Nonprofit Tech

Below is a contribution to this month's giving carnival question, Is Person-to-Person Fundraising Dead, or Just Getting Started?

Rosemary Cairns—writing from Uzice, Serbia—sent me this thoughtful response via email. She recasts my question about fundraising in broader terms of how peer-to-peer activities in general are transforming international development. In short, Rosemary is saying that fundraising is just the tip of the peer-to-peer iceberg. And unlike the arctic, this iceberg isn't melting away.

I will publish links to the remaining responses on Friday morning. The deadline for submitting contributions is Thursday, April 24. If you haven't already, please send me your contribution to this month's giving carnival question.

A few days ago, I came across this incredibly succint blog post about setting up a web 2.0 community on the cheap.

The tips come from the founder of ObamaCycle: A Craigslist for Obama Campaigners.

Bottom line: Don't pay a web developer $5,000 to build a Facebook application for your organization. Instead, head over to Ning, create a branded social network for free, and find out if people are interested in your community idea.

Here's the introduction to "10 Web 2.0 Tips: $75":

Sometimes, blog entries write themeselves. This post is one of those entries.

Yesterday evening, I attended an excellent pop education workshop called "Finding Our Way to Action: Tactics for Mapping Social Change," organized by the Center for Community Organizations (COCo) in Montreal. The workshop itself was incredibly well-conceived and presented. I'll be blogging about it in more detail next week.

For now, I want to share "nine core principles of engagement," distributed in leaflet form at the end of last night's workshop.

Santropol Roulant is one of Montreal's most effective community based organizations. It brings "people and groups together across cultures and generations" through an "innovative meals-on-wheels service and intergenerational programs."

Since 1995, their vibrant community of staffers and volunteers has braved -40 degree weather in winter to deliver meals across the island of Montreal.

In 2003, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation endeavored to find out what qualities make Santropol Roulant tick. The key findings of their 30-page study, entitled The Southern Wall: Organizational Engagement at Santropol Roulant were summed up in the leaflet distributed last night.

I feel strongly that all of the insights published below are equally important online as offline, including the reference to how physical space affects engagement. A welcoming space needs to be reflected online through images, videos, and appropriate graphic design.

For nonprofit tech professionals, I recommend pairing Santropol Roulant's "nine core principles of engagement" with Katya Andresen's Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We're Forgetting) about Online Outreach. The two documents together offer a picture perfect view of how and why organizations should use social media to reach and engage constituents.

Santropol Roulant's Nine Core Principles of Engagement

Santropol Roulant's "nine core principles of engagement" were posted here with permission from a staff member at COCo. Please let me know if further attribution is required.

If a conference can inspire new ideas, clarify one’s mission, and connect the people who can put those new ideas into action, then it rocks! That was my experience yesterday at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans.

After a lackluster performance by David Pogue (I realize that 75% of the conference attendees disagree with me on this point), my day got rolling with an awesome presentation by Brian Reich of EchoDitto (author of Media Rules). Few people can sum up the unique qualities of 30+ niche social networks and then contextualize these distinctions for the nonprofit sector. Reich’s presentation did just that and got the wheels turning in my head.

In the afternoon, I headed over to “APIs for Beginners”, presented by Kurt Voelker (Forum One Communications), Tompkins Spann (Convio), and Jeremy Carbaugh (Sunlight Foundation). This is where my mind really started churning.

I was in the second row, a real keener, thinking about the big elephant in the room: collaboration.

API’s allow for the integration and mashing of data, services and hardware. Data in the broadest sense can include the actions that constituents take in support of nonprofits, independent projects, and specific outcomes.

It’s no leap to imagine APIs that allow for seamless, on the fly, coalition building among nonprofits and social action platforms. Merge (temporarily) the constituent databases of three leading nonprofits, present an opportunity to take action in support of the common mission these nonprofits share, and carry out those actions by drawing on the toolset of two or more social action platforms.

That would be making the most of APIs for social change work.

The problem, as Jeremy Carbaugh pointed out in response to a question I posed, is the culture that nonprofits work within. We tend to think about technology in terms of advancing specific programs at specific nonprofits instead of delivering on the promises we have made to fulfill our mission.

Let’s take some time to examine the culture in which we do our work. Let’s bring programmers to the table before we spec out our programmatic work (hat tip to Tompkins Spann) and rule out the possibility of working toward our mission in full partnership with the nonprofits that also work in our area.

My "Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms" could be a first step toward this vision. I’m trying to create a meta-level “cloud” of all social action opportunities that individuals can take in support of nonprofits, independent projects, and specific outcomes. This “cloud” draws from 16 social action platforms, and offers real opportunities for individuals to engage with social issues. Often these opportunities are created by individuals themselves.

The "cloud," once turned into “a search engine for social change,” ‘’a map of social change,” or “a recommendation engine for social change” will result in an integration of the nonprofit sector in ways we can’t fully imagine.

Through “A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms,” social action platforms like Change.org, SixDegrees, DonorsChoose, ZaZengo, and others are showing that opening data to 3rd party developers can result in more opportunities for engagement and (I hate to borrow from Milton Friedman) “lift all boats.”

On the fly technology-enabled coalition building is the future of nonprofit tech. Getting there won’t be easy. Thank you to the presenters I met yesterday for sparking these reflections.

PS – The enthusiasm for my work that Idealist.org founder Ami Dar offered toward the end of last night, during the Calder Strategies launch party, served as extra affirmation that I’m on the right track. Thanks Ami! I’ll make sure Idealist.org knows about the open-API of social action opportunities as soon as it’s ready. In the meantime, people can test drive the mashup here.

PPS – If you like what I'm up to, please cast a vote for "A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms" in the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. (Voting ends on Monday, March 24 at 5PM PST)

Michael GilbertIn September, I met Michael Gilbert of The Gilbert Center at a conference called Web of Change.

From his home-based research center, Michael conducts webinars, produces the Nonprofit Online News, and publishes extremely relevant articles for organizations coping with a shifting communications environment.

At the Web of Change Conference and during a follow-up meeting in his Seattle home, Michael, myself, and Chris Lundberg from DemocracyinAction discussed the enormous potential for the semantic web and micro-philanthropy to transform the nonprofit sector.

This morning I came across one of Michael's latest articles, entitled The End of the Organization?

Here's an excerpt:

This article provides a link to The Gilbert Center's inaugural issue of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society. Have a look at the table of contents. The first issue of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society can be purchased on four different licenses ranging from $18.95 to $37.95.

Voices without Votes, A Project of Global Voices and ReutersPeer-to-peer social change campaigns normally cross international borders like oceans and wind. They are designed to leverage a person’s worldwide social network in support of a desired outcome, no matter the location. In politics, peer-to-peer social change campaigns involve raising money and recruiting votes for a political candidate.

What do you do when you’re not a U.S. citizen and don’t have hundreds of Americans within your social network? How are you supposed to use social media to impact a presidential election, the outcome of which may be a matter of life or death for people in your community?

The answer can be found in a new online project from Global Voices called Voices without Votes.

I’m very excited to see the new project from Global Voices go live (on Super Tuesday no less) with support from Reuters. For the last several weeks, I’ve been participating in a listserv organized by Global Voices to brainstorm and make plans for this new website.

The new project carries the same name and purpose as an initiative I started in 2004. Voices without Votes 2004 was the spark that got me into the social media for social change mess that I now find myself.

At the time, I was living hand to mouth as a Masters student in History at the University of Toronto. A U.S. citizen by birth, I had been studying in Canada for the previous six years. I realized that my Canadian friends would not be able to vote in the election that could boot from office a U.S. president that none of us liked. My company on the streets of Toronto protesting the Iraq War would have to stand by and watch as U.S. citizens re-elected the reckless leader of a global empire.

My response to this conundrum was to build a website through which non-Americans could send “Dear America” letters to U.S. citizens. These letters would state non-American perspectives on U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. election. My goal was to encourage diaologue between Americans and non-Americans ahead of the 2004 U.S. presidential election. I crisscrossed the University of Toronto campus getting international students and Canadians to write letters. I transcribed these letters and posted them on my site.

Later, I rebuilt the website using a content management system called Xaraya, which made it possible for non-Americans to post their own letters. A small group of dear friends helped me with the design, programming, and outreach. We stood back watched as a few hundred letters flowed through the site ahead of the November 2004 election.

All this was happening before YouTube and Facebook and at a time when blogs and tagging barely existed. The web has evolved dramatically in the last four years. The new Voices without Votes project can draw on a robust social media toolkit as well as the amazing staffers and volunteers at Global Voices. Combined with financial and marketing support from Reuters, Voices without Votes 2008 should make big headlines.

As long as 3% of the world’s population votes in an election to annoint the "leader of the free world" while ignoring world opinion, the democratic process in the U.S. is left wide open to criticism. Maybe this year, U.S. citizens will wake up and pay attention to what non-Americans have to say about U.S. foreign policy.

I’m looking forward to reporting on the role that social media and peer-to-peer awareness raising campaigns will play.

Global Voices Advocacy has published an invaluable (and free) guide to creating a blog for social change.

Here's the official description:

Here's the summary from the Nonprofit News Network:

For the last four months, I have been asking the founders of ChipIn to supply me with an RSS feed of new widget fundraising campaigns. “We’re busy with other things” was the consistent response. Now I know on what.

SproutBuilder is a versatile widget creation tool, built by the founders of ChipIn, that helps individuals, companies, and nonprofits create social media widgets. A widget is a small piece of code that contains a combination of graphics, text, and interactive components. A single widget can appear in many locations at the same time.

Imagine if putting together a branded widget for your nonprofit or independent project was as simple as pasting the URL of a supporter-created video on YouTube, dragging a collection of photos from your desktop, and then plugging-in the RSS feed from your blog.

From what I can tell, creating a SproutBuilder widget is that simple. Supporters of your organization or independent project can then spread the new widget on their personal websites, blogs, or any of the most popular social networks.

It appears that the widgets can also include a “donate now” button that links to PayPal or possibly NetworkforGood. When I get clarification on the “donate now” process, I’ll paste an update here.

Here’s the official video introduction to SproutBuilder:

Below are a few excerpts from the initial reviews on leading tech news websites.

From TechCrunch

From Mashable

From ReadWriteWeb

For anyone who missed this thread started by Beth Kanter, several nonprofit social media gurus have been posting their thoughts on the questions:

"What if I could start all my social media and nonprofit work over from scratch? What would I do differently? What lessons have I learned that will stick with me for 2008?"

Katya Andresen of the Non-Profit Marketing Blog:

• It’s not that hard, and I should have gotten over the intimidation factor sooner
• It’s about “social,” not “media.”
• Social media takes "word of mouth" to a new level
• Think before you build something new, because we already have overdevelopment in social media.

Beth Kanter of Beth's Blog:

• Don't Join New Social Networks Without Thinking
• Size doesn't matter
• Deep engagement in one community is better than being spread too thin across many communities.
• Translation skills are really, really, really important. (translation meaning converting geek talk into a common language)

Britt Bravo of NetSquared:

• Comments are small, but powerful tools
• Have a purpose for each of the social networks you join
• A blog can be a website too
• Information overload is real

If you have the time, I definitely recommend clicking on the links above and reading the full versions of these three posts. Katya, Beth, and Britt know nonprofit social media inside out.

A recent opinion piece from The Guardian casts new light on Facebook, and more importantly, on the investors who have helped turn the dorm-room project into one of the fastest growing multi-national companies.

For the last eight months, Facebook has had a strangle hold on the imagination of the nonprofit tech community. Technology consultants and bloggers have written endlessly about strengthening the relationships between a nonprofit and its supporters through Facebook, including myself.

But to what end? If Facebook is designed primarily to centralize resources in the hands of the few and advertise brand names that have nothing todo with the nonprofits we support, then what good could a one-off Facebook group or fundraising application do for philanthropy and the change sector?

As Facebook continues to flex its corporate identity, nonprofits and the people who support them may start looking elsewhere for social action platforms designed for social change. Purpose-driven communities like Change.org, ZaZengo, GiveMeaning and Razoo may prove safer and more credible places for organizations and independent projects to harness the power of networked individuals.

Here are a few excerpts from Tom Hodgkinson's With Friends Like These: