America’s Giving Challenge Reflections

America’s Giving Challenge concluded last week. The event, the second such challenge, was sponsored by The Case Foundation ($150,000), The Aspen Institute’s Program on Philanthropy & Social Innovation ($20,000) and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($75,000). Nonprofit organizations competed to raise the largest number of friends online using the Causes application on Facebook and on Parade Magazine’s site. The winners received matching grants from the funders mentioned above.

Although there will be a much more thorough assessment conducted by The Case Foundation, I thought I’d capture a few reflections immediately upon the competition’s completion.

This is one few online competitions to happen a second time, so it’s a great moment to reflect on what stayed the same and what was different. I’ll base these reflections in part on the assessment report that Beth and I wrote for The Case Foundation on the first Challenge that took place from December 2007 to January 2008.

There were a few changes from last time.

• A shorter competition time, down from fifty days to thirty days.
• An intensive effort by the Case Foundation prior to the Challenge to provide technical assistance through a series of videos calling Giving Gurus series (I participated in one.)
• A crushing recession.

So, what happened? According to the Nonprofit Times, the total giving was up from last time. The first Challenge round resulted in nearly $1.8 million from more than 71,000 donors. This time, 106,000 unique donations generated more than $2 million. In other words, many more people gave slightly more in total over twenty fewer days.

Here are my initial thoughts about this:

• It looks like the recession may be depressing the average amount given. Nonetheless, a lot of people gave.
• The nature of the Challenge is that friends are likely to give to friends for a cause. That would explain the large numbers of givers even if they are each giving a little less.
• One of the most interesting findings from the first round was that the winners were a collection of very small, relatively unknown nonprofits. Beth and I had a concern that given the success of the first round that this one could be dominated by the biggest and best known nonprofits that would have far more resources to throw at the competition. But that doesn’t appear to have happened. Again, the winners are small, relatively unknown groups. Overseas China Education Foundation, in Houston, Texas; The Prem Rawat Foundation (TPRF: Food for People), in Los Angeles, Calif.; Overseas Save Chinese Children Foundation (Save Chinese Children), in Toledo, Ohio; Fitness Challenge (Ride 2 Recovery), Calabasas, Calif.; and, Atlas Service Corps (Atlas Corps = International Cooperation), in Washington, D.C.  Only Atlas Service Corps was a repeat winner from the first round.

Questions I’d love answers to now include:

• Did the participants have a great comfort level with social media, particularly Facebook, than the first round of participants?
• Is the assumption that the average gift size per donor was lower than the first round and can this be attributed to the recession?
• Did participants use other social media tools like Twitter to help get the word out?
• Did the big large nonprofits participate and fizzle out, or did they choose not to participate? And if they chose not to, why not?

Those are my thoughts for now, can’t wait to learn more!

Is Social Capital Increasing Online?

Jocelyn Harmon has written a terrific post called Are We Still Bowling Alone? Jocelyn rightly ponders the possibility that the use of social media tools, particularly social networking sites, is reversing the trends of decreasing social capital that Robert Putnam famously wrote about at the end of the twentieth century in Bowling Alone.

Populations the size of not-so-small countries are on MySpace, Friendster (not so big here, but very big in Asia) and, of course, Facebook. Friends are connecting to friends in growing numbers. The assumption therefore, is that we are renewing the fabric of communities as Putnam called social capital. And I believe that we are – but proving it isn’t quite so easy.

Social capital at its core is made up of two key components: trust and reciprocity. I believe that the social networking sites are doing a great job of creating and increasing trust between people. Unlike chat rooms that were a part of the Web 1.0 landscape, in the Web 2.0 world users choose their friends. And unchoose them by defriending them or no longer following them on Twitter. We choose people based on our on land connections and based on their reputation – are they friends with people that I know, do they work for organizations that I trust? If the answers are yes, then we connect with them and trust them with our information and our friends. And for the most part this works very well, that’s why the social networking sites have grown so quickly.  And we can check in quickly and easily with acquaintances, maintain friendships with people from previous times in our lives more easily than ever before. This is the phenomenon that Leisa Reichelt cleverly calls “ambient intimacy.“

So, trust is growing, but as mentioned above that’s only one part of the social capital equation. Reciprocity focuses on what we’re doing with all of these connections.

Reciprocity, the second half of the recipe for social capital is defined to mean that I do something for someone with the confidence that at some future time they’ll do something similar for me. I bring someone food when they’re sick, or water their plants when they’re away, or go to their birthday party because it is the right thing to do – but also with the confidence that I can count on them to do something similar for me in the future. How is this playing out online?

Jocelyn rightly points out that some of what is happening online that is reciprocal is fundraising. I click for breast cancer because my friend Sally asked me to, and in the future, she’ll click on Hope for Henry for me. America’s Giving Challenge that is now underway is entirely based on the notion of friends asking friends to contribute to their cause. But, reciprocity online is also about helping one another. Twitter is a great place to watch reciprocity in action. Twitter followers answer questions for one another, what’s the best tool for X?, who knows the best consultant for Y?, who is going to Z event? There are many stories of a blog post about a family in need and the immediate response of a community of people quickly and generously supporting them with food, clothing, supplies, etc. David Armano spearheaded such an effort last year.

My question, the big question really about social capital in general, is how can we measure this reciprocity online — and is it growing?  And I wish I had an easy answer, but our communities are complicated online. We don’t just exist in one place, we’re talk and connect with people in lots of places online, around lots of issues and measuring where reciprocity exists around the web and how it is growing would be a pretty big task. It also outweighs the incessant focus on measure clicks as return on investment – particularly for causes. Clicks count, but they pale in comparison to the creation or strengthening of social capital that is much more important to improving social outcomes in the long run.

There are ways to begin. For instance, what is the nature of the conversation with the comments on a blog? And how many retweets does one get on Twitter when asking a question? And, how many people are talking about your issue on their blog and linking to you? And, of course, how many are you linking to? These are important, but they’re just a beginning to understanding the nature and strength of relationships that are growing online.

So, well, I’m going to take the easy way out today and say we need to figure it out, and I’m open to suggestions!  This is clearly a topic that will need revisiting over time.

America’s Giving Challenge is Launched

Today, at 3 pm eastern time, the second America’s Giving Challenge is being launched by The Case Foundation.

Over the next thirty days, literally until November 6th at 2:59 pm eastern time, thousands of individual activists will champion their favorite causes and vie for the largest number of friends raised on the Causes application on Facebook. The top friend getters each giving at least $10 each will win $50,000 plus the money they raise using Causes. Prizes for causes that raise the largest number of friends in a day will be awarded $500.

Participants can register to compete, view details and donate to a cause they care about at www.americasgivingchallenge.com.

I urge participants to take a quick peek at the assessment report that Beth and I wrote about the first Giving Challenge go round, chock full of suggestions and lessons learned from the first round.

Managing Social Media Not Letting it Manage You

I am a guest “giving guru” tomorrow for the Gear Up for Giving effort organized by The Case Foundation in preparation for the second Giving Challenge. I wrote a piece on how to reorganize onself to better manage social media, and the time it takes to engaged online — and not be overwhelmed or managed by it. The post is below and also on the Case Foundation blog. I’ll be doing a live video chat tomorrow at 1 eastern to talk about online giving using social media.

I hope you’ll join the chat tomorrow and check out the other terrific resources and video chats on the Case website.

I want to tell you about my friend, Sheila. Sheila is the Executive Director of the Inner City Homeless Shelter. She’s worked at the shelter for fourteen years, the first ten as the program director.

Sheila has watched over the past few years in bewilderment as all of this webby, bloggy, Facepagey stuff has been happening. She doesn’t quite understand what they’re all doing. Sheila uses email at work, she still has her AOL account at home that she uses to send messages and funny stories to her sisters and mother, and she has a cell phone that she uses, when she remembers to turn it on.

Sheila was aware that other organizations were setting up Facebook pages but didn’t know why, and hoped, really, deep down inside, that maybe all of this was a twenty-first century version of the hoola hoop, which she was also never very good at anyway.

She hears bits of conversation about some new thing or other seemingly every week, was it Wither or Twicker, well, whatever it was, everyone seemed entranced with it while Sheila could barely keep up with email and couldn’t envision adding any more things to her life, increasing her information overload and making her long to-do list always longer.

Oh, how she dreads her to-do list! It’s a treadmill of a list that just keeps churning on and on, while she dashes from meeting to meeting. Sheila works at least twelve hours a day on a shoestring budget. And year after year she has to find new ways to raise money to keep the place afloat. It always feels like a house of cards; she’s just one major grant withdrawn from the whole thing collapsing. She can’t make the day any longer, she can’t click and ping like the kids, she feels like she’s fading away into oblivion. In a sigh of resignation Sheila adds one more thing to her to-do list: hire summer intern to take care of social media stuff.

Does Sheila sounds familiar? Maybe just parts of her story strike a chord with you or someone you know. Sheila needs to learn how to work better, smarter, more effectively. But the key for Sheila is not to think of adding social media to her too-full do-to list, but by becoming a more social person using the tools right in front of her.

The first step is finding a mentor, maybe it’s a young person at work, or one of her kids, who can help Sheila learn to use the tools. She needs to really try them out, gets hands on and practice being social. Sheila needs to upload photos, be a guest blogger somewhere, set up her own Twitter account (as herself, not behind a logo!).

Sheila needs to build an online social network of trusted people, friends and people she knows by reputation, who make up her ecosystem of people and organizations who care about her issue and organization. On sites like Facebook or Twitter, she beings to reveal herself in small bits. What she’s thinking of doing, what questions she has, what help she needs. Sheila starts to unwrap herself from the waxy building up of organizational inertia that makes it so hard to reach outside and invite others in.

Once Sheila begins to practice in private, she can begin to talk to her staff about all of the ways that they can begin to work with their network, not at or in spite of it. Only when Sheila is comfortable with the social media, can the entire organization start to get creative about ways to leverage the creativity and smarts in their network.

This will all take time. Mastering anything new takes time. But what choice does Sheila really have because continuing down the same road, working in an organizational silo, refusing to engage with her network that is sitting there, waiting and wanting to help, isn’t a sustainable way of working. Ellen Miller, the co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation has spent a forty-year career as an advocate for open and transparent government. In the last five years, she has become an outspoken and energetic proponent of using social media for social change. Here is Ellen’s advice to Sheila, “If it is a priority to you to reach out a community for whatever the purpose is; financial support, volunteer support, community support, if outreach to your community is one of your key responsibilities then this has to be a priority.”

Managing one’s time with social media is an important and not always easy task. Here are a few tips for managing the flow based on Leo Babauta’s blog.

1. Practice turning the flow on and off. Designate specific times to use particular tools and try to stick with it. If 8-9 am is Twitter time, stick to it. And don’t worry about being off line for a while, everyone will survive.
2. Take a week and track where you go online and how much time you spend there. What was a good use of time, what wasn’t? Eliminate the bad time.
3. Cleanse your Inbox. Unsubscribe to everything that you possibly can. Emails have an expiration date, it’s important to delete the mail, clean it out, and get rid of what’s been sitting there for a while. Set up folders for specific topics to move them out of your Inbox. There is nothing more dispiriting than facing two thousand emails every day.
4. Find your trusted sources. Watch to see who is quoted or retweeted a lot in your network and make sure to follow them. And don’t be afraid to defriend other folks who fill up your spaces with less useful information. Let these trusted, influential sources search the web for you.

Causes on Facebook: An Update and Lessons

The latest edition of my Social Good podcast was posted yesterday. The topic this month is the Causes application on Facebook, where things stand and how to be successful using it. My guests were Joe Green the co-founder of Causes and Amy Eldridge, the founder and executive director of Love Without Boundaries. I first heard about Amy’s group through the research that Beth and I did for the Giving Challenge assessment effort for The Case Foundation.

Causes just had its two year anniversary. To date about 200,000 Causes have been created, and about 50,000 of those have been created for a specific nonprofit organization. And this just in from the Causes folks today, they surpassed $10 million in total donations using the application.

As you’ll hear Amy and Joe caution, uses Causes takes the same persistence and elbow grease that all fundraising efforts require. In addition, here are a few lessons learned from their experiences:

• As I mentioned Causes and Facebook are not ATM machines. Successful efforts have built relationships with their supporters.
• Successful efforts have been time limited, urgent campaigns that have engaged people — and then let them go when the campaign is over.
• Causes augments, doesn’t replace, your other fundraising efforts.
• It’s important to know when to lay fallow and spend your energy building your community and raising awareness of your Cause rather than trying fruitlessly to fundraise.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good

Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong.

It will be very intersting to see how this effort unfolds. Mashable is a very widely read site with amazing reach on a host of other channels like Twitter and Facebook. As Jocelyn wrote, “I’m excited to see how this campaign unfolds as it will provide additional benchmarks and information regarding the ROI of social media and how nonprofits can best use these channels.”

So, of course, I wish them well and hope the Summer of Social Good turns out better than the Summer of George. But I was stopped short when I read the first sentence on the Mashable’s site about the campaign, “Summer of Social Good is the first large scale online charitable campaign to raise funds strictly online through the power of Social Media and the Internet.” This is simply not true, in particular they would have been well served to take a peek at how America’s Giving Challenge sponsored by The Case Foundation unfolded. As a result of that fifty day effort over 80,000 people gave $1.7 million.

But more than the total numbers of people who gave and total dollar amount that they gave, The Challenge (FYI: Beth and I authored an assessment report of the Challenge that will be released by the Foundation this month)

What that Challenge had that the Summer of Social Good is a sense of urgency for donors, without which it is too easy for people who intend to give, want to give, mean to give, to just put it off. The urgency of the Challenge resulted from the financial match that The Case Foundation offered daily and at the end of the effort to reward the causes that raised the largest number of friends not dollars. A sense of urgency to motivate people to give also came from the length of the campaign (which was too long at 50 days) and a leader board that provided real-time data for participants to know how there were doing.

Again, I hope that the Summer of Social Good is phenomenally successful, just wish they had built their effort on the lessons learned from previous campaigns.

Case Foundation Walks the Talk

The Case Foundation (full disclosure: I am currently working on a project with the Foundation) announced yesterday a new grant challenge aimed at catalyzing a large number of donors to give this holiday season. Beginning last year, Case has focused on providing opportunities to highlight and reward the power of individual giving and activism.

As the Washington Post reports (registration stupidly required here) this morning. Here’s the gist of the article:

The Case Foundation, the philanthropy of Steve and Jean Case, is promoting America’s Giving Challenge, which aims to draw people who do not consider themselves to be philanthropists to donate as little as $10 to charities around the world. The foundation is working with Network for Good and GlobalGiving, nonprofit groups that allow donors to conduct online searches for charities to support.

The foundation has also begun a similar challenge on Facebook. Facebook users can donate to any of 1.5 million charities through the site’s “causes” section and have their donations and causes displayed as part of their personal profiles.

The Case Foundation is giving away $750,000 in the two online efforts, which start today and end January 31. People who recruit the most friends from their social networks will each receive $50,000 to donate to charity. The 100 charities that garner the highest number of online donations will each get $1,000.

There are many exciting aspects of this grant program. One in particular is recognizing the power of friends instead of just dollars to support causes. Young people in particular are not only not in a position to fund causes with large dollars, but don’t see the world through that lens alone. That’s the power behind the social networking sites; friends are their commerce and Case is recoginizing that and bringing that same passion to their causes.