Social Good Podcast: The Delicious Debacle

In mid December an ex-employee of Yahoo!, the owner of Delicious, released a slide from an internal presentation that indicated that Yahoo might close Delicious. Here is a copy of that slide showing which sites Yahoo! might shut down.

He tweeted the news that Delicious was shutting down and a picture of this slide, which immediately and naturally went flying around the web. Here is a post from TechCrunch about this event. This prompted thousands of people to look for a way to export their bookmarks from Delicious and import them to another, similar service. I saw this post from Michele Martin, a great blogger about nonprofits and social media that prompted me to think a bit more about what it means when a trusted tool shuts down, or even potentially shuts down. Strangely, and perhaps disastrously if Delicious doesn’t survive the defection of so many users, it took days for Yahoo to respnod to the rumors. Here is a post about their response.

Most of the social media tools that we use, like Facebook and Twitter, are free for the users. We invest a lot of time putting our data into these tools. What would happen if they one day disappeared?  Delicious is a very early social media tool that is widely used to bookmark websites and share those bookmarks with others. In this way a community or network of people can share what they’ve bookmarked and find useful websites quickly and easily.  I invited Allyson Kapin, the founder of Women Who Tech and co-founder of the web agency, Rad Campaign, and Michele to discuss the lessons from the Delicious meltdown with me for this month’s Social Good podcast.

I liked hearing about how Michele immediately went to her crowd on Facebook, blogs and Twitter to find an alternative to Delicious. Allyson was also very insightful about making sure we don’t put all of our network eggs in one basket and spread out among the social media channels to protect ourselves from a tool shut down. Allyson also talked about the importance of open source tools that we can preserved and supported by a community and not leave us at the whim of a for profit company.  I hope some foundations are listening to that last bit!

Hope you enjoy the podcast.

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?