Stanford Social Innovation Review

Crowdsourcing Social Change

You’re a small, scrappy social change organization. You crowdsource.  [Yeah, yeah, we know. It’s cheaper. Diversity solves problems faster. There is greater wisdom in numbers. Engagement builds collaboration and collaboration brings in money and volunteers.] But that’s not all. Crowdsourcing also turns Establishment philanthropy on its ear. “There’s not a lot of openness in traditional philanthropy,” Nonprofit Technology Network’s Holly Ross told the crowd that came to hear her, Beth Kanter, Netsquared’s Amy Sample Ward, video consultant David J. Neff and the Case Foundation’s Kari Saratovsky talk about disruptive change in the sector. Part of SxSW’s Crowdsourcing Innovative Social Change panel, Ross added: “Crowdsourcing is an ethos that the nonprofit industry needs to adopt to better itself.”

To be sure, open philanthropy – the movement for more open collaboration and transparency in the giving sector – is an urgent mission by itself. Thanks to the Web’s ability to produce ever-faster and larger outpourings of free information, knowledge is no longer scarce and sharing is becoming the most efficient approach to social problem-solving. [So what are some of the better examples of high-impact crowdsourcing? Here’s the panel’s short list, mostly of mobile startups. [Kanter asked her considerable social network back in January to start aggregating examples; SxSW attendees added some examples on the spot.]

• Open Green Map, offered up by Ross, helps communities map their eco-friendly spots, whether it’s a bike rack or a solar-heated apartment complex or a public herb garden. Using this open source collaborative platform, the Manhattan-based nonprofit has so far engaged more than 600 communities in 55 countries in creating citizen maps to catalyze new environmental projects, large and small. The maps are made by community members. OGM helps.
• NPR’s online community manager Andy Carvin cited Project NOAH. The acronym stands for Networked Organisms and Habitats. NOAH, now in beta, is a free iPhone application that helps people discover their local plants and animals and document them onto a common tech platform for review by research groups and others. In this way, citizen scientists can help to track new species or changes in the environment.
• Carvin also mentioned Open Street Map, a collaborative project to create a free, editable map of the world with the help of people using data from portable GPS devices. OSM has been used recently by disaster/crisis relief organizations to share such information as which roads are accessible and which are blocked in the wake of disasters or civil strife. [Ushahidi, another example, enables users to crowdsource crisis information that is then used to make dynamic, real-time maps of public health outbreaks, street rioting, food drops and emergency facilities during crisis situations.]
• The UpTake is a Minnesota-based citizen journalist nonprofit that crowdsources the news and helps editors filter hours of raw videotape for the best clips. [Think C-SPAN meets Ghost Hunters meets CNN’s iReport.] Everything is time-stamped; the UpTake’s profile increased during the disputed 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota. [UpTake provided full coverage of the recount process, earning it plaudits for accuracy from established and online news organizations.]
• Seattle Free School, suggested by Ward, uses social media to organize classes and teach students. “The owners found each other via social media and the project was born from the interaction,” Ward said. “This is ‘for the community by the community’ education and engages the best local experts to share their knowledge and experience for free.”
• Invisible People, an nonprofit that uses video storytelling to help de-stigmatize homeless people. “Our hope is that you’ll get mad enough to do something,” its Website reads. Invisible People uses crowdsourcing to select the best stories and interviews.

There are numerous other examples, but what are the lessons that can be shared from them?

Among the takeaways:

• Mix it up. Crowd-sourcing that harvests input from both experts and non-experts seems to work best for groups with a lot of in-house knowledge, said Saratovsky. “We do it this way [at Case] so it doesn’t become simply a popularity contest,” she said. Ross said Free Range Studios’ Youtopia project is another example of targeted crowdsourcing. Free Range decided to give away $30,000 worth of free consulting to the most innovative social change groups, and used the crowd to help staff narrow the field to 20 finalists. Ward urged attendees to differentiate between an open, unvetted “crowd” and a group’s “community” crowd—suggesting that tapping into an organization’s social network is a more strategic and manageable form of crowdsourcing for some initiatives.
• Small organizations with skimpy budgets have the most to gain. Said Ross: “It’s about realizing that if I want to create the most value for my cause and organization, then that value is going to come from beyond me. As a nonprofit, I am a gardener in the process.” Added Kanter: “An expert now is someone with a great network. Crowd-sourcing lets you tap into a wider range of talent and skills than you may have inside your organization.”
• Start slowly. “You can’t go from nothing to a lightbulb overnight,” said Ward. Use crowds to help you innovate in iterative steps over time.
• Don’t expect miracles.“Crowdsourcing is just another shiny object unless you can tie it to outcomes,” Kanter said. “Millions of crowd-sourced ideas don’t produce anything.” Be very clear about what you want the crowd to help you achieve and deliver before you get started, then be able to measure the impact of those efforts.
• Make it fun and keep it simple. “People don’t want to do a lot of heavy lifting but they do want to do good,” said Ward. At its best, crowd-sourcing can be a form of civic engagement. At its worst, it can be exploitative. Be careful that you don’t ask crowds for too much.

Okay, dear readers. Now it’s your turn. How do you use crowdsourcing and what lessons can you share with the crowd?

For more on the panel, see a summary of its presentation on slideshare.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

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What Matters About Mobile

So here we are, several weeks after text donations crossed from cutting edge to common place. I’ve been interviewed more times than I can count on what matters about text giving, and the real experts on social media and social good (Beth Kanter, Katrin Verclas, Allison Fine, Holly Ross, Geoff Livingston) have written, been quoted, held panel discussions, and written handbooks on the subject.

After all this good discussion, I’ve come to think that the question should not be “to text or not” but “what matters about mobile?” From the point of view of nonprofits, mobile gives them the opportunity to add a new location. Essentially, every organization in the world just got the opportunity to expand their footprint to include their current location and every mobile phone.

It may be like winning the location lottery. An organization can be where they are now and also on every one’s mobile phones.* That might be through a text short code. It might be through an App. It might be by being on FourSquare or other geolocation services. Maybe NPOs should start tagging their service delivery areas on Google Maps? The possibilities are many - far more than “just” a question of getting text donation enabled. Of course, like winning the lottery, organization now have to make choices they never had to worry about before.

Mobile matters. It matters as a news source and distribution channel. It matters as a payment system. It matters as a marketing platform. It matters as an organizing tool. Yes, I know the “to text donate or not question” is complicated in and of itself. Sadly, it is also too simple a question.

*(Noting that more and more nonprofits are being born on mobile phones - e.g., Ushahidi, The Extraordinaries)

Lucy Bernholz is the founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as executive producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

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Mobile: Increasingly on Call

On February 20, Harvard Business School (HBS) hosted its eleventh annual “Africa Business Conference,” a collection of high-profile discussions, many of which focused on the centrality of telecommunications, mobile banking, and new media in African development.  On February 27, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) held its “Policy Making in a Digital World” conference featuring luminaries such as Jonathan Zittrain, co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, panelists from the U.S. Department of State, and innovators from new platforms such as Ushahidi that enable crowd-sourced crisis mapping via SMS, and were instrumental to saving lives in Haiti.

Topics ranged from private equity in Africa to crisis response, but the commonality across both events for managers and innovators focused on international development was that new technology –open-source but coordinated and non-redundant, crowd-sourced platforms– is central to progress.  That high mobile penetration makes it the platform of choice is no novel news.  However, such conferences shed light on the empirics of how firms are innovating today, and raise important issues such as the fact that poor coverage and mobile promotions from competing networks impel many in Africa to own more than one phone, eroding the presumed mobile penetration associated with a number like 4 billion cell phones.

As I highlight in a Yale Journal of International Affairs article entitled, “Bringing Africa Online: Leveraging Technology to Empower Entrepreneurs,”, there are a number of challenges today.  The HBS conference focused on one such issue in that current transaction platforms insufficiently enable informed African consumers to access global retail outlets, and preclude entrepreneurs from providing goods on the world stage.  Online payment platforms limit access to many in emerging markets, and this impacts both consumers who want access to global providers, and retailers who cannot accept payments, and cannot fully leverage international promotion online. 

Peter Ojo, CEO of Virtual Terminal Network (VTN), described how his service empowers Nigerian consumers by enabling GSM mobile transactions from all 36 states.  Nigerian businesses can utilize VTN to accept mobile payments from consumers, and over 3,000 Nigerian businesses have adopted this platform.  Whereas PayPal and Google Checkout are cumbersome and ineffective on the continent due to legal and payment restrictions, VTN streamlines transaction costs for Nigerian businesses while concurrently offering access to domestic consumers.  Cost savings can inspire profit re-investment, leading to growth and employment.

As mobile is still the device of choice in Africa, mobile banking and mobile payment facilitation is a natural extension to what VTN offers in Nigeria.  While lacking the patina of fellow HBS panelists, young Benjamin Lyon, Executive Director of Frontline SMS, discussed his innovative company that facilitates institutional mobile transaction capabilities.  Frontline SMS is focused on helping provide back-end infrastructure that enables microfinance institutions to manage the logistics of frequent and voluminous inflow of mobile payments. 

At Columbia University SIPA, Ushahidi Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships, Patrick Meier, spoke on the groundbreaking humanitarian management applications for crowd-sourced mobile response.  Ushahidi, which means “witness” or “testimony” in Swahili, is a Kenyan organization supported by the Omidyar Network that focuses on crowd-sourced crisis mapping.  Following the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi –a network of volunteers who had undergone brief training– scoured a diverse array of media, from YouTube, UN reports, local radio in Creole and French, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to collect instant on-the-ground information from Haiti, map, tag, and geo-code it with GPS coordinates for immediate search and rescue application.  Whereas official mobilization took days, technology mobilization took hours, and within a week Ushahidi had been featured on CNN, referenced by Secretary of State Clinton, and thanked from the decks of a US Aircraft Carrier, by Marine commanders, and aid volunteers.

Meier stressed coordinated open-source development, wherein creation can happen without proprietary impediment, but wherein duplication is minimized, improving the consolidation of actionable information.  He stressed real-time, visual presentation of information, and audience-attuned presentation.  In the case of crisis response, GPS coordinates drive how teams are dispatched and lives saved.

On October 1-3, 2010 the International Conference on Crisis Mapping, focused on “Haiti, Chile and Beyond” will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, and will seek to expand on platforms that crowd-source local information via SMS, and relay actionable “tagged” information in real-time, GPS geo-coded maps.  A demand-driven, volunteer network of organizations, the conference will be a call for input.

Whether in expanding financial services access to the un-banked in Africa, improving access to payments platforms to enable consumers and entrepreneurs seeking global online markets, or responding to crisis, mobile is on call.  Many-to-many platforms that are developed open-source, and made available to all with the caveats of coordination, can continue to build upon crowd-source local knowledge.  Repackaged in intuitive, actionable ways, its rapid response availability and ease of use will ultimately necessitate its adoption for pragmatists and humanists, a statement that was evident at Harvard and Columbia, and now echoed at Stanford. 

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

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The First Social Movement Plan Competition

Would Martin Luther King Jr, Cesar Chavez or Mahatma Gandhi have entered a prize-driven competition for their respective causes?  Would their movements have been even more effective with the aid of the Internet and its social tools?

We’ll never know for sure, but we do know that many social movement organizations and grassroots organizers alike are starting to embrace the wild wild west of ‘e-organizing’: a landscape of new web-based tools and technologies designed to help self-organize large numbers of people and drive systemic change.

As you might have read recently in a SSIR email sent out to all magazine subscribers, Stanford students recently unveiled the first ever Movement Plan Competition.  This first year, this “Social-M Challenge” (‘M’ for Movement) is thematically focused on environmental sustainability and powered online by Blitz Bazaar, a new movement-management platform that makes it very easy for grassroots organizers to harness the power of the social web to start and grow a micro-movement, even for people with little comfort using the social web.  Full disclosure: I am the founder of Blitz Bazaar. 

Phase I of the challenge closed on January 29th with eighteen submitted movement plans, the best of which were awarded $1000 each. Now through February 27th, movement leaders will nurture and adjust their movements to the realities and lessons of campaigning.  The single best-realized and most-promising of the thirteen active social movements will be awarded $10,000. Challenge funding was generously provided by the following Stanford partner organizations: the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, the Sustainable Stanford Green Fund, the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Office of Community Engagement and the School of Humanities and Sciences. 

If you check out the site, you’ll see PhDs, professors and undergrad freshman all taking collective action for the sustainability-related causes.  These are micro-movements that promote issues like vegetarianism, community supported agriculture (a.k.a, eat local food), ‘Green’ values for young children, reusable utensils, ending food waste, oil-free water in Ecuador and more.  Each movement is working towards a very specific goal and lists actions anybody can take to help further the goal.  Again, the movements are not limited to Stanford students so anybody can get involved.

In a new era defined by disruptive new social technologies and a market-driven approach to social change, it is not surprising that social movement-making be similarly incentivized.  Grassroots organizers can also be motivated using the same successful format that we’ve now gotten used to for business plans and more recently the X-prize foundation.  However, this value of this type of competition goes well beyond just catalyzing social movements and therefore social change. Anybody who’s participated in the more familiar business plan competitions in the past knows that it’s less about the money and more about the process. 

Our partners at Stanford, The Precourt Institute, The Woods Institute, and the Stanford Office of Sustainability, have been pleased with the Challenge so far for a couple reasons.  First it embodies the transdisciplinary approach the University is trying to advocate.  Doctors working with engineers, MBAs and lawyers to solve the healthcare debacle makes a lot of sense but it is hard to make happen in practice.  Secondly, Social-M is seen as a valuable tool for experiential learning in an ever-more important but largely ignored discipline: campaigning.  Lastly, it is technologically innovative by incorporating social networking and social media into the loop via Blitz Bazaar.

Contingent on successful results gleamed from this Stanford’s Social-M Challenge, you can expect this “Movement Plan Competition” format to spread just like the ‘social’ business plan competition format has proliferated in the last decade.  Many more Universities and Social Movement organizations are likely to embrace this format as an effective way to teach and catalyze the discipline of movement-making, a.k.a. campaigning.

Lloyd Nimetz is the founder of Blitz Bazaar, a web-platform for grassroots organizers to more effectively manage and grow their movements and social campaigns.  He founded the online giving market HelpArgentina.org. He has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, a BA from Williams College and was a Fulbright Scholar to Argentina.

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Friending, Texting and Tweeting: Social Media and Community Foundations

Last week, I attended the Larger Community Foundations meeting in Miami, Florida, which is the annual meeting of the 35 or so largest community foundations in the United States. One of our speakers was the very provocative Dr. Lucy Bernholz of Blueprint Research and Design. As usual, she challenged us by presenting her view of the changing landscape of philanthropy and the impact it will have on community foundations in particular.

One of the most dramatic changes has been the onset of social media, mobile technology, and applications (or “apps”) that allow you to do virtually anything through your mobile device.  Dr. Berholz provided the following example: before the news media had reported the earthquake in Haiti, Twitter was all aflutter with the news of the quake. And by now, everyone is aware of the many millions of dollars that have been raised to date for Haiti Relief efforts via text-messaging through that little mobile device. All you have to do is punch in a few numbers, and your charitable gift is made.

So, Dr. Bernholz reached out to her Twitter followers and asked a simple question:  “What app would you like to see developed for use by community foundations?” Here is the link to her blog so that you can read the results:
http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2010/01/what-kind-of-apps-would-your-foundation.html#comments.

However, closer to home, I’d like to pose the question to each of you, our community of givers. What kind of app would you create for The Community Foundation?

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

Terri Freeman is the President of The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region. Prior to joining The Community Foundation, Ms. Freeman was the founding executive director of the Freddie Mac Foundation, one of the largest corporate foundations in the metropolitan Washington region.  Ms. Freeman obtained her bachelor’s degree in Journalism/Communication Arts from the University of Dayton in 1981 and received a master’s degree in organizational communication management from Howard University in 1983.

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Bay Area Social Entrepreneurs Talk Funding

Bay Area nonprofit leaders sounded pretty optimistic and focused on growth at a breakfast gathering I attended last week, entitled “Conversations with Social Entrepreneurs: 2010 and Beyond,” sponsored by Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project. At the beginning of the three-hour gathering at a downtown hotel, James Weinberg, founder and CEO of Commongood Careers, had the group of about 50 give a two-word description of how they were feeling. Attendees, who were mostly from education and youth development nonprofits, shouted out adjectives along the lines of “cautiously optimistic,” “growing,” “opportunities ahead,” and “pumped!”  The spirit in the room was energetic.

Kudos to Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project for bringing social entrepreneurs together for a chance to network; with job demands it’s always tough to take the time to get together.  These two organizations are holding four such breakfast events. The other three have already taken place in New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. The purpose of the events is to discuss nonprofits’ collective opportunities and challenges as well as the role “human capital management strategies” will play in their organizations this year.

Attendees are answering a brief survey on their organizations’ budgets, plans, and 2010 challenges. Survey results will be available on the Commongood Careers website in late February. Early results were handed out at our gathering – and comparisons between the Bay Area and the other three cities were intriguing.  (I don’t know how statistically valid the data is but the results were fun to look at nevertheless.)

Across the country, respondents said that a “significantly increased focus to secure gifts from high net worth individuals” was their number one funding goal in 2010, but the response was much higher from Bay Area nonprofits than from nonprofits in the other three cities.  Also according to these preliminary results, in order of priority, after high net worth individuals, Bay Area nonprofits were going to look for corporate partners second, and foundation grants, third.  In the rest of the country, all of these funding sources had about the same priority.

The San Francisco gathering included a panel discussion, and several panelists echoed what the survey data showed. BUILD in particular has been successful in changing its mix of funding to have more of an emphasis on individual donors. The social entrepreneurs on the panel were Suzanne McKechnie Klahr (BUILD), Louise Davis (Peer Health Exchange), and Jill Vialet (Playworks). These three panelists kept up the enthusiasm in the room by sharing their recent impressive successes and their growth plans for 2010.

The fourth panelist was Anne Marie Burgoyne (Draper Richards Foundation), who shared her insights from working with so many Draper Richards grantees (full disclosure: Draper Richards is one of the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s funders). Anne Marie commented that it didn’t surprise her that Bay Area nonprofits had a higher focus on pursuing individual donors given the wealth in the region. She also noted that she has seen that foundations are pulling back and choosing to fund what’s safe. As for corporate funding, Anne Marie said she is observing more partnerships and fewer dollars. She ended by encouraged nonprofits to pass by the “shiny pennies” on the road and stay focused on mission and their organizations’ strengths.

Overall, James noted several surprises he had from the survey: that most nonprofits expected their budget and program levels would expand this year and that government was fairly low on the list as a source of funding.

How about your organization?  Do you plan to grow your budget and programs this year? What funding balance are you aiming for (looking at individual donors, corporate funding, foundation grants, and government support) and has that balance shifted this year? Is the Bay Area a funding anomaly?

Ms. Ridley joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2006 as publishing director. Previously she was group president at CMP Media, where she ran a division of technology publications, events, and websites. Ridley is also founder and board chair of Friends of Timboni Feeder School, a nonprofit that supports a K-5 school in Kenya. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

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Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Donate to Idealist.org

How did you find your first nonprofit job?

For many of us, there’s only one answer to that question: Idealist.org. Like many of you, I found my very first full-time nonprofit job on their website. And it was the perfect job for me in the beginning of my nonprofit career. I remember it like it was yesterday…

I had recently graduated from college with a Bachelor’s degree in English that people said would never make me any money. They were partly right. I had already been working in the nonprofit field for almost three years on a volunteer or part-time basis for very little pay. I had no idea whether I could even find a full-time job that wouldn’t leave me homeless since the luxury of financial aid was long gone. My apprehension was heightened because I had also chosen to relocate from Richmond, Virginia, where I went to school – to Washington, DC, where all the nonprofits were, according to my professors. I had no friends in DC and no money. All I knew was that I wanted a job in the nonprofit sector.

My first attempt had been to go through a temp agency where I landed a great administrative position at the United Way, but it just wasn’t the perfect fit for me. So, I left after just a few months. I continued my search for the perfect nonprofit position. But, in the meantime, I needed money. I had an expensive apartment on the outskirts of DC. So, then I did a six-month stint at a District Court in Virginia as a Deputy Clerk. I figured I could put my minor in pre-law to use. The job sounded fancy, but all it meant was that I was supposed to process all the paperwork to keep the bad guys in jail. It was good money for me at the time, plus I had benefits. I’d never had a job with benefits before. But, then I started to get into trouble. People were being charged with crimes they couldn’t even understand because they couldn’t speak English. So, I spent my time running around trying to get them interpreters. I thought it was fair. I thought it was how the justice system should work. But apparently, that wasn’t my job. My job was not to help people have a fair trial. It was to process them and make sure they got into the right jail.

That’s when I knew I could never work in the legal system. Especially for the bureaucratic government. Eventually my boss at the District Court gave me two weeks to either shape up or ship out. I said my goodbyes, then went online and started applying for nonprofit jobs on Idealist.org. I don’t even remember how I found out about Idealist. Maybe from one of my professors. Maybe through a simple Google search. What happened next is that I found an open position with an organization in DC that worked with youth-serving organizations in communities of color, specifically the Black community. I had volunteered with African American youth in college. I cared deeply about people of color and how nonprofits could serve us. This was perfect for me. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted this job. They didn’t even call me until a month after I had applied! All of a sudden, I had an interview with them at 2:00pm. I got lost on the way there because I still hadn’t figured out the DC Metro system. I was late. I thought I’d blown it. I thought I’d have to go crawling back to the District Court. But then they called to offer me the job at 5:00pm that same day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Thank you Idealist.org for connecting me with my perfect nonprofit job. It started me on a path to even more connections and even more opportunities to contribute to my community through nonprofit work. That’s why I opened my wallet and made a donation this morning. If not for the great folks that put the Idealist website together, that maintain the content, that run the organization – those career connections could not have happened for me. I know that many of you have similar stories. And I hope you will share them in the comments!

In the meantime, here are several reasons why you should open your wallet and donate, too:

If you’ve ever found a nonprofit opportunity through Idealist – job, volunteer, board:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If you’re currently looking for a nonprofit job:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If your organization has hired or plans to hire an awesome new nonprofit employee:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

If you can’t imagine who or what could possibly take the place of Idealist:
http://www.idealist.org/donate

Please also share Ami Dar’s note below with your friends, especially all of your friends who have benefited from this amazing organization. This is one of those times where we may only have one chance to help save one of the cornerstones of the nonprofit sector. When I talk to young people, they always mention Idealist.org as the way they connected to the nonprofit field. And we desperately need these new leaders to continue coming into our organizations and breathing new life into the work of social change. We can’t let Idealist go down like this. We need them. And now, they need us.

Dear Friend,

You know how sometimes in life you go through a bad moment, and when
your friends hear about it later, they say, “Why didn’t you say
something? Why didn’t you ask? We would have helped.”

That’s where Idealist is now, and I am writing to ask for your help.

Very briefly, here’s what happened. Over the past ten years, most of
our funding has come from the small fees we charge organizations for
posting their jobs on Idealist. By September 2008, after years of
steady growth, these little drops were covering 70% of our budget.

Then, in October of that year, the financial crisis exploded, many
organizations understandably froze their hiring, and from one week to
the next our earned income was cut almost in half, leaving us with a
hole of more than $100,000 each month.

That was 16 months ago, and since then we’ve survived on faith and
fumes, by cutting expenses, and by getting a few large gifts from new
and old friends. But now we are about to hit a wall, and this is why I
am reaching out to you.

If over the past 15 years Idealist has helped you or a friend find a
job, an internship or a volunteer opportunity; connect with a person,
an idea or a resource; or just feel inspired for a moment, now we need
your help. I wouldn’t be asking, and not like this, if this were not a
critical time.

There are two ways you can help. First, if you can, please make a
donation at:

http://www.idealist.org/donate

Some people in this community are not in a position to contribute
right now, so if you are, please give as generously as you can. Thank you!

Second, please spread the word about this appeal by sharing this
message with friends and colleagues who may have benefited from
Idealist over the years. Since 1995 Idealist has touched hundreds of
thousands of lives. If in the next week or two we can reach everyone
who’d give us a hand if they knew we are in trouble, I believe we’ll
come out of this crisis even stronger than before.

I believe this because while this has been a tough stretch, I’ve never
been more optimistic about the future. The content on Idealist has
never been richer, our traffic is surging, we are building a whole new
Idealist.org that will be released later this year, and the potential
for connecting people, ideas, and resources around the world has never
been more urgent or more exciting.

Your contribution will allow us to maintain all our services
(summarized below), and it will also give us some time to diversify
our funding. Being able to breathe, recover, and plan ahead for a few
months will be an incredible blessing.

Thanks so much for your support. Idealist has always been a
community-driven site, and we can’t do this work without you.

Thank you!

Ami Dar
Executive Director
http://www.idealist.org/donate

Rosetta Thurman is a writer, speaker, professor and consultant working and living in the Washington, D.C. area.  She holds a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Management and blogs about nonprofits, leadership and social change at rosettathurman.com

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Internet Exchange Rates

In recent years, the explosion of social media impelled forward-looking businesses and non-profits to adopt aggressive new online strategies.  Page views and web analytics, it appeared, had become insufficient.

Spheres of influence were expanded via viral agents across the web.  Ethos changed: Why bring people to your page when you could syndicate your presence to them?  Tentacles emerged in the form of widgets and gadgets, in the form of Facebook pages, YouTube channels and Orkut communities, Twitter decks and LinkedIn badges.  People –known as “users”– were promoted into “friends” or “followers.” But their more optimistic titles ignored arguably more passive engagement.

Firms engaged in an equity split of user interest.  New channels had expanded the number of “friends” exposed to ideas, but this uniform web expansion inflated user titles and diluted user interest in any one particular thing.  There were more shares, and perhaps the potential for growth had increased, but the short-term diminished share value of each follower questioned the veracity of value creation.

New media broadened exposure, but greater passivity reduced the currency unit of each view.  The gold standard of the active user, the “unique visitor,” became passé as monikers du jour –“meme,” and “tweet”– intimated web marketing savvy.  Overlooking the gold standard might have inflated numbers and ego, but did the expansion of exposure create lasting value by growing passive involvement?  Is a large network of passive “friends” better than a smaller network of active, unique users?

Today, one must explore, if not understand, the trade-offs between resource allocation, and user cannibalization across forms of new media.  Rarely are we Facebook fans, YouTube followers, Google Alert subscribers, Twitter followers, and LinkedIn members, following the same organization across five platforms.  We pick, and we choose in what capacity we will follow each cause, company, and cohort.
The question then becomes, how does one segment those demographics of value to the organization, and leverage forms of new media in smart and meaningful ways?  How does one optimize active user engagement, reach the broadest audience at the least cost, maximize and retain interest in the business?

In an ideal world we would understand the currency units of active versus passive support.  There would be a CNBC of online currency units, and across industries and time lines we could understand the trade-offs.  Meme tickers on Bloomberg and across Times Square would indicate the diurnal exchange rate between a YouTube view, a Facebook follower, a “Re-Tweet,” and a unique website visit.
But until that notion takes hold we are left with questions rather than answers.

Suffice it to invoke Yochai Benkler, one of the world’s preeminent thinkers on what he calls the “Networked Public Sphere,” to address network trade-offs.  In his book, Wealth of Networks, he discusses emergent patterns.

While there is a thickening of online ties, and facilitation of online solidarity within communities, there is also a “loosening of the hierarchical aspects” of such relationships.  He discusses the emergence of “limited-purpose, loose relationships.”  While inherently passive and non-emotional, they do cohere diverse groups of individuals around specific topics of common interest, and foster a loose group gravity that enables periodic, but passive, engagement over longer time horizons.

Individuals will necessarily retain small, familial, tightly cohered bonds because it is these interactions that provide emotional sustenance.  Just as the telegraph and the telephone revolutionized communication, they did not supplant human interaction. Equally, today’s revolutionary new forms of content and message syndication broaden our spheres of influence, as people and as organizations, but they do not supplant those constituent, active forms of human engagement that remain vital.

There is a hierarchy of interaction, and not all forms of messaging are created equal. The question is what is their relative value, and in which context is each the most effective form of communication?

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

 

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Haiti Relief Shows Digital Giving’s Potential

The massive charitable response to the devastation in Haiti should be a wake-up call for the charitable marketplace.

Using text-messaging and other digital applications, givers quickly have donated millions of dollars to relief efforts.

Givers also showed social media can be powerful tools for charitable giving.

Just as online giving came of age in the days after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunamis in Asia, the Twitter generation has shown through its Haiti relief that texting is a strategy all nonprofits need to understand and put to use.

The challenge for nonprofits is figuring out how to do that.

The recession has hit the charitable marketplace hard, stressing nonprofits with rising demand for services and greater competition for shrinking donor dollars.

And in the face of the recession and a tradition of struggling to do too much with too little, too few nonprofits truly have taken full advantage of the Web and email, which these days already seem like “old” media.

Nonprofits tend to be slow on the uptake in adopting new media and fully integrating new digital tools into the way they do business.

Seeing the outpouring of Haitian relief using social media, nonprofits that truly care about connecting with givers using the means of communication their givers prefer should invest the time and effort to truly understand how to build digital tools into their overall operations.

Beyond just being cool and easy to use, social media actually can make a big difference in the way nonprofits raise money, recruit volunteers, deliver services, and communicate with constituents and supporters.

The huge question for nonprofits is whether they actually will do what it takes to plug into new media and put it to productive use.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper published by the A.J. Fletcher Foundation in Raleigh, N.C. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world.

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Social Enterprise: A Gated Community?

There’s a growing debate in the social enterprise world, not only about who’s a social entrepreneur but about who’s being left out of the club.

True, the exceptions and misconceptions abound, but the debate settles around two main points—that unless you’re a Caucasian and unless you’re an MBA, it’s tougher to get support for your good work trying to start a social enterprise.

Is that fair? Consider the arguments. The first point being raised by some across the sector is that MBAs seem to be preferred by social ventures and the foundations willing to fund aspiring social entrepreneurs. Employers, the argument goes, also seem to prefer MBAs, but the truth is that not everyone who can make a difference or start a social enterprise can afford business school—nor think they should have to get an MBA in order to get funding to develop their ideas. “I have no MBA nor do I want one,” says Martin Montero, the founder of Austin Social Innovation Fund. Montero tweeted me the other day in response to one of my queries about an October 15 story in the Wall Street Journal that cites the surge of interest by business school students in “socially-responsible money-making.” The article also notes how business schools are being pushed to create a whole host of courses and study tracks to help MBA students sort out the best way to build companies that both make money and help to solve social problems. Montero and others, including a number of Justmeans.com community members who messaged me earlier this week, said the fuss over socially-minded MBAs tends to leave out a great deal of people who are not in business school but who already have been making a big difference in the sector. ” We most definitely need more non-MBA social entrepreneurs,” Montero wrote.

A second point I keep hearing is that the developing world is, more or less, being left out of the conversation. Justmeans community member Gerard Ww, in a comment responding to my query on that site, said that “no company, organization, or individuals (seems) willing to really get their hands truly dirty side-by-side with us (those people at the bottom of the pyramid) while trying to help the BoP!” Describing himself as one of the billions at the bottom of the pyramid, he said that “we are never included in the [potential] interventions; it’s always the so-called academics and ‘successful’ business persons who dictate terms and conditions. Too few of us will ever be helped by the continued exclusion, but who else knows the conditions [at the bottom of the pyramid] better” than the people who live there?

Gerard isn’t the only person posing the question. Rod Schwartz, CEO of ClearlySo, an online marketplace that aims to raise the visibility of social businesses, sparked a lively debate earlier this year when he posed on the SocialEdge blog the following question: “Are the only innovations in social entrepreneurship Anglo-Saxon?” Schwartz had asked the same question at the 2009 Skoll World Forum, which I also attended, asking fellow conferees what they thought of the fact that a majority of the speakers and panelists were Caucasian.

Ashni Mohnot, who joins me as a contributing blogger at PopTech, wrote on that site this past summer that “many of the top socially entrepreneurial organizations work in international development, building products, services and social capital to improve lives at the base of the pyramid, yet they are often based in the UK or the US with founders and CEOs hailing from the Western world.” She cited D.light Design, FORGE, FaceAids, and Kiva as some examples of social ventures that develop their products by native Westerners or those educated in the West. Mohnot wrote that while these social ventures “subsequently engage locals in pilots, distribution or marketing, the initial product design is often the sole realm of the US arm.”

To be sure, it’s not true that all social innovators have MBAs and that they’re all “Anglo-Saxon” as Schwartz put it. But the debate continues over what some see as troubling trends in this new field of social enterprise.

What do you think? Do you perceive yourself to be in what Mohnot called an elite “social entrepreneur’s club?” Or is the debate unfair or misinformed? Does it raise some important or long-ignored issues that should continue to be discussed on these pages and across the sector?

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

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