Landmark Online Giving Study

Network for Good and TrueSense Marketing released their long awaited study of online giving appropriately named The Online Giving Study. The study looked at data for about $400 million worth of giving across charitable websites, giving portals and social networks processed by Network for Good.

Here are a few of the key findings:

• What we know about successful fundraising stays with the same with social media. A key passage of the report is, “Raising funds online is not about technology, any more than raising funds through the mail is about paper. It’s about the relationship between the nonprofit and the donor who wants to support a cause. People who give online are no different from other donors in that they expect a relationship— not simply a transaction—with the organization they support.”
• Online relationships are often deeply affected by offline connections and cultivation.
• December (people giving for tax purposes at the end of the year, literally the last days of the year) and disasters dominate the online giving landscape.

For me, the key data from the report is this chart:

Holy cow, look at how donors come and stay on organization’s websites for giving compared to portals (like Network for Good) and social networking sites (like Facebook)! Really, it’s not even close — I’m even wondering if the other channels are worth all of the effort, hoopla and eyeball fatigue they are creating.

The report emphasizes several times that donors are giving largely through an organization’s website because of the relationship they have with that organization. And if they give through another site, like a giving portal like Change.org, they give less and are not likely to give again.

These particular data raise two questions in my mind:

1. Do these findings reinforce the skepticism that have had about the need for Jumo? (You can see some of the criticism here and here.) What is the point of yet another platform that takes away time and attention from individual organizations if we’re finding that donors are not deepening their relationships anywhere but on their own site.
2. Does this make a group like charity:water, a born and bred Networked Nonprofit, look even more prescient building their own network, my charity:water, on their site as a place for action, advocacy and fundraising?

LinkedIn: The Little Network That Could

This month’s Social Good podcast focuses on the second life of LinkedIn.

Sometimes social media tools and channels come and go so quickly I never learn how to pronounce the name of the thing! And then sometimes, not often, but just sometimes, a tool starts, levels off and then has a more dynamic second life. LinkedIn is one of those second life social media tools. I remember when it started I just kept adding friends but didn’t really have any idea of why I was adding them or what do with them. Facebook seemed a more interesting place to be and meet people and share, unless you were looking for a job and then LinkedIn was a must.

LinkedIn then began to reinvent itself. As other social network sites were flattening out in terms of the number of users, LinkedIn was soaring – passing 60 million users this year, increasing by ten million users a year over the past several years. That’s still small compared to the over 300 million users on Facebook, but it’s not nothing. Then, I saw an article that said that LinkedIn was the only social network was that was profitable – take that Facebook and MySpace! Then it added the functionality to create groups of people with a common interest or geographic area. And all of a sudden my LinkedIn friending began to soar again.

My interest was really piqued when Susan Kistler, the Executive Director of the American Evaluation Association told me that they transitioned their longstanding listserve to a LinkedIn group last year and that the conversation was richer as a result.

The LinkedIn experts on this month’s podcast are Amy Sample Ward, a pioneer in the use of social media by nonprofits and currently the Community Development Manager for TechSoup Global and Estrella Rosenberg, serial nonprofit entrepreneur,  philanthropy expert and author of Adventures In Philanthropy

I hope you enjoy listening to Amy and Estrella with their very practical advice on how best to use LinkedIN for your organization or cause.  It’s really the little social network that could!

Wikileaks ≠ Transparency

As much as I hate using “gate” moniker, I want to discuss what is being called “Cablegate” because its ramifications for organizational life.

If you’ve been leaving beneath your bed for the last few weeks, you may not know that Cablegate refers to the release of thousands of secret State Department communications by Wikileaks. Here is good synopsis of the lead by Time Magazine.

Wikileaks first came onto the world’s radar screen by posting a video of American soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians. This is whistleblowing. The American military it appears had done a terrible thing and then covered it up. This is what journalists do, they uncover the bad things that companies and governments do and shed light on them. Daniel Ellsberg is one of the world’s most famous whistleblowers, having released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times to reveal the lies that the US government was telling the public about their administration of the war in Vietnam.

Cablegate isn’t whistleblowing, it isn’t righting a wrong, unveiling unethical or immoral behavior. It is the theft of regular communications that makes it nearly impossible for the State Department to function.

One of the smartest people I know, well, actually one of the smartest people anywhere, Esther Dyson, discussed the downside of what she called “radical transparency” at Transparency Camp last year a double edged sword for organizational leaders. Beth Kanter reported Esther saying at the camp, “Esther Dyson said that transparency should be able the results and any deals, but there is a place for private discussion.   “We could all go around naked and look like angels, but in the real world that doesn’t happen.”  Transparency has its benefits, but so does privacy.  As Esther Dyson said, “There is a need for respect – of relationships, to get trust, and further understandings.   You can’t be fully transparent all the time because you need to give people a safe place to have the discussion without disrespecting others.”

And there is why I respectfully disagree with my friend and colleague, Micah Sifry, who wrote yesterday on his blog on TechPresident, “…there is a danger rising both to internet freedom and open government here, but that is not because of Wikileaks. It is because people who are threatened by more transparency want to stop this trend before it is completely uncontrollable.”

Leaks like Cablegate might be inevitable, however they are not honorable or constructive. Street crime might be inevitable but that doesn’t make it right. It also makes the word of transparency advocates, like Micah, much harder because it masks the true beauty and value of transparency which is to enable outsiders to get in and insiders to get out in order to make the work or product or law better. Transparency is not an academic exercise or window dressing for show, when done well and right, for instance in the ways that the Sunlight Foundation works, it makes the work better. Releasing every day cables of conversations within the State Department doesn’t make anything better, it just makes the work harder to do at all, much less do well.

The leakers, including Wikileaks, should be punished for it. How is any organization or government agency supposed to do business, to wrestle with complicated situations where the answers aren’t clear cut, in other words deal with the world as it is, if every conversation, every thought, every musing is going to be public.

The shame as Micah points out is that this kind of behavior provides cover for anti-transparency forces to have an excuse to become more opaque. They would would head in that direction anyway. News organizations should not have printed these leaks, it wasn’t news, it was a crime.

OK, folks, start disagreeing now!

Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding

My friend Carol Cone has co-authored a new book on nonprofit branding called, Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding! It’s a great book and resource for nonprofit organizations interested in branding with very specific case studies of the way that nonprofit organizations like Komen for the Cure, Unicef and smaller organizations like College Forward! among others.  One of my favorite sentences among may was this one, “Your brand must stand for a cause — something bigger than organizational activities, something that your constituents care about and believe in.”

The book is good news, but the contest accompanying the book is really exciting news. The authors have announced a contest called the Breakthrough Nonprofit Branding Contest worth $100,000 in free advertising space in USA TODAY for the lucky nonprofit winner. Here how it works:

Nonprofits will apply here to be eligible to compete in the contest. A panel of charity industry leaders will evaluate entrants based on their effectiveness in marketing, communications and social impact, and on how the first prize will impact their organization.  The public will then vote on the ten finalists to decide which North American organization will walk away with the first place prize.The deadline to enter the contest is December 10, 2010.

Sounds like a great opportunity for some lucky nonprofit!

Which is Better: More Donors or More $$$?

The Minnesota Community Foundation has their second annual “Give to the Max Day” last week and once again it was a spectacular success.

The first giving day was last year. I had a chance to talk to the chief architect at the Minnesota Community Foundation, Jennifer Ford Reedy, a few months ago for my Social Good podcast for the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

It was a terrific example of a foundation forming partnerships with dozens of local nonprofits and a dozen other funders, creating an open source platform for giving (it was open source to enable and encourage other foundations to replicate the effort.) And at the end of the day, that first go round, the day generated 38,000 donors giving $14,000. I remember seeing those numbers on Beth’s blog and thinking that there had to be a typo. In the depths of the recession it was astounding to see that Minnesotans had given that much money to charitable causes. But, then, again, it’s Minnesotans, the most generous people in the world.

Jennifer posted a summary of this year’s event on the Council of Foundation’s blog last week. Jennifer outlined a key difference between this year’s event and last year’s. They decided this year to focus on increasing the number of donations not the size of the donations. They were successful in doing this, their bottom line this year was 42,000 donors pledging a total of $10 million.

As Jennifer writes, “we created an incentive system that rewards organizations for turnout.” The incentive were grand prizes of $20,000 and $10,000 to the nonprofits that raised the largest number of donors during the day.

This all raises a very interesting question: should nonprofits be aiming for more donors or more money?

Smart people like Kim Klein have been arguing for years that building a broad base of supporters is critical to long term sustainability for nonprofits.

But what if the needs are so great, winters in Minnesota are brutal after all, that losing $4 million hurts local people and communities in the most need right now?

I think part of the answer has to be what happens to these donors after they give on the big day? Blackbaud reports that donors who give online give more over time than their traditional counterparts. However, we reported that after the first America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation that the winners didn’t know what to do with their online donors once they had them. That was three years ago, maybe we’re collectively getting better at learning how to build relationships with our online friends and turn them into long term donors now.

Maybe. At least I hope so! Katya, Kivi and Rebecca provide hopeful insights here on how to retain online donors.

This is, I suppose, the heart of our biggest challenge for the next few years; creating online friends, building stronger ties with a portion of them, asking them to give in real, authentic ways — and getting them to give again.

Listserv Abominations

I had great fun speaking at the Jacob Burns Film Center & Media Arts Lab the other night with a wonderful group of nonprofit executives. During the Q&A someone asked about the utility of listservs. I responded that they are an abomination, a source of email overload and epicenter for the awful habit of “Reply All.” There was nervous laughter but also resistance in the room. One woman replied that her listservs were still valuable to her, a source of information and advice, and her older colleagues were comfortable using them. Old habits die slowly.

Yes, of course, I was being a bit of a smarty pants, but this vestige of Web 1.0 of packing email boxes full of Great! and I Agree! and Our Servers Have Been Down What Did I Miss? is archaic in today’s Web 3.0 world (a social media world powered by social networks.) Cathy Nelson has an interesting take on this issue of listservs:

Recently in a blog reference I made a passing comment about listservs being archaic.  Well apparently I struck a nerve.  This post is not meant to be an apology, But I do want to take a stand here.  I am still a member of a listserv. Why? There is a node of my network that just can’t seem to move beyond its listserv for communication purposes, despite a blog, a wiki, a ning, and even Twitter and Facebook presences.  So I share information there, and attempt to expose this node to forward minded thinking.  Not sure how successful I am, and sometimes I worry that I am considered an annoyance.  But sadly, it is where this node in my network resides, and no amount of prodding, exposure to newer ways, or guilt-trips seem to move them to our other modes of networking.

I was recently asked to join a listserv for a new board chair position I’ve started and couldn’t bring myself to do it.  As I said to the group at the Burns, even if I set my filters on email and look at the emails once in a while, I would still have to sift through all of that chafe to get to just a little bit of wheat.

The argument against sun setting listservs is that it is a model of social networking most comfortable for older users of email. Once they’re on the list then they are set, and are reluctant, loathe actually, to switch to any other platform for conversation.

But this isn’t a hard and fast rule. The American Evaluation Association moved their listserv to LinkedIn a few years ago and it has gone spectacularly well. Susan Kisler, the head of AEA, said that they initially lost some folks who were reluctant to move to LinkedIn, but the conversation has been richer, more substantive, on the new platform.

Of course, at the heart of this issue is the intractability of a lot of people. Once they have a system they don’t want to change it. And although we tend to think of this as an issue particular to older people, there are plenty of inflexible younger people. It’s an interesting question: what makes one person open to new ideas and ways of working and another person resistant to them? I’ll leave most of this to the shrinks of the world, however, I do think that it is important to consider what we’re teaching in management classes. In addition to listening and facilitation skills that are critical, we also need to add constant adult learning as key characteristic of effective leadership.

The Future is Mobile

Nonprofits are increasingly using social media.  LoyaltyClicks has released a new study of a survey of nonprofits that indicates that they are increasingly using social media to connect with their communities. As we know intuitively but can now quantify with surveys such as these, “Our survey showed that 91% of our respondents use Facebook, 63% use Twitter, 45% use YouTube and 35% use LinkedIn, amongst other media. And 92% of surveyed nonprofits plan on using at least one of these tools in 2011.”

But, alas, it’s not enough. The future isn’t going to happen at desks, it’s going to be mobile. In other words, the Revolution is Going to Be Tweeted – From Our Phones!

Bango reports a 600% (!) increase in the use of mobile websites in the past year. This increase is being driven by smart phones; Blackberries, Nokia and iPhones and there is no slowing down foreseen in the near future.

However, again according to LoyaltyClicks, “only 16% of the surveyed nonprofits plan on having mobile websites in 2011, while 19% plan on having Smartphone Applications.” There are significant differences in the ways that people use their mobile devices to access information, connect to friends, make donations – basically they behave differently and our applications and access points need to reflect those differences in ways that they don’t do now. Clearly, it’s time for us to get moving (pun intended!) NTEN and MobileActive are two great resources for finding out more about how to use mobile and finding technological help for your particular applications. No time to waste, the time to get mobile was last week!

Quantifying Evaluation – At Last

Innovation Network, Inc. (InnoNet) has released a research study, State of Evaluation 2010, that illuminates the opaque current state of evaluation practice in the nonprofit sector.

There is an amazing dearth of research on the practice of program evaluation. Who does what and how is hardly ever asked – except by InnoNet. Using data from Guidestar, over 36,000 nonprofits were invited to participate in the study and 1,072 chose to do so. A few of the key findings (there are many more in the report itself, which is beautifully crafted for easy reading):

• 85% of responding organizations report engaging in evaluation over the past year. Although the nature of the type of evaluation that they engage in varies widely including monitoring outputs, evaluating process and evaluating outcomes.
• Only 27% worked with an outside evaluator.
• Large organizations, those with budgets over $5 million) were more likely to evaluate their work and had staff dedicated to evaluation.
• Funders and boards of directors are the primary audience for evaluation results (58% combined).

There were some unsurprising but still desultory findings reported as well. Including:

• 36% of the respondents reported that NONE of their funders supported their evaluation work.
• Evaluation ranked second to last in organizational priorities.

The bottom line is that evaluation continues to be difficult to understand and implement for many nonprofit organizations, strain the budgets or smaller organizations and unfunded by grantmakers.

I have a thought of how to try to change these dynamics. I wonder if it is possible to measure if and how organizations that are intensively implementing outcomes evaluation are better at serving their communities AND raising money. The one way to motivate both funders and nonprofits to make program evaluation a priority is to prove the value of investing in it.

 

Response to “It Gets Better”

In response to my post and podcast yesterday about Dan Savage and the It Gets Better Project, I heard from my friend Lucy Bernholz. She noted that the gay community was upset about the videos and in the process of pushing back.

The concern is that It Get Better is too passive, it is counseling gay teens to grin and bear it until adulthood when they will have more control of their lives and it will get better. Responses have included: Where’s the Proof it Gets Better? to Stop Bullying Now! to Groundspark’s “Make it Better NOW” project. On on the Groundspark site I found one of the most moving videos I’ve ever seen fro

Any large community of people is going to have vigorous debate about an issue that is important to their well-being. And this is a big, healthy debate. I don’t think it detracts from the amazing story of the It Gets Better Project, an entire YouTube channel going viral, but it does remind me that there is no one right way forward for any social change issue.

Thanks, Lucy.

Social Good Podcast with Dan Savage of “It Gets Better Project”

My monthly Social Good podcast for the Chronicle of Philanthropy features Dan Savage, a Seattle-based journalist. Dan and his husband, Terry Miller, are the catalysts for a viral video phenomenon called the It Gets Better Project.

This fall has been a dismal and disheartening season for gay teens. Several bullied gay teens felt so alone and hopeless than they committed suicide; Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas to name just a few.

Dan and Terry wished that they had had just a few minutes with each of these boys to tell them, from their own experience, that life gets better after adolescence, after high school. And then Dan realized that he had been sitting back waiting for permission from someone, somewhere to talk to these kids. But in the Connected Age no permission is required, social media allows anyone to say anything to the world. So he and Terry went to a local restaurant and created a video with their own, personal message to gay teens – it gets better, they promised. They uploaded the video to YouTube on September 22nd. Dan then announced the video in his newspaper column and on his podcast. Here is their video:

And the video took off, over 250,000 views in the first two days. And it kept climbing. But then something even more remarkable happened; other people, regular people became to upload videos of their own stories. Mormons and Muslims, big city and small town, men and women, people from every stripe and corner of the country began to respond. And then, of course, the movie stars and politicians followed, including the President and the Secretary of State.

I assumed that since this effort was called a “Project” that Dan had some infrastructure, maybe not professional staff but at least volunteers, who had been driving outreach and encouraging regular and rich and famous to upload videos. Here is President Obama’s video:

But when I interviewed Dan I learned that no one had reached out to anyone! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a free-agent effort take off in quite this way before. Free agents is the term that Beth and I use in The Networked Nonprofit for individuals who create an activism campaign on their own using social media. A free agent campaign that is often cited is Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars”, one man’s grievance against the airline which cavalierly treated his instrument and has been viewed near 10 million times.  Here it is:

But the difference is that only Dave was making videos. The It Gets Better Project is spectacular because Dan and Terry provided an opportunity for hundreds of other people to share their stories as well. Unasked, unbidden, uncontrolled. Extraordinary. I hope you’ll take a listen to Dan.