Q: Tell me about the role of money in asking for help from the crowd. How much does it make sense to offer, when should it be offered, and how do you know whether to offer it at all?

When we were putting Innocentive together, the question came up of whether it should be based on intellectual stimulation or funding. I was adamantly opposed to doing it without funding. On the commercial side, I think it’s shameful that the benefactor would benefit and not share. But when it comes to the philanthropic side, sharing your intellect is a donation in-kind. That could be a perfectly acceptable way for social institutions to further leverage their capital.

For me, the key to whether there’s a prize etc. is absolute transparency every step of the way. Be clear about why you’ve posted it, what the benefits are intended to be, and why you’ve decided for or against a prize. You should be completely open about what the model is, how it’s funded, and what we’ll try and do to help defray your expenses. Then you let the marketplace decide whether you’ve offered something reasonable.

I’m very much in favor of foundations funding prizes. Let me ask you, what percent of foundations that have more than five million dollar budgets have unpaid or volunteer CEOs? Very few. So they don’t really have a problem with paying someone for working on their behalf. I would argue that finding solutions is a good use of donor dollars. And, you can give individuals the option of donating the prize money back to the organization. The compensation may be a combination of dollars and societal benefit. In fact, if we really wanted to solve disease problems like malaria, we’d approach them that way, because there’s not enough money available in that market to make it worth it for purely financial reasons. We’ve drawn artificial boundaries between commercial and nonprofit models. I think we should be very open to all of the mixed-utility models in between.

This is the final section of our interview with Alph. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.)

Q: I’m curious to know if you’ve had any experience with prediction markets. Do you think they have applications for social-sector organizations?

I look at prediction markets as a kind of cognition example of collective intelligence; how does one aggregate the analytical pieces of knowledge that need to contribute to a conclusion of some kind? Do we just vote on it? Do we take a poll? Do we average across everybody’s responses or find the midpoint? I happen to be more intrigued than opposed — I think [this approach] aggregates knowledge in a very clever way, more accurate than just taking the average.

One of the areas I’ve seen [prediction markets] being used is in predicting legislative outcomes, so there could be political applications. They’re quite adaptable.

The challenge with them is the challenge with challenges: articulating the “security” to be traded. I’ve found that until people have been through it a couple times and are trained to think that way, they keep writing polls, which won’t work if you’re trying to get a true prediction out of it.

What characterizes a good security is that there’s an unambiguous strike price — which has two components: the pricing mechanism and the act or event that determines when the pricing kicks in. It’s not trivial, although I think there are some pretty good rules for writing good securities or deciding that this isn’t a good candidate for a prediction market.

We ran a closed study one time in which we predicted scientific outcomes that were complex, such as FDA approval at the end or in the earlier stages of the process. Even though that might sound like a black and white technical question, at the time you’re predicting it you’re asking a lot of questions about which you have a lot of knowledge but where the knowledge in each of those areas isn’t perfect and the way in which all of those areas fit together to determine an outcome isn’t clear.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1, part 2, and part 3.)

Q: Some social-sector problems are settled but require expertise, which are typically addressed by service delivery, while others require experimentation because we have yet to discover a solution. When would you go open versus closed on each type?

Let me use the AIDS issue as a way of stating where I think you may want to go open and where you may want to stay closed. Say there’s a newly created foundation that’s focused on AIDS in Kenya. Posting a challenge that says, “Well, what about AIDS should we address?” isn’t terribly useful. You’d tend to get a lot of chaff coming in. First I’d let the internal program director stumble around to figure out what the organization’s mission is and where they’re going to cut in. Having concluded that they think education of women in Kenya is going to be a fruitful area, now there’s potential to open it up. Maybe we need to explore more ideas than we’ve thought of for reaching Kenyan women and addressing barriers to their education. With the answers to that you could return to the organization to do some design work, and let’s say that after that you end up with a question of how to distribute educational materials. Then you could open it up again to the crowd.

I would cast it open each time I had a concrete question to ask. That’s what separates successful users of open systems from the unsuccessful ones: a well-articulated challenge. The challenge needs to allow people to see where the skills they have can be applied to the problem. That doesn’t mean aiming it squarely at a certain skillset, because then you’re back to digging in the pit of closed innovation but on a massive scale. There’s an art to challenge-writing that I didn’t appreciate when we launched the company.

An historical example is Archimedes. We remember Archimedes for his stroke of insight, but we forget that Hero posed a clearly articulated problem and it was that problem that helped coalesce the geometry and the math. It was Hero’s posing of the challenge in its general form, not to Archimedes as a geometer or as a person who took baths, that made everything come together. The first time Hero posed the challenge, Archimedes sent him away saying there was no solution; it was not until he took the bath that he realized there was a solution. Even in ignorance, Hero articulated a clearly-bounded, well-framed problem.

The goal is not to use the crowd for an answer you know they are specifically trained to provide but rather to focus the question in a way that they can bring to bear a mix of skills, some of which you can predict and others of which you can’t.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1 and part 2.)

Q: Is there a middle ground where you can cast out to a group that’s very much beyond your organization without the fanfare of a fully public Innocentive challenge?

Recognizing that there might be a need for this, Innocentive does have a product that they call “at work” that lets you specify a private network which could include employees, contractors, vendors, or any other group with which you have existing relationships. Companies are interested in this for a number of and one of them is definitely the desire to manage confidentiality. We’ve seen that it works. In my pre-Innocentive days at Eli Lilly, when we cast out for 1000 different perspectives across the company, we raised the diversity of perspectives we were tapping and found a lot of hidden pockets of expertise that we hadn’t necessarily recruited for.

There are three levels you can work at: the classic keep-it-small level where a person is assigned to work on it, the intermediate level where you broaden to a closed network, and the public level. Confidentiality is obviously one of the criteria for choosing between them.
It’s also worth mentioning that if all of my experiments are succeeding and the measure of where I am relative to where I need to be is really a matter of time, money and execution, I don’t see that much of an advantage in doing that externally. Then the question is whether I want to outsource: if I’m just churning the crank on the easy-to-solve problems, I might contract them out so my employees can focus on the really difficult stuff.

To be honest, if I was going to throw it open and it’s not a confidentiality issue, more is better. It never stops you from using the ideas of the larger network, whereas smaller precludes you from using the ideas of the larger group.

Stay tuned for further insights from Alph in the coming days. If you haven’t read his earlier points, catch up on part 1.)

This piece was originally published on WiserEarth by Kerry Vineberg.

The climate change movement has been gaining momentum in recent months. We’ve felt it building at organizations like 350.org in preparation for the major UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen this December. We had a call with social media coordinator Joe Solomon of 350.org to get a sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of it all, and his thoughts on how to effectively network for a cause.

The person: Joe has roots in technology and social change, and figuring out web-connected community solutions for an array of causes. He was the Director of Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge and joined 350.org to get closer to the point of impact. “The climate movement affects many of the issues of our time,” he said. “It’s also a matter of survival.” The desire to help the world came early for Joe: he can remember drawing pictures against rainforest logging in third grade.

The connection: He’s no stranger to WiserEarth, having helped us network with NetSquared for our first WiserTuesday Paris event!

The plan: At the time of the interview, 350.org was leading up to the International Day of Climate Action, and Joe mentioned excitedly: “Twitter and Facebook are on fire right now! It’s such an offline, collaborative movement that explodes onto the online scene. We’re really riding a wave, with at least two dozen active 350 organizers on Twitter – with accounts like @350Vermont, @350Peru, @350London — And so many new people are jumping on board, asking, ‘Where am I going to be on October 24?’”

The advice: Joe has been working in the social media arena for some time, and offers some tips on how to get impact:

• Highlight your partners’ efforts: “350 is a super collaborative campaign. We’re trying to build and demonstrate a movement, and like any open movement, it’s not about us — as much as it’s about a collaborative groundswell of organizations, organizers, rock climbers, messengers, bloggers, super models, photographers, you name it — all working to get us back to 350. We’re always trying to highlight our friends at Greenpeace, TckTckTck, Avaaz, Powershift, 1Sky, Oxfam, Transition Towns – and hundreds more, plus all the thousands of grassroots organizers who are the reason why we’ve collectively come this far…. How can your organization act more like a movement and shine the light on what others are doing to change the world with you?”
• Try open threads on Facebook: “As a way to support the conversations that were already happening, we started inviting organizers and supporters to connect around ‘open threads’ in Facebook. Literally, we would start an update with ‘Open Thread:’ and then share quick updates and a few questions. So far, we’ve had some very positive results.”
• Start or support a Twitter hashtag for your cause or sector. In the global climate movement headed towards Copenhagen, there’s #350ppm, #COP15, #FABTreaty, and others. What hashtag can help your cause area connect, share resources, and collaborate for more effective impact?
• Group people together using TweepML: This is a way to highlight a group of community members via a list that any Twitter user can follow all at once. 350 tries to employ this to connect organizers to each other.  Joe says, “There are also Twitter Lists, but what’s great about TweepML is community members can actually follow each other. The stats from the 350 Organizers list claim to have generated over 1,300 followers. Now we just gotta figure out a way to help the 1,077 350 badge wearers connect! Ideas welcome!”
• Don’t feed, inspire: In the days before the International Day of Climate Action, 350 turned off all feeds. They don’t pipe their blog into Twitter or Facebook, and purposely choose where to share that people will find useful and inspiring, and can connect around. The feeds are still off.
• Get face to face: “We’re way ahead of ourselves in mastering how to connect on Twitter, Facebook, and other online communities. We’ve discovered the most brilliant ways to build our lists. We’re all of us social media gurus. Now it’s time to invite our supporters outside, empower them as leaders, and together transform our communities for the changes we all seek. WiserTuesdays are an amazing step in this direction.”

The hope: Joe says, “In December (next month!) world leaders from every country on the planet are meeting in Copenhagen to craft a global climate treaty. What’s at stake at that meeting is massive — a treaty that’s in line with what science and justice demand could be key to turning the tide on global warming and getting our planet back on a sustainable path.

“The hope we can act on is that we keep the pressure on, through delivering 350 photos directly into the hands of our leaders, and other actions — December 12 looks like it’s gonna be big — to help world leaders see just how powerful and global this movement has become.”

The reward: “It’s incredible to watch all of us rise together, to be a part of this call to action around a scientific data point that’s above our organizations’ walls and shows how widespread and collaborative the climate and social justice movement really is,” Joe reflects. “Many thanks to WiserEarth for all your support, for being such a great resource, and for inspiring calls to action as strong and adorable as this one:

Q: You’ve probably seen more configurations than most of today’s crowdsourcing tools. What are the most interesting ways you’ve seen people are taking advantage of them?

I see some people recognizing that crowdsourcing technologies can be used in an iterative fashion, where people cycle between casting out broader questions, using ideas from the larger community, then going back within the smaller community until you encounter a more specific question for which you need the large, diversified group.

Let me contrast that with two less effective approaches. One would be the simply internal or “staying closed” approach in which the amount of diverse thinking I have to bring to the problem is a function of my staffing, which itself is designed to weed out a certain kind of diversity. A lack of diversity of approaches is one of the shortcomings baked into a wholly internal approach.

The second is when you realize you need something external but “bolt it on” to the outside of your current internal innovation engine, in which case it’s not an integrated work system. The truth is, if you want to have an effective external innovation system, you have to reshape both your internal and external systems, appropriately designate roles and align them to the different cycles of opening wide, narrowing down, and so forth.

This is often a challenge for foundations because they tend to run leaner on their internal innovation expertise relative to the commercial world. It’s also an opportunity — they’re less likely to institutionalize themselves into a box that wasn’t the most effective box to be in. They’ve got these trained people (I’m still very much in favor of trained experts, don’t get me wrong on that) and hopefully they’ve also got an advisory board of highly intelligent experts. It might be that the advisory board would identify an area where the current approaches weren’t working as well as they could; that could be a signal to open the challenge up to a broader set of avenues that wouldn’t have otherwise been explored; and then they evaluate the different suggestions and winnow them down; then let’s say one of the selected suggestions runs into a barrier that the internal organization can’t tackle, the advisory board could then open it up again. A good example is the Prize4Life, focused on the disease ALS. They identified the specific issues to solve and then offered a prize to the scientific community for a solution.

Crowds aren’t wise just because they’re crowds. They need process and focus, and their wisdom can do much more if you’re providing some of that. Some of that process comes from the new toolbox of technologies; some of that focus comes from experts saying, “This is the reason the problem isn’t solved” and narrowing it down so the crowd has something to chew on.

What you want are discrete, clearly articulable challenges for which the responses could be a broad spectrum of ideas. If I cannot articulate what it is I need, it’s very hard to assign others to just stumble around and see what shows up, though we know that there’s sometimes a phase of that on projects. That’s something that I suspect smaller groups are better at making sense of, and there’s efficiencies to gain in keeping it in one mind. You’re getting the human intuition and whatever else it is that makes great scientists great.

One example that comes to mind comes from the wreck of the oil tanker Valdez up by Prince William Sound. In cold temperatures, oil floats so viscously that you can only move it around at a very slow pace. Recognizing this, experts said that we needed to somehow lower the viscosity of oil to allow more oil to flow per unit of time at these abysmally low temperatures. They defined the problem really well and posted it on Innocentive. It was solved by a chemist at the University of Illinois who’d worked in the construction industry during the summer. It turns out that with cement, the more viscous the better, so the concrete industry has figured out a way to keep cement moving through the injection of certain small particles. This chemist submitted his solution, they tried it in Alaska and it worked.

(Stay tuned for further insights from Mr. Bingham in the coming days.)

• Top of the list: assessing the impact of networks is really hard.
• People participate in networks for multiple reasons (and similarly, funders fund networks for multiple reasons). It’s hard to align around and clarify desired outcomes – and/or figure out how to assess progress towards multiple sets of outcomes.
• Network impact can be hard to see. It’s difficult to measure causality (or even simply track activity) in decentralized, complex systems with lots of players.
• Some of the most powerful network impact may be unexpected. How do you measure the impact of emergent, self-organized action?
• Finally: it can take a really long time to achieve measurable impact.

Added to the challenges is the fact that, according to evaluators I’ve spoken with, the tools for assessing emergent systems are lacking. (Social network analysis does seem to be promising in some cases, though it is resource-intensive). Kudos to the evaluators who are bravely taking on the challenge of measuring network impact!

Challenges aside, what can you measure? I really like the framework set out by Madeline Taylor and Pete Plastrik in Net Gains, and Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt in “Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks” (both highly recommended reading). In both these thought pieces, the authors outline three levels of network impact to consider:

• Connectivity: what is the nature of relationships within the network? Is everyone connected who needs to be? What is the quality of these connections? Does the network effectively bridge differences? Is the network becoming more interconnected? What is the network’s reach?
• Overall network health: how healthy is the network along multiple dimensions (participation, network form, leadership, capacity, etc.). How have participants been impacted by the network?
• Field level outcomes: what progress is the network making on achieving its intended social impact (e.g. policy outcomes, innovative products)? How do you know?

The network funders community of practice has been working on this question: how do you make the case, and what principles to keep in mind when assessing the impact of networks? Here are few starting points:

• Be clear about 1) the network’s value proposition, 2) expectations for the network, 3) to whom is the network accountable, 4) the donor’s role in the network
• Pay attention to network history and context
• Gather data from diverse perspectives, including feedback from constituents outside the network
• Emphasize learning over near-term judgment, so that the purpose is not punitive
• Focus on meaningful contribution toward impact
• Integrate into an ongoing process of network learning and adaptation
• Build capacity to conduct self-evaluation

What are you learning about making the case for network impact? How do you know networks work?

It’s been an eventful month in the wiki-working world. The most important event is the second annual America’s Giving Challenge, a competition which launched on October 7th at the Case Foundation where nonprofits go head-to-head in using social media to raise money. It’s a triple win: the champion gets $50,000 on top of having run a successful campaign, the other contestants get to raise money and sharpen their social media fundraising skills, and those of us watching for what works get a new set of examples to chew on. Facebook Causes smartly offered its own tips on effective strategies in a video interview with Case.

Speaking of fundraising, the question of whether social media can really raise money can also be answered by the case studies that Fast Company published under the headline “Tweet, Tweet, Ka-Ching.” There’s two traditional nonprofits on the list–LiveStrong and National Wildlife Federation–while the remainder are the social-media natives DonorsChoose, Twestival Local, and 12 for 12K Challenge.

Beth Kanter often poses the provocative question of whether yours is a listening organization, and this month kudos in that category go to both the micro-lender Kiva and marketing guru Seth Godin for modeling what it means to listen to your online community and adapt on the fly. Godin made a couple of rather egregious mis-steps, first taking an ill-informed swipe at nonprofits in his blog and then launching a business model that asked companies to pay him $400 a month for the right to control how they were represented on his website Squidoo. Both were critiqued loudly in public in various corners of the blogosphere and Twittersphere, to the extent that many would expect his reputation to be irreparably tarnished… yet his immediate response was to both  change the offending business model and start working directly with nonprofits. His about-face was so rapid and complete as to earn a hat-tip from Geoff Livingston at CRT/tanaka, one of his most outspoken critics.

In the case of Kiva, blogger David Roodman published a muckraking post that posed a profound question about whether Kiva’s supposed model of direct-to-the-needy lending was actually a bait and switch. When this sparked a firestorm of debate, neatly summarized on Tactical Philanthropy, Kiva’s CEO not only wrote the blogger a lengthy email addressing the matter but immediately changed how Kiva describes its process. In Roodman’s words: “Flannery’s response to my criticism blended grace, humility, and quiet confidence. The world would be a much better place if all charities, all organizations for that matter, were as open and responsive to criticism as Kiva has been.”

Transparency and responsiveness can penetrate even an organization’s strategic planning, as the Wikimedia Foundation is demonstrating with its doors-thrown-open approach. They’ve engaged Bridgespan for help navigating the questions, but their commitment is to forge a strategy that is driven by the desires of the “wikimedia movement”–the people who believe in the potential of public wiki-based collaborative creation. They’re open to suggestions through a wiki, online “office hours,” Twitter, and self-organized face-to-face gathers.

Finally, two important pieces take a step back and help explain the shape of this very interesting moment: Lucy Bernholz discusses the implications of data for the field of philanthropy in three posts (1/2/3) and strategy+business offers lessons for open-source collaboration from the quality movement: The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration.

The stereotypical volunteer gig is cleaning up a park or stuffing envelopes for a mailing, repetitive physical tasks that require a lot of bodies in one place for a certain amount of time in order to get something done. About 26% of the population is willing to pitch in that way on a regular basis. Jacob thinks that number is too low. He believes that The Extraordinaries can help nonprofits reach far more volunteers by giving them a way to help using their computers or their smartphones. Crowdsourcing volunteer help over the Internet has been around for some time, as NASA’s ClickWorkers and TPM Muckraker can attest, and it’s shown considerable promise. But there’s something exciting about crowdsourcing volunteer help through smartphones: people carry smartphones with them all the time and the devices have a range of capabilities that go beyond Internet access: making calls, sending emails, tracking location, snapping photos, and even reporting the angle at which they’re being pointed. This is all very cutting-edge today, but according to an estimate that Jacob quoted, 1/10^th of the world will be using a smartphone in about four years—not hard to believe considering that yesterday’s $200 Nokia phones are now $10 in much of the developing world. The Extraordinaries, along with others who will doubtless jump into this space, is creating a platform for nonprofits to tap these emerging abilities as the basis for new kinds of volunteering.

Even with these fancy new technical abilities in mind, it might sound strange to think that “real” volunteer work could be done through a smartphone. After all, the tagline on The Extraordinaries website promotes the idea of volunteering in just a few minutes while you’re on the bus or waiting in line—and how much can you really get done in that time? Jacob gave me a number of examples that illustrate how micro-volunteering can be genuinely helpful:

• Kaboom! is using volunteers to document the quality of play-spaces around the country using pictures, location, and written descriptions
• First Aid Corps is using volunteers to record the locations of defibrillators in public places
• Big Cat Rescue is using volunteers to document the abuse of big cats by giving volunteers the ability to record the location of an abused animal and snap photographic evidence
• The Extraordinaries team will soon be using volunteers to translate documents, which can be done on either a commercial or a charitable basis
• The San Francisco Bike Coalition could, Jacob suggested, show the city which streets are most in need of bike lanes by providing its members with an application that would track where they ride

It will be interesting to see what kind of new social change efforts will arise through micro-volunteering and other forms of collaboration that are now possible through smartphones. Text messaging alone gave us flashmobs and real-time coordination at protests, increasing the power of grassroots activists. Email, web access, GPS, still cameras, video cameras, and tilt sensors each open up a new realm of opportunity, with more to come as the technology develops. The strength of The Extraordinaries is that it is a platform through the less tech-savvy organizations can use these new abilities with a minimum of hassle, widening the range of organizations that might come up with innovative new ways to harness them.

Yet in network terms, the volunteering that The Extraordinaries offers still works on the traditional model of “hub and spoke,” with the nonprofit as the hub that takes chunks of works from individual volunteers who don’t otherwise connect with each other. It’s a simple, efficient, yet still hierarchical model for a group of people to work together. That’s useful for organizations to accomplish a centrally-organized task. But the possibility also exists for the volunteering to be done in ad hoc networks, teams of individuals who use their smartphones to connect for the purposes of a pro-social task and then disband, perhaps organized by volunteer “team captains” who were inspired by a certain cause and tapped their personal networks to bring together teams. Those teams could be local, of course, but they could also be brought together from anywhere on the Internet, taking advantage of the far-flung social webs of social connectivity that individuals can now sustain through Facebook. This already happens in political advocacy, where phone-banking is a potent form of volunteer work. But that only requires a phone. Can you think of a cause where ad hoc teams could use GPS and cameras to help create change on their own?

• You can provide content & services directly on the site, reaching your audience in the course of their social interaction with others in the network and customizing that interaction based on their profile
• You can do fundraising directly, which you can only talk about on Facebook and Facebook Causes

The reason these are so important is that they let an organization strike a bargain with its network that is richer for both. One of the most salient points that Clay Shirky made in his book is that every successful piece of social software makes its own promise to the people who use it, which is always some variety of “if you keep coming, you’ll keep getting something you need.” Having a fan page or Cause on Facebook is great for the people who need to express their allegiance to your organization as part of their identity, but it’s hard to deliver more than that. If your social networking site can deliver content and services itself, people will have a much more compelling reason to show up. Jeff described two main reasons why he’s seen customized social networks attract users: when the users see the opportunity to connect with others like themselves and when they think it can help them answer an important question. Those are promises that an organization can’t easily make through a public social network, and when you can make that kind of a promise, fundraising is likely to be a lot easier.

Jeff was kind enough to provide a number of examples that illustrate this point:

• The Arthritis Foundation’s RA Connect, which provides educational content from known experts and uses bulletin boards to host ongoing conversations
• The Sierra Club’s Climate Crossroads, which encourages participants to take legislative action and also hosts a swap meet of climate-friendly recipes
• The Sierra Club’s Trails, which gives participants the tools to map and describe the best hiking trails in their area (creating a valuable public resource over time), and the ability to hold local hiking events
• Community Gatepath’s AbilityPath, for parents whose kids of have learning disabilities, which provides an opportunity to connect as well as expert advice—soon to include mentoring services

Have you considered using a house social network? Did you find it valuable to your network strategy?

Working Wikily: Can you give us a quick summary of how networks factor into your research?

Sam Logan: The idea of the network effect – where people are loosely connected in one way or another, and they all draw advantages from being part of network – is often applied to business strategies. The way I look at it, it’s also applied as a criminal strategy. Within the black market economy, and areas of Latin America, it has been the driver of the recent evolution of organized crime. One of the distinctions I’ve observed [among organized crime] is the movement from an organizational structure – pyramid shaped, like the Italian mafias – to one that is a flat, horizontally structured network. The MS-13, and Mexican organized criminal groups now operate this way. So that’s my entrance into the network effect, and how it works in criminal world.

WW: So if that’s how gangs and criminal networks organize, can the same logic be applied to intervene and break them up?

SL: I had a discussion with a guy at the FBI who works on the national gang task force – how do they go about identifying who the “shot-callers” are within the network in the US? Because essentially what they are trying to do is cut off the heads [of the network] and let the group dissolve that way. Each node is called a clique, and each clique has 1-2 leaders, so if you can take out those two guys, the rest scurry. But even at the level of the FBI….[they] are so saddled with operational requirements and expectations, they don’t have time to look at the 40,000 foot picture and say what is an efficient method for going about achieving results. One of biggest complaints is they don’t have time to stand back and look at this.

WW: How might network approaches help them?

SL: The best practices that work in the NGO world can also be applied to law enforcement; the problem is, they aren’t doing that….[I’ve been] talking to analysts who work in the private sector, the intelligence community, and they are all stuck in the “Think Tank 1.0” model. When you get out of that box, you can begin looking at things through the lens of how networks work. There’s a slow and steady movement in that direction…To what extent are you looking at the world through a lens of networks understanding, networks intelligence, in terms of the way you gather information, how you apply that and share it?

WW: What other work are you doing related to networks?

SL: The other aspect of networks that is worth mentioning – it’s a project called Southern Pulse: we are using a network-effect and open source within the intelligence-gathering world. The idea for Southern Pulse is the Think Tank 2.0 model – decentralizing [intelligence gathering] and building out a network. It started with myself and four contacts, and then we reached out to our contacts, to begin a project of sharing information with one another. Initially it was a spin-off from my blog, and newsletter. We cover security issues in Latin America. Within the network of 600 self-recruited individuals, half provide us with information. They have found so much value in the information, they want to give back….[The site] is set up like a blog – each bit of information is organized as a blog where you can comment….In terms of preparing the newsletter, there is an editorial role: we take scraps of info, boil it down into concise information, or short paragraphs that we call “pulses,” focused on southern half of the world. 60% of different [news] feeds we receive come from all around the world. The other 40% come from on the ground: law enforcement, academics, journalists, business men – they send information they receive on the ground. The content is heavily weighted toward organized crime and security.

WW: Where can someone go for more information?

SL: My blog at networkedintelligence.wordpress.com and my website at southernpulse.com.

Anybody who’s read this blog knows that it contains some recurrent themes—the need for more transparency and “real people” in public decision-making, as well as the cultural, political, and social shifts that technology is driving. I thought about this last week while attending a special session at the National Conference on Citizenship on “Nonprofits in the Age of Web 2.0,” which featured an impressive smattering of leading technologists, nonprofit directors, foundations, and Millennial leaders talking about how technology is pushing organizations to change—and change fast.

While the discussion may have been old hat to some of us who’ve been blathering about these issues (see older posts), it was energizing to see people from domains that are often disconnected talk to each other. Nonprofits, for example, are increasingly aware of technology’s potential but often befuddled as to how to integrate it so that it reduces costs and leads to outcomes. Civic engagement groups mention technology at their conferences but there’s not much deep exploration as to how it could enhance meaningful participation. And technologists are often so immersed in the “latest thing” they sometimes forget that a considerable swath of the public isn’t tweeting 24/7; as a result, they risk alienating the people they say they want to reach.

Yet, all of these folks need each other, especially in this rapidly-changing world. As Joe Trippi remarked, “We’re not talking about radio shifting to TV—it’s not just about a change in the way we communicate. It’s about a change in power and how people use that power.” He and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum echoed Clay Shirky’s contention that the Internet is just as transformational as the printing press because both give ordinary people the ability to access information without having to rely on gatekeepers/elites.

What does that mean for nonprofits, especially big organizations focused on “social change”? Sifry suggested that traditionally, there has been a sector of “professional do-gooders,” but now “do-gooding” is becoming more populist in nature. And it’s particularly prevalent in the political sphere, where millions of Americans are taking action on issues without need for more formal intermediaries such as nonprofit advocacy groups. Today, there’s an emerging “fourth sector”—the churches, the grassroots, and the “barnraisers”—who are using technology to move entire agendas, Sifry noted.

Interestingly, that may be coming full circle back to where civic and political organizations first began—in the kitchens and church basements of community folks. Those “identity groups,” says Theda Skocpol, led to more professionalized organizations that burgeoned during the 1960s. Civic groups moved from “membership to management,” whereby membership became nothing more than writing a check to mostly DC-based professional advocates who did the work.

Now? Membership may be moving from check-writing to signing up for email lists, according to emerging research. That may reflect a new generation of young people who’ve grown up with technology and are using it to go around traditional institutions and make change in ways they believe are more cost-efficient and get results more quickly. Rather than writing checks to big institutions or taking to the streets in protest, young people who care about an issue can whip up a powerful protest movement through blogs, wikis, You Tube, text messages, virtual town halls, social networks, and digital brainstorms.

As a result, the core membership bases of some leading advocacy groups is declining and/or comprising mostly older donors more comfortable with institutional loyalty. That’s lacking among young people, one panelist noted, which may be due to young people’s impatience with bureaucracy; “top-down” messaging campaigns; and confrontation, rather than collaboration.

But what does all this mean for the future of nonprofit membership organizations? A new paper by the Monitor Institute, Working Wikily 2.0: Social Change with a Network Mindset suggests that nonprofits will have to begin working with a network mindset—embracing principles like openness, transparency, decentralized decision-making, and distributed action—and that doing so can help funders and activists increase their impact. The paper dovetails with a new national research study, funded by the Packard Foundation, that Monitor Institute is conducting to determine how and to what extent nonprofit membership groups are changing (or not) in light of current trends. (In the spirit of transparency, I should say that I’m working on this study with Heather Grant and Barbara Kibbe.)

Conference attendees agreed. Nonprofits are “going to have to let go of control,” said Scott Heifernan of Meetup.org and Adam Connor of Facebook. “Organizations have to realize that they no longer have control of their message or brand because people are already talking about them on the internet. They have to change from trying to control the message to monitoring what’s being said. Organizations also have to cede power to people to self-organize and do it locally. And they have to learn to collaborate more.”

Does that mean that there’s no role for traditional nonprofit, membership-based groups? Not necessarily. The jury’s still out as to whether internet organizing leads to longer-term civic engagement. And, is signing up for or forwarding emails any different than writing a check? And is one a more meaningful form of civic/political engagement? As political blogger Michael Connery points out, technologically-driven initiatives may help to achieve “one off” goals, but it’s not clear that those will matter over time.

Another problem? The assumption that “bottom up” and crowd-sourcing strategies always lead to thoughtful decisions. Recent efforts by the White House to ask the public what mattered to them most led to legalizing marijuana as the top vote-getter, suggesting that there’s a role for both experts and “real people” to play in what gets decided and how.

And, of course, nothing can take the place of face-to-face conversations. As Heifernan noted, the Internet can be used to “get people offline” and connect. But how do groups do that in ways that deepen human relationships and collaboration? As one panelist said, “No one gets together with a group of people they met via the internet and asks, ‘what’s our mission or purpose?’ right off the bat. They ask ‘what am I interested in?’ and then ‘how can we move from me to we?”

Finally, it’s important to note that young people have usually been the ones upending traditional mores and that all of this is part of a “wild west” occurring in a new era of fast-paced technology and the tools it provides—the dust from which has yet to settle. Before dismissing nonprofit advocacy organizations, it’ll be necessary to take a closer look at what these groups have to offer and whether their new brethren are a replacement or complement to them in their efforts to most effectively and efficiently engage millions of people in civic and political life.

As part of some research the Institute has been doing on how to effectively identify early-stage, high-potential grantees, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of intuition in philanthropy. I was introduced to the idea by Chet Tchozewski of the Global Greengrants Fund, who has been talking about “intuitive grantmaking” for a few years now. He came to it out of necessity. Global Greengrants was giving away extremely small grants (often $5,000 or even less) to grassroots environmental organizations, so it couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a rigorous due diligence process. His solution was to use a network of on-the-ground advisors in the regions where GGF is funding, and to trust those advisors’ instincts and knowledge about who would be good grantees. Global Greengrants feels that this system has worked well over the years. And while their process may not be as thorough as what some other foundations use, there is a clear sense that this intuitive approach is “good enough.”

This notion of trusting the intuition, knowledge, and experience of experts was echoed as I recently began to talk with funders doing “innovation” grantmaking and a few folks from the venture capital world. VC’s do a great deal of research, but it often comes down to the idea of “trusting their gut.” It’s about intuition. And intuition, when you drill deeper to figure out what’s behind it, often appears to be in large part about pattern recognition.

It was Patrick Maloney of the Lemelson Foundation who suggested this to me—that vetting high-risk, early-stage efforts is really about pattern recognition. He explained that you get really good at recognizing one “pattern” that works—one type of team or approach that is likely to succeed. But recognizing one pattern doesn’t mean that you’re good at catching all of the good ideas. You end up missing a lot of things that might succeed, because you’re really good at seeing the single type of pattern you know. As Patrick explained to me, “You may get good at picking grants that work, but you’ll never be great at picking what won’t work, because you don’t know what other types of things, outside your pattern, will succeed.”

And this is where the power of networks comes into the picture. By using a network of knowledgeable experts, each of whom is good at recognizing a certain type of pattern that works, you can ultimately catch many more of the types of things that will succeed. Call it “network intuition” if you will—building on the cumulative pattern recognition of multiple expert perspectives to create a more systematic way of using intuition.

A networked approach to intuition also allows you to eliminate some of the error and bias that can creep into intuitive judgments. It’s possible to see the flaws when you’re using logical reasoning, but it’s almost impossible to catch mistakes and biases in your intuition. By compiling the perspectives of a network of advisors, you can begin to filter out some of the specific biases that might taint a single individual’s intuition.

In many ways, the idea of intuitive grantmaking flows naturally from Clayton Christensen’s theories about disruptive innovation. He talks about how cheaper, simpler versions of products or services that are “good enough” for many users can ultimately displace more sophisticated offerings. Think, for example, of the way that IBM was focused on making mainframe computers in the 1970s, allowing the upstart personal computer to build a new market serving as a “good enough” tool for most everyday users. PCs were aimed at a new market that manufacturers of the larger product weren’t interested in, and the machines ultimately moved up-market through performance improvements until they actually started competing for customers that used to be buying mainframes.

This idea was on my mind when I went to the “Innovation and Evaluation” meeting at IDEO a few weeks ago. If intuition can be used as an effective, “good enough” tool for due diligence, could it also be applied to evaluation and impact assessment? In many ways, it seems a natural fit. Right now, the social sector is clamoring for quasi-experimental control groups and sophisticated evaluations that cost a great deal of money, but more often than not produce inconclusive findings. Because of the challenges of proving causality in the social sector, the result of many of these expensive studies often ends up being: “It depends.”

And while I’d never argue that we should stop trying to find better metrics and better approaches for measuring impact, I have begun to wonder whether in some cases, we might be better off developing methods for using and trusting the intuition of a network that will allow us to do a “good enough” job of assessing our impact?

I don’t have answers here yet… But it seems something worth thinking about. What would it look like to do intuitive impact assessment? Who would be the right network, and how would you build it? And would it really be “good enough?”

I’d love to know what others might think about this.

We’re used to the idea that only an individual or a small and closely-aligned group can articulate an opinion, and that is exactly how blogs tend to be used. The only established process we have for expressing opinions or coming to a decision in groups is the legislature, since any large group attempting to come to a decision without that level of formal procedure will quickly break down into a shouting match. MixedInk’s process effectively encodes the legislative process into software, adding a level of structure to group editing allows it to happen with any size group and no prior relationships between them. Its principal limits are that (1) the group has to share basic agreement about the text it’s intending to collaborate on and that (2) the document it drafts needs to be short enough that different versions are easy to compare.

How could MixedInk be applied? Slate readers used it to compose an inauguration speech for Obama, the White House Open Government Initiative used it to invite the public to suggest methods for improving transparency and participation in government, and the Associated Press used it to invite the public to express the cases for and against Justice Sotomayor. I had the chance last month to speak with one of its co-creators, David Stern (@davestern), and I asked him what uses he could imagine in the social sector. He suggested that membership-based nonprofits like the Sierra Club could use it to allow their members to collectively author petitions or open letters, and that foundations could use it to let their staff collectively author the organizational mission. Those might sound like radical words, but they represent the new options that are now available through MixedInk and the rest of Web 2.0. I’ve included below my complete Q&A with David from July 2009.

David Stern: The company was founded in 2007, but the official launch was in January of this year, and I have yet to see any direct competitors. The idea came about because blogs were playing a big role in the 2004 and 2006 elections. It was exciting because people were suddenly expressing themselves online, but at the same time people were limited by the fact that there were so many of them. If you were one of a thousand comments on a blog post, your input is lost. We wanted to create a way for groups to speak with a collective voice. For example, hundreds of thousands could write a mission statement for their organization, or a blog post, or an op-ed. It was intended for political and social organization from the start, and we see a huge range of ways that it could be applied.

WW: What makes it different?

DS: We compare ourselves to a wiki, but we’re really a combination of a wiki and Digg/IdeaStorm. We take the wiki and we add a rating system so that you don’t have to express a neutral point of view. Neutral point of view works well when you have a small team and people can pick up the phone and work out disagreements, and it works well for Wikipedia where people are trying to write neutral encyclopedia articles. But it doesn’t work well for other texts where subjectivity is meant to be part of the process.

But I wouldn’t make the comparison to Wikipedia because MixedInk is geared to shorter text, about 1500 words or less. If you have a longer text you can divide it up, but it gets cumbersome with something really long. Otherwise it gets really messy when you’re trying to tell the difference between two 30-page documents. Theoretically it could be used to create some of the content that’s on Wikipedia, especially to resolve the controversial areas. If there was one section of an article where the debate was particularly heated, you could try to create just that piece with MixedInk.

WW: Is it designed for a certain scale?

DS: It’s meant to be infinitely scalable. The structure has no upper limit. The biggest groups we’ve done it with so far has been in the range of hundreds of people. For example, we did a project with Slate Magazine to invite people to compose an inaugural address for Obama. That was our opening salvo and since then we’ve done other projects with advocacy groups, with a member of Congress, with the White House on their open government policy that they’ll be creating.

WW: Does there have to be a deadline? How do you make sure that you end up with one version at the end?

DS: There doesn’t need to be a deadline, but it does focus the community’s attention. Many applications like an advocacy letter or an op-ed have external deadlines. But theoretically you could have an ongoing process. We let organizers set a deadline so that they can tell people to write things in time for voting, but any version can be voted on at any stage. What we’ve found is that the versions that include more co-authors and more points of view are those that tend to rise to the top. Everyone tends to end up focusing on a few competing ways of articulating the message.

WW: Are there any other “best practices” that you would recommend for making MixedInk the most effective? Conversely, have you noticed any important pitfalls to avoid?

DS: It helps if you tell people exactly what the point is, a real-world hook. In the Slate project they said that they were going to create a speech, and they included examples of previous speeches. People had a really solid idea of what was expected of them. You also have to give them a sense of how the output will be used. In the case of the Slate piece they said that they were going to publish it on the site and address it as a suggestion to Obama. It can’t be just a bunch of words sitting on a website somewhere. Those are the two important pieces: frame the issue correctly (asking people for a specific kind of text that they’re familiar with), and that they understand how the output will be used. We’ve also found it helps if people are asked to collaborate explicitly in the email and on the website, using words like “collaborate” and “remix.” Otherwise they might just write their individual thoughts and not try to work together.
MixedInk is best for groups where the distribution of opinion is roughly a bell-curve. On most policy issues there are often an underlying set of principles that most people can agree on, and MixedInk helps find the extent to which there is a consensus. On the issues where there are different camps and you know where they are up front—like if you wanted to do editorials promoting Obama and McCain, you could have each camp make their argument in separate editorials. Each camp could express their collective viewpoint without interference from those who disagree. My view is that real opinions, outside the context of constraints of a few options, can find a consensus. There typically IS a bell-shaped distribution of opinion. If you didn’t know where the camps were beforehand, you could establish separate pages for each potential camp and see where the most interest lies. Or you could dig deeper and ask people to frame the basic principles where they can agree.

WW: Are there any sweet-spot uses that you’re waiting to see tested?

DS: Product reviews. I’d love to see a review of the iPhone 3GS done by the crowd of everyone who bought one yesterday. That way you get a sense of what real people think about it and not just the experts. It would be a shift of power in the control over the national discourse to citizens, over experts.

We haven’t done any endorsements of candidates, or any op-eds period, where you put citizens’ voices right next to the Tom Friedmans and David Brooks of the world. It would be nice to put something created by 1200 NYTimes readers in the same space. That could be organized by the media company or by an advocacy group or another group. [Update: since this conversation, MixedInk did a op-ed project with the AP, where readers were asked to make the cases for and against Sotomayor’s nomination collaboratively.]

We’ve met some folks at the State Department. I think it would be really cool to let the American express their collective support for the Iranians, writing an open letter to the Iranian people.

In the corporate arena, it would be really cool to create a collective mission statement or environmental policy.
That said, every time we walk into a room people have their own ideas about what this could be used for. We just try to help them.

WW: How could you see foundations and nonprofits using it best?

DS: If we were talking to a membership organization of any sort, I would recommend the basic idea of giving up some control over your communication strategy, your overall objectives and messaging, and giving your members a greater feeling of ownership over the organization. What if the Sierra Club said that they are going to run whatever ad their national community creates? Then their basic shifts from “we’re going to lobby on your behalf in Washington” to “we’re going to make your collective voice, literally, heard in Washington.” It’s a radical shift in control, over the long term, towards constituent control over policy. That said, there are ways to dip your toes in the water, to get a feel for the crowdsourcing process and build trust with your members/supporters, without taking major risks on policy and message development.

If you’re talking about a large foundation like the Ford Foundation or the Gates Foundation, they could use MixedInk to let their thousands and thousands of employees to shape organization policy: “What is our mission?” Normally you answer that with a retreat for 30-40 top executives, and they come up with something, but then the employees don’t necessarily relate to it. This would be a way for your employees, on whom you depend, to shape the organization’s mission and expression of its values. On a more strategic level, if there is a really tough question that the organization is facing, you can bring in the employees on the problem-solving process. These people might not be as well-educated or make as much money, but collectively their wisdom does exceed that of a group that can fit into a board room.

WW: Could foundations use MixedInk to take input from the people who they are trying to help?

DS: Yes, but the caveat is that in order to have a wise crowd you have to have a crowd. It all depends on the universe of contributors. If it’s a large enough group of people who are capable with and have access to computers, MixedInk could be very helpful. With any big issue, if you can pick a large group to ask for their opinion, the question is really whether it’s a big enough group and whether they can and want to express their opinion. A lot of people get asked to contribute and don’t, whether because they don’t have time or access or whatever. This could also be a way for your most passionate supporters play a role. If the Heritage Foundation, or MoveOn, asked its supporters for arguments for and against a public option, they’d get a lot fewer people than if they just circulated a poll, but they’d get a much deeper level of engagement and more substantive input.

The vision for Slow Money is to be the Wall Street of slow food by organizing investment into local food systems. Their stated goals:

• To steer significant new sources of capital to small food enterprises, appropriate-scale organic farming and local food systems; and,
• To catalyze the emergence of the nurture capital industry—entrepreneurial finance supporting soil fertility, carrying capacity, sense of place, cultural and ecological diversity, and nonviolence.

The phrasing immediately caught my eye. Those are not only lofty goals, they also reflect a network-savvy mindset about the work to be done. Slow Money doesn’t sit at the center of a command economy, so steering capital means developing and channeling investors’ desire to back local food systems. The role of catalyzing a new industry places Slow Money even more explicitly in the role of table-setter and network-weaver. This positioning as cutting-edge is not accidental. As they say in their pitch to join as a member: “Is it typical philanthropy? No. Is it investing as we’ve come to know it? No. Is it achievable? Yes.”

Their plan remains an outline but contains a number of laudable examples of placing networks at the center of strategic thinking. It’s worth taking a moment to examine their choices and how they can be thought of as a model. At a high level, their plan appears cutting-edge in a number of ways:

• Taking a network approach to strategy formation, gathering input and developing ideas gradually through the founders, regional attendees, and national attendees
• Providing a channel for private philanthropy that sidesteps foundations
• Providing a channel for impact investing that focuses on a specific set of issues
• Investing heavily in the network of personal trust among the businesses, investors, and philanthropists who will be taking the actions to create local food systems

Looking closer, here’s what they’ve done already:

• Recruited 60 founding members who have committed to taking leadership and have donated at least $1,000. Many of these are leading lights in the slow food movement. It appears that this is where the vision comes from. There’s probably a small core who have pulled in the rest of the 60, but it appears that they haven’t codified a precise plan before expanding the leadership group to its current large size. Instead they’ve invited these others to help them develop and shape the nascent group’s direction, building off of the ideas that Woody Tasch laid out in his book from late 2008, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money. That might sound frightening from the perspective of the founders, who no doubt could tell you exactly how they would like to see the organization form, but what they gain by handing over power is (a) intelligent input from those with different backgrounds, (b) a diversity of perspectives that will help them become better aligned with the needs of the broader public, and (c) a far larger group of highly-committed leaders who will use their skills and personal networks to promote the vision.
• Published a set of Slow Money principles which set out a vision of the changes that Slow Money wants to achieve. Just publishing these principles as the views of a group of established leaders is a network-minded strategic move, since they place a “stake in the ground” that is not only useful for Slow Money to present itself to investors but can also be a point of reference in the public dialogue.

What they’re doing now:

• Asking for signatures endorsing the principles and donations of any size to support the effort. You might look at the goal of the fundraising drive as simply gathering money, but they’ve smartly set their sights on building up a long enough list that one or more national foundations will provide them with a grant. It’s an obvious point, but it’s worth repeating in this context how easy it can be to forget that the signers to a set of principles represent a powerful statement that a “base” exists in support of the cause.
• Holding regional convenings called “Slow Money Institutes” to explore investment needs and strategies for building local food systems. They’ve already convened Institutes in Vermont, California, and Washington and plan to hold them in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Kentucky in 2009. It’s significant that these are not research efforts. They are not doing desk research and a series of interviews to develop a single view of what needs to happen in each region. That might be a helpful information-gathering process for an organization that was only interested in charting its own course, but since their goal is to encourage action on the part of many other independent players, they also have to develop the desire for action and build up a sense among the participants that others are acting along similar lines. The latter is especially important at the regional level since it is regional food systems that Slow Money is aiming to create. They’re also holding national convenings, the first of which was the reason for the Roots of Change announcement and will be held in Santa Fe on September 10-11. These are useful not only for drawing people from around the country but also for knitting together the regional networks’ participants so that they can compare notes and collaborate.

And what they plan to do:

• Create regional investment funds, launched with money from a national “Seed Fund” and then matched (or at least strengthened) by money from the “Co-Investment Fund.” They could have made this national/regional split to reflect the fact that regional economies are the unit of analysis. But regions are also a step closer to the scale of personal networks and a personal sense of identity.
• Create a number of other financial entities for promoting local and sustainable food systems, each of which appear to be designed as a magnet for large donations to work symbiotically alongside the regional investment funds.

They’re off to a strong start. Are there any ways that their strategy could be further enhanced by thinking like a network? There are a few that come to mind:

Tactics:

• Recruit bloggers to promote the principles and donating to the cause–since the concept of slow money touches on a wide range of specific issues from impact investing to environmental protection to climate to local living, there ought to be plenty of bloggers interested
• Tweet news about the development of local food systems
• Encourage the petition signatories to spread the news to their friends through social media, and run the petition on act.ly so that people on Twitter can sign and broadcast their support at the same time
• Use a wiki to crowdsource information about the current status of local food systems
• Use MixedInk to draft collective statements of purpose for each of the regional convenings
• Create a Facebook group for the national group and a Ning for each of the regions, which would carry forward the face-to-face relationships and encourage new online social connections

Strategy:

• Set up investment funds that are even more local, perhaps operating at the county level, to tap more deeply into personal networks and an individual’s sense of identity
• Target small-scale donors by asking people to donate money to investment pools and then participate in collective management of managing the funds using online community tools

What do you think of their plan? Are there other ways that they could succeed by acting as a network?

Please let us know what you think! What are your stories of social change driven by a network mindset? What lessons are you learning about working wikily?

SocialMobilize breaks down some of the most interesting findings within the study:

• 89% of the respondents use social media including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, vlogs, and wikis (versus 75% in 2007)
• 81% said that “social media is at least ‘somewhat important’ to their future strategy”.
• 79% use social networking and video blogging. Social networking was up 47% in 2008 from what it was in 2007. Video usage in 2008 was up 38% over 2007.
• 57% blog
• 67% had an RSS feed of their blog (versus 58% in 2007)
• 56% allowed email subscriptions (versus 23% in 2007)
• 16% use wikis
• 45% say social media is important to their fundraising efforts

For some, however, these findings are a no-brainer. Blake Bowyer, who write marketing consulting company EyeTraffic Media’s Insight Blog, says:

“If you think about it, often working on shoestring budgets and heartstring issues, the combination of nonprofits and social media makes perfect sense. Two of the biggest benefits of social media: efficiency and connectivity. Efficiency in the sense that any organization from your local pet shelter to Oxfam America can instantly establish a presence on many social networks and acquire followers, fans, and benefactors it might never reach traditionally… Moreover, with that presence, a nonprofit can connect mano-a-mano with its benefactors – new and old.”

Two unanswered questions, however, are (a) the skill and effectiveness with which nonprofits are using these tools and (b) whether that use is built into the organizational strategy. We are currently in a moment of experimentation, as GlobalGiving’s case studies from the Summer of Social Good are showing us, when the tools are still new and the opportunity exists to map out fresh new ways for them to serve a nonprofit’s needs and even reshape the organization around new ways of working. The study looks at some ways in which organizations are more effectively using social media (i.e. greater use of RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions), but it is still unclear whether social sector users of social media are receiving the training or developing the knowledge base they need. The Working Wikily resources library is a good place to start in that design process, and two particularly useful documents are the introduction by Steve MacGlaughlin at Blackbaud and the draft handbook by Wendy Harman at the Red Cross.

What do you think? Are social sector organizations doing a good job with social media? What examples have you seen of the tools being put to strategic use? What is your organization doing with social media, and how could it be more effective?

With each op-ed, Nick Kristof chips away at the good-hearted but lazy NYT readers to make us aware and make us care about the world’s most pressing issues. He always has great data and research to back up his points. He often point us in the right direction of an amazing innovator and highlight something that needs fixing. He sometimes (but not often enough) will even tell us what we can do.

Last week his post “Would You Let This Girl Drown?” expands upon the lesson that “one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic” and why we are so willing assist a stranger in need before us, yet so unwilling to donate to save strangers from malaria thousands of miles away. People with important causes need to combat these realities of human psychology, but in most cases they do a poor job. Kristof tells us how humanitarians are incredibly ineffective at selling their causes, stating, “Any brand of toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than the life-saving work of aid groups.”

He continues…

In the case of fighting poverty, there are billions of other bystanders to erode a personal sense of responsibility. Moreover, humanitarian appeals emphasize the scale of the challenges — 25,000 children will die today! — in ways that are as likely to numb us as to galvanize us.

….There are no easy answers here, but if a toothpaste company had these miserable results in its messaging, it would go back to the drawing board. That’s what bleeding hearts need to do as well.

As a follow-up in today’s post, Kristoff shows the world a New York City based non-profit called charity:water that has been incredibly effective with marketing their cause and connecting those who want to give with those who need the help. I’ve been using charity:water as a case-study on how to use social media in every presentation at work for the last 18 months (for commercial and nonprofit clients). I’m grateful someone with just a tad bigger audience is teaching the world the lessons of Scott Harrison and team.

What Scott does is simple – get rich people to give money people in Africa and Asia can have clean drinking water. In three years, Scott has raised $10M from 50,000 individual donors and provided nearly 1M people clean drinking water.

How does Scott do it? Kristof gives three important lessons.

1. Ensure that every penny from new donors will go to projects in the field. He accomplishes this by cajoling his 500 most committed donors to cover all administrative costs.

2. Show donors the specific impact of their contributions. Mr. Harrison grants naming rights to wells. He posts photos and G.P.S. coordinates so donors can look up their wells on Google Earth. And in September, Mr. Harrison is going to roll out a new Web site that will match even the smallest donation to a particular project that can be tracked online.

3. Leap into new media and social networks. This spring, charity: water raised $250,000 through a “Twestival” — a series of meetings among followers on Twitter. Last year, it raised $965,000 by asking people with September birthdays to forgo presents and instead solicit cash to build wells in Ethiopia. The campaign went viral on the Web, partly because Mr. Harrison invests in clever, often sassy videos.

I’ll add two more lessons to Scott’s formula of success, both related to design:

4. Leveraging great design to create great impact. Getting better design is not about making something “pretty” but it is about telling the story you want to tell. A good designer puts order to the way the message, ideas, information is communicated. The point of the message, the intended recipient , the voice you want to use to relay the message all dictate how you design your website, materials, events, etc… Putting investment here shows that you value good communication if you think you have a message that is worth spreading.

The investment in good design pays off in surprising ways, re: Saks Fifth Avenue giving up its store windows to charity:water’s message.

Do you think Saks Fifth Avenue would have given up its store windows to spread your message with your crappy site, logo, pictures, and materials?

5. Use great photography to inspire action. Good pictures bring immediacy to what you are doing, even if it thousands of miles away.

I’ll ignore your five paragraph essay on your mission and your work, but I won’t ignore this:

Or this logo…

For aid groups, non-profits, or advocacy organizations, I hope we take these lessons and change something about what we are doing. It’s worth the investment.

Arguably, it may not be the right question. If networks are the webs of relationships that surround us, how can they then be “supported”? How can a funder help a network increase its “effectiveness” if, by definition, networks are neutral, not goal-directed? On the other hand, there are plenty of people who equate networks with formal coalitions and alliances, and many networks do have explicit goals. The term “network” means different things to different people, and the confusion around the language has only been exacerbated with the ‘friending’ frenzy of online social networks.

My colleagues and I have landed on a definition that describes the kinds of networks in which we are interested:
• groups of individuals and/or organizations
• connected through meaningful relationships
• in which there are many participants (and the potential to grow)
• with some space for self-organization
• fueled by new technologies for connection and collaboration

The funders we have been working with come into the ‘network’ conversation from a number of different entry points. They are interested in networks that have various purposes: learning and evaluation, advocacy, innovation. However, there is a surprising amount of convergence around how they define networks. Their frame is pretty well-aligned with the above definition, with one important addition – within a network, the nature of the ties is critical; the more trust the better.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that interest is growing among grantmakers in the question of how funders can best support networks. Courtney Bourns and Kathleen Enright at Grantmakers for Effective Organizations told us that they’re seeing a shift from investing in (individual) organizational effectiveness to investing in collective approaches—movements, campaigns, and networks.

And, even in the past year, it feels like the language of networks has become more commonplace.  I do believe support for networks as a vehicle for social change has long been a central –but tacit – part of the work of many grantmakers. In recent years, the pioneering work of foundations like Barr, Annie E. Casey, and Packard has facilitated the development of language and theory to talk about and make explicit the practice of supporting networks. Now that the language and theory is starting to catch up with practice, funders are beginning to see the practice of weaving effective networks, as a powerful mechanism for social change.

Discrete grantmaking practices for supporting networks that I’ve seen  include:
• Investment in social network mapping in order “see” the network and act strategically using this new knowledge
• Support for network weavers
• Strengthening the network’s infrastructure (e.g. communications)
• Support for opportunities for network participants to connect (e.g. in-person convenings)
• Support for processes that help networks develop continuous feedback loops and become “learning networks”
• Funding actions / projects that emerge from the network

I still have many more questions than answers (e.g., how patient should funders be with emergence? How do you know that networks work – and therefore, make the argument for investing in networks? What is the funder’s role in a network?) Fortunately, there is thoughtful experimentation underway that will shed light on these questions.

For the network funders convening, we invited Chuck House, Director of Stanford’s interactive telecommunications research center, to speak with the group. His advice: “You know where the future is going. We have to work in networks. But why have every foundation reinvent [how they support and work in] networks? You are building a reference model for how foundations can work in the future. Hurry.”

The most provocative moment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference that I attended last week was the speech that

Boyd asked the crowd: how many of you use Facebook? Nearly everyone raised their hands. MySpace? Just a few brave souls raised their hand in the crowd of mostly American, liberal-leaning, and white politicians, organizers, and technologists. With roughly equal numbers of American visitors to both sites last month, this was a stark reminder that there “is not a universal public” online. The conclusion was important for anyone in the audience interested in communicating with Americans as a whole. Sociologists have long studied “homophily”—the tendency of individuals to associate and bond with similar others. Whites know whites, liberals know liberals, and geeks know geeks. What boyd made clear is that online interaction is no different. “Many of you know people who joined Facebook in the last year,” she said. Heads nodded. “Well, numerous adults have also joined MySpace in the last year. My guess is that not many of you know adults who have recently created accounts on MySpace. Why? Probably because they aren’t like you.”

The point that boyd drove home is a specific case of the concern raised by Cass Sunstein (in Republic.com 2.0) and other thinkers: that the self-directed nature of the Internet could lead to social fragmentation. Online communities often form around shared interests and existing relationships, which leads them to be naturally less diverse than physical communities where location is often chosen out of practicality. Social media is a playground for homophily, and to the extent that we get our information and ideas from people like us, it can insulate us from the broader conversation and amplify our most extreme views.

This phenomenon is even more important for those of us who are working daily to influence politics and social change. If social networks are a modern-day incarnation of the public sphere, that is where politicians should go to hear the voices and concerns of their constituents, where organizers should go to rally people for their causes, and where our researchers and educators should go to share knowledge. But if we forget that race and class are a factor online, assuming that the choice of services is a simple matter of comparative advantage, we risk reinforcing the very divisions that we’re trying to bridge.

However, there were astonishingly few nonprofits or foundations present at PDF (unless you count academics from universities). I ran into a few here and there, but my guess is they represented less than 10% of attendees. Vince Stehle of Surdna was present, along with Chris Gates of PACE (Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement); and there were some grassroots organizers such as ACORN in breakout sessions. The audience was also more male than female (60%, according to one estimate), certainly more liberal than conservative (at one point someone asked how many Republicans were in the audience and only 10 people raised their hands, out of 1000+!), and disconcertingly white. The lack of diversity was a fact not lost on some speakers, who issued an invitation for any grassroots communities of color to attend next year, although whether or not they meant for free was unclear. I say all this not to harp on political correctness, but rather to point out that there seems to be a disconnect in the discourse about politics and technology with the actual grassroots, civil society groups who are so often organizing “on the ground”—and the very civil society groups who are doing the hard work of building democracy everyday. We need to start connecting these dots.

These themes of race and class were not lost on ethnographer danah boyd, who gave one of the most provocative presentations of the conference – quoting both Habermas and inner-city teens! She talked about how online social networks mirror off-line social dynamics, and described the phenomenon of “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook. While some have a Utopian vision of the Internet as the Great Integrator, or Ultimate Public Space, boyd cautioned against this naïve illusion and pushes us to work harder to cross the digital divide. (My teammate and fellow attendee Jake Samuelson has more on boyd’s talk in the following post.)

The other most compelling presentation of the conference was by Michael Wesch, from Kansas State, who talked about how YouTube and online video is shaping our notions of self and identity, allowing for new possibilities of connection and community. (He’s most known for his YouTube video: The Machine is Us/ing Us viewed 10 million times). He quoted the famous Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” He also talked about the modern day problems of alienation, narcissism, and anomie, embodied in the ever-popular flippant phrase of adolescents everywhere: “Whatever.” He believes that YouTube might hold the antidote to these problems of self-absorption: we know ourselves through our relations with others, and this new media is creating new ways of relating to others, hence new ways of knowing ourselves. He showed clips where people are unafraid to express their deepest hopes and fears to millions of strangers. With 20 hours of video being uploaded every minute to YouTube (up to 500,000 videos a day), let’s hope he’s right to think that YouTube can bring us closer together rather than driving us further apart.

A few other interesting highlights of the conference:

· Mayor Bloomberg, who joined by video since he couldn’t make it in person. (How appropriate for this audience!) He shared the New York City government’s efforts to make the local bureaucracy much more transparent and connected, a theme that echoed through several other plenary sessions exploring the White House’s use of online tools for engaging citizens in policy and local governments’ attempts to become more open and accessible.

· A breakout panel on how demographics are driving politics, where Simon Rosenberg, Morley Winograd (of NDN.org), and Jose Vargas of the Washington Post shared research on how the Millennial generation, and Hispanic voters are critical groups to cultivate for both parties. Currently both lean heavily Democratic and voted for Obama in ‘08. If their projections are to be believed, the increasing shift to southwest states, coupled with the rise of these two voting blocks means that Democrats are much more favored to win going forward than Republicans, who have an aging, white, south-eastern base.

· Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, who talked about how social networks are being used for social change, particularly as an organizing tool for local revolutions such as those in Columbia and Iran. Facebook now has 200M users, the majority of whom are outside of the US. She sees social networking sites as the outlet for people to forge connections on many levels: “People want to connect not just to each other, but to issues, causes and movements… The small actions we take every day on Facebook are the ones that prime us for big actions.”

· Alec Ross from the State Department, who talked about “21^st Century Statecraft,” a concept of foreign relations that is focused on the power of networks. “Technology says that power and input doesn’t have to be the exclusive privilege of the few, but can be used to empower citizens,” he said. Most interesting was his ambition to broaden diplomacy to include not only state-to-state communication but also communication that is state-to-people and people-to-people. As an example of this new approach he highlighted how Obama’s speech in Cairo was translated live and broadcast on TV, the Internet, and mobile phones. “Now what we’re looking at is the potential of citizens to push governments,” he said. “It’s a dynamic that is dominating the mindshare of diplomats.”

I’d like to close, on an appropriate note for Independence Day, with these insightful words from Ross: “If Paul Revere was a modern citizen, he wouldn’t have ridden down Main Street, he would have just tweeted – and we would have never known his name. Everyone who lives in our network society now has the power to be a Paul Revere. Everyone who has Twitter now has a global distribution network.”

As part of a series of lectures organized by TED Conferences, Shirky discussed the changing media landscape and choices facing organizations looking to communicate with an empowered audience.

“In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience is increasingly full participants,” Shirky said that communicating “is less about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals” and more about “creating an environment of convening and supporting groups.”

Below is a video of Shirky, who also is an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program.

The advent of Twollars earlier this year offers the social sector another reason to take note of social media.

Twollars is a Twitter-based currency that combines two key trends shaping the social sector: the power of social media and the economy of micropayments. Conceived by two social media users (who, in true Working Wikily fashion, met via Twitter), Twollars, called the “currency of appreciation”, was designed as a way of rewarding positive action—a “thank you” that “could last beyond the brief act of saying thanks.” Twitter users, who are each allocated 50 Twollars, can award the virtual currency to other Twitterites—as a way of acknowledging them for posting helpful information, sharing a funny video, or writing something inspiring.

Beyond registering e-appreciation, the virtual currency can also be used to support charities: donating Twollars to a nonprofit organization can raise both awareness and cash for the group. According to a recent article in the Guardian, the concept has already raised more than $1,500 for charity : water. (The Star has further relevant coverage, as does Mashable and Wild Apricot Blog.)

How do Twollars on Twitter add up to dollars in the bank? Twollars are intended as a unit of appreciation, i.e. a quantification of social capital, and the company is maintaining a registry of vetted nonprofits who can exchange their Twollars for donations. The founders see the primary source of donations as individuals or businesses who want to give their charity in a novel way, and they’ve also made nonprofits the only source of new Twollars for anyone who wants to replenish their account.

Twollars is a unique donation-focused twist on the combination of Twitter and “micro-payment” services such as the TipJoy, TwitPay, and ChipIn. These micropayment services provide a simple and direct mechanism for paying or donating small amounts of money to an organization. (BusinessWeek has more about social media-based micropayment systems.) Twollars provides the micropayment service but introduces the additional concept of a currency that is used simply to express appreciation, something that is typically left invisible and un-quantified.

The concept appears to be an improvement on the original eBay feedback system: just as someone on eBay with positive feedback ratings from others is probably worth buying from, a charity that has received more Twollars than might be viewed as more worthy of a donation. The benefit to a charity could be double: it could both win attention by advertising the amount of Twollar appreciation it’s received and also encourage donors to buy its Twollars as an easy way to donate real money. (This would appear to create a disincentive for charities to sell back their Twollars, but we’ll see. The experiment has just begun.)

It remains to be seen whether Twollars will take off. The concept takes some effort to wrap your head around, and at an exchange rate of 10 Twollars to the dollar, is it worth expending limited resources to accumulate the made-up money? Time will tell.

Here’s a snapshot of Twollars, by the numbers:

• Number of Twollar followers on Twitter: 894
• Charities that have registered at Twollar.com: 60
• Twollar transactions since the expanded, improved Twollar launched in May 2009: over 3,400
• Charity with the most Twollars: Camfed, with 619 Twollars

Here are a few, easy steps to take advantage of Twollars today—and begin sharing your appreciation and thanks on Twitter!

• Register your nonprofit on Twollar (and on Twitter if you haven’t yet!)
• Start following Twollar’s Twitter stream
• Share and award your 50 Twollars
• Tweet about Twollars and raise awareness for the effort—and encourage your followers on Twitter begin donating their own (If a user wants to donate 10 Twollars to a charity, such as VitaminAngels, they’d tweet something like “@vitaminangels 10 Twollars for all their great work in Africa”.)
• See the Twollars Charity Guide to Twitter on the Twollar blog for more advice and hints

“When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism… In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure.” – Kevin Kelly

Participating in social media is a means to more than just marketing success, contends tech visionary Kevin Kelly in a recent Wired Magazine essay. There’s no question that social media is an important path forward in the media revolution. But to participate in online community efforts is also to channel the age-old desire for collective identity and communal effort, the very same desire that fueled political movements in the past.

Kelly argues that Wikipedia, Creative Commons, file-sharing, collaborative filtering, photo tagging, and other communal online activities are manifestations of a new form of that desire. This new ‘digital socialism’ is radically decentralized, elevates the power of the individual, and (for now) operates in the realm of culture and business rather than state power and economic structure. It makes use of collaborative technologies built on Internet infrastructure to coordinate group activity with almost zero organizational overhead, and the results have been a staggering new level of efficiency at producing social benefit. Kelly argues that the culture of using these tools for social impact deserves the label of “a movement.” If he’s right, could social-sector leaders who are cultivating communities to support their cause consider themselves leaders in the ‘digital socialist’ movement?

When it comes to public image, the question is nearly farcical. The ‘digital socialism’ that Kelly identifies is a nascent movement that the public hasn’t heard of, so for any leader to identify with it in public would probably earn only quizzical stares. Then there’s the fact that the vast majority of social-sector organizations prefer to remain outside partisan politics, and the word ‘socialism’ is strongly associated in the American brain with left-of-left politics.

Where Kelly’s ideas do matter is in helping leaders craft deeply effective and innovative social media strategies. Regardless of the label and its political implications, Kelly is undeniably right that some of the most attractive qualities of social media are the opportunity they present to share, cooperate, collaborate, and sometimes even take collective action. That is a very different set of root desires than the urge to buy a product, use a service, or help a stranger in need. Yet it is those urges that social media participants are satisfying—so it is those that any social media strategy has to satisfy. Therein lies the rub: most organizations don’t frame their goals in terms of satisfying collectivist urges. Social media strategy ought to grow from that connection between an organization’s mission and the human urge to collaborate.

A compressed outline and some relevant excerpts from the essay

• The culture of Internet users has many communal elements. Witness the success of:
  • Wikipedia and the nearly 150 wiki engines that host myriad small wiki efforts
  • The sharing-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright
  • File-sharing that continues in spite of illegality
  • Collaborative filters like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine
• This is socialist activity outside of the state, operating in the realm of culture and economics, at least for the time being. It is a socialism decentralized to the extreme, in a form that elevates individual freedom.
• “It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.”
• Clay Shirky suggests a hierarchy for this activity: people begin by sharing, then they cooperate, then collaborate, and finally take collective action. We can see evidence of this in today’s landscape:
  • Sharing – photos shared via social networking sites and email, status updates, YouTube videos, Yelp reviews, Loopt locations, Delicious bookmarks
  • Cooperation – collaborative filters offer individual products for collective use, resulting in an aggregate library that is far more valuable than any individual could create and wielding a cultural power on par with major media channels
  • Collaboration – open-source software products which result in high-performance tools that demand significant work from their contributors and provide only credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience as payment
  • Collectivism – hierarchical organizations are now being run in more collectivist ways, as in the case of the elite corps that governs Wikipedia.
• Why do people do it? “A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was ‘to learn and develop new skills.’ That’s practical. One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.”
• “Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.”

Twestival Local: Biggest Twitter Fundraising Event in History Returns – A second Twestival is now scheduled for September 12th, this time encouraging local groups of Twitter users to host events in aid of their favorite charities: “We can make brilliant things happen if we put our hearts behind them. The goal is ‘to give people the opportunity to feel they are a part of a larger social movement, but bring the cause a little closer to home.’ On this day, cities will be encouraged to host events and select a registered charity to support with 100% of the proceeds.”

Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies – “The fan pages that are doing it right are the ones that are actively engaging with their fans. These pages have creative content, two-way communication, active discussion boards, videos and images, and a fun and casual tone to match the medium. Below are five mini case studies of brands that are doing everything right when it comes to Facebook fan pages, presented so that you can learn by example.”

Change native to the digital world – Lucy Bernholz is trying to define what it means for an organization to be a digital native and is looking for examples. Her starter list:  Lend4health, Ushahidi, socialactions, tudiabetes, patientslikeme, charmtracker (part of MedicalMine), kiva, globalgiving, donorschoose, Allforgood, and mobilemovement. Got other ideas? She’ll be posting a more complete list soon.

Why Non-Profits Are So Good at Social Media – Conversation Starter (at the Harvard Business Review) insists that it is nonprofits who have been the early adopters and natural leaders in social media innovation, contrary to popular opinion in the social sector where many organizations see themselves as playing catch-up to businesses. To back up the point are five one-paragraph examples of nonprofits whose social media strategies embody the basic principles of success with the new tools: 1. Engage your audience by speaking to their core concerns. 2. Put your audience in the driver’s seat. 3. Offer a mix of tangible and social benefits. 4. Embrace emergent value propositions. 5. Innovate within the bounds of your core mission.

My Interview in BusinessWeek on Iran’s Twitter Revolution – Wading into a flurry of media attention on the use of Twitter by Iranian protestors, Gaurav Mishra voices skepticism about the real role of the tool in organizing the opposition. He makes an important point for anyone evaluating the real value of these tools for effecting grassroots change: “Political organizers use these tools because they create a multiplier effect—not only do you get a story about the campaign but then you also get a story about the fact they are using social-networking tools, so you get two stories for the price of one. The international media loves [the] social-networking world. But in India or in Iran, their use is still somewhat limited.”

15 Ways to Measure Return on Engagement (ROE) of Social Media – A useful roundup of tips and tricks for how to quantify — or at least qualitatively capture — the value of social media to an organization.

8 Nonprofit CEOs Who Tweet – Beth offers some thoughts on the benefits of tweeting and rounds up eight examples of nonprofit execs who are hopping on the trend.

Catalyst for Change: The Impact of Millennials on Organization Culture and Policy – The Monitor Group just released this report on what organizational leaders need to know about the Millennial generation and how to react. There are notable parallels to the lessons in Working Wikily.

Social Networks for Nonprofits: Why You Should Grow Your Own – Common Knowledge, who conducted the recent NTEN survey of social network usage in the nonprofit world, also released this whitepaper in April explaining the broader uses and rationales for using social networks in the social sector. Well worth the read.

Is serious discussion possible in online communities? – Martin Reed at CommunitySpark has some interesting reflections on what went wrong with the Open Government Brainstorm, and he has five recommendations for how to do it right: 1. Have clear, prominent guidelines from day one. 2. Ensure all visitors know what the moderation process is. 3. Have a clear appeals process – how do users report their grievances? (Answer: privately). 4. If individuals or groups try to hijack the community, engage in a private dialogue and compromise. 5. Do not draw attention to individuals or special interest groups.

Resources to Help Your Nonprofit Group Navigate Online Social Media – A list of twelve useful online resources highlighted by a panel of marketing and social-media experts who were brought together by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success – Facebook Causes was panned again in the Washington Post, a year after it was first reviewed, and the same charge was leveled at it the second time around: the average dollars per donor remains low, making it an ineffective tool for fundraising. Beth takes the reporter to task, echoing Allison Fine and many others. The basic flaws in the reporter’s reasoning are to think that (1) a nonprofit’s only interest is in fundraising and (2) social media is the right place to pursue that need. Nonprofits also need awareness of their message and avenues for building relationships with potential donors, both of which are steps on the road to winning donations. Social media is very useful for both of these, but it takes passionate advocacy and real relationships with the public before any organization can start hoping to raise money. It is simply a misguided metric for measuring Causes’ success.

Nonprofit Social Network Survey Released – A new survey on nonprofits’ use of social media is out and Allison Fine provides a summary. 80% have a dedicated staff member focusing between a quarter and all of their time on social media. Three quarters are on Facebook, but average tenure is under two years, the communities they’ve formed are an average of a bit over five thousand members, and while many are fundraising very few are raising real revenue. Greater success has been achieved by the third of the group who built their own social networks, a quarter of which are being used for fundraising and 8% of which raised over $10k in the past year.

• How to engage people who are using social media: “The reality is, people don’t go online to give attention, but to get it. They don’t want to be part of the audience. They want to perform and be heard, to be present. It’s an almost biological urge… That’s why digital media are replacing old media so rapidly – and why this new era is so difficult for marketers. They need to learn to join the conversation rather than interrupt it… the marketers need to be relevant – but not controlling. They’re used to being in charge. But this type of media is full of people being active without them… Increasingly, consumers are interested in talking to one another, rather than reading the previous words of the experts. ”How can nonprofits provide a “stage” for participation that helps them achieve their goals? How can they join the conversation?

• What motivates people to participate in the social web: “Businesspeople still don’t get the strength and importance of nonmonetary markets… In general, more and more people will spend their time on free entertainment and activity, just as they did a century ago. Twenty or 30 years from now, you’ll see some parts of the world much richer, the West relatively poorer than it is today, and much more of the economy returned to a non-monetary, non-transactional, relationship-driven base… A lot of people in the West are discovering that they have more things than they really need. Now they have a way to spend their time that costs almost no money.”Nonprofits have a strategic advantage in this new economy. How can nonprofits create rewarding opportunities to participate in nonmonetary transactions?
• The general trend towards transparency: “The opaque institutions around us are becoming semitransparent, in ways that people care about. Twenty years ago, if you bought a tube of toothpaste, it might have had the address of the manufacturer so you can write to it if you had questions. Then they added a toll-free number. Now it includes a Web site, and you can find out more about the ingredients. And there are third-party Web sites, like a project called Barcode Wikipedia, where information is posted that the manufacturer might not want to volunteer: for example, where products are manufactured, and whether children are used in the factories.”How can foundations and nonprofits use the new tools to force transparency on opaque institutions and model that level of transparency themselves?

• The paradox of choice in philanthropy: “As many marketers know, it’s better to give people a simpler set of options – not just because it’s confusing to have more, but because that creates a feeling of too much responsibility for the outcome. You don’t want to make a mistake. There’s a similar paradox of choice in philanthropy: if you’re confronted with helping starving children in Romania versus raped women in Kenya versus earthquake sufferers in China, you feel overwhelmed and end up not helping anybody.”How can nonprofits adjust their fundraising strategies to help potential donors navigate the constant paradox of too much choice?

Squarepeg: iphone app manages social actions, posts to twitter, facebook, email, rss – A brand-new iPhone application lets users of the world’s most popular smartphone manage all of the causes listed on Social Actions from anywhere in the cellular net. It even allows republishing on the go via Twitter, Facebook, email, or RSS. The advent of smartphones is barreling forward at freight train speed and software to put them to use is coming fast on its tail. What other apps could we see by the end of 2010 as iPhones and Androids become even more widespread?

Guest Post: Hillary Clinton on Social Media and Causes – Hillary had a heartening section in her graduation speech to Barnard where she waxed poetic about the power of socially-networked activists to storm the gates of traditional hierarchical power. What other examples are we seeing of the Obama administration promoting and embodying the principles of networks?

Smithsonian: Crowdsourcing An Institution’s Vision on Youtube – The Smithsonian Institution has been going through a major strategic planning initiative and decided, “in a flash of cloud like behavior” (to quote Beth), to ask for submissions on YouTube about what the future Smithsonian should look like. Best of all, listen to this from a Smithsonian staffer on their view of the process: “The process has been designed to be very wide open within the Institution, so this seemed a easy and fun way to gather some input from the outside using New Media… Building our systems from the ground up to both meet the internal needs of our researchers and other specialists while still filtering up to meet the needs of our constituents via our websites and our presence on an ever widening array of external social sites is going to take a lot of resources. We need begin to get a view from a lot of perspectives, and this is just one more slice of the pie.” Now that’s working wikily.

The Twitter Book: Must-Read Book for Simple, Practical Advice – For a simple desk guide to the art and science of tweeting, Beth heartily recommends The Twitter Book, a quick one-hour read that covers: Listening, Conversations, Sharing Information and Ideas, Reveal Yourself, and Twitter for Business.

Free the Fail Whale! – Witnessing the 3000% growth that Twitter has enjoyed in the past year, Igniter has a suggestion: “pull a Visa” and standardize what is clearly going to be a permanent messaging protocol. There are going to be many more Twitters competing for a share of the the “public micro-messaging” space, so why not make sure that they all interoperate? Perhaps a forward-thinking foundation could sponsor a technical roundtable to kickstart the process.

Google Wave: A Complete Guide – Google just unveiled a brand new real-time communications platform called Wave, a messaging service that combines elements of almost every other kind of social software into one. Mashable was kind enough to compose a wrap-up of all the coverage that cuts through the hype and explains exactly what the key features of Wave will be when it is released later this year: real-time exchange, embeddability in other sites, wiki editing, open-source code, playback of any part of the exchange, natural language, and drag-and-drop file sharing. While it won’t change the social media landscape overnight, Wave certainly has the potential for widespread adoption. Given what we can see already of its feature set, what impact could it have?

Learning as a Network – Harold Jarche juxtaposes three theories: Learning as a Network, double-loop learning, and connectivism. Each provide an angle of insight into how and why learning can happen quickly and effectively in a networked context, but as he notes, all three are theoretical and not ready for use in making the elevator pitch to an executive director. How could you make this points in a way that is fast, clear, and compelling?

New resource on leadership networks – Networks are especially helpful for connecting leaders to one another, and Bruce Hoppe at Connectedness has just released a new paper along with Claire Reinelt called “SNA and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks” which proposes a conceptual framework for distinguishing among the different kinds of useful networks that we’re now seeing: (1) Peer leadership, (2) Organizational leadership, (3) Field-policy leadership, and (4) Collective leadership. Their work ties in closely to the networks training that the Monitor Institute’s Diana Scearce and Heather Grant delivered just this past week. Do these categories resonate with your experience of networks in the field? Are there other kinds that might also be beneficial?

Social Yell – Thanks to Max Gladwell for this tip as well: “The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.”

Playing For Change | Peace Through Music – Thanks to Max Gladwell for highlighting this gem: “Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.”

Mobile is one of the fastest growing and most talked about areas of technology. We wrote about it a year ago

1. Mobile continues to be truly global: Mobile penetration in the US is approaching 90% of the population and global penetration is now 60% according to the UN. There are nearly 1.3 Billion wireless connections. Most developing countries have a much higher saturation of mobile phones vs. computers with Internet connections, given cell phones’ lower cost, limited need for uninterrupted power, and more basic infrastructure requirements. Check out these photos of wireless use around the world and this video on mobile use in Africa

2. Data is cheap, and soon all phones will be “smart”: The price of data plans is decreasing as more users demand these plans and manufacturers gain more market power over carriers. At the same time, cell phone manufacturers are adapting to consumer needs and focusing on so-called “smart phones“ with multimedia capabilities. According to a recent Forrester report, 90% of devices on the market in 2015 will be “smart”. These devices give users the ability to do more with their phones

3. You can do more with phones: Smart phones, particularly those with internet access and the ability to run applications, open up a new world of possibilities for users. Traditional online services formerly only available via computers are beginning to merge with mobile devices; as services move to the “cloud” (see Lucy Bernholz’s description of Philanthropy in the Cloud), mobile will be a required conduit for access. Mobile applications are another seamless way to give users greater ability to connect, coordinate, and collaborate. For example, a mobile application written for health workers in Kenya helps track and contain disease. MobileActive is working to create a database of the many applications used for social good. In addition, new multimedia capable phones transform any smart phone user into a citizen journalist. Citizen journalists have proliferated, as evidenced by photos taken in Myanmar in late 2007, the first pictures of the recent US Airways emergency landing on Twitter, and even video of Condoleezza Rice’s public argument with a college student

4. Don’t have a smart phone? Greater impact is still possible: In rural and underdeveloped areas of the world, SMS is an incredibly powerful way to connect with and organize groups of people. In these areas, mobile connectivity is infrequent and uncertain; SMS is therefore often the best way to send messages. UNICEF developed a suite of SMS-based tools called RapidSMS. These tools enable mass-scale quantitative and qualitative data collection and messaging through mobile SMS. In practice, use of this tool has allowed nearly instantaneous collection of food distribution data and analysis of problems and gaps. Another application of this simple technology in the Philippines helps distressed Filipinos working abroad. New applications and platforms similar to RapidSMS will enable other types of connectivity and organization

5. Location-based technology: Another emerging mobile trend is the proliferation of location-based technology. ReadWriteWeb noted this as one of their major trends in 2009 and has a good list of interesting new mobile applications. Applications such as BrightKite, Loopt, and Google Latitude allow users to share their location and track where their friends are. Future applications could help make it easier for activists to coordinate or enable NGOs to track the movements of workers in the field. Expect to see location to become an increasingly important aspect of new mobile applications.

Do you see any other trends in mobile technology? What are the ways you have used mobile devices to connect, organize, or increase your organization’s impact?

1. Design your experiments around a problem to solve, not the technology tools. While hands-on experimentation with tools like wikis, Facebook, and social network mapping is critical, it’s important to remember that the tools are simply a means to an end. Begin with the problem you are trying to solve and then identify tools that may help, not the other way around. The best design may be made up of the simplest tools—pen and paper for mapping your network, an email listserv for brainstorming.

2. Experiment a lot, invest in understanding what works and what doesn’t, and make only new mistakes.

3. Set appropriate expectations for time and effort required. Beth Kanter writes in her blog that “social media takes time to see results and there isn’t instant gratification.” There is a direct correlation between the time invested and the results.

4. Prioritize human elements like trust and fun. We have learned that much of what we know about building relationships between two people remains true for networks—online and in-person. Human elements, like trust and fun, matter. At their core, networks are about relationships, which are built on a platform of trust, whether online or offline. Networks will only succeed if they allow time and space for individuals to build authentic working relationships.

5. Understand your position within networks and act on this knowledge. As a funder, it’s easy to think of yourself and your foundation as outsiders to a network. And as a network leader, it’s easy to focus exclusively on the target network you’re weaving, and to forget the many networks you already operate within. Networks have traditionally been hard to see. But with the growing accessibility of network mapping and visualization tools, you can see what was before invisible—hidden in the tacit knowledge of many different network participants. By becoming aware of your position within networks and better understanding the network’s dynamics, you can identify opportunities for impact and act on that knowledge.

6. Push power to the edges. The new social tools are empowering people to self-organize quickly and easily, without burdensome centralized infrastructure. The tools allow many people to connect with one another, with little increase in the marginal costs of bringing in even very large numbers of additional participants. For social sector leaders, the self-organizing potential of networks presents an opportunity to decentralize and push power to the edges of the network.

7. Balance bottom up and top down strategies for organizing people and effort. According to Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelley, what is needed is a balance between top-down and bottom-up logic. Citing the presence of high-level “editors” who helped to identify and control persistent vandalism within the bottom-up network that built Wikipedia, Kelley explains, “The exhilarating frontier today is the myriad ways in which we can mix out-of-control creation with various levels of top-down control.”

8. Be open and transparent; share what you’re doing and learning as a matter of course.

What do you think? What lessons are you learning about working wikily?

In previous posts we described how Congress is using Twitter and how TweetsGiving raised a substantial amount of money for charity. Recently, Twitter was featured prominently in international news after it was reportedly used to bring together a “smart mob” of protestors in Moldova. More than 10,000 protestors were brought together using Twitter in combination with other social network tools such as Facebook (see our earlier post on Facebook’s use in Egypt) and Live Journal.

A key quote from the article:

The protesters created their own searchable tag on Twitter, rallying Moldovans to join and propelling events in this small former Soviet state onto a Twitter list of newly popular topics, so people around the world could keep track.

However, weeks after the event, some felt that Twitter’s role was trumped up and that there were actually larger forces at play, with only a few of the core protestors using Twitter. Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post argues:

It is becoming clear that there was no Twitter Revolution in Moldova, and not merely because there are only a handful of registered Twitter users in the country… The unexpectedly large demonstration was not a spontaneous product of technical advance… The Moldovan opposition isn’t well organized or popular enough to inspire a movement like that, with or without Twitter. More to the point, some of the most violent demonstrators were immediately identified… as members of the Moldovan security services

Ethan Zuckerman believes that Twitter’s role may have had more to do with getting journalist attention than bringing people together. And Tech President has a survey of many experts who make a similar claim.

Regardless of the result in Moldova, non-profit leaders will only continue to hear about this hot new technology. We hope to write more about Twitter in the future and will attempt extract deeper meaning out of the hype that surrounds it. Two great places to begin learning about Twitter include this post from Beth Kanter and a new Twitter activism guide from DigiActive. For non-profits, the motivation to learn about and utilize Twitter will become even more important as the platform develops a larger user base and as its users learn more about the tool’s power to organize.

Does Twitter have the potential to help you in achieving your organization’s goals?

How are you using Twitter to promote your cause or inspire your followers?

Much has been written in the last several months regarding the state of peril that surrounds the print media industry, particularly newspapers. The death of traditional media has been heralded for years, with technological changes decreasing both circulation and advertising. However, America’s economic crisis has greatly accentuated these effects, lowering the rates that advertisers are willing to pay, and increasing the difficulty of raising capital or courting potential buyers for failing newspapers. Publicly traded American newspapers have lost over forty percent of their market value within the last three years, and a number of high profile newspapers have gone out of business with others suffering from cash flow issues and imminent demise. The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was forced to discontinue its print edition, and several large newspapers including the San Francisco chronicle and the Chicago Sun-Times have been put on endangered lists.

A number of publications and high profile authors have written on the topic, offering suggestions and wisdom to publishers in dire straits. The Atlantic suggests that a post-print Times would mix original reporting with aggregation from other sources. The New Yorker gives praise to new media sources, profiling alternative up-and-comers such as The Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo. Though many might consider these sources partial, they have broken important stories and produced reporting available only online through an array of crowd-sourced correspondents. Clay Shirky wrote an influential piece last month deliberating over what he calls the “unthinkable.” Shirky offers the suggestion, “now is the time for experiments” and that “the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need”.

Much more can be written about the state of traditional media, the hurdles it must overcome, and the myriad of potential solutions. But, the more interesting issue at hand for many members of the non-profit community is 1. What are the direct consequences for the not-for-profit world? And, 2. What are the important lessons that non-profit leaders can take away from the rapid decline of print media?

The New Yorker, Shirky, and a number of other voices argue that the survivors within the print industry will not be without support from the nonprofit sector. In fact, some newspapers are converting to nonprofit business models, which might require grants, endowments, or donations in place of revenue streams. The Christian Science Monitor (a newspaper that recently shuttered its printing presses) describes a number of new non-profit journalism ventures, such as The Voice of San Diego. Reuters reports that two weeks ago US Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced legislation allowing newspapers to become non-profits if they so choose. Funders that believe in the importance of newspapers might be needed to step in as key sources of funding to save major publishers.

For non-profits, the unexpectedly rapid decline of newspapers only re-emphasizes the need to adapt to a changing era. Allison Fine offered this advice in Beth Kanter’s Philanthropy 2.0 study:

Keep doing what works but know and plan like it isn’t going to work forever. In fact, you should plan that this is the last year you’ll be able to do what you’ve done before successfully. You don’t want to get caught totally off guard like newspapers that thought they had much longer to transition from old to new than they really did.

Non-profits and funders will need to be nimble as they realize what does and does not work. They will also need to be more much more open-minded and flexible in adopting new methods, implementing new ideas, and conducting experiments with new technology, and possibly new business models. Although it is difficult to tell what the future might hold for the non-profit world, if newspapers are any kind of leading indicator, the US’s economic climate in combination with preexisting trends will have a similar impact. The social sector simply needs to be prepared.

Are there other lessons that the non-profit world should take from the transformation and decline of traditional media?

• It’s growing fast: Two-thirds of the developed-world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time. ‘Member communities’ (social networking and blogging) has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and software applications. Time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing at over three times the rate of overall Internet-usage growth, and in most countries the percentage of Internet time spent on social networks has doubled
• It’s going global: ‘Member Communities’ has taken a foothold in every major market from 50% of the online population in Switzerland and Germany to 80% in Brazil. Facebook has become the largest player on the global stage, dominant in many countries, yet localized offerings have won the day in many others.
• It’s growing up: Reflecting the other data we’ve seen here recently, Facebook’s greatest growth in global audience numbers as come from ages 35-49 and also enjoyed strong growth from the 50-64 segment.

Yet amidst this explosion of growth, commercial advertisers still don’t know how to use social networks to sell products, which is the same reason why typical nonprofit appeals for donations are also not working. The report quips: “A well-used analogy is that advertising on a social network is like gate-crashing a party.” This is likely connected to the fact that the word consumers most closely associate with ‘advertising’ is ‘false,’ a survey result that might apply at least partially to appeals for charity.

Three points of advice that Nielsen offers to advertisers apply equally well to nonprofits and echo the thinking in Working Wikily:

1. Advertising must be a conversation: advertising should be about participating in a relevant conversation with consumers rather than simply pushing ads on them
2. The tone of advertising must be more authentic, candid, and humble—because the goal in social media is for your message to spread by word of mouth
3. Advertising should be about adding value: friendships are about adding value to one another’s lives, and so should advertising on social media, such as the special offers and sneak previews on fan sites

Shouldn’t nonprofits be leaders in this space? Social-sector organizations are founded in order to add value and almost universally have a message that is authentic, candid, and humble. By contrast to many commercial firms, the only shift they need to make is to let that soul shine through and engage the public in a down-to-earth conversation. What’s one example of a social-sector organization whose message is especially suited for social media?

Nonprofit leaders clearly face a similar quandary, as do corporate leaders concerned about public engagement. On the one hand, inviting public input provides a fantastic opportunity for boosting the legitimacy of your choices in the public eye. What better way to fend off criticism and provide the public with a sense of satisfaction with your actions than to throw open the front door, invite anyone to voice their opinion, and promise to listen? After all, tools like Google Moderator let you do it simple, fast and free — and along with extra legitimacy you might also get some valuable input. Yet the results of Change.gov experiment were not encouraging; the quality of suggestions at Whitehouse2.org is arguably higher, but the stakes are also lower since Obama has not promised to listen. What if you ask “the public” and the suggestions you get are not just different from your own ideas but are simply not thoughtful? Now you’ve ended up in the Obama dilemma: how do you fulfill the public desire for input while still making the right decisions?

Shirky’s answer is effectively that you shouldn’t have made such a promise in the first place: “If you want to know where new interesting useful ideas are going to come from, don’t look at crowds and don’t look at individuals, look at small groups of smart people arguing with each other. Historically that’s been a big source of change.” Peterson more or less agrees, but designs a role for broad public input, proposing that the government should split its efforts to incorporate public input in two directions: (1) open conversations at the local level where the politics are less complex and the issues are more tangible and (2) publicly visible conversations among government-accredited experts that are carefully moderated to prevent small organized groups from hijacking the results. The latter would provide governmental leaders with only the views that they believed they needed, hobbling the chances of including deeply contrarian views, but would be far more likely to produce insight than a conversation that included the general public.

Perhaps a similar approach would be useful for nonprofit leaders.

What if the common practice of consulting with experts were opened up for public view in cases where the conversation was particularly relevant to the public debate?

What if calls for open public critique on were carefully scoped so that the issues being addressed were simple enough that they didn’t take deeply specialized knowledge to discuss?

Plans for the Economic Crisis – A wiki where nonprofits can collaboratively brainstorm strategies for how to survive the economic crisis. This is just the kind of project for which wikis can be helpful, since there are many good strategies and nonprofit managers would doubtless appreciate sharing. The content remains in the early stages, but perhaps if more people join then a community of users will develop the ideas further.

Interview: François Bar, “Mobile Voices” – “Mobile Voices is a partnership to research and design a platform for low- wage immigrants in Los Angeles to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform is being designed in collaboration with its users to help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.” Every nonprofit should ask: what are the stories that our stakeholders/donors/volunteers/beneficiaries could tell that others would find moving? Because the tools are there for them to do it fast, easy, and cheap.

Prizes Gain in Popularity as Philanthropic Strategy – McKinsey just released a substantial (124-page) report detailing best practices in using prizes. It’s a weighty report and worth reading in detail. This Chronicle of Philanthropy story summarizes it neatly. Notable quote on the reason why prizes are seeing a rennaissance: “Factors include new attitudes among social entrepreneurs to “shifting risk,” the networking abilities of Web 2.0 technology, and intensified interest in the potential of collaborative, “open source” approaches to combating poverty and other large-scale social conundrums.”

Crowdsourcing Nonprofit’s Good News « A. Fine Blog – In the midst of the downturn an interesting crowdsourcing effort has popped up: gathering examples of how nonprofits are surviving and even thriving. This is a great application for collective tagging, providing a place where a latent group of similarly-interested people can gather and work side by side for mutual benefit.

Twitter Jumped the Shark This Week – The Daily Beast – More notes on the mainstreaming of Twitter, albeit in the snarky tone of an exasperated columnist who prefers not to tweet. The point: we’ve arrived at the moment when the legions of the un-cool, un-hip, and old-school are tweeting alongside the technology-forward trailblazers. Old-media journalists, Senators, and lots of normal folks are now getting on board. The question is now what the trend will produce, since many are bound to join and find the twittersphere not to their taste. Will America become a Twitter nation? Regardless of the outcome, the case for the social sector to use Twitter as a means of engaging with the public has never been stronger.

Is IDonateToCharity.org The Next Best Fundrising Idea? – There’s a new auction site up designed to be the eBay of charity auctions: anyone can set up an auction and designate a good cause to receive the profits. NetSquared loves the idea: “I can see this site being bigger then ebay. Why would someone want to buy an item from a corporation or business, when they can buy that same item from a charity and have their money be put to good use?” While it probably won’t be bigger than eBay, since we’re still talking about charitable motives, it is a great example of web tools being put to innovative use for fundraising. The technology and the idea are both Web 1.0, but apparently nobody had thought to do it before.

Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project – A MacArthur-funded team concluded a three-year study in November 2008 of how youth use social media. What they have to say is not surprising but provides even more reason to believe that social media is essential to any social-sector work involving education, activism, awareness, and youth engagement. The two headlines of their findings are that (1) youth use online media to extend friendships and interests, and (2) youth engage in peer-based, self-directed learning online.

The essence of his work, he says, is “finding the people out there who care.” When you can connect with them on your issue — one of shared interest between the campaigner and the individual — they’ll pick up the banner themselves and promote it to their own networks, which can be the link in a long and powerful chain:

Facebook and MySpace users exchange links to other sites with relevant news, and bloggers fuel the buzz on their own sites. Chatter builds to a boil, what insiders call a blog swarm, and eventually the mainstream media pick up the conversation.

Getting that ball rolling means not only finding these online communities but becoming an authentic member:

Before reaching out to the [Toyota Prius] Hypermilers, Gonzales spent a few days learning about the group-its cultural environment and conversational tone, as well as how it responds to outsiders-as if he were an anthropologist investigating a newfound tribe on some far-flung island.

There didn’t used to be a need to join the communities that formed within the activist base. Not only was there no way to find them, being scattered across the country, but there wasn’t much benefit to finding out more about the donors for your cause than was necessary for fundraising.

But fundraising is only part of the point in a netroots campaign. Netroots activists can do more than just generate funds, they promote awareness. With traditional media organizations in the blender and blogs continuing their meteoric rise, awareness can snowball and translate into political traction. The netroots are properly viewed as near-peers, less a large collection of commodities and more a network of potentially powerful partners.

What causes have the most to gain from netroots campaigning today? Are there other good examples of netroots campaigning and how the tradecraft is developing?

Now, it’s easy to dismiss visualizations as frivolous, and some on the list might fall into that category. But even the frivolous ones contain a germ of important insight: the power of visual experience is so much greater than that of text, that even a completely meaningless image can entrance the viewer. Well-constructed data visualizations can help viewers come to analytic conclusions that they couldn’t otherwise, as we’ve learned through some of our experiences with network mapping. Additional value comes from their ability to grab the attention of groups and focus it on the information being presented. That’s especially powerful in an organizational context, where creating a collective “map” of a system can lead to greater shared understanding and insights. It literally forces people out of their silos and functions, and makes them see the “forest” rather than just trees.

A classic example, which didn’t make the list because it’s no longer new, is Death and Taxes: The Budget Graph, the product of WallStats which is now turning out many other great visuals. It’s a simple visualization that takes the federal budget and charts the allocation of funds in a branching tree of bubbles that are sized to show the quantity of dollars spent on each program, with the left containing military programs and the right containing civil program. Viewers naturally compare the size of the bubbles, which is a far more intuitive task than comparing abstract numbers; many are startled to discover things like the fact that the F-22 fighter costs as much as the entire Department of Health and Human Services. That fact has always been available to the public, but until the Budget Graph, there was nothing guiding people to discover it themselves–to literally see it with their own eyes.

Great analytic visualizations, like the Budget Graph and most of FlowingData’s top five, grab your attention first and then do something valuable with it, illustrating the logic of an important question in a way that is not only attractive but also insightful and sometimes even inspiring. The creators of Ushahidi recently won recognition at the TED Conference for not only enabling voters to report corruption of the democratic process but then visualizing that information so that it was engaging and accessible. Where else have you seen visualization helped to solve a social problem, and what of today’s problems would be particularly suited for visualization?

Same-sex marriage movement looks to ‘Obamify’ – Obama’s best practices are already being picked up explicitly by the gay marriage movement, the failure of which in the Prop. 8 campaign was partly attributed to its lack of attention to the new modes of organizing: “Obamification… would involve pairing new media technology with old-fashioned, door-to-door outreach – two tactics that were not used well in the unsuccessful opposition to Proposition 8 in November, according to a report by Marriage Equality USA, an Oakland-based organization that supports gay marriage. The strategy means ditching scripted phone-bank calls and TV commercials that Marriage Equality say “lacked heart.” Instead, gay families – and their friends and sympathetic clergy – would be encouraged to get out of the state’s big cities and knock on doors in places where they have little support, such as the Central Valley. It would mean allowing supporters more leeway to tell their own stories.”

The Digital Activism Survey 2009 – An international survey of the people who use digital tools for activism and advocacy, by DigiActive. The results should be interesting — watch this space.

Online Advocacy Guide – A short, practically-minded how-to guide for using online tools and social media for advocacy. Covers four areas in particular: Mobilising and Coordinating, Documenting and Visualizing, Informing and Communicating, and Bypassing and Accessing.

Seed Salon: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi + James Fowler – Barbarasi, a leading network theorist, converses with a prominent sociologist (Fowler) about the impact of networks on both the sciences and society. They describe how both the technology and theory of networks are causing academics to rethink the boundaries around their disciplines, and how the resulting new body of theory is the root of many of the new practices that are being taken up throughout the practical disciplines.

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

(I highly recommend reading the article in full, especially for its thoughtfully-constructed infographics. For more detail about how companies are using specific tools, check out “Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise,” the June 2008 report on the results of McKinsey’s second-annual survey.)

How have you seen social software being used in large organizations? Have you come across any examples of best (or not-as-great) management practices?

A Mobile Phone For Facebook Lovers – On the technology side, it’s worth noting that according to GigaOM “the biggest trend in the mobile industry” is “application-specific mobile phones.” This one is built around Skype, Facebook, Google, instant messaging, and Last.fm. The cutting edge of mobile devices are shaping themselves around social networking software, which means it probably won’t be long before social networking connectivity is baked directly into most of the mainstream’s handhelds.

Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise – The McKinsey Quarterly’s 10-page survey of the corporate uses of Web 2.0 tools, from June 2008, with a great deal of useful detail on which tools are being used, for what purposes, and with what level of success.

Social Media Saves Lives: Salmonella Outbreak Pushes HHS, FDA, CDC to Get Social – You know a new mode of communication has really arrived when even the government is using it. During the latest salmonella outbreak, the sheer immediacy of social media gave the HHS, FDA, and CDC reason to make it a part of their combined communication strategy: “Leveraging social media to spread the word proved to be the point on which the agencies could quickly combine forces… The avenues employed by the agencies included blogs, texting, mobile versions of agency Web sites, online video from the FDA and CDC on YouTube, podcasts, XML files and RSS feeds including “CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response,” social network outreach on sites like MySpace, a variety of Twitter entities like @FDArecalls and @CDCemergency, virtual worlds, and widgets. The various channels carried both breaking news as well as education information on Salmonella.”

GOP, RSS, and API! Oh My! US Congress Republicans’ New Site – The GOP just revamped their website, which now sports RSS feeds and an access point that will enable data-driven mashups. ReadWriteWeb has a review, and their conclusion is that “…the potential for interesting mashups using this data is huge. And those mashups could give us an entirely different way of visualizing the US government at work.” They’re so happy to see it happen, they even get a little misty-eyed about the larger shift that it augurs for our nation: “…the accessibility afforded by the new GOP.gov marks another momentous step forward for the US government in allowing citizens to access information – in near real-time – about the inner workings of the Federal machine. And every step in that direction brings us closer to realizing the true transparency in which the ideals of democracy reside.”

Before we dive into the details, what makes this example particularly relevant is how it illustrates the pitfalls and opportunities that social media presents to established organizations. What we see here is a case where the the political opposition had a party, with a staffed organization, but that the organization’s desire to continue its existence forced it to compromise in ways that were frustrating to its base. The availability of Facebook offered a way to express views and take action without risking the livelihood of any organization, using “groups” that could be created and destroyed at the click of a button. This is not at all unlike the situation of many nonprofits that exist to pursue social change, and the lesson is clear: if you aren’t moving as fast as your base, your base now has the tools to sprint ahead on its own. What’s the appropriate response? Perhaps to take a cue from the role that the U.S. State Department has played, which is to use your resources and stature to become a convener. The State Department created meta-groups online for Facebook groups’ organizers to share best practices with one another and also held real-world conferences to help these people establish strong personal ties. In so doing, they’ve given themselves a seat at the table and the opportunity to set the tone of the conversation, which in their case is an emphasis on promoting democracy.

KEY QUOTES:

Facebook has become quite popular in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world in spite of minimal Internet access:

In most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited Web sites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo. About one in nine Egyptians has Internet access, and around 9 percent of that group are on Facebook — a total of almost 800,000 members.

Facebook is particularly popular in Egypt for discussing serious political issues because the government’s repressive tactics have left most youth disaffected with the traditional forms of political expression:

Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt… for young people in Egypt, Facebook, which allows users to speak freely to one another and encourages them to form groups, is irresistible as a platform not only for social interaction but also for dissent… A 2004 study by the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies found that 67 percent of young people weren’t registered to vote, and 84 percent had never participated in a public demonstration.

Facebook’s site could easily be blocked by government censors but is so popular for apolitical socializing that cutting off access is (to date) not worth the political cost of infuriating the general Facebook-using population:

Web sites or proxy servers created specifically for activists are easy for a government to shut down, Zuckerman says, but around the world, dissidents thrive on sites, like Facebook, that are used primarily for more mundane purposes (like exchanging pictures of cute cats). Authoritarian regimes can’t block political Facebook groups without blocking all the “American Idol” fans and cat lovers as well. “The government can’t simply shut down Facebook, because doing so would alert a large group of people who they can’t afford to radicalize,” Zuckerman explained.

Facebook offered a way to organize without compromise to youth who were frustrated with the traditional hierarchy of the opposition party. It is a textbook case of Web 2.0 tools surprising an established organization by providing its base with an alternative path to achieving its goals:

During the 2005 election campaign, Esraa Rashid started volunteering at the headquarters of El Ghad, a liberal democratic party that was founded in 2004 by Ayman Nour, a wealthy lawyer and member of Parliament. Nour came in second in the election, behind Mubarak, with 7 percent of the vote; he is currently in jail for forgery charges that his supporters insist are bogus. Rashid told me that she loved working at the Ghad office, but she and some of her friends in the youth wing grew impatient with the party bureaucracy. Like most political parties in Egypt, El Ghad has a strict hierarchy, and before deciding to stage an event, the leaders would carefully weigh a number of factors, including internal office politics and their current standing with the Mubarak regime. Members of the youth wing, Rashid told me, didn’t have much say in that process, or much interest in the endless deliberations. So she and some friends turned to Facebook as a quicker, easier way to plan their own events and protests.

Giving the base a direct avenue for expression resulted in a more complete picture of popular will than was represented by the traditional opposition:

“Facebook revealed a liberal undercurrent in Egyptian society,” Nawara said. “In general, there’s this kind of apathy, a sense that there is nothing we can do to change the situation. But with Facebook you realize there are others who think alike and share the same ideals. You can find Islamists there, but it is really dominated by liberal voices.”

Groups on social networking sites are expressionistic:

…there are countless political Facebook groups in Egypt, many of which flare up and fall into disuse in a matter of days… Some sought to coordinate humanitarian aid to Gaza, some criticized the Egyptian government, some criticized other Arab countries for blaming Egypt for the conflict and still others railed against Hamas. When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to “destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists.” Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.

Even the most organized of the Facebook groups was not the result of a carefully architected campaign–the pair that started it were shocked at how popular it became:

…almost as soon as [Rashid] set up the group, there were 16 members; when she refreshed the page a few minutes later, there were more than 60. The next day, more than 1,000. Rashid watched with fear and excitement as thousands of people, then tens of thousands, started joining and posting to the group. Eventually, the number reached 76,000.

The State Department considers these groups loosely aligned with their efforts to promote democracy and have decided to become involved. Their methods are instructive: rather than attempting to attract a crowd with their own groups, they’ve acted as a facilitator:

State Department officials told me they believe that social-networking software like Facebook’s has the potential to become a powerful pro-democracy tool. They pointed to recent developments in Saudi Arabia, where in November a Facebook group helped organize a national hunger strike against the kingdom’s imprisonment of political opponents, and in Colombia, where activists last February used Facebook to organize one of the largest protests ever held in that country, a nationwide series of demonstrations against the FARC insurgency. Not long ago, the State Department created its own group on Facebook called “Alliance of Youth Movements,” a coalition of groups from a dozen countries who use Facebook for political organizing. Last month, they brought an international collection of young online political activists, including one from the April 6 group, as well as Facebook executives and representatives from Google and MTV, to New York for a three-day conference.

As is typically the case with online organizing, it was most effective when used as an extension of real-world activism on the part of a close-knit group:

The April 6 strike was a success partly because it had its roots offline, among a cohesive, organized group of laborers; their protest was then vastly amplified by the Facebook activists.

Inauguration Day on Twitter – Good news about Twitter: it saw its heaviest usage ever on Inauguration and was able to keep up with the traffic, a major improvement over its earlier frequent outages, giving greater reason to hope that the underlying code is robust enough to support it as an emergent new platform.

Using Social Networks for Social Change: Facebook, MySpace and More – A wonderfully insightful, reflective piece by the founders of the Genocide Intervention Network on their participation-centric strategy for organizing: “Many groups use social networks for mobilizing — getting members out to an evnt, getting people to sign a petition, getting people to donate for a cause. GI-Net focuses on organizing — creating an educated constituency of people who can motivate others.”

Is Email Dead? – An interesting tactical note: while there are some reasons to believe that email contact is in decline as an effective way for nonprofits to reach members, genuinely urgent appeals (e.g. “the deadline is tomorrow, act now”) are actually getting better results than before.

Beyond WiMAX: Gigabit Wireless – The technologies for mobile access to the Internet are moving fast, bringing us ever closer to a fully-wired, always-connected population: not only is WiMAX arriving in the very near future, but engineers are already working on the following generation of cellular that could provide fiber-optic data speeds through the air.

Building Blocks of Social Media – A good quick-and-dirty overview of the most commonly-used social media tools, with practical advice for how to put them to use in a nonprofit context.

Two sources substantiate this: demographic statistics from Facebook and a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Facebook is a good indicator for the world of social networking sites at large, having reached the #1 spot about six months ago, with 150 million users, while the Pew study provides a broader view. The Facebook stats show that in the U.S. the 35-54 year old segment grew 276% in the last six months, meaning that this population on the site has roughly doubled in size every two months (hat tip: Social Ch@nge). The Pew numbers show similar growth: some 35% of online adults now have at least one profile on a social networking site, more than quadruple the amount that did in February 2005 when the figure was 8%. Whereas teenagers initially were the first to take to these new tools, rapid uptake has now slowed, and the number of adults has steadily doubled every 18 months for the past four years (hat tip: TechBeat). The 18-24-year-old segment now stands at 40% (60 million) of the Facebook population, and the 35-54-year-old segment has now reached 4.6% (7 million). Those are global figures, but here in the U.S. our population of 18-24-year-olds is only about 22 million and our population of 35-54-year-olds is about 82 million. That means there is a great deal of room for growth among adults.

How many adults will get on board? My guess is that it could be a surprisingly high number. Unlike text messaging, social networking sites are not hard to use, and the basic concept of using the Internet to keep up with friends is intuitive to anyone familiar with email. There’s a reason why they’re called social networking sites: these are tools that are attractive to the extent that your friends use them, which means that we’re likely to see growth snowball as increasing numbers of Boomers and Xers find themselves surrounded by people who are using social networking to communicate. There are certainly some reasons why older generations will be more reticent adopters, since there are still some segments of the Boomers and older population who remain only somewhat accustomed to using the Internet. Yet I think it’s all too easy to brush off older groups as Luddites. My bet is that for every stereotypical Boomer who refuses to change there are at least three or four of his/her peers who will enjoy exploring the expanded world of social connectivity that is available on Facebook.

As older demographic groups rush to join the social networking bandwagon, it’s common sense that philanthropies and nonprofits should be there to not only welcome them, but also help introduce them to this new way of engaging with social causes. Social change is always about being a leader—what better way to strengthen a leadership-based brand than to get on the cutting edge?

22 Ways A Blog Can Rock Your Non-Profit’s Social Media Campaign – The title says it all — this is a great list, covering all the bases for why and how blogging should be the centerpiece of a nonprofit media strategy.

Social Publishing: Scribd as a Tool for Nonprofit Outreach – Everyone should be using Scribd.com to publish documents online. Why? Because their tools make it push-button easy to re-publish your material on blogs or social networking sites.

49 amazing social media, Web 2.0 and Internet stats – The title says it all. My favorite: “2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily.”

Revolution, Facebook-Style – Can Social Networking Turn Young Egyptians Into a Force for Democratic Change? – The Times provides a case study of how youth are putting social networks to serious use for making political change: the conflict in Gaza has given Egyptian youth a powerful reason to organize, and with their limited rights for offline political speech they have been organizing on Facebook in large numbers.

A glimpse into social mobile’s long tail – A very thoughtful piece about the deep usefulness of decentralizing control when designing technology solutions for the developing world: “My belief is that users don’t want access to tools – they want to be given the tools. There’s a subtle but significant difference. They want to have their own system, something which works with them to solve their problem.”

iPhone Apps for Nonprofits – Nonprofits are starting to make innovative use of the iPhone’s smart-phone capabilities with a few creative applications such as a guide to sustainable seafood, a game that lets you take care of the planet as if it were a pet, and (an idea for) one that enables small donations on the go.

Kiva.org: Beyond www.kiva.org – This may look like a piece of technical news, but it’s also a great example of working wikily: Kiva is about to release an API, which means that soon anyone will be able to write software that will further extend and modify the tools on the Kiva website. As they themselves note, this could lead to a Kiva iPhone app, text messages that tell you when new loan opportunities pop up, and any other creative uses that the world can think of. Taking the time to code a public API is an investment, but giving the world a public interface to your tools lets you tap into the creativity of others. You have to give up control, of course — but that’s part of the point. It’s one of the best ways to crowdsource innovation.

10 Ways Twitter Will Change Blog Design in 2009 – Social media never stops changing: Twitter hit it big in 2008, and this is a list of ideas/predictions for how the blogging form is likely to shift in 2009 to accomodate the new arrival.

socialcreditcard.org – This blog posts introduces the idea of a “social credit card,” a concept that beautifully epitomizes the usefulness of individual empowerment in today’s world: if a company wants to encourage volunteering and other socially constructive activity outside of the office, a social credit card is a simple tool it can give to the employees for tracking their work, making it easy to offer quantitative incentives for doing good.

GroundReport – A model of crowdsourcing: this website has given citizen journalists a publishing platform since 2006 and built up a network of 3,500 contributors whose work is vetted by professional editors. Writers are more than just volunteers — every story is paid, encouraging higher quality content.

Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy – A deep dive into the technical art of assessing a social media strategy, with details on which metrics provide the richest insight.

Government By the People 2.0 – A number of salient voices came together on a panel to discuss how technology is changing democracy. They offer some interesting insights into how social media impacted the election, the challenges of controlling your message from the top down versus bottom up, and many other related issues. (This is a liveblogged near-transcript of the conversation.)

Obama on No. 1 Change.gov Question: Let’s Punt – The top crowd-chosen question on Change.org was no softball: “Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor – ideally Patrick Fitzgerald – to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?” But Obama’s reaction was to simply say that he’s still evaluating the question. This would be an example of how to kill relationships with your online community: if you fail to take their questions seriously, it won’t be long before they decide that you’re behaving just like any other big institution, and that trying to engage with you just isn’t worth the effort.

Vietnamese government implementing–and promoting–open source software – Joining South Africa and several others, the government of Vietnam is now converting its operations to run solely on free and open-source software by 2010. Why? It costs nothing to buy, it’s cheap to administer, it’s often more stable and secure, and it has the public-image benefit of being made by a global community of volunteers rather than a profit-driven multinational — all reasons that should resonate with the social sector as well.

As an introduction for the uninitiated, here are four essential principles:

Principle 1: Find your audience where they already are
There are probably already blogs and social networks that have attracted the people you want to reach, unless your audience is entirely new to the web. If they’ve already found good sources for the issue you address, they probably won’t want to subscribe to yet another service. Make it easy on them (and you) by piggybacking on the services that they already use. If they are Facebook users, consider creating a Cause and a Group. If they are regular readers of a certain blogs, consider asking those bloggers if you can guest blog with them. If they are YouTube viewers then create your own video ‘channel’ and recruit subscribers. If you are targeting youth, don’t forget to use mobile phones and Twitter. You get the picture. Be intentional and strategic about exactly who you want to reach, and learn where they already hang out. For example, if your target is policymakers interested in climate change, you might be better off contributing to the acclaimed blog realclimate.org than being on Facebook.

Principle 2: Experiment for free
Web 2.0 tools can almost always be had for free, or nearly free. Why bother to maintain and host your own service when you can simply use an existing one? There is little to no stigma attached to using someone else’s service – and often it’s a good idea to distinguish between what is ‘official’ on your branded website, versus what is ‘co-created’ with your members on your Web 2.0 site. Down the road when you have a better idea of what you are doing, and what works, you can always integrate these tools back into your organization’s website or set up your own hosted service. Put the money you save into applying Principles 3 & 4.

Principle 3: Think about the off-line component
Building and sustaining an on-line community is often hard to do because interactions lack the high-impact emotional content of face-to-face meetings. Consider holding regular audio or video conference calls where people can interact in real time with their own voices, and perhaps also hold in-person meetings designed to supplement on-line interaction. Or, build on existing membership meetings, or conferences where your community already gathers. Like any community, it’s the quality of trust, and the depth of the relationships that will sustain it. So think strategically about the off-line component, and how it integrates with your web community.

Principle 4: Actively recruit and manage your community
Your site (or subsection of someone else’s) might get a little bit of traffic from Google searches, but beyond that it’s up to you to bring people to it. You wouldn’t secretly prepare for a party and then expect people to show up uninvited, would you? Then why do it on the Internet. Think of your Web 2.0 site as if it were a social event—invite all the people you know who you think would enjoy each other’s company. The easiest way to build a community is to encourage an existing off-line community to join you online. You can also advertise in other places online where you think your audience is likely to spend time. Then the people who arrive need to be actively managed by paid staffers or dedicated volunteers. Like any good dinner party, someone has to play host by bringing food and drink (i.e. interesting content) and starting conversations so that the outliers feel comfortable enough to get to know each other. Like all communities, having someone facilitate these social interactions, encouraging and inviting participation, can help keep interest in your group alive.

For further reading, consider Mobilizing Generation 2.0, CauseWired, or the just-released 33 Million People in the Room.

COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES

FORGE Closes Funding Gap – The FORGE fundraising saga is complete, and it has a happy ending: enough donors stepped up to the plate that FORGE was able to close its funding gap and win the $20,000 matching grant that had been offered earlier by a foundation. Having demonstrated that radical transparency can be a successful strategy, director Kjerstin Erickson can now turn her attention to rebuilding the organization.

Making Nonprofit Collaboration a Foundation Strategy: The Lodestar Foundation – Collaboration happens too infrequently among nonprofits, so the Lodestar Foundation has dedicated significant effort (including a prize) to promoting nonprofit collaboration and documenting its best practices. This short interview with Lodestar’s president has the details.

Let’s Talk | Case Foundation – The Case Foundation has a brand-new blog, which naturally addresses social media and today’s new kinds of tech-enabled giving.

Putting Citizens First: Transforming Online Govt White Paper – The Obama administration has promised revolutionary openness, and in response the thirty top web managers of the federal government have just released this lengthy document describing exactly how they’re going to update the Federal web to match that vision. And if the government can do it, everyone else not only can but really should.

Wall Street Journal Evaluates Charity Evaluators – Tactical Philanthropy quotes the Journal’s critique of Charity Navigator and other evaluators. The recommended response to the problem of poor evaluation: do it yourself, and be honest. “Donors may do best by looking for charities that set specific numerical goals for themselves, and admit when they’ve fallen short. The American Cancer Society, for instance, gave itself a thumbs down last year for insufficiently reducing cancer mortality. In its Strategic Plan Progress Report, it admitted it was unlikely to meet its own goals for reducing mortality by 50% by 2015, since mortality wasn’t dropping fast enough from 1991 to 2004.”

David Plouffe: The Obama Campaign Used Grassroots Data and Computer Modeling to Allocate Resources in Real Time – techPresident has some very interesting excerpts here from David Plouffe about how the Obama campaign used large amounts of volunteer-gathered data to rapidly adjust its campaign tactics. There are direct parallels here to politically-oriented causes, and also a broader lesson about the power that gain be gained from using modern tools for data analytics.

The Case Foundation: Change Begins With Me – This new campaign from the Case Foundation epitomizes one of the core principles of working wikily: set up a way for individuals to take on your goal as their personal cause. The cause in this case is broad: becoming part of the change that Obama has promised to bring about in America. Their method: offer a free trip to Inauguration as the incentive to provide an eloquent description answering, “How will YOU commit to bringing about change in your neighborhood, your community or your nation?”

Wikipedia fundraiser surpasses $6 million – Chalk up one more example of the power of small donations: the fundraiser to save Wikipedia turned out to be a smashing success, raising more than its goal of $6 million from over 125,000 individual donors. The last $2 million arrived after a personal appeal by the site’s founder Jimmy Wales sparked 50,000 contributions in eight days. The average donation size: just under $50.

The Case Foundation: Change Begins With Me – This new campaign from the Case Foundation epitomizes one of the core principles of working wikily: set up a way for individuals to take on your goal as their personal cause. The cause in this case is broad: becoming part of the change that Obama has promised to bring about in America. Their method: offer a free trip to Inauguration as the incentive to provide an eloquent description answering, “How will YOU commit to bringing about change in your neighborhood, your community or your nation?”

SERIOUS TWEETING

NPR: Help NPR Plan Our Social Media Activities for the Inauguration - Building on the success of the Twitter VoteReport project, NPR is engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort to enable citizen journalism, “mobcasting,” tagged Twittering, and dynamic maps of all the content. If they can pull it off, the event could be a great example of best practices in using social media to make public events truly participatory.

Israel Holds a Twitter News Conference on Gaza – NYTimes.com – The Israeli consulate’s use of Twitter was reported in the New York Times. Flip to the bottom of the article to witness their remarkably authentic use of Tweet-speak to address serious questions about the war.

State of the Twittersphere: What It Means For Nonprofit Best Practices on Twitter – Beth offers a very useful synthesis of both the vital stats of the Twitter userbase (key points: recently-arrived, growing quickly, and mostly connected to small networks) and also advice to nonprofits on how to use Twitter effectively without making the gaffes typical of institutions (key points: listen before talking, show personality, be responsive).

Micro Fundraising on Twitter: Red Kettle Campaign, Wellwishes cracks $2,000 mark – Beth describes three successful new micro-fundraising campaigns on Twitter, showing that the trend is gaining steam.

Gaza Attacks: Two Related Reactions, in Second Life and Twitter - Israel’s current offensive against Hamas has provoked outrage among many around the world, and the reaction is being expressed online in many interesting ways. Two that stand out: an online protest held by activists in Second Life, exemplifying a new mode of organizing, and a Twitter-based “press conference” held by the Israeli consulate in New York to respond to questions from the public, exemplifying a new level of responsiveness from government.

TECHNOLOGY/TOOLS

New Listening Tool: Who Is Talking About You? - Listening is a big part of engaging with social media, but how do you keep track of what others are saying with so many platforms? WhosTalkin.com is a free new search tool that scans most of them: blogs, micro media, news, forums, social bookmarking sites, and social networking sites. Hat tip to Beth for this one and also the Radian6 commercial service she uses for similar purposes.

Glassdoor.com – Where greatnonprofits.org lets the public rate nonprofits from the outside, GlassDoor lets employees of any company rate it from the inside. Users enter their salary, position, and a few other pieces of information into the database in exchange for the ability to anonymously comment on the quality of the management and other aspects of their organization. The lesson: even “internal” decisions can now be public. Very few of the choices made by a company remain hidden from inquisitive eyes.

New Web site a network for nonprofits – The new website www.greatnonprofits.org now offers the same blessing and curse to nonprofits that Yelp offers to restaurants and retailers: a “yellow pages” directory that lets users rate the nonprofits where they volunteer, work, donate, or receive services. If this takes off, nonprofits will face the same challenge as all the other retail services who know that news about them will spread like wildfire among their potential customers, whether good or bad, without going through the usual channels of professional critics. As elsewhere, those that will fare best will be those who realize their clothes have been stolen and decide to become fit enough to look good in the nude.

Extraordinary mobile volunteering - A new service called The Extraordinaries takes crowdsourcing micro: they match nonprofits who need help with volunteers who are willing to give 20 minutes of their time, finding helpful work that those volunteers can complete from anywhere via their mobile phone. It might seem daunting to find a way to use that kind of work, but what if it meant you could have an army of 20-minute phone-based helpers?

Social Media Predictions for 2009 - Filtering through the glut of predictions about what 2009 will hold for the development of social media, Max Gladwell offers his top ten predictions and additional commentary. Here’s a summary of those with particular relevance to the social sector: brands developing a persona that represents the company’s core values, using Twitter for marketing, using social media’s cheapness to save advertising money, and producing valuable ideas as gifts to the public.

Pew Internet and American Life Project: Future of the Internet - There’s a new report out from Pew on the future of the Internet. A few key points, all of which back up the general argument for working wikily:

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.

The markets are still small—they account for less than 1 percent of all giving in the U.S. (”not even the crumbs from the [philanthropic] pie,” according to Tom Williams of GiveMeaning). But as many people have observed, what matters with these startups is not the size, but the trend line. And with some of the larger sites like GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose growing at a rate of more than 100% a year, the trend is definitely on the rise.

Much of the conversation at the Stanford conference focused on two key elements: how the online giving markets are doing as markets—and how they are working online. On the latter point, Matt Halpern of the Omidyar Network drew on his past experience at eBay to lay out four key elements of successful online marketplaces: (1) driving users to the site; (2) making the platform easy to use; (3) ensuring trust; and (4) getting incentives right so that these other elements are reinforced.

What was emphasized less at the conference though, was the other word in the title of the program: online giving markets. Although they are still early in their development, these online giving markets represent a unique entry into the increasingly diverse philanthropic environment. They’re different from regular financial markets, and they’re more than just philanthropy online: they are allowing people to make connections, learn, and take action on issues in ways that were never before possible. They are an essential part of what Joel Fleishman, in his book The Foundation, calls the “American polyarchy”—a pluralistic society with many different independent power centers.

Fleishman says that he has “No doubt that it is this characteristic of our society—the proliferation of countless points of view on all issues, the proliferation of countless independent sources of initiative—that is the bedrock of our nation’s vitality, vibrancy, power, and enduring strength.” He sees foundations as instrumental in supporting the polyarchy, and American democracy.

In many ways, I think the online giving marketplaces are the next evolution of this: democratizing philanthropy by empowering more donors to express their views and support things they care about, while simultaneously allowing nonprofits and projects around the world to get the support they need. The new tools are opening up the field so that philanthropy is no longer just the province of the wealthy. It is becoming easier than ever before for people of all backgrounds and perspectives to give at whatever level they can afford.

But with this empowerment and connection, these markets also raise many interesting questions:

• Will the “wisdom of the crowds” nature of these markets (as individual donors spread their funds across a range of individual nonprofits) add up to more than the sum of their parts? What does it mean for the “strategic” element of philanthropy?
• These online giving marketplaces have for the most part been created in a growing economy. None of them have yet reached real financial sustainability. What will this mean in the current global economic downturn? Is there a sustainable model here?
• Are online giving markets here to stay? Are they the next incarnation of foundations or community foundations, adapted to fit today’s more “connected” context? Are they a set of niche players (perhaps a designated “exit strategy” for foundations… like a “public offering” where foundations can hand off to a broader public grantees they no longer want to fund)? Or are they simply today’s pioneers of a new tool, that some day will be incorporated into other organizations?

When seen through this philanthropic lens, I’ve started to wonder if it makes sense to hold the online giving markets to a “for-profit” marketplace standard. Can we really expect them to grow at a pace like eBay or Amazon did? It’s great to aspire to that standard, but perhaps a better point of comparison for the new marketplaces would be the development of community foundations around the United States. Many community foundations have taken years, or even decades to reach scale and financial sustainability, often with significant support from mainstream funders like the Mott, Ford, Kellogg, Knight, and Packard foundations. Online giving marketplaces may have an important role to play in the field, but let’s keep in mind that they’re still very much in the early stages of their development. It may be several years before we can begin to answer the questions posed above.