I just finished doing a training for Open Society Institute media and information coordinators on social media with colleague, David Sasaki, from Global Voices. I've known since 2005 and I realized that the last time I had seen him was in 2007 in Cambodia at the blogging conference and over an interesting dinner served by our hosts.
Our charge was to teach back-to-back simultaneous workshops covering social media strategy for NGOs and social media tools. It made me think of the metaphor of the Dance Floor and the Balcony a phrase and exercise that I learned from a session that Eric Eugene Kim facilitated.
The term comes from titled Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading with Marty Linsky and Ron Heifetz which is where Eugene Eric Kim borrowed the metaphor of The Dance Floor and the Balcony of his exercise.
The idea is the "balcony" is the strategic, big picture and the dance floor is when we're in the thick of operations or "in the weeds." Leaders need to shift between the two viewpoints to be effective.
I used this metaphor to talk about the importance of having both the strategic view of social media as well as the hands-on experience of the tactical and tools. It is important to shift between the tools and that strategic overview. As one participant noted in the discussion, a big problem she observes with social media within nonprofits is that the leadership is "divorced" from the social media and tactics are delegated to the "young person on staff" without strategic insight.
I also pointed out the inherent tension we experience between strategy and tactics. Strategy is analytical, reflective, and thinking - not much action. Tactics is doing, moving, and acting. So, the sessions we co-taught were geared to so both these perspectives. We covered some strategy points, but also had the group tweeting.
We opened with a plenary session providing an opportunity for participants to introduce themselves and do a couple of icebreakers. I was also able to share the workshop wiki. We also used a unique hashtag #OSITango. (Participants were relieved that our icebreaker did not involve any tango dancing!).
Participants got to introduce themselves with "just three tags," picking three key words that describe them. Some participants acknowledged that they "Twitter resisters." We two more exercises to learn about their personal and organizational social media use - a stand up and sit down exercise.
Next we did a human spectra gram, a technique that colleague Allen Gunn from Aspiration. Colleague Kaliya Hamlin has this description:
This is an interactive whole group exercise that helps highlight the
range of perspectives in a group. There is a tape on the floor with
agree at one and disagree at the other:
agree |—————–|—————–| disagree.
The moderator asks a somewhat controversial question and directs
participants to take a stand on the spectrum. The moderator then
interviews people at different points on the spectrum about the
opinions they hold. This process creates a shared experience while
demonstrating the range of opinions in a community. It can serve as an
anchor for additional conversations.
We asked this question:
Social media is a fad and a waste of time for nonprofit organizations Social media can enhance fundraising for NGOs.
This generated a good discussion allowing for expression of different points of view. David Sasaki has a terrific reflection on that here. But, I'll quote:
I’ll admit, it wasn’t the easiest group to work with at the start (the
average introduction was something like “Hi, my name is X and I think
Twitter is a waste of time”), but by the end of the day I think we made
some converts out of what were initially some pretty harsh critics:
David goes on to make some points about getting people's hands on the tools while also pointing out the strategic options:
But really, this is the thing about Twitter and many similar tools –
they don’t make sense until you try them. And for most people they
don’t make sense until you try them out for a couple weeks. You have to
wait until you come across information that is relevant to you –
information that you otherwise wouldn’t have come across – in order to
appreciate the advantage of being part of the network.
There is also always an inherent power struggle in teaching
networked technologies to people in positions of power. New
technologies always take power away from one group and afford it to
another. Individuals who are at the top of institutional hierarchies
often grow frustrated when they come to understand that it’s
increasingly not the position you have but rather the connections you
have that lead to information awareness, and to power. Often times the
workshops I give are full of people who have been working years – if
not decades – to move up the institutional hierarchy to positions of
power. They are comfortable being reported to by their team and
reporting up to their director. But they are often – and understandably
– resistant to enter a network where all that matters is how which
connections you have and how well you are able to absorb and parse
information.
We then did our respective workshops on strategy and tactics and then reconvened as a whole group to do a little bit of a reflection. I think this process is important to make the final opening up happen. The last part of the day was focused on answering learning
consolidation questions, ending with circle where we went around and
shared the answer to: "What one step can take to incorporate social
media into your practice."
As David reflects on how attitudes change:
At the beginning of today’s workshop the majority of those attending
were openly skeptical about social media. (Though they obviously had
some interest or they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.) But
once Beth and I walked them through how the tools actually work and how
different activists and organizations have used those tools to their
advantage, everyone in the room opened up to the idea of adopting the
tools and techniques themselves. Like every other aspect in life, it’s
difficult to really accept something until you understand it.
And now comes the challenge of transfer - with a one-day session where we teach to the "ah-ha" moment, share both strategy and actual hands-on activities - and some reflection on the next steps. This is why I always create a wiki with resources, a leave behind - and be open to answer to any questions, especially on Twitter.
How have you witnessed social skeptics changing their minds? What do think is required?
This past week, June Holley did a brown bag lunch at the Packard Foundation on network weaving and I was lucky enough to learn from her for a few hours! How would I describe June Holley? She's the guru of network weaving and walks on water.
She gave a brilliant presentation that shared the story of footing binding in China and how using a networked approach and network weaving techniques, they were able to change the practice in a decade.
She covered some techniques of network weaving, sharing her check list of network weaving. One of the ideas that she covered is the practice of making introductions or "closing the triangle." I was reflecting on that and how Twitter can really facilitate network weaving. Here's an example:
Charlene Li posted the above tweet looking for examples of social media in schools. I immediately thought of someone in my network, Vicky Davis, who writes the Coolcat Teacher blog.
So I quickly made an introduction, thinking that they both come from different networks, but now could mutually benefit one another. My cc: to June Holley, was a little tongue and cheek or sort wink and node to the master that I was applying one of her lessons.
Another master at social network analysis and network weaving, gave me some network weaving coaching from Twitter as well - saying that it was important to let everyone know the value of closing the triangle.
So, decided to write this post! Thank you June for a fantastic and inspiring workshop!
How are you weaving people in your network? Have a story?
On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to do a Webinar called "Social Media for Trainers: A Bag of Tricks" over at the Engage 365 Online Community site. I blogged about the content last week. I had sooo much fun creating and delivering it. And, in looking over the evaluations and reviews, I think the participants did too. I got an email from hosts Chris Uschan and Tony Veroeven who shared some numbers, "We had 190 attend and ask 140 questions in a back channel that looked like Clark Griswald's House at Christmas!"
I had to look up the Clark Griswald reference (National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation), but you might be scratching your head wondering what the heck is a back channel? It's a live chat during a workshop or presentation and these days, it mostly taking place on Twitter.
Cliff Atkinson's new book, The Back Channel is a must read for anyone presenting at conferences or planning trainings in age of social media. In fact, we gave away a couple of free copies.
I've been experimenting with integrating social media into instruction for the past five years, so the webinar was a great opportunity to reflect on practice. I covered these three topics:
Why: Social media integrated into instruction - Pass or Fail?
What: The art of social instructional design
How: 6 Tools and Tips
If you didn't have a chance to participate, you'll find the slides, resource materials, and an archived recording over at the webinar wiki. But what's even better is that this wasn't an isolated training, it was part of an new online community called Engage365 which runs on a platform called "Conference 2.0"
This online community, Engage365, is a place to network and share knowledge about how to integrate the use of social media for events. It has 400 members. The community is hosted by Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish in collaboration with Omnipress
This is a lively community, mostly because of the expertise of people like Maddie, Lindy, and Tony who are skillful community managers. However, the platform offers some excellent social features. It integrates online community discussion forums, structured learning like webinars, content, with participants' social profiles. I like how it aggregate the social ant trails of the community. And, how you click on your "friends" profiles and see their social streams. It isn't a walled garden.
Here's some reflections on the Webinar:
Overcoming the Strawberry Jam Problem With Social Design
I emphasized the importance of knowing your audience. In the presentation, I showed folks how to easily survey the audience using google forms. However, some webinar platforms have a real-time polling feature, the virtual equivalent of asking people to raise their hands if ... The poll revealed that revealed 40% were beginners/novices and 60% intermediate or experts. We had similar spread for those having experience designing and delivering trainings.
One participant described this as the "strawberry jam" problem that if the training is trying to cover too much content and too many different levels, than it gets spread too thin. From my experience in doing technology trainings, no matter well you describe levels and content, you always get a range of experience, comfort, and skill.
I think you can design around it. How? By having the whole group understand at the beginning that there are different levels and how they might react to the material. Then, I encourage beginners to ask their questions and acknowledge that the content may feel fast-paced - and that's why I've included tutorials on the wiki. For the intermediate users, I put them to work sharing their knowledge. After all, teaching others improves retention and helps consolidates one's own knowledge. Otherwise, more advanced people might get bored or start ask more detailed technical questions. This is where a back channel like Twitter can be really useful.
Since the engage365 platform is very porous, when I tweeted about the
webinar, a lot of colleagues joined. And they have lots of wisdom to
share, so the backchannel transcript had some gems. I was delighted to see that some of my colleagues were excited to try some of these ideas in their trainings and Kivi Leroux Miller suggested that we do a session at NTC this year called "Online Trainings That Don't Suck," so watch out.
Social Instructional Design
I think I made up the term "social instructional design" which is how you integrate social media tools into your workshop AND how you plan for engagement during delivery. What I wasn't able to find was any research that spoke to the pros and cons, in a scientific way, of integrating social media into instruction. I was able to find some research and pieces about laptops in the classroom. Know of any?
My own experience as a learner and teacher is that social tools deepen the learning. But it is definitely a matter of personal learning styles and treating your participants as adults who can decide how they learn best. As the instructor, there are clearly benefits - like being able to better read the room, getting really useful insights from participants, and improving your materials.
Key Instructional Concepts As Tweets
One piece of advice that I learned from Cliff Atkinson's book was to think about your presentation key points as tweets so people can retweet them. The book has a cool worksheet to help you plan these out. It's also good to look at your Twitter transcript so you can see what resonated with participants. Here's a few points that I picked up that I will integrate into the next time I do this:
Integrating social media into your instructional practice will change how your teach
Be prepared to improvise more and drop the script if it isn't working with the audience
Live in a tool for a month, and experiment with only one tool at time
Learning the tools is like learning a music instrument, start slowly and work up speed and practice
Don't hold all your questions until the end, take Twitter breaks and allow for questions
Understand the art of repurposing your materials to save time
There were a lot of questions along the lines of "how much time does this take?" Why create a wiki for each workshop. I remembered some terrific blog posts that Kivi Leroux Miller wrote (here and here) about repurposing content and this definitely applies to instructional materials. All I can say that if you design for repurposing, it takes less time.
When I design a workshop, I start with a simple framework. Why, What, How. The what usually has some sort of grid. For this workshop, it was thinking about the trainer's tasks before, during, and after - and then how social media tool might enhance those tasks.
The Place for the Nitty-Gritty How To Questions
There are always nitty gritty what button do I click questions or a specific question about whether a tool can do xyz. If you are doing a webinar that is why, what, and little bit of how - there is not time for that. One thing I do is include a list of links to the best how-to and tutorials. It is also good to have people in the back channel who can answer those questions or do a follow up session.
For follow up sessions, these are best designed as "Ask the Expert" or get your questions answers. I love the way NTEN does these sessions. They're done on the phone and chat. An NTEN staff person interviews the expert on a conference call line, while people listen and post questions in the back channel. And then an NTEN moderator in the chat answers the questions or asks them outloud, selecting the questions in a logical order.
I could imagine a two-part session. The why, what, and how and then a second ask the expert session.
Here's a few questions that were posted in the chat during the Webinar:
Are the three wiki tools listed free? (yes, pbwiki, wikispaces, and wetpaint have free versions)
For webinars - do you have a favorite webinar tool? (I use what the host uses. I like webinar software that facilitates learning between participants)
How do you install the delicious tool to google chrome? (look here)
Any advice about using Google Wave? (here's info about using it as backchannel)
Have you ever used a wiki during webinar for interactivity? (once and it was disaster, best to use to supplement discussion in between phone calls)
Extending the learning
I always ask reflective questions at the end of each training - these are 1) What's one idea you'll put into practice? 2) What's one resource you need to move forward? This is useful to ask just as the training is over, but even richer if you can ask again the next morning after everyone has had a good night's sleep.
Learning gets richer when they marinate. Unfortunately, we don't often have a whole day and half to connect with people we are training. So, here is where social media -- tools like Twitter can help you connect again with your learners.
What are your thoughts about integrating social media into your trainings? What have you learned that works or doesn't work?
Note from Beth: Ashoka's Twitter account was placed on the Twitter Suggested List about the same time as my account. Tom Dawkins, who is responsible for Ashoka Tweets, offered to write a guest post reflecting on some best practices for using Twitter.
Ashoka:Innovators for the Public have just passed the first anniversary of the launch of our main account @AshokaTweets. We have gone through a few key phases in the first year, from working hard for nine months to build our first 10,000 connections and then being placed on the Twitter Suggested Users list and racing to the more than 300,000 we now have. This post will explain how we have approached Twitter and what we have learned.
First, some back story:
Ashoka was founded on the belief that social entrepreneurs are the most powerful force changing the world. For almost 30 years Ashoka has been seeking out and supporting the best innovators working to create systemic change to join the Ashoka Fellowship. Supporting these visionary leaders, raising the profile of their work and facilitating collaborations and sharing has allowed many to pursue a life of changemaking, scaling their impact and, in many instances, affecting national policy and changing the lives of thousands in their communities.
After 30 years of electing over 2,200 incredible social entrepreneurs as Fellows we have been able to observe some powerful themes in their work. And the most significant is this: great social entrepreneurs empower their communities, and invite and inspire those around them to become changemakers themselves.
With this insight we gained a deeper appreciation for the fact that innovation happens at many levels and we saw more clearly the kind of world we were working to create, a world many of our Fellows are leading towards, one in which every person has the opportunity to create positive change in their community, and where our collective intelligence and initiative will allow solutions to outrun the challenges we face. This led to our new tagline and mission, creating an Everyone a Changemaker™ world.
It was this mission that drew me to Ashoka, and which drew Ashoka to me. Building an Everyone a Changemaker™ world is a very different mission from simply looking for the world’s elite social entrepreneurs, it involves using the stories and examples of these entrepreneurs to inspire people to action, sharing lessons learned across our networks and opening up the innovation process to more people. This called for a new approach to outreach and communications and led to me joining Ashoka in late 2008 in a new position of Digital Marketing Strategist.
Changemakers.com is the most high-profile example of Ashoka’s new approach to building community and fostering innovation, but so too is the work we are doing in social media and, in particularly Twitter.
The question we asked ourselves when we were planning to launch a Twitter account was: how could we use Twitter to help build an Everyone A Changemaker™ world? In thinking about this question we realized that one of Ashoka’s most important roles as the oldest and largest organization focused on Social Entrepreneurship was as convener, that we have the opportunity to bring together diverse insights and experiences to help map the most effective way forward in tackling many of the world’s most pressing challenges. We wanted to continue to play this role on Twitter.
In addition I felt it was important that we be as human as possible, highlighting not only our Fellows but our staff, and empowering them to be more effective advocates. This was also the chance to share news in a more timely fashion, as well as to proactively reach out and form connections, answer questions, and spark conversations.
Our goals, therefore, where to: -be timely; -be human; -be proactive; -convene our community.
Timely means sharing our news rapidly, as it came in, rather than simply crafting careful news stories for our website at a rate of no more than one a week. It means monitoring the online conversations about social entrepreneurship and issues we care about and directing attention to news hits and interesting blog posts. It means responding to questions rapidly and directing people to where they can find the information they are looking for.
The goal of being human has led me to run several Introduction to Twitter seminars and webinars for our staff. We currently have over 50 of my colleagues on Twitter where they are sharing their passion for their work and growing our reach and connections exponentially. The next step will be to integrate this onto our website where soon you will be able to see a list and live stream of all our staff on Twitter, along with one for our Fellows. Ashoka does such a diversity of work, from eHealth projects to new social change financing models, it’s impossible for a single person like me to accurately represent it. Now those with the knowledge and passion for these topics can participate themselves, in their own words, in the conversations of relevance to them, bringing new ideas back into the organization and better informing the wider sector on what we’re up to.
Being human also means acknowledging who is the person behind an organizational Twitter handle. The bio of AshokaTweets says “Tweets by @tomjd and friends”. I know when I get into a conversation with an organizational account it means a lot to me that they acknowledge up-front that there’s a real person behind the account, allowing a more personal connection to be made.
Being proactive rules out using RSS feeds to populate our Twitter feed. Each tweet is hand-crafted and relevant to our audience, something we checked by asking our followers want sort of information they wanted from us in a poll. We also participated in conversations with organizations such as Skoll Foundation, Social Actions and Change.org to agree on some shared hashtags to denote our areas of work, which led to widespread adoption of #socent for Social Entrepreneurship. We also use Twitter to proactively reach out and respond to comments about Ashoka, social entrepreneurship and social change
Finally, in considering how to use Twitter to convene conversations that matter we came up with the ideas of a monthly real-time discussion on Twitter, #SocEntChat, short for Social Entrepreneurship Chat. #SocEntChat takes place on the first Wednesday of every month from 4-6pm US EST focused on a specific theme. Recent chats have looked at green entrepreneurship, mobile innovation and building cultures of social entrepreneurship on university campuses. We have had contributors from North America, Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and Australia, representing entrepreneurs, staff from large non-profits, activists, enthusiasts, bloggers and more. Conversations focus on next steps and areas for further exploration. All the transcripts can be accessed from our Squidoo Lense.
The next #SocEntChat is being held on Wednesday February 3 on the topic of Building Peace through Social Entrepreneurship. We would love you to join us.
We still have a lot to learn about Twitter and the microblogging medium will continue to evolve in interesting ways. What is clear is that a platform that allows people to connect with one another and talk about the things they care about is a platform made for social change, a place where we can build constituencies and communities capable of collaboratively creating a better future. In other words, it is a place for changemakers, and for building an Everyone a Changemaker world.
Tom is the Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, where he is focused on using social media to help create an Everyone a Changemaker world. He is @tomjd on Twitter
Note from Beth: I was lucky enough to connect with Julio Vasconcellos when we wrote blog posts on similar topics several weeks ago and he was kind enough to assist me with the birthday campaign.
The week we launched TwitCause, TechCrunch called us a “Causes for Twitter,” today our platform for supporting nonprofit causes on Twitter has surpassed 500,000 followers, spotlighted dozens of nonprofits, raised tens of thousands of dollars, and won the hearts of celebrities, nonprofits, and caring Twitterers.
Although
we’ve come a long way from our early days, we haven’t always gotten
things right from the get-go, and we’ve learned a lot along the way by
listening to our supporters and doing a whole lot of experimenting.
Today, I’d like to share some of those lessons learned with you.
For
those unfamiliar with TwitCause, we provide a way for Twitterers to
support nonprofit causes they care about. We do this by highlighting
(on Twitter and on our website) a cause every week and encouraging
people to follow it, tweet its message, and consider making a donation.
We also partnerwithrespectedbrands
willing to donate to causes as supporters tweet updates that spread the
cause’s message. TechCrunch’s original piece is a good overview, as are
theseposts on Experience Project, the company behind TwitCause.
With no further adieu, here are 5 lessons we’ve learned on the road to 500,000 followers:
1. Keep your Message Simple and Short: The
beauty of Twitter is that it forces even the most verbose of us to be
succinct. If you can’t summarize your organization’s mission in 140
characters, try again until you can. In this day and age of short
attention spans, it’s critical to grab attention with a short and clear
message. We had to do this for TwitCause despite the hidden complexity
of our product, and I think that the simplicity of our offering enabled
so many people to grasp the concept quickly, rally behind it, and
spread it to their friends.
2. Provide Immediate Results from an Action:
People like to see an immediate and direct result from their own
action, social media users have an even stronger desire for this
immediacy. My friend Jessica Jackley who co-founded Kiva
told me early on that one of the reasons Kiva works is that you see the
exact goat herder you’re helping with your loan (not to mention read
his story and look at his pictures). Not only does that provide
immediacy, but it creates a fun experience which makes participants
want to keep coming back to Kiva and tell their friends about it. DonorsChoose has successfully tapped into the same pathos by allowing you to pick the specific school project you are helping to fund. From our TwitCause experience, we’ve seen
orders-of-magnitude more tweeting and retweeting of a cause’s message
when supporters know that for each tweet they publish, $1 will be
directly donated to the cause by a sponsoring brand rather than a
delayed and indirect payoff when their tweets are destined at only
calling on others to consider making a donation.
3. Enable People to Pre-Commit their Support:
We’re all busy. As much as we want to visit a site once a week and
support that week’s cause, even the most dedicated of us will forget
once in a while or lose interest over time. That’s why allowing people
to pre-commit their future support is a great way to enable supporters
to continuously show their support and for organizations to maintain a
steady level of active supporters. This approach has been successfully
employed by nonprofits that ask donors to subscribe to a monthly donation
amount which is automatically charged to their credit cards, without
necessitating them to remember the donation every month and go through
the process of donating repeatedly. At TwitCause, we’ve found great
success with our TwitCause Stars
program, which enables supporters to pre-commit to support the weekly
featured TwitCause by tweeting a message and following that cause. We
do this automatically on their behalf, once they’ve authorized us to do
so via the Twitter API. We have nearly 1,000 people that have done
this, including major celebrities like Alyssa Milano and Shannon Elizabeth.
4. Don’t Expect People to Pay: I’ve written before
about my belief that social media users are great for spreading a
message and awareness, but largely ineffective for raising large sums
of money. Generally speaking, very few people actually donate, and
those that do make comparatively small contributions. There are a few
notable exceptions (Obama anyone?), but they are very few and far
between and often are not pure-social-media plays. Causes on Facebook
has raised a lot of money in aggregate, but a pittance on a per-user
basis. If you keep this fact in your fundraising strategy, it’ll save you a lot of heartache later on.
5. Do Expect Brands to Pay: If
you believe my claim that social media is a great way to generate a lot
of attention (we’ve reached tens of millions of people with TwitCause),
and you agree that brands are willing to pay to get attention, you can
see how marrying the two in a clean manner can be incredibly powerful.
Think of the #beatcancer campaign sponsored by ebay and MillerCoors, the recent Pepsi giving campaign on Facebook, and countlessothers,
and you’ll see what I’m talking about. What’s critical here is that the
campaign not turn into a thinly-disguised advertisement and in fact is
primarily focused on benefiting the social cause, but allotting the
brand to respectfully participate in the conversation in an authentic
fashion. TwitCause partnered with Häagen-Dazs to raise money for honey
bee research (a cause Häagen-Dazs has long championed), partnered with
Lion’s Gate's movie “Precious” to raise money for literacy (the film has a strong message about literacy as hope), and with pro-biotic brand Attune
to support Celiac Disease (the Attune Bar is great for digestive
health). All campaigns raised thousands of dollars for the nonprofits
(100% of proceeds going to the nonprofit) and spread the causes’
messages to millions of people.
I'd love to hear in the comments
which of these you agree or disagree with as well as what other
"lessons learned" you would add to the list.
Julio Vasconcellos manages TwitCause for the Experience Project and advises nonprofits on social media strategy and tactics. This post was originally published on Julio's blog, The Armchair Founder.
Given the visible success of the Haiti text to give campaigns, SMS is bound to become one of the tools in the an organization's fundraising bag if it isn't already.
Every time someone texts “tp4bc” to 60611, the textPlus mobile address, textPlus will donate $1 to Boarding for Breast Cancer, a non-profit, youth-focused education, awareness, and fundraising foundation whose mission is to increase awareness about breast cancer, the importance of early detection and the value of an active lifestyle.
textPlus, a mobile app, offers users free texting with group text capability. What's cool is that Drew’s employer GOGII is the mobile app developers behind textPlus a free group texting application available on the iphone and android platforms.
This is not the first time Drew Olanoff has taken to the social web to fundraise for cancer. Last May after Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he launched a charity called blamedrewscancer.com which donated $1 dollar to the LIVESTRONG foundation for every person that followed @DrewFromTV, the twitter handle of comedian Drew Carey. The charity has raised $15,000 dollars to date and is a great example of personal fundraising that leverages the power of social media.
If you are looking for information about to design and implement an effective sms campaign, Allyson Kapin has a post that includes tips, as well as a description of some of the challenges. Her tips include:
If your nonprofit is thinking of launching a mobile fundraising campaign, it’s critical that you develop a multi-channel marketing and outreach plan to spread the word and maximize donations. For example:
Start with emailing your online activists and donors and place your shortcode and keyword front and center. Include a “Forward to a Friend” link and a “Share This” app on the landing page so people can promote it to social networks too. Reinforce this in a follow up thank you email as well.
Leverage social networks. Tweet the “text to donate” campaign. Ask followers to pass it on. Post it to your Facebook Fanpage and any other social networks your organization is active on. Report back on key milestones. The American Red Cross has done a terrific job in the last 72 hours of reporting how much money they are raising via mobile, the work they are doing on the ground, etc.
Paid advertising such as banner ads, keywords and text ads are excellent and fast ways to promote your campaign to millions of people and grow your list at the same time.
Follow up with your donors. Tell them about the progress you have made towards reaching your fundraising goals. Explain how their money is being spent. Share some personal stories by people who have been impacted by their donations.
Update: More from Heather Mansfield on mobile marketing best practices here and some
Has your organization incorporated text to give in it is fundraising bag of tricks? What have you learned about implementing these campaigns? What are the best specific blog posts and resources out there on SMS fundraising?
Less than two hours ago, Chase Community Giving made the much anticipated unofficial post on its wall announcing the lucky winner of $1 million dollars and five finalists each receiving $100,000 on its contest Fan Page.
This contest was the culmination of a two-part "vote for me" cause marketing strategy that started in November and has been rife with controversy. In some ways, it comes as no surprise that the race to the finish line ended with more allegations of dubious behavior by contest participants and those watching them compete. It's left some nonprofit professionals wondering whether these types of contests are a good idea.
The lucky winner, Invisible Children, has won $1 million, but the Huffington Post is reporting that the second place winner, engaged in voter fraud. Further Huffington Post reports:
In the contest's last few hours, many newly created profiles voted for
The Isha Foundation, some of them with dubious-looking names, including
Gdfg Kcjbvkljvb
and Sdfj Dfsjlfkddjf. Several other profiles with more realistic names
voted for Isha, though these accounts have had few if any friends or
activity prior to voting.Though many of the profiles supporting The Isha Foundation appear to
be new with little to no activity, it's unclear if that is a violation
of the terms and conditions of participating in the contest.
Invisible Children has also been accused of fraud during the duration of the contest. Change.org reported
on January 19 that many users who had not voted for Invisible Children
had been tagged in a photo with an image reading "I Voted For Invisible
Children," making it appear as though that user had voted for the group.
Voting for the Chase Community Giving contest ended at midnight on
January 23, with an official announcement of the winner coming on
Monday, January 26. It is unknown whether Chase and Facebook will be
verifying the legitimacy of vote counts after the contest has ended.
I'm not surprised. The contest was tainted during the first round when several nonprofits that had placed in the top 100 were disqualified without reason amidst criticisms about the contest design. This happened right before the holidays in December and an article by Stephanie Strom in the New York Times reported:
JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.
The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.
Dubbed the Chase Bank's Online Contest Fail and a firestorm of criticism followed. The disqualified groups organized a boycott of Chase and probably would have ignited an angry crowd if not a matter of timing. The events happened right before Christmas when everyone distracted by holiday celebrations. Chase Bank did not apparently make any formal, public concessions to the disqualified groups and the nonprofits decided to move on.
I think the more important question is the debate as to whether these "vote for me" contests are beneficial to nonprofits and social change. I don't think contests should be banned entirely, they just need to be better designed:
1.) Contest Design Should Not Promote Scarcity Thinking:Scarcity thinking assumes no growth and heightened competition. Contests that are designed to select winners based on popular votes only and huge dollar amounts inspire scarcity thinking. Much like throwing some fish food into a pond filled with starving Koi fish:
Scarcity thinking also inspires less than honest tactics. It doesn't promote thoughtfulness or field wide learning.
Further, for organizations that are pestering their supporters and friends to "vote for me" has the potential of eroding the hard earned social capital. It does not promote the good kind of relationship building that can really sustain an organization in the long run. It promotes transactional relationships.
2. The Role of Experts: There is a role for expert opinion in crowdsourcing projects to make them more effective.
Some contests, for example the Knight News Challenge and Case Foundation Make It Your Own,
have handled this need for expertise by having a two-tiered process.
The crowd identifies the top contenders, not the winners and a panel of
experts selects the winners. The Brooklyn Museum of Art's Click
Exhibition used two crowds - a general crowd and a crowd of curators (Allison Fine and I profiled this project in the chapter on crowdsourcing in our forthcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit)
3. A Balance of Social Good and Marketing: Can throwing a lot of money out there for nonprofits to beg for really solve social problems or make the world a better place? There needs to be a balance of social good and cause marketing or else it might come off as "cause washing." We
know that corporate greed is being replaced by generosity and we know there is potential synergy between financial performance and attention to community and social needs. But it can't be a pure marketing strategy - there needs to be some theory of change.
The above diagram describes the theory of change for Prizes
from a recent report by McKinsey This type of thinking needs to go hand in hand with marketing strategies to ensure an effective design.
What are the best ways that cause-related marketing campaigns can truly have a social impact?
PROFAMIL Haiti has provided sexual and reproductive health services in Haiti since 1984. This organization is part of a 40 member organization network called International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF/WHR). The program in Haiti has three clinics, but the ones in Port-au-Prince, and Jacmel were completely destroyed by the earthquake as you can see by the photo above.
In an email interview, Laura Zaks, Public Affairs Coordinator, shared with me this sad story of devastation and the urgent need for funds to help PROFAMIL resume services through a temporary static clinic and Mobile Health Units to deliver services in tent cities where displaced persons have gathered.
1. How did the earthquake impact PROFAMIL Haiti's work?
PROFAMIL’s clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel have been destroyed, although a small amount of equipment and supplies has been salvaged. Unfortunately, many supplies remain trapped in building rubble with conditions too dangerous to access, particularly in light of the aftershocks. In addition, one staff member, the Director of Finance and acting Executive Director has passed away and at least several staff members have been injured, though a full report on the health and well-being of all staff and their families in both cities has not yet been received.
2. What's needed to rebuild the program?
IPPF/WHR has put together a proposal for funding from various donor sources totaling $2,500,000. This is based on the immediate needs over the next three to six months for human resources, site operations/communications and logistical support, transportation, and medical and surgical supplies.
Given the lack of physical clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel and with the structural integrity of standing buildings uncertain, PROFAMIL is coordinating to offer basic primary health care and sexual and reproductive health services via several modalities, including:
• PROFAMILIA in the Dominican Republic has been coordinating with partners in deploying mobile health unit teams across the border to Haiti to conduct an initial assessment of key areas of need and to begin providing health services. Currently, the majority of international assistance is concentrated in Port-au-Prince, with many unmet health demands in the areas surrounding Leogame, Matrissals, Jacmel, Petit Goave and Grand Goave. These mobile health unit teams, consisting of medical doctors, nurses, and volunteer staff, have extensive experience in working with Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic.
• PROFAMIL staff and community health promoters in Jacmel and Port-au-Prince will organize mobile health units to bring primary health care, obstetric care, family planning and HIV prevention services to community-based sites, including tent cities and other temporary shelters that have been set up in and around both cities.
• Though its physical clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel are too damaged to resume operations, PROFAMIL will seek to establish temporary service provision facilities in fixed physical structures only as appropriate and based on structural assessments of their safety.
3. How can people contribute?
We have set up a donate page on our website where secure donations can be made from any country. 100% of the money collected through this site will go towards getting PROFAMIL’s clinics and mobile health units up and working as soon as possible. The link is: https://secure.ga0.org/02/haiti and it is also accessible from the IPPF/WRH homepage: www.ippfwhr.org.
3. Are you using social media to get the word out?
We also have an online advocacy center: www.freechoicesaveslives.org. We have mobilized our online membership from this center by sending two appeals asking for donations. We will continue to update our membership as we receive further news from our partners on the ground.
4. Please describe to my readers the connection between sexual reproductive health services and poverty reduction.
PROFAMIL’s work has always been closely linked to poverty reduction efforts within Haiti. This brief slideshow gives a good picture in the link between sexual reproductive healthcare and poverty reduction. Haiti is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the Western Hemisphere. Infant and maternal mortality rates are the region’s highest, and Haiti’s devastating HIV/AIDS rate is second in the world only to Sub-Saharan Africa. 2006 data indicates that only 28% of the population uses modern contraceptives. Less than one-half of all births are attended by a skilled health professional.
PROFAMIL is one of Haiti’s largest nongovernmental sexual and reproductive health providers. Its clinics, community distribution points, and mobile health units provide hundreds of thousands of sexual and reproductive healthcare services annually. For 25 years, PROFAMIL has provided low-cost, high-quality healthcare services including family planning, early detection of breast and cervical cancer, pre-and-post natal services, and voluntary testing and counselling for HIV/AIDS. In rural areas, a network of health promoters and mobile health clinics provide family planning and basic health care-often the only healthcare available in these remote communities. They recently inaugurated new clinics in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel, to better serve their increasing patient base. Given the massive socio-economic and health care challenges facing the country, PROFAMIL’s work has been and will continue to be tremendously important in future development efforts in the country. The stories from the field that I pointed to above further reinforce this connection between PROFAMIL and poverty reduction efforts in Haiti.
I've been involved with teaching and learning technology for nonprofits since 1993 when I worked for the New York Foundation for the Arts' online network for artists, Arts Wire. My job was the network weaver. I didn't know anything about UNIX, discussion forums, email, or any of the technology used. And, many of our community members were just learning too.
I was immediately thrown into a situation of dynamic teaching and learning. I had to learn how to create web pages, manage email, modem escape codes, navigate the Internet, and whatever came along. And then immediately create instructional materials and trainings for the community. It developed into something called "SpiderSchool."
When Maddie Grant at Social Fish invited me to do a FREE webinar over at the 365 Engage Community, I was thrilled to have an opportunity to reflect the practice of incorporating social media into instruction. The Webinar will take place next Tuesday, January 26 at 9:00 - 10:00 am PST. Here's the description:
Join Beth Kanter who has been teaching nonprofit technology workshops
for over 15 years, both offline and online. For almost six years, she
has been integrating social media tools and tricks into her
instructional practice. She is going to share with you all her secrets,
her tool bag, and other tips for using social media to create
instructional materials, research your audience, deliver your workshop
and follow up.
If this isn't enough, she'll be giving away three
free copies of Cliff Atkinson's new book, The Back Channel, required
reading for trainers. All workshop participants will receive a discount
coupon for the book.
When I design a training, whether a one-hour webinar or an all-day face-to-face workshop, I don't begin with the technology integration. I begin with the instructional goals and finding out as much as possible about the audience. Not unlike where you start for a communications or social media strategy, eh?
Learning Objectives:
Understand why it is important to incorporate social media tools in your instructional practice for trainings
How to think like a social instructional designer
Introduction to six different social media tools and techniques for a planning, delivering, and evaluating a training session
When formulating learning objectives, this is typically done in consultation with your workshop host. I also always review Bloom's Taxonomy and have found this diagram really useful.
I also think about what I'm not going to cover due to time constraints and communicate that upfront. I also try to scaffold Webinars - and give more overviews and point people to the presentation for links, resources, and more self-directed learning.
I also try to identify a framework that will help me design the content. My central thesis is that social media can enhance all phases of the instructional design, delivery, and evaluation process:
Audience Research
Because I'm mostly teaching workshops about social media, if the participants have a social media presence, I can easily find it, review before the workshop, and even incorporate a screencapture or two into the materials. If I'm doing a Webinar, I might use the poll feature and do my research in real time. It's the equivalent of asking the audience to raise their hands if ..
The big questions I want to know are related to the learning goals:
What is the audience's level of experience?
Are there any particular attitudes or opinions that the audience holds that may be a barrier or enhancement to reaching learning goals?
Because this is a webinar connected with an online community, I've been reading the threads on the site to understand attitudes better.
I've also learned I always get a mixed group. That's one advantage of the backchannel - is that you came your presentation top level - and encourage more advanced people to share what they know in the backchannel and then bring that into the conversation. You can also encourage those who are less experienced to ask their questions. This encourages interaction between participants and they can learn from one another.
Materials and Lesson Plan Development
The next step in design is the actual content and instructional delivery. I also think about how I will engage participants, especially if it is a webinar. I do this for myself by creating a detailed trainer's outline that includes timings, content, and process. Sometimes I just use my powerpoint deck and add the process notes and timings in the notes section.
I always include a good list of resources, particularly how-to steps, videos, and screencasts. I think it is ineffective to take a group of people through a step by step process all at once because people are different levels of understanding and comfort. For me, it is better to show people the important concepts and principles, and then link to how-to steps for self-paced tutorials. It takes practice to master tech steps.
The part of the planning process always include research for good resources. I use delicious, slideshare, and twitter. When I'm ready to build materials, I start with me setting up a workshop wiki It becomes a hub for all electronic materials.
The advantage of having all this detailed information on a wiki is two-fold. First, it saves a lot of paper. For face-to-face workshops, I try print only what is necessary and give people the URL of wiki if they want to go deeper. Second, you can refer detailed questions to a resource on the wiki or if you get a question about something that you haven't included a specific resource for, you can add it on the fly.
The social media integration also includes setting up a #hashtag, uploading slides into slideshare, and living link lists on delicious.
The Topics
I'm going to how social media in your training can benefit both the instructor and learners, the design process, and then provide some very practical information:
-Use Google Forms for Pre/Post Participant Evaluations
-Use Delicious To Research and Build Your Resource Link Lists
-Share Your PowerPoint Deck with SlideShare
-Use A Wiki For Electronic Handouts, Electronic Flip Chart, and Leave Behind
-Integrating Twitter as A BackChannel into Instruction
-Documenting Your Workshop With Photos and Videos
When a disaster of this magnitude strikes, our impulse is to help in some way. Like many people, I donated both on the Web and for the first time via text to the Red Cross. For a more details about the SMS fundraising results, see this this detailed report on the SMS fundraising campaign from MobileActive and yesterday's article in the New York Times from Stephanie Strom.
But beyond giving, many of us want to help, particularly techies. As Michaela Hackner points out:
There is at least one good news story emerging around the world
about this devastating crisis: technology is changing the playing field.
Sure, technology isn't necessarily air-dropping supplies and
ferrying in doctors, but it's raising millions of dollars, helping the
right people connect where they're needed, and making all of us
distinctly aware that something horrible is happening and needs our
attention. It's also helping all of us who feel helpless, nestled in
our homes in the developed world, contribute to the cause and see
immediate impact.
Geoff Livingston, my colleague at Zoetica, has a post in Mashable today on Five Social Media Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake Relief. He describes how with the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector,
people’s ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has
only been increased.
Here's some specific examples of how, if you're a techie, you can find ways to donate your technical expertise or time to Haiti or some of the many ways techies are helping out:
The Crisis Commons facilitates partnerships and maintains a network of technology
volunteers to respond to specific needs in times of crisis. People
work on projects based on their skills and interests to create
technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating
disasters and crises around the world. Here you will find opportunities to donate your tech skills to Haiti.
Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform, has been providing updates on its work crowdsourcing information on the ground. Erik Hersman shared a post this morning with some of the success stories from their "4636," an emergency short code.
The Extraordinaries have pioneered the concept of "micro volunteering" that allows people to complete micro-tasks for organizations or efforts passionate about, using a mobile phone or web browser,
in a few minutes of spare time. They have created a Haiti support page to harness the power
of the crowd to help locate and identify missing persons with just a
few minutes of your time.
There are two micro volunteering opportunities:
The Image Tagger — Sort through news photos coming out of Haiti and categorize (tag) them with keywords like “adult, child, alive, deceased.” Never before has there been a system that can bring together thousands of photos from across the web and have them sorted by live human beings (no computer could ever know that there is a teenager in a photo).
The Matcher — We’ve engineered a system that matches faces of missing people to faces in photos coming from Haiti. The goal is to help desperate families find their loved ones. Volunteers use the matcher to look for a missing person in images that have been tagged with the image tagger.
Ben Rigby, Co-Founder, recently left a comment on a post I wrote about nonprofit iPhone apps noting that he just launched a "Mission" at Extradinaries that asks their community to help find nonprofit iPhone apps. It uses their new researcher tool
If you're interested in learning in more depth about mobile phones and social good, I recommend that you follow Extraordinaries, MobileActive, and Ushahidi.
Note from Beth:There has been a variety of criticism of contests.Nonprofit consultant Hildy Gottlieb has been a vocal skeptic and is deeply philosophically opposed to online contests as a method of change in the social sector. Her main objection to "vote me contests" is that it pits one amazing cause against another, perpetuating the scarcity mentality that lives in the hope of a pot of gold. She also feels that contests have too much of a myopic focus on channeling dollars or click actions rather than engaging people's hearts and minds and souls.
Earlier this month, I sent out a few tweets asking for the counterpoint to Hildy's view. Jared Paul, the co-founder of a new nonprofit that has a focus on homeless youth and one of the winners of the $25,000 in the first phase of Chase's Giving Community Contest offered to share his thoughts.While as of this writing, his organization is in the bottom 25% of the leaderboard he shares a few points below about why contests like this can be helpful for small, new nonprofits.
In addition, Andy Amsler, a volunteer for another organization in the bottom 30% of the leaderboard as of this writing, left this comment on a blog post about the value of the contest for their organization.
Now that social media has normalized,
can contests like this be a level playing field where organizations
with hundreds and thousands of fans and much larger budgets compete along side those smaller
organizations?Nathaniel Whittemore pointed out some further problems with dubious strategies that as he says turns these contests into a farce.
Does these contests really help build capacity of nonprofits and bring innovative solutions for social to the forefront or not?What do you think?
Guest Post by Jared Paul, A Good Idea
My name is Jared Paul and I’m the founder of a one and a half year old, San Francisco nonprofit called A Good Idea (AGI) that recently made the top 100 in the Chase Community Giving contest. AGI is a vehicle for positive social change ideas that connect people in need with people who want to help. Our largest “good idea” to date will be a fully accredited residential high school for homeless teens in San Francisco, which we will look to replicate in other cities across the country.
As a fairly new nonprofit, this online contest gave us the ability to gain exposure and compete with some more established organizations. The best part was that we won $25,000 and more if we do well in the second phase of the contest (up to $1 million!). Not bad for three weeks work, especially considering that we recently netted $10,000 for 3 MONTHS of planning a fundraiser!
You might ask, how did a less than two year old nonprofit make the top 100 out of 500,000 nonprofits nationwide? Well…sheer hustle, an inspiring video, and a supportive network.
To control spam, Facebook makes it impossible to email more than 20 people at a time, so to email your friend list, you must break your list down into groups of 20. Emailing my list of over 4,000 friends took me a few hours and I helped 40-50 friends through this process, quite time consuming. Chase also created an “activity” page where you could see who was voting for which nonprofit. Everyone had 20 votes to use (and you could only vote once per nonprofit) so people were usually left with 19 extra votes. I began emailing people after they voted, asking them to consider using one of their votes for AGI. While my Thanksgiving wasn’t much of a holiday as I had a laptop on my lap at all times, it was well worth it.
People in New Jersey, Nebraska, and New York who were learning about A Good Idea were emailing me asking how they could start a chapter in their hometown and asking their friends to vote. We started receiving unsolicited donations from people who cried after watching the video on our website and felt the urge to donate money to us. In summary for Round 1, we had our friends vote, we had our friends ask their friends to vote, and we asked total strangers to vote…and it worked!
For Round 2 we came up with a more elaborate marketing strategy including partnering with four other Bay Area nonprofits to support each other, voting parties, the attempt to get celebrities tweeting about us, getting local high schools on board, and much more. So far it hasn’t proven to be enough as we are far behind in the standings, but don’t count us out yet as we’ve got a few tricks still up our sleeves!
All in all this process has been an unbelievably strenuous but rewarding process that has left me feeling an enormous amount of gratitude for the opportunity that Chase and Facebook. Thanks for reading and of course, you can vote for us.
Updated: Andy Amsler expanded on his blog comment about why these contests are good for small organizations. You can read more here.
Note from Beth: Anne Mai Bertlesen and I had a quick exchange at the end of year after I blogged about the Pepsi and Chase Giving Contests in December. She offered to write a guest post that provides an "insider's perspective" having run a number of cause-related ventures including contests.
Just before the holidays, a debate emerged among the greater cause
community on the value and role of contests for good. The debate was
triggered by allegations that Chase Bank’s Community Giving
program on FaceBook was flawed, that groups were unfairly eliminated
and that Chase was not transparent in its management and communication
of the program. (For an excellent summation of the controversy and
attendant commentary, see writer and consultant Beth Kanter’s blog.) The controversy prompted some conference sponsors to consider hosting a forum to examine how these contests are designed and managed.
What’s missing from the current debate though are the perspectives
of marketers and corporate philanthropic managers who sponsor and
manage these programs. Those of us who have planned, executed and
evaluated these types of contests for good on behalf of major brands
have done so with the best intentions and not to “cause wash” — i.e.,
buy good brand karma under the guise of philanthropy. In addition, we
know:
These programs are difficult and resource intensive.
Programs, like Chase’s Community Giving and Pepsi’s soon to be
launched Refresh Project, that reach millions of consumers, require
significant support from philanthropy, marketing, advertising, public
affairs, legal, and customer service departments within a corporation
to develop, manage and promote. This is not a program that one or two
people — who have other corporate responsibilities — can do in their
spare time. Just evaluating all the submissions can take many, many
people hours. Amazon, in 2005, and Google, in 2008, learned the hard
way. Amazon discontinued their program after its inaugural year,
opting instead to offer consumers a pre-determined list of charities to
support. Google’s 10100 Project not only extended the
contest timeline significantly — adding an entire year — but also
changed the program mid stream after receiving over 100,000 submissions.
They can be extraordinarily expensive to run.
Like most marketing programs, these contests require promotional
support to get the word out — not only to prospective project/cause
submitters but also to the eligible voting population. The brilliance
behind the Chase Community Giving Program is that the promotion took
place largely on Facebook; there appears to have been, at least for
Round One, no above the line advertising support nor did the firm
invest in the development of a separate program website.
These contests can bring out the best and the worst in participants — particularly if the stakes are high.
The stories that pour in are astounding: causes and issues you might
not have known existed, intriguing solutions that upturn conventional
wisdom, the courage and conviction of the individuals involved in these
causes and issues. But for hundreds and thousands of inspiring
stories, there will be participants who will engage in questionable
behavior — e.g., utilizing bots or offshore submission “sweatshops” to
“stuff the ballot;” submitting ideas or media that they do not own the
rights to; accusing fellow participants of foul play; gaming the
program.
Depending on the program design, participants may need time and support to mobilize their supporters. Riffing on American Express’ Members Project (disclosure: I was involved in this program), Pepsi Refresh Project has a downloadable toolkit
to help participants develop their ideas for submission. Online
seminars that teach non-profits how to use social networking tools is
also very helpful as is assigning mentors to projects, which Pepsi will
be doing in their program.
Leader boards can be deceiving if more than votes are required to advance.
Some programs have multiple criteria — e.g., achievability, innovation
— in addition to popular support as evidenced in vote tallies. In
those cases, displaying votes can inadvertently mislead participants to
believe the outcome relies entirely on the votes. Communicating
frequently and prominently about the other eligibility requirements
will help — but some will still be confused. In the case of Chase, it
might have been helpful to have a link to Chase’s Corporate
Responsibility sitelet since aligning with their corporate
responsibility goals was a key criteria.
Despite the best plans and intentions, criticism will be levied.
Be prepared but patient. And, remember, there are important causes and
inspiring organizations that will gain exposure and support because of
these contests.
Chase Community Giving in four days away from its second
phase of the competition and Pepsi has launched it’s Refresh Project. I
hope that the Case Foundation includes marketers and corporate
philanthropy managers in its forum on contests for good. Just as there
are best practices and benchmarks for marketing online, via email,
direct mail etc. so too should a body of knowledge be developed about
contests for good. And sponsors of these contests for good should be
included in the conversation.
Anne Mai Bertelsen is a marketing and digital strategist passionate about making a difference.
The natural human urge is to do something to help. And, we're seeing this all over the world, all over the social web. Britt Bravo has a terrific compilation of grassroots efforts underway to help Haiti. Here's a few more:
1. Donations of Needed Items
charity:water offices were transformed into a drop off location for needed items in Haiti. Although they stopped accepting donations of items at 5:00 PM (because the plane leaves on Tuesday), I thought this video is one small example of different grassroots efforts underway to help. These supplies will be transported by Partners in Health to where they are needed most. Other charity:water partners in Haiti, Concern Worldwide US, are sending supplies from Ireland and still have a pressing need for donations.
charity:water is encouraging online donations to their partners who are in Haiti and working to quickly to deliver disaster relief services. Partners in Health and Concern Worldwide, US.
Britt Bravo's post summarizes some good advice to those who feel the urge to volunteer or do something:
This is a call to action or call to sing. Amy Carol Wolff, a musician, wrote a song this summer and now she is hoping that people will use it for benefit concerts. More here.
3. SMS Fundraising Update
The Red Cross text HAITI to 90999 campaign continues to break records in SMS giving in the US. As of a couple of hours ago, the Red Cross Twitter account retweeted the above from mgive it has raised $21 million in $10 donations. MobileActive has a detailed report on the fundraising via sms.
4. Embedded Giving to Haiti
We're also seeing more embedded giving opportunities to give to disaster relief efforts. This one comes from Causeworld, an iPhone app that allows users to leverage donations from corporate sponsors by spreading good karma. They are doubling donations to the Red Cross disaster relief effort.
The top 100 "eligible" vote getters were announced in December. Each organization received $25,000 and the announcement caused some controversy because of the contest eligibility rules and lack of a leaderboard.
The second round of the contest opened on January 15th and the
pre-contest promotion on January 14th on the contest fan page was met with
a chorus of "Vote for Haiti." Chase had, in face, already donated to the relief efforts, although the link to the corporate press release was not posted on the Fan Page all until two days later.
The 100 organizations are now participating in the next round,
"The Big Idea" where the 100 charities share their big idea for
changing the world and get votes. The winner gets $1 million and
five finalists will receive $100,000 each. The top 100 included a mix of nonprofits with an operating budget of under $10 million with programs in designated
Chase corporate responsibility areas: education, health care, housing,
the environment, combating hunger, arts and culture, human services and
animal welfare.
Over the holidays and into early January, the Chase Community Giving contest quietly implemented a leader board, a scoreboard showing who is winning based on the number of votes. In other contests, the leaderboard has been updated in real time. Unlike standard practice for other contests, this leader board is updated twice a day.
Having real-time information is very important to the organizations. It helps them motivate supporters to vote as well as helps organizations make real-time adjustments to their strategy. Real time leaderboards make the contest very transparent. Nonetheless, you can still click
through to each group's project page to see the real-time vote tally
and I'm sure all 100 organizations are monitoring how others are doing to get out the vote.
The platform initially had some technical problems where the voting pages and leaderboard landing pages did not load quickly or at all. This may be due to heavy voting traffic or whatever, but contest organizations came up with creative workarounds. For example. Friendship Circle, has a web contest landing page that provides instructions on how to vote and a direct link to the Facebook app page.
Some are some quick observations about the strategies the organizations are using as the contest unfolds.
Explaining the "big idea" succinctly in a few sentences
As Farra Trompeter points out in a post about the contest, it is important to explain the big idea in a few sentences. As I looked up and down the leaderboard, I noticed that Idealist was in the top 15. Their proposal for "changing the world" is something they've been working on and getting feedback on for the past two years. The executive director, Ami Dar, has been a thought leader the nonprofit technology sector for many years. Because I know their work first-hand, they got my vote!
It's not just the size of the Fan base, but activating them
In watching the scoreboard, the first and second place contenders have been fluid. Invisible Children had a dramatic lead in the last two days, but was over taken by Twloha which as of this writing had a lead of 10,000 votes or approximately 37,000 votes or roughly 10% of its Facebook fans. But this isn't about size of a charity's fan page as you can see by looking at the third place contender, Bridge to Turkiye, with almost 20,000 votes and a fan page base of 4,000.
Organizing Offline and Online
There is also the importance of offline/online connection that can't be ignored. For example, Friendship Circle, had a rallied at a Piston's Game in Detroit (see above video) and organized 3,000 teens to play freeze tag on Facebook to rally the vote.
The Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) was around 50th on the leaderboard on Saturday and is now a respective #15 with a small but committed fan base of 600 people on Facebook. The organization made it into the top 100 because passionate and well connected supporter, Teddy Zee, decided to be their champion. He is organized parties
to get hundreds of people to vote and connect through chats to get
their friends to vote during the voting week. According to Deborah Suh, executive director, "Whether we win the next
round (we get $100,000 or $1 million), this has been a great way to
raise our social networking presence."
Good luck to all the organizations participating in the contest. Here's where you can go vote!
What strategy advice would you offer to the 100 organizations competing in this contest?
Cine Institute, an organization that provides Haitian youth
with film education, is located a block from an orphanage built by Luke Montgomery, co-founder of WeCanBuildanOrphanage.com,
an interactive charity building a home, clinic and school for AIDS
orphans in Haiti. He's passionate about helping children and obsessed with
leveraging the power of "good ideas for good causes."
Luke is a colleague of several social media colleagues, including Justin Perkins from Care
Justin passed this message along on Thursday:
Still no word from our orphanage. Our town of Jakmel (also spelled Jacmel if you want to Google it) has been largely destroyed and our AIDS orphanage is constructed out of cement... not good. Most of these types of buildings in our town have crumbled. Best case: Our kids are safe but all the care staff will be dealing with their own families, destroyed and dead family members and all water and food will now be even more scarce. Worst case: The orphanage collapsed like all other concrete buildings in town and the locals might hesitate to dig out HIV infected bloody kids. I haven't been able to sleep. Crying.
I'm going back to Haiti in the next few days and need help to give hands-on help to our kids and the townspeople.
This morning Justin passed along some good news that the staff and kids are all alive at the orphanage in Haiti, but the building was completely destroyed. Justin also passed a long a message from his friend Luke, the founder of the orphanage,
Our children have all survived. Somehow amidst all the death around them, these 13 orphans made it out of the rubble alive. They are now living on the street surrounded by rubble with no food, water, blankets or medicine. Many of them are HIV+. Two are handicapped and can not walk. We are rushing an emergency team to them to care for, feed and protect them. I'm leaving and will be on the ground in Haiti for as long as it takes to rebuild."
Please spread this emergency link:
EarthquakeOrphans.com
Crisis Mapping
My colleagues at Ushahidi have been working around the clock and around the globe mapping crisis information from Haiti.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the board). For those you who are not familiar with
Ushahidi, they have a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed
data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or time line. Their
goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the
public for use in crisis response. Here's more about their haiti platform.
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network,
the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA
Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS,
Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with
everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.
Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock
to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has
crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!),
coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners,
and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at
Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a
global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock
support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team
goes to sleep and vice versa.
Ory describes their current challenges, including:
Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies
trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and
following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently
doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and
INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be
done.
She has called on us to help get the word out about Ushahidi, she seeking contacts with local or diaspora Haitian media or NGOs, and connections with larger humanitarian organizations to share information.
Last night Rachel Weidinger started to organize nptech ties to help colleague, Wendy Harman - and now they're also connecting with Ushahidi.
Crisis Camps
Jake Brewer over at Sunlight Foundation let me know about Civic Hackers Haiti going on this weekend in Silicon Valley as well as in other locations.
My colleagues at Ushahidi have already swung into action and are mapping crisis information from Haiti. (Disclaimer: I'm on the board). For those you who arenot familiar with Ushahidi, they have a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response.
They also have a list of charitable organizations/ngos doing work in Haiti that need donations - like Partners in Health. If you want donate, make sure you keep your scam filter active ... You can also text to give to the American Red Cross: Text HAITI to 90999 donate $10 to the Red Cross for Haiti efforts. You can donate $10 up to three times, and 100% of the donations will reach the Red Cross Foundation. This effort is run by Mobile Accord. $3 million has already been donated.
MobileActive has an aggregated list of places to donate or find additional information.
The key to success in social media is to leave room for reflection at the end of a project. Reflection gives you a chance to understand what worked and what didn't. You need metrics to measure against goals, but you also need harvest those insights. I do this with every social media activity as well as whenever I teach.
With that said, it is hard to do when you have a big, hairy to do list breathing down your neck. It's hard to do when you get pulled in to the fast moving, forward current of Twitter or when you're chipping away to get your email in box down to zero.
But how to shift from the frenetic pace of getting things done to giving yourself time to think and improve what you're doing. That was the reason for the eating chocolate exercise I did in PoST class on Monday. The exercise is intended to help you slow down, be in the moment, and shift you into a reflective mindset or at least feel what it is like. The exercise is simple - take five minutes to eat a hershey's kiss and notice everything about the experience.
Chocolate activates the pleasure center of the brain, at least according to some research. I asked the students what else does that? After a nervous giggle, I shared with them that donating and volunteering does the same thing as chocolate to your brain.
My challenge was to get into a reflective mindset about this birthday campaign. I did not eat chocolate. I listened to music to get into a meditative state. You need to find what works for you to shift you into that mindset.
This post harvests what I learned and what I still don't know about the birthday campaign strategy and measurement as well as guest teaching a graduate school class.
1.) Setting the Right Dollar Goal
My 53rd birthday wish was to raise money for the Sharing Foundation to send 53 Cambodian Youngsters to school by covering the cost of their uniforms ($10 per child or $530). We crushed that goal and raised $5,010 because of your generosity in donating and calling attention to the birthday wish. That means 501 youngsters will be able to attend school in Cambodia and hopefully, fine, a route out of poverty.
Kami Huyse Watson, my colleague at Zoetica, suggested the goal was too low and I should have aimed for $5,300. And, the low goal was one of the reasons that community rallied with the self-organized surprise party. But another reason I set that low goal was because the Causes birthday wish software did not give me the flexibility of setting a goal without attaching it to a gift amount and number of donors. The highest I could make it was $530 (10 gifts of $53)
I went with it anyway because this campaign was much a shorter duration than last year's birthday campaign where I raised $6,000. This campaign was 5 days versus 14 days and I spent much less time implementing, so while the total is less, presumably my ROI is higher.
I remember talking with Stacey Monk on the phone last November about how difficult it is to set goals for social media infused fundraising campaigns. She didn't set a specific dollar goal, but stages of goals and that were integrated into the platform. I did this, but because I was using Causes, it was not integrated into the platform. I did this by adding a match - I'd donate $10 for each year if the Sharing Foundation's Cause reached $25,000 - which it did.
One lesson is that if your fundraising platform doesn't allow this flexibility, don't use it. Or maybe Causes will improve the goal setting feature. And, if you are an individual or a small organization without $ resources or access to technical expertise to set up your own platform, you have some tradeoffs to ponder.
2.) Understand Your Theory of Change As It Applies to Donations
Enrique Allen, the teaching assistant for the PoST class, Social entrepreneur and Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab Researcher (and one smart dude who generously shares what he knows), created a drawing on the whiteboard that mapped out the my campaign in the context of a behavior change model. In order for someone to make a donation, three things are required: motivation, ability, and trigger. It blew me away. I quickly took photos and did a fast video of him explaining it. What I'd love to have is a worksheet to use for my next campaign. Hmm.
3.) You Can't Measure Love or Creativity, But These Are Essential Online Community or Network Signs of Life
Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk did plan and execute one hell of a surprise party! In a google document, some how they put the word out and 66 people signed up to blog and tweet about the birthday wish propelling its success! But they also asked to share how I've impacted their work, and by pointing that out created a very meaningful birthday gift.
As I read through the post (I'm not yet finished leaving personal thank you comments yet, I will), I was at the point of tears because of the love and support I've gotten from peers and colleagues - and even consequential strangers. You can't quantify love as a metric, but it is important sign or signal of life in your online community.
So is creativity. The array of creative ways that people wished me a happy birthday was very inspiring to me. Self-expression is such a powerful thing to see and having people articulate it for your cause is the holy grail. Donna Arraiga whipped me up a Khmer Dessert on her food blog, Eddie Harran sent me virtual tim-tams from Australia. Debra Askanase gave me a terrific piece on reasons to read my blog which I've linked on my side bar. Michaela Hackner's cute dog, Atlas, a bark and paw shake to the Cute Dog Theory.
Paul Lamb re-purposed the lyrics to a famous Beatle's Tune as a birthday song. Can you guess the song?
When I get older suffering from Carpal tunnel , Many days from now, Will you still be so kind Supporting my Facebook Causes all the time?
If I'd been blogging till quarter to three Would you still respond, Will you still need me, will you still Tweet me, When you’re fifty three?
4.) Real Time Tracking, Real Time Network Weaving
I've talked a lot about the importance of real-time tracking of your campaign while it is unfolding. You reflect in real-time, observe, tweak and adjust. For example, I noticed that Spencer Brodsky, who I helped last December when he was doing a fundraiser campaign for his project in Rwanda, re-tweeting the birthday call to action. So, I encouraged him to help me with reaching my influencers on Twitter - that I learned about from Eric Peterson.
I also realized the opportunities for real time network weaving as the campaign is unfolding. I've learned so much the past few months from the master of network weaving, June Holley and Christine Egger. But networking in real time has to be supported by developing relationships over the long haul. In reading the posts, it struck me a lot of these relationships are not transactional, but deeper. Jean Russell has a great post on some simple ways to do real time network weaving.
I didn't realize how many people I had connected with over the years through social media and how much reciprocity there is. I pointed to a lot of posts in my thank you note immediately after the event, but want to pick out a few more posts that contain a wealth of information about relationship building on the social web. Some are people I've known for many years, some are people I've just met in the last few weeks.
One of the big surprises for me was the surprise party. Amy Sample Ward wrote a reflection on crowdsourcing a surprise party! It has made me curious about how you design a campaign or social action for self-organization. Maybe it is just a guiding principle.
Certainly, there are some areas where you can be intentional about it - for example, in your choice of software and how it is designed. For example, the google document served a quick wiki - it was simple, not over built and easy to participate. Also, the fact that Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk asked people to ask others, using a networked approach to organizing this party.
6.) Measure the Whole Funnel
This is perhaps, the most important learning for me. Enrique Allen asked me what I call a "teachable moment question" during the class. "Should you send people in the tweet to the donation form or to page describing why to donate?" I angsted over that question while I was setting it up. When I posted my lesson plan, I asked Sean Power about measuring conversion and he pointed me to an awesome slide deck that he and Alistair Croll created.
I adapted above funnel framework from one his diagrams. I shared what I was measuring with the class and asked them what was missing. CONVERSION!
Why wasn't I measuring conversion - you know the people who click from the Tweet to donation landing page and actually make a donation. The reason I can't track these metrics is because the donation landing page was not in my control - it was from the Causes application. So, yet another reason to think carefully about features in your donation platform and the ability to capture important metrics.
I decided to move forward with this because I thought, if anything, Sean Power, Enrique Allen, Avinash Kaushik, KD Paine, or maybe some other metrics gurus might teach us something.
2047 Clicks http://bit.ly/beth53 (call to action, linked to the FB Causes Birthday Wish)
Donations
$5010 Raised 148 donors 40% new donors 8% increase in new Cause members
Here's what I wasn't able to measure:
Attention
Views on Facebook Causes Birthday Wish Landing Page
Total unique impressions (the unique number of Twitter users who saw the retweets - that is the unique number of the combined number of Twitter followers for the above 475 Tweets). I know that this is possible using the API as per Julio, but I don't know how to do it technically.
Conversion Rate
The number/percentage of donors who clicked through from Twitter and made a donation
The number/percentage of donors who clicked through from blog post and made a donation
The number/percentage of donors who clicked through from seeing it on Facebook/Causes and made a donation
I know this would not be accurate, but what if I said that given 2047 clicks on the donation landing page and a total of 145 donors, the conversion rate would be 7%. I, of course, don't have anything to compare it to - other campaigns I've run, other nonprofit campaigns, or some sort of industry benchmarks. Not to mention that the way the number was derived is bogus.
Metrics and measurement gurus, what do you think?
7.) More Time Thanking, Than Asking
This is the first fundraiser where I spent more time thanking than I did asking. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it is something positive.
Some Quick Reflections on Instruction
I was honored to be included in the line up of for the invited guests, The Power of Social Technology Class is a graduate course, at Stanford Business School. This class answers the question "How to leverage the power of new social technology to effectively create real social good." The theoretical framework, "Dragonfly Effect: Mindset and Method" is geared towards helping students create a project with a clear single, focused goal to cultivate social good. It also helps students learn the process of a rapid prototype experiment that has viral effects, can be measured, and improved with reflection.
The instructor Jennifer Aaker just rocks. Spend a few minutes on her page and read a few of research papers. She's currently working on a book with her husband based on the course, so I'm definitely reserving my copy. After the class, she shared the story with her three children (above) who rallied together and made a contribution to the Sharing Foundation!
The class blog features posts by the students. Ann wrote a post about my session here. Definitely go check them out and leave some comments.
Grace talks about joining the Twitter Revolution and asks a great question related to her project:
I'm raising tens of thousands of dollars for a nonprofit from corporate sponsors. One open question for me is how to balance influencing individuals vs. companies when fundraising for a nonprofit, and how to identify key decision-makers in philanthropic companies.
I love how social technologies allow us to discover more beautiful voices and empower people. I'm going to twitter more! Follow me @wikibea :) and tell me when I'm not doing it right!
I'll stop now, but if the students taking this class want to connect with people who work with nonprofits and are using social media, my birthday party has a terrific list of 66 bloggers to connect with.
Last week, I created an iPhone app out of my blog in ten minutes at a cost of $50 using a service call AppMkr. It made wonder when we'll start to see more iPhone apps from and to benefit nonprofits.
Britt also mentions that The Extraordinaries was just about to launch its iPhone application to help people find 20-minute volunteer opportunities. Put another way, an iPhone application to put thumbs to good use. This application can now be downloaded here.
Another iPhone application is Give Work,
a collaborative effort by CrowdFlower, a professional crowdsourcing
service provider, and Samasource, a non-profit organization that trains
youths and refugees to use computers, and by extension to find
sustainable employment. The application creates an opportunity for Kenyan refugees by
matching iPhone users' volunteer work with that of the refugees, who do
the same tasks and are paid double.
Recently, Heather Mansfield at the Nonprofit Tech 2.0 Blog, mentioned that Causeworld and the Extraordinaires were two of three iPhone apps that every nonprofit should know about. The third app was called "Charity Finder" that lets user donate to nonprofits via simple interface. While Heather describes as the app as experimental, she envisions that it is only a matter of time before we'll see Network for Good or other charity listings service as an iPhone app.
In the meantime, we'll certainly see more and more nonprofits release branded content in native iPhone format. That is, versions of their Web site content on a iPhone. A couple of examples:
Just after New Years, I shared my 3 words for the year . One of the words was the phrase, "Full of Life" and the word for that is Zoetica the name of a new company that creating with colleagues, strategist Geoff Livingston and PR maven Kami Watson
I've been in the nonprofit field since 1980 and since 1985 have worked as a soloist, a freelancer. And while I have had many amazing collaborations, partners and clients, I feel that I can have a much greater impact by working within a formalized business structure, a company, and with partners who have complimentary strengths.
We all have titles that end with "o"s - I'm the CEO, Geoff is the CMO, and Kami is the COO. We have natural roles that play to our strengths. There also something else to point out. I've enjoyed working with both Kami and Geoff, who I have tremendous respect and learn from all the time.
What does this mean for Beth's Blog? I plan to keep blogging here a Beth's blog like I've done for the past 6 years, sharing my knowledge freely, supporting your work, and having fun learning. My focus area in the company will be on training and I will
continue to build on my work over the past few decades working with
nonprofits on how to use technology effectively.
You can check out both Geoff and Kami’s take on the new company, You can also check out the official press release.
Today was the best birthday ever! My 53rd birthday wish was to raise money for the Sharing Foundation to send 53 Cambodian Youngsters to school by covering the cost of their uniforms ($10 per child). We crushed that goal and raised $4,540 because of your generosity in donating and calling attention to the birthday wish. That means 454 youngsters will be able to attend school in Cambodia and hopefully, fine, a route out of poverty.
But there was something else at play for me this year, my fourth, celebrating my birthday with social media and a networked fundraising campaign for the Sharing Foundation ...
Bora Vuth, a young man from Cambodia who is attending college here in US, put his finger on it as he joined 136 other people on Facebook who donated to the Sharing Foundation. Kami Watson Huyse calls this a shared accomplishment. It makes you feel good to give and celebrate and be part of a network of people doing the same. Like the children in the orphanage managed by the Sharing Foundation who celebrate their birthday on the same day once a year, it felt like everyone was having a birthday today!
One of things I've learned about social media and doing fundraising for causes is that you will be surprised! And little did I know that Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk were planning one hell of a surprise party! In a google document, some how they put the word out and 66 people signed up to blog and tweet about the birthday wish propelling its success! But they also asked to share how I've impacted their work, and by pointing that out has been created a very meaningful birthday gift.
Reading the birthday greetings and blog posts, made me thing about network weaving and how much Christine Egger and I have learned from June Holley recently. I've had the honor to work many people who are using social media for social change or fundraising, support their work, cheer them on, and learn from them. So, being able do some real time network weaving while the birthday campaign was unfolding was highly satsifying.
I met Spencer Brodsky last December when he was doing a fundraiser campaign for his project in Rwanda. He helped me with reaching my influencers on Twitter. And connected with Mark Horvath. I noticed dozens of these connections and facilitated a few. It's like we're all working together, informally, in a networked way to support one another's work.
In reading all the blog posts, it is reminding me that relationships are not transactions and developed over time through a series of opportunities to work together. For example, in reading Allison Fine's post, the coauthor with me of our forthcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit, I realized that we've known each other through out blogs since 2006. There are other colleagues that I've met through social media and probably wouldn't have known or worked together if it had not been for this new connected, for example Nick Booth and Steve Bridger.
When Amy posted that Tweet, I was on my way to be a guest instructor at a Stanford Business School Class, the Power of Social Technology taught by Jennifer Aaker. I got to teach two back to back sessions of the class and it was exhilarating. When I peeked at my Twitter stream and saw the happy birthday tweets, Facebook wall posts, and blogs, I nearly fell off my chair!
Well, I'm rolling up my sleeves as Jordan V would say and as Sean Power suggests will be writing a post to share insights about what I've learned from today's action learning experiment about real time tracking, analytics, metrics, and reflection. I'll also share some insights about instruction. But it is late, and time for bed!
Somaly Mam, Cambodia woman, is an anti-slavery activist and survivor fighting for victims all over the world. I noticed her tweet tonight after Spenser Brodsky's tweet about my birthday campaign connected me to her. Human Trafficking is a huge issue around the world, especially in Cambodia. Leng Sopharath, the young woman our family has sponsored for college in Cambodia through the Sharing Foundation, could have ended up in a very different place, but instead was able to go to college. (She graduates this year!)
The Sharing Foundation works more on the prevention side of this problem, in the form of vocational training, educational programs from preschool to college, and the orphanage. You can learn more about the programs in the video below created by Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman when they traveled with Christina Arnold, Founder of Project Hope, which focuses on anti-trafficking in Southeast Asia. (You can learn more from this video that Jonny Goldstein made about her organization).
And don't forget to wish me happy birthday on Twitter too!
Happy birthday #beth53! Let's send Cambodian kids to school: http://bit.ly/beth53
The Sharing Foundation has raised over $24,000 on Facebook. If my
birthday campaign can bring the total to $25,000 by my birthday, I'll
kick in $530, $10 for each year. If my birthday campaign can bring the
total to $28,000 by my birthday, I'll kick in $53 for each year or
$2800.
Donors: Thank you for making a difference in the lives of Cambodian children
Cathryn Hrudicka Stacey Beatrice Lucy Monk Brian Reich Elke Sisco Dan Michel Stephen Sherlock Scott Henderson William McClellan III Chris Noble Anne Mai Bertelsen Anne Quinn Ulseth Wendy Harman Amy Sample Ward Michael Hoffman Farra Trompeter Stephanie McAuliffe Sandy Lopacki David Krumlauf Spencer Brodsky Sandra Sutton Andrews Judith Sol-Dyess Marianne Richmond Mark Horvath Catrina Joy Roallos Korey Lee Patti Anklam Joyce Schneider Samathida and Monothiya Kem Norman Reiss Jill Frank Ray Nichols Katya Andresen Amy Jussel Emma Latham Bill Grey Barbara Levy Joe Baker Shanon Des Roches Dian Francesca Jay Frost Samantha Sakemiller James Wu Janet Fouts Geoff Livingston Jay Hall David Neff Sean Power Adin Miller Shara Karasic Thomas Kelly Ayelet Baron Laura Clos Danielle Brigida JD Lasica Carol Cone Roger Carr Tim Brauhn
It's my 53rd birthday on Monday and here's my birthday party plans. I combining raising money to send Cambodian youngsters to school, an action learning experiment on the art of retweet, guest teaching at Stanford Business School class on social technology, and eating chocolate. What could be more fun?
I've set a modest goal this year because small actions add up. Thank you for donating! I'm very honored that @hardlynormal, a homeless activist, has donated. As well as friends and colleagues:
Anne Mai Bertelsen Anne Quinn Ulseth Wendy Harman Amy Sample Ward Michael Hoffman Farra Trompeter Stephanie McAuliffe Sandy Lopacki David Krumlauf Spencer Brodsky Sandra Sutton Andrews Judith Sol-Dyess Marianne Richmond Mark Horvath Catrina Joy Roallos Korey Lee Patti Anklam Joyce Schneider Samathida and Monothiya Kem Norman Reiss Jill Frank Ray Nichols Katya Andresen Amy Jussel Emma Latham Bill Grey Barbara Levy Joe Baker Shanon Des Roches Dian Francesca Jay Frost Samantha Sakemiller James Wu Janet Fouts Geoff Livingston Jay Hall David Neff Sean Power Adin Miller Shara Karasic Thomas Kelly Ayelet Baron Laura Clos Danielle Brigida JD Lasica Carol Cone Roger Carr Tim Brauhn
Eric Peterson who created a Twitter analytics tool called Twitalyzer sent me a birthday donation (a dollar for each year) and offered advice. He suggested that I use Twitalyzer's Top 25 retweeters report shows the twenty-five people retweeting me ranked by impact as measured by Twitalyzer. Impact, as defined by Twitalyzer, is a combination of the following factors:
* The number of followers a user has * The number of unique references and citations of the user in Twitter * The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeted * The frequency at which the user is uniquely retweeting other people * The relative frequency at which the user posts updates
Based on the analysis, he suggested that I focus on asking the people on the top of list to retweet the message. In looking at the list, it also makes sense to focus on those who have high engagement with their followers.
My birthday is on Monday, January 11th on Monday. I'm celebrating with an action learning experiment and birthday wish fundraiser for Cambodian children. When I checked the names of donors so I could leave a thank you note, my heart stopped.
There was a $25 donation from Samathida Kem, the daughter of Kem Sokha, a human rights leader in Cambodia. Her sister, Monovithya, who is in Holland attending school couldn't get her dutch ATM card to work so she asked her sister, who is in the US now, to make the donation.
A big thank you Monovithya and Samathida for their generosity.
I've never met them face-to-face, but almost four years to the day, our paths crossed virtually when their father, a human rights activist, was thrown in jail in Cambodia. His daughters were quickly put on a plane out of the country. Once they arrived in America, they organized an all-night candlelight vigil in front of the White House to call attention to their father's plight. I blogged about it, after tracking them down on the phone. Their father was released from prison several weeks later and organized a Freedom of Expression Rally in Cambodia.
Insight
Prepare to be surprised! If your organization ventures out on social networks - tries a few experiments - you never now what connections will be made and what relationships will be cultivated. The community of people who have support the Sharing Foundation through my connection with them constantly surprises me. What also surprises me are there are people I don't know face-to-face who have donated. Social networks and connections let you strengthen loose ties with consequential strangers.
The Sharing Foundation has raised a little over $24,000 on Facebook. If my
birthday campaign can bring the total to $25,000 by my birthday, I'll
kick in $530, $10 for each year. If we get to $28,000, I'll kick in $53 for each year or $2809. You can donate here.
Over the summer, I wrote a post called "Crowded Roads Ahead for Charity 2.0: How To Address Cause Fatigue and Scaling." As more and more nonprofits and individuals flock to social networks, creating acacophony of fundraising pitches and the subsequent cause fatigue, how can organizations scale? charity:water was one of the first to create it's own social network for fundraising.
Now we have the American Cancer Society scaling the concept of the birthday fundraiser. It's birthday fundraising on steroids with the creation of their birthday fundraising platform and accompanying social media presence. They want to create a world with more birthdays! And, they want you to declare your birthday to cancer (not the year, but the month, date and more importantly your email address)
The American Cancer Society campaign, called "More Birthdays," is aimed at creating a "birthday movement." The message is that if there is less cancer, there are more birthdays. They are encouraging people to declare their birthday to cancer (and adopt a healthy lifestyle).
The campaign caught my attention because their Twitter branded account was wishing people happy birthday on Twitter, including me. (They're searching on the term "happy birthday" and tweeting a birthday greeting with a pointer to their More Birthdays Site.)
The campaign web site incorporates a person-to-person fundraising platform where you can set up a personal fundraising birthday page and raise money from your friends for the American Cancer Society. Think Relay for Life fundraising pages with a different theme. The web site has additional content, for example tips on how to celebrate your birthday in a healthy way as well as how to use it as an excuse to donate to the American Cancer Society. There's also a cake contest.
This multi-channel campaign includes a Facebook App and even an iPhone app. When you download the Facebook app, you are asked for your contact information, but when you skip past that and the other ways that the American Cancer Society wants you to promote their cause on Facebook. You finally arrive in the birthday center, where you can see a list of people's birthdays, including your friends. And you can easily "celebrate" their birthday with one click, sending a birthday greeting to their Facebook profile.
Right before the holidays, eBay released 2009 figures for Giving Works, its fundraising program and marked a historic record for total funds raised for non-profits through ebay.com. According to the report, the eBay community gave $50 million to nonprofits, a 17% jump over 2008 despite the ongoing recession.
The program allows individuals to donate while using eBay. I was lucky enough to do a quick email interview with Robert Chatwani, eBay’s head of Global Citizenship, to learn more behind the numbers.
(1) Give me your elevator speech
At eBay, we think about citizenship and sustainability in terms of People, Planet, and Communities. Our focus is on harnessing the reach and scale of our core businesses – eBay and PayPal – to create a positive impact. By fostering entrepreneurship for global sellers, keeping goods out of landfills through the sale of pre-owned products, and raising funds for nonprofits through sales on eBay, we’re growing our business and enabling millions of eBay users to participate by voting with their dollars. Plus we have 15,000 employees around the world who get to think about changing the world through their everyday work, which is really exciting.
In terms of giving – we see two large macro trends taking place. The first is that online giving is growing fast, at a rate that’s 7 times faster than offline giving. The other is that many more consumers are thinking about social and environmental values when making decisions about what to buy. These consumers have new mindset, and they’re more practical and socially conscious than ever before.
More about eBay's different CSR and sustainability initiatives can be accessed at here.
(2) Many nonprofits are talking about how fundraising is down this year and the rough year ahead. Yet giving is up for ebay Giving Works. What gives?
First and foremost, we’re fortunate to have generous buyers and sellers using eBay. And you’re correct – the reality is that consumers are more conscious about their spending and giving these days. But we decided early on that rather than asking eBay users to give more, we’d create simple ways for more users to give. It’s very powerful to combine shopping and giving into a single transaction. We offer 5 different ways to give, and users can donate as little as $1 to their favorite charities. In the world of online giving, this idea of "micro philanthropy" is still a new concept – and one that we are seeing really take hold, especially given the current economic climate. The bottom line is that internal innovation and lowering barriers for our users has led to a surge in giving on eBay. We’ll exit this year at over $50 million raised for global nonprofits.
(3) How are the organizations that receive donations selected?
We work with a partner organization, MissionFish, to verify an organization’s 501(c)(3) status via a simple online form. We now have over 21,000 charities in the program and it continues to grow. Qualifying nonprofits receive their own dedicated eBay Giving Works page that shows all the listings and sellers benefiting them. We love to see new nonprofits join the program.
(4) What advice would you give to nonprofits who want to be recipients?
There are several ways to make your nonprofit stand out on eBay. What works well is when the nonprofit organization promotes their relationship with eBay to their current members and donors. By simply selling products on eBay, sellers can elect to have up to 100% of the final sales price donated to their favorite nonprofit. We take care of all of the donation processing and tax paperwork.
Beyond that, we often feature nonprofits and promote selected organizations to millions of buyers and sellers. Lastly, we provide banners and buttons that organizations can place on their website to direct supporters to their eBay Giving Works page, which features products that benefit their organization. We also host discussion boards and provide selling assistance to make the process easy.
(5) We've been hearing a lot of about selfish giving and lethal generosity, etc - What does ebay get from this giving?
It's an interesting debate, and to us, there are a few factors at play here. The birth of the Giving Works program at eBay was, in large part, a response the charitable - and purely altruistic - instincts of our buyer community. It actually started as an effort to put a process and infrastructure in place for individuals that wanted to support the families and victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. At the time, the program was called Auction for America. Since then the program has evolved into a platform where all types of users - including buyers, sellers, and nonprofits - can connect with one another to drive forward the missions and goals of an unbelievably wide range of causes...a marketplace, of sorts, for charitable giving.
In terms of motive, the truth is that it varies according to user. Buyers often look for items that bear the eBay Giving Works ribbon because supporting their favorite cause makes them feel good. Oftentimes, sellers will donate a percentage of proceeds to causes that they believe in, simply because they believe it is the right thing to do. A great example of this is a woman named Elizabeth Bennet, who runs an eBay store called AfricaDirect. To date, she has donated nearly $40,000 via the eBay Giving Works program.
That said, there is truth to the argument that alignment with a cause can be good for business - in fact, just last week, a study was released that indicated that eBay buyers are actually willing to pay more to do good. We’ve seen that an eBay Giving Works item advertising that 10 percent of proceeds will be given to charity is nearly 20 percent more likely to sell than its non-charity equivalent, and at a two percent higher price. To us, this creates a win-win where each participant can realize the benefits of transacting with one another. We call this "sustainable philanthropy" - creating business-relevant motivations that encourage charitable behavior.
