NpTech Tag: Change.org To Launch White-Label Social Network for Nonprofits, GeekToys that Give Geekbumps, and Blog Readability

What reading level is your blog?  Most NpTech blogs are high school level.  Remember, it's not the level, but whether it is a match to your audience.

Social Networking for Social Change

According to TechCrunch, Change.org, a social networking site that links volunteers to causes and voters to politicians will launch a new white-label social network for non-profits.  For the launch, they’ve already partnered with 50 non-profits, like Care2, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International

The question it raises for nonprofits is, join an existing network like Facebook or MySpace or build your own social network or combination? And maybe this should not be an either/or question, but most likely resources will dictate that.   

Rolling your own social network wrapped with your organization's branding, data, and integrated into an organizational site will provide more control.   According to an email from Ben Rattray, Change.Org founder, "This is not at all meant as a replacement for the profiles organizations have on MySpace and Facebook, which I think are great for reaching younger supporters.  But these sites have two important limitations that give nonprofits reason to look for additional tools.  First, neither site has all the custom features, branding, or data integration that many organizations want.   Second, we're hearing from most organizations that despite the huge membership of MySpace and Facebook, only 5-15% of their current donors are on either site.  So nonprofits that focus exclusively on these sites are failing to fully engage 85% of their existing donors – comprising the people most likely to give and raise additional money."

So, does it make sense to roll your own network to appeal to those 85% of existing donors who do not participate on social networking sites, but may be engaged with the organization through other channels like email, face-to-face, or web site forums?  Do we know enough about the differences between users and non-users of social networking sites?    Also, building your own social network and growing and supporting a community takes work and relationship building to be successful-- whether you to do it on Facebook or your own site.  As FrogLoop blog concludes in its recent analysis of MySpace, "Social networking sites are essentially a microcosm of the internet, and hosting a profile on either is akin to managing a website.  It still requires a lot of attention, staff time, management and promotion."

While larger nonprofits may have the capacity to sustain multiple profiles and community efforts on social networking sites, plus their own branded community, not all nonprofits do.   One hopes that nonprofits deciding to roll their own social networks, aren't creating their own social silos and have gone into it with a solid strategy, clear objectives and measurable metrics, and can evaluate the ROI. 

What do you think?  How will your organization decide whether to roll their own social network and/or have a profile on a larger social networking site or just say no to social networks?  Drop a comment or link back and I'll round it up for next week's summary.

More On Social Networking for Social Change

OneNorthWest recently hosted a seminar on social networking sites and environmental organizations. Jon Stahl has a live blog post of remarks by the speakers. 

This is a must-read.  The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication October issue is devoted to scholarly research on social networks.  There are 18 articles.  If you're short on time, read the abtracts and dive deeper into Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.

Social Change Websites is an excellent directory of the best nonprofit, grassroots, and advocacy campaign websites devoted to social change.  You can sort by category and location and it campaign as a basic description.  I'd love to see more detail, like an overview the strategies or how they measure success.

Marnie Webb (who appears to be blogging a bit more these days since she switched to a MAC) tagged an interesting article from the Wall Journal that asks "Is there a numerical cap on how many friends we can have?"  The article refers to the Dunbar number - 150 - the ceiling on the number of personal contacts a human has the capacity to maintain.  The article says that new research suggests that social networking sites will help humans surpass this limit.  Last word from Prof. Dunbar: .."isn't sold on the idea that social networks make his number outdated. The research, he says, "made us realize people don't know what these
wretched things called relationships are -- and that helps explain why we're so bad at them."

Hitwise has published a study that shows visits to social networks overtaking visits to web-based email services in the UK for the first time.  Is this wave of the future?  Will email remain the killer app or go the way of the page view?

The Wild Apricot Blog has published a nice list of ten examples of how nonprofits can use Facebook. Be sure to check out Beginner's Guide to Facebook and How to promote your Cause on Facebook articles.

DevelopmentSeed blog posted back in October some screenshots of the Facebook application created to Help End Poverty as part of the UN Millennium Campaign outreach to Facebook community.  Would love to read a summary of the campaign results and lessons learned.   If you're curious about what other Facebook applications are being used by nonprofits, check out this top 12 list.

Perhaps you're wondering what type of skills you need on staff to implement a social networking and media strategy.   You can learn a lot about that more through this informative interview by The Buzz Bin with Steve Bridger on the Buzz Director.

Tis the Season

These sites may not be of interest to participants of "Buy Nothing Day," on November 23, but what better way to feed your consumer urges and desire to good by shopping for charity!  A new entry into the charity shopping category, is MAATIAM.  Of course, another way to do this is to set up your own shop on cafepress. (Oh, I so want a NTEN baseball cap!)  Or purchase gift items from a socially responsible retail store like Ten Thousand Islands that helps support local artisans and Fair Trade in developing countries.

Now that you've shopped for good, what about for yourself?  Check out Steve Dembo's Geek Toys that'll give you Geekbumps which includes the Give One Get One XO Laptop Campaign (hurry offer ends on November 30th) and a Chumby (hmm .. Nancy White got herself an early holiday gift)

It's November, crunch time for nonprofit fundraisers looking to take advantage of the holiday giving.  Don't have your strategy and plans in place yet???  No worries.  This early holiday gift from the good folks
at Care2 and SeaChange Strategies, "A Procrastinator's Guide to Year-End Fundraising"
will give you a crash course on best practices for maximizing online giving.  This beautifully designed and well written concise guide is a must-read.

Nonprofit Software

Earlier this month, Convio alerted its nonprofit clients of an Online Security Issue as reported by the nonprofit tech blog (be sure to read through the comments), NTEN and TechSoup blog. leading to an impassioned request for best practices for minimizing damage when this security breaches occur on several listservs.  Allan Benamer responded this week with some suggested guidelines for nonprofits to use for disclosure of security breaches

Check this out!  The NOSI Choosing and Using Free and Open Source primer is on the ICT Hub Knowledgebase!

Video

The AFP Nonprofit Technology blog points to a story by Jennifer Gilomen from BAVC about digital storytelling techniques and tools for nonprofits in the NPTimes.  If you have a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, there is another related story called "Telling Moving Stories."  You read an excerpt here.

Michael Hoffman from See3 points us to the 1 Second Film, a collaborative art project, micro video blogging example, and micro fundraising campaign.

Global Development Matters is a new site with lots of video, quizzes on global development and extensive q/a on a variety of global development project.  Check out the introduction video for more.

Andy Carvin has a terrific interview with Marc Hawker and Jiva Parthipan about their experiences making a viral video for Amnesty International's anti-torture campaign about Guantanamo interrogation techniques.

Chris Brogan points to Show in a Box, a fully packaged WordPress blog with custom themes and other features built in to create an out of box video blog experience. 

Ever wanted to incorporate a slide show in your drupal site?

SEO/SMO

Grassroots.Org has a general primer on Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits, although some of the information in the linkbuilding section is circa 1999. 

Jonathan Coleman's slide show, You Can't Raise $$$ if People Can't Find You on SEO fundraisers.

SMO stands for Social Media Optimization which is the process of making your site/blog more visible in social media searches and sites, more easily linked by other sites, and more frequently discussed online.


Micro Media: Strategy, Tools, and Techniques

A few months ago, Jeremiah Owyang coined a term "MicroMedia," which is the next evolution of micro blogging (think Twitter).   Quick audio or video messages published to a trusted social community.  May be created and consumed using mobile technology and distributed using other social media tools.

Here's a good list of micro-media tools, although they are labeled as mobile learning tools.

One of the hallmarks of micro blogging is that you had to write the essence of an idea in more than 140 characters or in the case of micro media capturing the video in less than minute or recording your report very concisely.   Perhaps there is a lot to learn from headline writing skills.

Amy Sample Ward has an interesting take on adoption issues as related to micro-media tools.

Blogging

While it is almost a year old, this slide show called 10 Ways to a Killer Blog by Robert and Maryam Scoble about how to blog well is an entertaining, quick and useful read.

NpTech Global

Kabissa joins Aid for Africa for the third year running!

I don't speak or read Japanese.  So, I have no idea why this page was tagged with NpTech.  Do you?

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology. Many individuals tag hundreds of resources each week. Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free.

Comments

[Ben Rattray]

Hey Beth,

This is Ben from Change.org. Thanks for the review of our new white-label service :-)

I think you raise an important issue about whether the 85% of donors who are not on Facebook or MySpace really want to join a social network around social issues if they don’t want to join one of the mainstream social networks.

The short answer is that I don’t think most of them want to join a social network, but I do think many of them want a better giving experience, and it happens to be that social networking tools can help provide that.

Similarly, people who use Yelp don’t want to join a social network, they want better information on what restaurants they should go to, and it just so happens that social networking tools have helped provide great restaurant reviews. (Who knew?)

I know a lot of people are getting tired of seeing yet another social network launching and being applied to a new space. Certainly some of this exasperation is properly placed. But I think much of it also falsely presupposes that all sites that use social networking tools are about socializing. And Change.org for one is not about socializing but about providing a way to get more involved in social causes and more effectively advance social change, and we use social networking tools because they’re a powerful way to facilitate these things.

So I’m completely with anyone who thinks that most of the 85% of donors not on MySpace and Facebook probably don’t want to socialize online. But that’s not what we’re offering, and it’s not why most people think when they go to our site – or to any of the branded social networks that our nonprofit partners are creating. Instead, people join a nonprofit’s network because they want to get more involved in the organization, have more control over where their money goes by directing it to specific projects, and combine efforts with others to magnify their impact (whether in fundraising or taking action). Similarly, nonprofits are excited about using our tools not because they want to have a social network per se, but because they want to personalize their communication with donors, empower supporters to fundraise and advocate on their behalf, and give people a sense of being part of their community. And those are exactly the things we’re trying to facilitate.

I hope that makes sense, and would love to hear your and everyone else’s thoughts as always.

Best,

Ben

[Beth Kanter]

I think we agree that a white label social networking application creates an online community. However, it isn't because of the software or tool that people will donate or become more engaged or more deeply involved with the organization unless there is a strategy behind. What type of strategy?

-Community building and relationship building
-Not just asking for money, but providing recognition and donor stewardship
-Telling the story of the cause in an interesting and compelling way
-Ongoing contact and conversation

My point is that all that takes work - whether you do it on your facebook profile or you do it on your own branded social network.

I really don't think that if you build a social network, the donors will come unless you have a strategy behind. Am I missing something?

Also, I agree with you that it may not be "Facebook/Myspace versus roll your own" because the larger networks or even niche networks like change - are a way to find potential supporters (if the people on those networks match your .org's target demographic). And I can see the value of a "roll your own" social network as your .org's branded online community - particularly if you link contact information to your internal data systems. However, having them all and doing it well requires time, resources, and staff - (in addition to strategy) -- so organizations are going to need to really figure out why they want a social network in the first place, pick wisely, have a strategy, capacity to implement strategy, have metrics to determine success......

[Ben Rattray]

Great points, Beth. I should have echoed your comment about nonprofits needing to work to make these networks successful, because you’re right on.

There tends to be a “field of dreams” mentality with social networks that goes something like this: “Facebook/MySpace has 50/100 million members, so if I create a profile and get just a small percentage of people to join my community, we’ll take off.” This is similar to how people used to think of the web and their website ten years ago (e.g. “there are 500 million people on the web, so all I need to do is create a website…”)

As you’ve implied, not only do people rarely just chance upon your social networking profile (or website), but they won’t come back if they’re not nurtured.

This is something we’re definitely sensitive to, so there are two things we’re doing to help nonprofits address it.

1. Strategy:

As you mentioned, having a core strategy and knowing how to effectively use these tools is probably the most important component here. But the honest truth is that most organizations don’t know how to best build community and to get the most out of these tools, and until now we (at Change.org) have done a pretty poor job in giving them guidance. We’re changing this starting next week, when our community manager, Heather Mansfield, is going to start sending around best practices. She’s also started giving Web 2.0 trainings in several cities, and we’re going to be having weekly training sessions for new nonprofits that sign up for Change.org starting in December. (Incidentally, I had the pleasure of meeting Katya Andresen for the first time last week, and she stressed how important providing training had become to making sure their clients were able to make best use of the donation, email, and tracking tools they provide.)

2. Structural:

In addition to giving nonprofits strategic advice, we’ve tried to make sure that our platform is structured to be minimally resource demanding for organizations. There’s no doubt that some amount of time investment is important to make these networks work, but that time investment can very dramatically based on the features of a network. For example, having something like a discussion forum on your network will inevitably demand a significant amount of time, both to monitor and (more likely) seed with content on a regular basis. But for most organizations discussion forums don’t make a lot of sense, and aren’t worth the time investment. This is why the default setting is not to have discussion forums on nonprofit communities on Change.org (instead nonprofits have a blogging tool, which is easier to manage). The desire to minimize resource demands is also why we’ve opted for interconnecting all of the nonprofit social networks on Change.org rather than offering these as entirely independent communities (which would require each organization to provide much more content and activity to sustain). Overall, our aim is to structure things so that nonprofits can sustain an active community while dedicating only 1 hour per week, so long as they have the proper strategy in place. (That said, it's also naturally the case that the more time an organization spends, the more engaged their supporter base will be and the more likely they will be to achieve their goals - i.e. more supporters, more money and more actions.)