Earlier this week I had the pleasure of speaking with Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley.  His area of expertise is corporate web applications and web services, but he also covers social computing and social applications, and that’s what we talked about.  He was kind enough to blog about it on the Gartner blog, saying in part that big businesses can take a lesson from Firstgiving on the topic of leverage:

First is that enteprises can learn a great deal from firstgiving.com about leverage. Leverage is a major if not the major benefit of social applications. By engaging the community and delegating what is best done by the community to the community you can get tremendous leverage.

At Firstgiving, we really believe that being a for-profit social enterprise gives us the discipline and independence to pursue growth for ourselves and growth for the nonprofits and fundraisers who are our customers.  This means that we’re really focused on the quality and efficiency of everything we do.

Businesses and nonprofits both need to do more with less whenever possible, and if person to person fundraising can reduce the total cost of fundraising or increase the total raised - and we think it does both - that’s a pretty powerful kind of leverage.  Every day I see individual examples of fundraisers getting dozens of donations from their communities, and nonprofits activating dozens of fundraisers to do the same, but chatting with somebody from the enterprise IT world helped put that all into a wider perspective.

Anthony also notes that he’s looking for more examples of “mass collaboration leverage” so if you know about any, pop over to his blog and leave a comment.