them, something my fiancé will confirm I am very guilty of! That video got me thinking…what would be the equivalent of collecting webinar recordings you won't watch? With the help of some AI brainstorming, I present to you half a dozen favorite new terms:
Tsunwebinaru - Tsun or “to pile up” (from tsumu, like in tsundoku) plus webinaru (the Japanese katakana rendering of the English word webinar). So, tsunwebinaru would whimsically mean "the practice of accumulating webinar recordings without watching them."
Zoomnoku - From Zoom + tsundoku, the ancient and noble art of clicking “Register” on Zoom webinars and then ghosting the playback link like a pro.
Webinarchivist - A portmanteau of webinar + archivist to describe someone dedicated to curating an impressive archive of unwatched webinars, for anthropological study by future civilizations.
FOMOnar Syndrome - From FOMO (fear of missing out) + webinar, translating to the compulsive behavior of signing up for every free webinar just in case it’s life-changing (spoiler: you never watch them).
Click’n’Skip - For those who enthusiastically register, confirm, calendar... and then ghost. “Click now, skip forever.”
Save-it Syndrome - Compulsive saving of links, files, and webinars with absolutely no plan for follow-through. Usually followed by “I’ll totally watch this over the weekend.”
But more seriously, it got me thinking, how do we improve our webinars and Zoom calls in an era of online engagement burnout? Here are three strategies I’ve been thinking about that chip away at different connected issues:
Extend your reach – First, I’ve been pondering that we ask the same people in our networks to keep coming back. How do we engage new people? How do we ask our networks to promote our content to their networks? Who else can be dissemination or recruitment partners? Maybe we can find some new participants for whom our content is excitingly new.
Filter RSVPs – In the webinar example above, we would have had more realistic expectations if we knew some people who RSVP’d just wanted a recording. We could have clarified that this was “off-the-record” to encourage people to log in. Or if we’d planned to record, we could have asked in the RSVP if each respondent was “definitely planning to show, might show depending on their schedule, or just RSVP’ing for the notes/recording.”
Plan for Better Follow-Up – In the race that we all face to keep up, one thing I’ve noticed we and so many others could do better is follow up on a training or briefing more thoughtfully. To name a few examples, we all could prep our follow-up emails so they can get sent out quickly, clean up recordings with either light or heavy editing to make them more engaging, craft highlight notes so people capture some key takeaways, or even highlight the timestamps of each highlight so people are incentivized to open the recordings that sadly get so few views.
I know we won’t have time to do all these things ourselves, but they’re things I’m keeping in mind to try and do as much as possible when possible. What else are you trying?
Understanding Extreme Wealth Today
📷 credit: StockCake
The following was originally published in Mike Gast's Organize the Rich Substack in a post entitled “Who are the wealthy in the US today?”. Mike is a longtime friend and colleague of our founder Jason Franklin since their organizing time together in Resource Generation in the early 2000s through to today.
I loved your latest article (A six pack of election related reflections) and the ideas behind it and agree 100% with your fourth point about the need for some serious and thoughtful power mapping…but just a note that the Street Insider article of "25 wealthiest heirs" was out of date and frankly badly done and deceptive in its framing. It came from Investing.com which often publishes spammy "articles" built by AI scraping of other data and click-baity combinations of publicly available or Wikipedia information. Even the “author” of the article, credited as Audrey Kyanova, seems to be a fake account/name.
So, the idea to map wealthy heirs is needed but, while all of the people in that Street Insider article are wealthy, none of them are among the richest heirs and only two would make it to most thoughtful people's list of possible wealthiest heirs.
Who are the wealthy in the US today?
It's hard for people to wrap their heads around the extreme wealth concentration in the US right now. As noted by the New York Times, we’re facing the greatest wealth transfer in American history. A projected $84 trillion in assets is set to change hands over the next 20 years, and the top 10% wealthiest Americans control over 50% of those assets.
The Forbes 400, while imperfect, is the most accurate and publicly available list of the wealthiest people in the US today. Forbes spends a lot of time trying to estimate the wealth of people who are constantly trying to hide or exaggerate their assets, not an easy task.
From Mapped: Where do the wealthiest people in the world live? by Omri Wallach
The current intro to the Forbes 400 notes: "The wealthiest people in America have never been wealthier. The 400 richest people in America are having a rollicking time in the roaring 2020s. In all, they are worth a record $5.4 trillion, up nearly $1 trillion from last year. A dozen have $100 billion-plus fortunes, also a record. And admission to this elite club is pricier than ever: A minimum net worth of $3.3 billion is required, up $400 million since 2023."
Right now, the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List counts 762 Americans among the world’s 2,740 billionaires, meaning 362 billionaires don't even make the Forbes 400 list. This is mind boggling and such a reminder of how skewed the wealth concentration in this country has become.
Additionally, talking about millionaires as wealthy these days is almost no longer useful. It is true but it can skew our thinking. The 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve found that approximately 18% of U.S. households had at least a seven figure net worth which translates to roughly 23.7 million millionaire households across the country.
From Mapped: The Richest Billionaires in US States by Avery Koop
The average net worth of Americans has exceeded $1M because the wealthiest people skew the average up, although median net worth also rose to $192,900 because of surging housing and stock prices. However, averages and medians hide extreme inequality. Over 25% of the American population have a negative net worth (debts exceed assets). And for almost all wealthy Americans, their home plus retirement savings represent the vast majority of their wealth, while for the extremely wealthy those represent a tiny slice of their assets. (Check out the chart at the bottom of this post for details.)
Talking about the top 1% of wealth holders in the US (1.27 million households) is a better frame to truly understand extreme wealth today. Estimates to be in the top 1% hover around $13-14M+ so we'd need to talk about "deca-millionaires to billionaires" to have a more accurate framing for extreme wealth in the US, but "millionaires & billionaires" rolls off the tongue better so our language keeps obscuring true inequality.
What wealthy means continues to change, but our society’s language and understanding have failed to keep up with the extreme wealth accumulation and concentration of the past quarter century.
From What assets make up wealth? by Jeff Desjardins
Who are the wealthiest heirs in the US?
Back to the question of heirs. If we want to talk about the 25 richest heirs in the US, are we talking about those who have inherited or those who will inherit?
In terms of those who will inherit, shockingly, Elon Musk's children probably account for a third of the wealthiest 25 heirs. He has 11 children, some likely won't inherit at all given the way he has treated them, but the rest will all count among the wealthiest heirs.
You'd likely round out the rest of a 25 person list with a subset of the 32 kids of the other eleven people with net assets over $100B - Bezos (4), Zuckerberg (3), Ellison (4), Buffet (3), Page (1), Brinn (3), Ballmer (3), Gates (3), Bloomberg (2), Huang (2), and Dell (4). However, five of these twelve people have signed the Giving Pledge (Bloomberg, Buffet, Ellison, Gates, and Zuckerberg) so if they fulfill their pledges some of their 15 kids may be excluded from this list.
Wealth inequality is so extreme in this country, it's hard for any of us to wrap our mind around the fact that even the two wealthiest heirs from that Street Insider article - Alex Soros (one of George Soros’ five children) or Eve Jobs (one of Steve Jobs’ four children) - wouldn't be among the 25 wealthiest heirs in the country.
From Breaking Down the Wealth of America’s Top 20 Billionaires by Marcus Lu. Graphic by Miranda Smith
If we want to think about the wealthiest people who have already inherited, it gets complicated. If we just think about the current wealthiest people in the US who mostly inherited their wealth, you could consider the 28 people who had a score of 1 (the lowest score) on the Forbes "Self Made Index".
According to a 2020 Forbes article on the self made index, that includes 75-year-old Christy Walton, who married Walton heir John T. Walton; brothers James and Austen Cargill (76 & 74 respectively); Daniel Pritzker (66); and others.
Or if we're talking just about wealthiest young inheritors, there are eight Americans under 50 on the Forbes real time billionaire list whose primary wealth came from inheritance.
Lukas Walton (youngest member of the Forbes 400, $34B), the wealthiest by far.
Scott Duncan ($8.3B, oil & gas company Enterprise Products).
Brothers Mat ($9B) & Justin ($4.8B) Ishbia whose wealth mostly comes from mortgage lender United Wholesale Mortgage founded by their father Jeff Ishbia.
Lynsi Snyder ($7.3B) who inherited ownership of and now runs In-n-Out Burger.
Brothers Alejandro ($2.5B) and Andres ($1.5B) Santo Domingo who are heirs to the SABMiller company which was sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev.
Stefan Soloviev ($2.3B) whose billionaire real estate developer father Sheldon Soloviev passed in 2020.
We’d need to spend more time to build a list of 25, but to round out a Top 10 I would add two other young (under 50) billionaires who earned significant wealth built on big inheritances:
Josh Kushner ($3.8B, brother to Trump son-in-law Jared) backed some of the decade's biggest startups through his VC firm including Instagram, Spotify, and OpenAI with wealth he inherited from his father, real estate tycoon Charles Kushner.
Ernest Garcia III ($4.2B) founded online automobile dealer Carvana in 2012 with funding from his billionaire father, Ernest Garcia II.
Anyway, none of this invalidates your arguments nor the need for mapping. It’s just a reminder that we need to make sure to map the right things, grounded in real understanding of what extreme wealth (and wealth inequality) looks like in American society today.
I have to add what is arguably the best graphic video explaining American wealth inequality produced in the last twenty years. Created by an anonymous freelance filmmaker, “Politizane” is based largely on reporting from Mother Jones. This video’s underlying assertions still hold true although American inequality is even greater today than it was in 2012, when it was made.
Rise of Mega Donors – Part 1: Sector Fragility & Volatility
📷 credit: Pascal Bernardon via Unsplash
I’ve often been quoted as saying “we’re living in the second golden age of philanthropy because we’re living in the second golden age of inequality.” In recent years, as a result of the increasing concentration of wealth, the nonprofit sector has become increasingly reliant on the generosity of a smaller set of ultra wealthy individuals, a trend that brings both benefits and significant challenges. The concentration of wealth and the rise of mega donors – individuals who contribute exceptionally large sums – have fundamentally altered the landscape of philanthropy, creating a fragility and instability that threatens the very mission of many nonprofit organizations.
The Power Dynamics of Wealth Concentration
The concentration of wealth among a small group of individuals has given rise to a phenomenon where a handful of mega donors wield disproportionate influence over the nonprofit sector. While their contributions can be transformative, enabling organizations to launch ambitious projects and scale their impact, this concentration of power raises several concerns. Mega donors often have specific interests and agendas, which can steer the priorities and strategies of nonprofits in ways that may not align with the broader needs of the communities they serve. This can lead to a misalignment between donor-driven initiatives and grassroots needs, resulting in a distortion of the sector's priorities.
This dynamic can skew the focus of entire organizations or even sectors. For instance, if a mega donor is particularly interested in funding education technology but the community's most urgent need is basic education access, the nonprofit might pivot its efforts toward technology to secure funding. This misalignment not only distorts the sector's priorities but also risks marginalizing critical issues that lack high-profile champions.
Dependency and Volatility
Beyond even the high profile mega donors like Scott, Gates, Bezos and others, nonprofits across the field increasingly find themselves dependent on a few large donors for a significant portion of their funding. The traditional fundraising pyramid has become narrower and more pointed, with a higher percent of revenue coming from a few at the top vs many small gifts at the bottom. This dependency creates a precarious situation. The withdrawal of support by even one mega donor can lead to severe financial instability, forcing organizations to scale back programs, lay off staff, or, in extreme cases, shut down entirely. Such volatility undermines the sustainability of nonprofits, making it difficult for them to plan long-term initiatives or invest in building their organizational capacity.
Such dependency curtails the ability of nonprofits to plan and execute long-term initiatives. Strategic planning becomes fraught with uncertainty when funding sources are unstable, impeding the sector’s capacity to make sustained progress on complex social issues. The unpredictability of mega donations translates into a lack of financial resilience, leaving nonprofits vulnerable to the changing tides of donor preferences.
There is an urgent demand from society to use any windfall of funds for immediate needs and yet, with the volatility of mega gifts nonprofits wrestle with how much of any windfall to put into reserves or spread out over time. As they plan for the future, they increasingly must plan with several dramatically different funding scenarios which makes settling on a strategy challenging, and those scenarios have less to do with overall economic health or strength of their organization and more to do with the whims and desires of a small set of critical major and mega donors.
Erosion of Public Trust
In addition to their impact on individual nonprofits, the dominance of mega donors also has implications for public trust in the nonprofit sector. When a few wealthy individuals have the power to shape the agenda of numerous organizations, there is a risk that the sector will be perceived as serving the interests of the elite rather than the public good. This perception can erode trust and alongside the belief that “they’re getting taken care of by Billionaire X or Millionaire Y,” can discourage smaller donors from contributing which only exacerbates the cycle, further concentrating power in the hands of a few. Moreover, the public may become skeptical of the motives behind large donations, suspecting that they are more about tax benefits or personal legacy-building than genuine altruism.
Public skepticism can also grow regarding the true motives behind large donations, with suspicions that these gifts are driven more by tax benefits or personal legacy-building than by genuine altruism. This erosion of trust can undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the nonprofit sector as a whole.
The concentration of wealth is not likely to dramatically shift in the coming years and the continued dominance of major and mega donors is likely a reality for the sector for the foreseeable future. But there are steps that both donors and funders can and should take to address these dynamics, stay tuned for Part 2 for some suggestions on some of those key steps.