Beth Asked a Question

Beth asked a question on her blog the other day:

Do we have examples of using nonprofits using social media for:

• Volunteer or board recruitment strategy
• Ooutreach or educational program delivery
• Crowdsourcing ideas for program development
• Professional development
• Integrated in other areas

The answer is that there are a growing number of examples of organizations, and individuals, using social media as part of their programs not just part of fundraising and communications efforts. For instance:

• One of my favorite crowdsourcing efforts that happens online and on land is the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. It’s over a hundred years old and now uses a variety of social media tools like Flckr, online databases, blogs and online videos to recruit bird counters and share their data.
• WeAreMedia which Beth helped to organize and launch with NTEN is a terrific example of a wiki to help a community learn together that is being continuously updated and improved. The increased use of webinars by organizations is reducing the cost of professional development for organizations.
• The Extraordinaries is a new effort for volunteers to dip into volunteering on-the-go using their smart phones.
• The Meyer Memorial Trust in Portland, OR hosts a terrific blog on its site about new media and its uses for social change.
• And, of course, the use of Facebook and other social networking sites are being used to build relationships and a sense of community for thousands of nonprofits.

I was concerned about two years ago that social media were being relegated for use largely to political and advocacy campaigns. The nonprofit community began to dip their toe in for fundraising and some communication efforts. It is really only in the last year or so that the use of social media more broadly to help organizations meet their mission is beginning to happen for both nonprofit and foundations. This is great news, we will only see more of these kinds of activities unfold.

But, Beth does mention one area that isn’t seeing enough change and development with social media right now. It is boards and governance. There are many ways that governing boards could use social media to connect board members to one another and to their communities through wikis, social networks, and blogs. But, to date, there has been a great deal of hesitation about opening up governance. It is one more frontier that will begin to change soon — it has to because governance is too important and social media are too powerful to continue to work in isolation from one another.

Listening = Leadership

I had two unusual visitors today here in my home office. Jordan and Chris, two FBI agents came calling, and yes, they were both wearing dark suits and ties, although I didn’t they were not wearing dark sunglasses.

They were conducting a background check on a former colleague of mine and came to ask a few questions. (And said it was fine to blog about conversation.)

One question was what leadership qualities my colleague had exhibited. My immediate answer was that he was a great listener. My new FBI friend stopped short. He said he had been doing these interviews for a while and had never heard that answer. Really, I said, that’s a shame because in my mind it is the most critical for effective leadership.

As Beth and I are writing our book the question of where to put listening has come up time and again. Basically, we want to put it everywhere because it affects everything that an organization does, can do, should do in concert with their ecosystems. Social media are unique tools in that amplify good listening and bad listening, as well. So, for instance, it is clear when an organization has their ear to the ground and is hearing what bloggers and Twitterers are saying about the organization, and joining the conversation. All of the staff at the Sunlight Foundation are really adept listeners.

But when an organization is being talked about and the organization or company isn’t listening it’s far more aggregious. Remember the angry mommy blogger storm about the tone dear Motrin ad about all of those crazy and tired moms with sore backs from lugging their babies around in slings?

Beth has written extensively and beautifully about the power of using social media tools for listening. We ought to expect that organizational leaders are adept and appreciative of the power of listening as an important, in my mind the most important, criteria to effectively lead their organizations in the Connected Age.

Provocative Ideas from Personal Democracy Forum

Had an amazing time at Personal Democracy Forum this year (although, sadly I couldn’t stay for the whole thing.) Love the fact that I always come away from the conference wtih my head buzzing from all of the interesting ideas.

Here is the Day One recap.

And here is Day Two.

When the videos are posted from the sessions, I will be sure to post links to danah boyd’s amazing talk on the ghettoization of the web (what she called “white flight” from MySpace to Facebook) and Mark Pesce’s talk about working in the clouds. Really thought provoking.

But just as importantly, yesterday, Beth made it to California, two kids, one husband, and cello in tow. So, how do you get a cello to California, watch and see:

Assessing America’s Giving Challenge

The Case Foundation released this morning the asseement report that Beth and I co-authored on their Giving Challenge. It was a wonderful opportunity and experience really digging into the Challenge to better understand how and why it worked, we hope you’ll read and enjoy the report.

Here’s the skinny on what the Giving Challenge:

• The Giving Challenge was a 50 day event from December 2007 through January 2008.
• The Case Foundation provided awards to participants who raised the largest number of friends, not money, every day and in total by the end of the Challenge.
• The Challenge raised $1.8 million from more than 71,000 donors, benefiting thousands of causes.
• Individuals were encouraged to participate as champions for their causes as well as organizations (and they did so in large numbers)

All of that is nice, but when it eneded something really remarkable happened. When the final winners were announced they were a Who’s Who of . . .who?  They weren’t Amnesty International and the Red Cross, wonderful causes, of course, but not the winners of the Challenge. It turned out that 11 of the 16 Giving Challenge award recipients were for causes with annual organizational budgets of less than $1m. They included Love without Boundaries, Beth’s cause The Sharing Foundation, Nourish International , and the Fanconi Anemia Research Fund. Not exactly household names. So, how were these groups, many of which don’t even have staff, able to be so successful in The Giving Challenge? What’s the secret sauce? That’s what Beth and I set out to find out through lots of interviews and surveys last year.

Here’s what we learned:

• The structure of the Challenge lent itself to leveling the playing field and enabling smaller groups to be successful. Those key elements included the use of Causes on Facebook that enables smaller groups to connect friend-to-friend at no cost, the short time frame that enabled smaller groups to hang in there and give it all they had for a limited albeit exhausting, period of time, the urgency of the Challenge created by the significant matching dollars offered by The Case Foundation, and the leader board that enabled everyone to see how they were doing and spur their volunteers to do more to keep up with the competition.
• The winners were able to make their efforts go viral, meaning friends of friends were working on their behalf to support their Challenge efforts, because they had talented individuals who spent an enormous amount of time as network weavers and cheerleaders-in-chief. The winners had an inner circle fo volunteers who outworked less successful groups not by a few but by hundreds of hours.
• Winners pushed power to the edges through their social networks and were agile, real-time learners. Winners didn’t have set plans when they started, they just started. Friends of friends blogged on their behalf, sent text messages, walked dorm room to dorm room laptop in hand raising friends, asked their office colleagues for help. There was no one right way to win the Challenge and all of the winners had a robust mix of online and on land efforts and learned in real time throughout the Challenge how best to connect with their friends and potential supporters.
• Personal connections were critical in activating the viral effect of successful cause efforts – by large margins (between 61-74%), cause champions reported reaching out for donations and outreach assistance to people they knew personally, including known supporters, family, friends and colleagues first to spread the word and encourage participation in the Challenge.
• Most winners reported that the friends that they raised during the Challenge were new donors to their organizations. The urgency of the effort enabled groups to turn friends into funders. This is a critically important finding not only for the Challenge but for groups using Causes on Facebook.

I hope you’ll have a chance to read the report. I’d love your feedback as would The Case Foundation as they prepare for the next Giving Challenge later this year.

Assessing Games for Change and Learning Loops

I had the privilege of attending a day-long seminar yesterday organized by Games for Change, a terrific nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the dissemination and understanding of video games that are created for the purpose of educating and activating people for social change.

It was quite an august gathering of folk!  About forty people attended including Christine Bachen, Associate Professor of Communication, Santa Clara University, James Gee, Professor, Arizona State University, Barry Joseph, Director of the Online Leadership Program, Global Kids, Joseph Kahne, Dean of the School of Education and Director of the Civic Engagement Research Group, Mills College, Dan Schwartz, Professor of Education, Stanford University, Suzanne Seggerman, President and Co-founder of Games for Change, and Valerie Shute, Associate Professor Florida State University, Educational Psychology and Learning Systems.

Our host was Alex Quinn, Executive Director, Games for Change. We saw demos and discussion of assessments for Quest Atlantis and Our Courts (spearheaded by Sandra Day O’Connor!) I’m not a gaming expert and I found it really interesting, if a bit overwhelming, learning about the complicated double challenge of creating video games that are both fun and educational. As Jim Gee said, ‘Games are at root model-based thinking and are by definition an oversimplification of any issue.” but the logic that has to go into designing a game that has sticky and raises awareness, even action, for issues, seemed quite complex and challenging to me — and when done well, really magical.

Alex was kind enough to ask me to share a few thoughts on what Beth and I have been thinking about in regards to assessing social change efforts involving social media.  I shared our Listening and Learning Loops model which is built on KD Paine SobCon ROI of Relationships in Social Media. KD’s model illustrates a ladder of engagement that moves people from Social Networks to  Engagement to Relationship to Return on Investment. We have adopted this model specifically for social change purposes in which Social Networks generate Social Capital for Social Change with listening as the connective tissue.

Here is an illustration of this progression that our Chair of the Charts Committee (Beth!) whipped up:

WE are trying to illustrate a real-time, lighter assessment process that activists can use to engage their community in developing efforts and make real-time improvements and adjustments. But it only works with constant listening and conversations. At each level of engagement, and again this is not intended to be an entirely linear progression, some people will start at social capital or social change and others will stay at social networks, there are a variety of ways for a social change effort to get feedback and data on how they’re doing. For instance, to measure the size of your social network you can track statistics on your website and blog, links to your site and do social network analysis of your network.   To measure an increase in social capital, which we define as an increase in trust and reciprocity within the network, you can look at what others are doing on your behalf, like retweets, comments on blogs and YouTube (for which you can also do content analysis) and blog posts by others about your cause or campaign. And, of course, measuring social change happens largely as it always has, by tracking what people are doing online and talking to them about what they’re thinking and doing on land through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

This is a work in progress and we would appreciate any feedback you have for us!

Wash Post Disses Causes on Facebook

This morning’s Washington Post article, “To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green”, takes some not-very-new shots at Causes, the friending and fundraising app on Facebook, while not providing any new insights. From the first sentence, “It seems foolproof: nonprofits using the power of the Internet to raise money through a clever Facebook application. ” my antenna went up because this article was entering Causes and Facebook through the wrong door; the dollar per donor door.

Let’s begin by deconstructing the article itself, which according to my friends at Network For Good, contains a number of inaccuracies.  Causes and Network for Good have a partnership to process donations made through Facebook.  One huge point of ongoing misinterpretation about the number of causes on Facebook requires clarification. There are around 250 thousand causes on the Causes platform. A cause does not have to be associated with a specific nonprofit, and most of these, over 200,00 aren’t. That leaves about 46,000 nonprofits that are connected to a cause. But, of these only 8,000 are using Network for Good, meaning they’ve created an official profile, can use their npo dashboard, and can raise money. Therefore in trying to determine the average size of donations, it is more accurate to use the 8,000 active fundraising efforts for nonprofits rather than the 176,000 used in the Post article. When the universe of causes that includes the Green on Sundays groups is included in the overall cause number,  divided by the total amount of dollars given resulting in an itty bitty average gift. This is enormously skewed by the number of inactive causes on FB or the number of causes who never intended to raise money using Causes.  So, according to Network for Good’s data, 8,000 causes have actively raised money using Causes for a total of $7.5 million — or an average total of donations to each cause of over $930.

The news here is that there isn’t any new news. This issue first surfaced last year.  Beth raised the question then of how much was being raised on Causes and what that means for fundraising via social networks.  Conor also raised similar questions and issues. Givvy took a look at the numbers last year and saw pluses and minuses. The only reason to run with this old news that I can think of is that the the recession has made fundraising more difficult this year,which in turn has made fundraisers more anxious (which I didn’t think was possible since they’re such an anxious bunch to begin with!) and Causes an easy target.

But, looking at the success and drawbacks of Causes to date is helpful in assessing where we are in the Connected Age with fundraising.  Here are a few thoughts about the importance and lessons of Causes to date:

1. Causes enables a lot of people to “support a cause.” In old thinking that meant only one thing: give us money.  But in connected thinking, it means that each one of us is can be more than an ATM for our causes.  Causes on FB enables us to tell our own world – distinct from the world -  about the issues, campaigns, orgs that they are passionate about. We can bring our networks of friends, our ingenuity, our passion, our time, our expertise to support causes.  It enables lots and lots of people to learn about causes and to share them with their friends easily, quickly and inexpensively.

2. Episodically, Causes has demonstrated the amazing power of distributed fundraising for causes.  Last year’s Giving Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation is a perfect example. Beth and I were commissioned by the Foundation to assess the Challenge late last year. We found that the Causes Giving Challenge on Facebook raised a total of $571,686 from 25,795 unique donors for 3,936 causes. That’s an average gift of just over $20, a very respectable amount in the online direct mail world (if one feels compelled to measure things that way). What was important about the Giving Challenge experiment was that it showed what could happen through this mechanism when it was engaged and ignited in the right way; meaning a time limited competition in which the bar set by the Foundation wasn’t the dollars raised by each cause but the number of friends raised. The winners of the Giving Challenge raised significant sums (meaning tens of thousands of dollars, which is a lot of money to small orgs that won) and friends using Causes – most of whom were first time donors to their cause.

3. The Washington Post article calls Causes “largely ineffective.” Well, that depends on how one defines effectiveness. And this is one place where the Causes folks have some culpability because they have raised dollars raised as a critical measure of their application’s success. This is what I call malmeasurement, grabbing onto an easy data point and equating it to success whether it fits or not. Using dollars raised as a critical measure of success has allowed others to hammer Causes without much cause. Remember that the overwhelming number of Facebook users are still under 25 years old. This is very young for donors, and it is unreasonable to expect them to give the number and size gifts of their parents and grandparents.

4. There is a framing issue here. If Causes was judged on awareness only it would get an A+ – there are very few mechanisms that enable communities of people to  learn so much about causes so inexpensively.  So, let’s reframe: what if Causes was judged the number of people who know about a cause who didn’t know about it before; the number of people who increase their involvement with that cause by sharing information with friends about it, organizing an event, blogging and tweeting about it, and so on; the number of people who have self-organized an event for the cause. I’m sure there are other meausres, but you get the point, what measures we use to define success will utlimately define us and while dollars in might be easy to measure it’s not alwasy the best one to use.

This leaves us with is the spigot issue.  I was speaking at a conference last year when a development director asked, “How do I get money out of Facebook?”  Oy, or for my lovely readers from the midwest, Ugh! The broad public perception that Causes is a spigot that when turned on will start a gush of donations to causes needs to change. This does not mean that Causes can’t be useful for raising money, the Giving Challenge is proof of lots of money being raised by lots of activists and causes in a short amount of time.  But as Frogloop noted last year, “The problem is that the same challenges apply in any medium — you need to cut through the noise, develop a list of supporters, get those supporters to pay attention, and encourage those supporters to do something.” This takes work and constancy and resilience and patience – nothing qualities that journalists and online watchers are known for!  The bottom line here is that Causes isn’t just about raising money, it’s also about raising friends and awareness, and in the long run turning loose social ties into stronger ones for a cause may be more important than one-time donations of $10 and $20 dollars right now. Our rush to judge this application effective or ineffective over a very short time period with a primary user base of very young people is off base.

Orchestrating Answers on YouTube

I have a new favorite YouTube video.  (Well, OK, I will admit to getting a bit teary-eyed watching Susan Boyle live her dream on Britain’s Got Talent — but I’m not alone on that one!)

But, here’s my new favorite video, the Internet Global Symphony Mashup, a compilation of the virtual auditions YouTube sponsored.

In her brilliantly titled post, “How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?  Upload Upload Upload,” Beth describes the process that led to this mashup:

“The YouTube Symphony Orchestra released the first performance, a premiere of the Tan Dun composition “Internet Symphony, Eroica”  The performers were selected from thousands of video auditions from around the globe. The finalists winnowed down by a jury of professional musicians, not unlike a traditional audition, but the winners were crowdsourced by YouTube users via online voting.  The resulting “mashed up” symphony orchestra, had more than 90 players representing over 30 countries.”

The mashup video is a beautiful piece of artistry in its own right. And it naturally leads to questions of whether and how video auditions and virtual orchestras might aid an ailing arts community in the future. But I need to catch myself before I go too far down that pathway.  It’s too darn easy to race into a cul de sac of zero-sum questions of whether virtual orchestras are better or worse than live ones, rather than a more productive conversation (even if it’s in my own head where I have a lot of conversations!) of how social media can improve and augment orchestras and create a better experience or the players and the audience and a more sustainable model in the future.

Will blogs replace newspapers? Will YouTube replace the local symphony orchestra? Will the Kindle replace printed books?  Those are questions perched precariously on a platform of fear and anxiety and despair, rather than explorations of how we can create new and better models. Maureen Dowd’s column on Wednesday was just this kind of thinking; look at how Google is destroying journalism!  Oh, MoDo, say it ain’t so.  I know you’re scared, I’m scared for you, and newspapers and arts orgs. But journalism isn’t under assault, the business model that depends almost entirely on paid advertisements and classified ads is. The models that were teetering on irrelevance got kicked in the stomach first and hardest by the recession. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need arts and journalism – we just need them in different forms; slimmed down financially and people-wise, beefed up social media-wise.

So, back to our virtual orchestra.  Let’s brainstorm; what could be better about orchestras in the future using social media:

1. As Beth points out, this could be a lighter, less expensive auditioning process for the future.  Virtual auditions would be good for orchestras that could do first-cuts by video, good for auditioners who wouldn’t have to spend the time and money to travel to auditions and have everyone watch them sweat for eight hours.
2. Virtual orchestras could give audiences a preview of upcoming performances with comnentary by conductors and links to references so that the watchers could become as well informed as the players. This would be really helpful to educate younger audience members and remind performing arts orgs (who, sadly, seem to need this kind of reminding a lot) that not everyone comes to their live performances fully educated on the works.
3. Virtual performances could allow composers to try out new works much less expensvely.  It could also allow players to practice new works and get feedback less expensively via social media.
4. Finally, of course, social media lets the rest of us who can’t participate in a live performance share in a syphony’s beauty and joy.

This past Wednesday, the YouTube Orchestra, performers selected by the YouTube community plus members of the world’s finest orchestras, performed live at Carnegie Hall. Enjoy!

A Compass for Social Media for Social Good

Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston posted a summary of their findings from a recent survey of nonprofit donors and their attitudes about causes and giving online. A common complaint of online giving to date (see previous post about Blackbaud survey here) is that the dollar amounts are too low per donor and donors are tending to be one-time givers. In other words, online donors aren’t the elixir to replace the dying direct mail donors. Here are a few sub-highlights (meaning a summary of their summary) of their survey results from 426 online respondents:

• The axiom that older donors give more because they have more to give doesn’t change because of the mechanism of giving;
• 84 percent of the social media savvy aged 30-49 and 55 percent of those older than 50 used conversational media to discuss philanthropy;
• Seventy-seven percent of those 50 and older and 71 percent aged 30-49 prefer email. Additionally, 45 percent of 30-49 year olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks;
• Blogs represent the second most viable source of information next to social networks (among both the digital rich and the traditional brackets);
• 81% want information from a highly credible or quality source
  • 77% from a trusted organization
  • 59% would like to interact with other donors
  • 58% want to interact with philanthropic experts
• In summary, nonprofits and charities have a strong opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations (that may lead to contributions) with the social media savvy (30-49 and >50) – especially those who are uncultivated.

Add to this mix the fact that the fastest growing segment of Facebook users are women over 55 and we can see that social networking sites will be rich areas for discussion, organizing and fundraising for causes from now on.

So, the difficult question for nonprofits right now is: how do we navigate from what has been to what will be while still making payroll? To take that question a bit further, it is really about how you can create the capacity within yourself and your organization for seeing the world as it is but moving towards what it will be. And, for right now in this time of transition, we have to do both.

It is curious to me how often a discussion of social media becomes a zero sum game in people’s minds. If we’re using direct mail we’re not raising money online, or everything that was on land has to go online. The world doesn’t work in such stark black and white contrasts, it is, for better and worse, a continuum of grays.

If you’re struggling wtih how to manage the transition to the connected age of the future for fundraising, here are a few steps to help you get unstuck:

1. Keep doing what works but know and plan like it isn’t going to work forever. In fact, you should plan that this is the last year you’ll be able to do what you’ve done before successfully. You don’t want to get caught totally off guard like newspapers that thought they had much longer to transition from old to new than they really did.
2. Get your conversations going online NOW! Pick one or two places, say Twitter and Facebook, and start talking about your issues and listening to the conversations that folks are having about your cause. Don’t worry if the conversation is small, don’t worry that it isn’t leading to donations right now. You need to practice talking to people online about your cause; these aren’t skills that more traditional orgs have in their DNA.
3. Find one fundraising event or idea to take online this year. Use Facebook to ask your folks for ideas for fundraisers, should we pick a day and everyone does their own thing like Red Nose Day, or should we have one event in person, maybe a lower key breakfast this year instead of a fancy dinner, or maybe a virtual event or contest? Don’t prescribe, listen and learn.

OK, those are you marching orders – get going!

Are You a Person or an Org on Twitter?

There was a great post on the Chronicle’s website today about the use of Twitter by nonprofit organizations.

Great quotes from my Social Citizens blog pal Kari Dunn Saratovsky at the Case Foundation and Beth (of course!) on the various ways that foundations and nonprofits are using Twitter to share news, raise money, organize events and generally connect with their supporters.

But one of the tips at the end of the article left me pondering. It said: Be professional. While for an animal-rights group blogging about vegan recipes may make sense, posting about how disappointed you were in last night’s episode of Lost probably doesn’t.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I do like my Twitter friends to focus mainly on their work and our shared passion for the various ways that social media are enhancing social change efforts. But one of the nicest things about Twitter is how easy it is to get to know someone in such short bursts of communication. I’ve learned that my old friend Ruby is pregnant, and my new friend Qui is moving to the Northwest. I hear about job openings, job woes, what people ate at their business dinner and who is stuck on the tarmac. I am getting to know my business contacts as real people, not as suits behind a desk.

Here’s the best way to see the difference. I am friends with Andy Carvin (who I’ve only met through email and Twitter!) through his personal Twitter account, he also writes the more formal NPR tweets. Andy tweets as a person, where he’s going today, what he’s reading, who he’s seeing, and what great stories are online at NPR.org or other sites that I should read. And I often do. But when his tweets behind the formal NPRpolitics logo show up I hardly ever read them. I’m not friends with a logo and I find them cold to look at on my screen.

So, I think I disagree with the advice that one should be professional on Twitter. I think you should be yourself – which is always the best thing to be anyway, right? You should use Twitter to its best advantage, meaning use it to help you to connect in meaningful ways with large numbers of people who care about you and your cause.

Who Are You?

In find myself asking this one question a lot recently.  And it’s making me cranky  (yes, I know, crankier than usual!) Because one of the greatest attributes of the Connected Age is people connecting with one another. But when companies or organizations hide behind social media tools and make it difficult to figure out who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish it is very aggravating.

Here’s an example: ActiveCause.  It is part of a slew of new social networking sites for causes.  The site is very slick, calling for a higher purpose in philanthropy:

Financial donations are just one part of your giving power – learn how to take philanthropy to a higher level with The Social Giving Network.

I don’t really know what that means. So, I click on the tab for contact us and get a form. I clicked around and can’t find any people on this social site – no Twitter feed, no blog, no About Us. I assume it is intended to be a money making operation, perhaps by taking a percentage of donations given, but that isn’t specified anywhere.

Beth wrote the other day about the difficulty that she had tracking down the cause associated with the Tweetathon:.

I looked the charity up on guidestar and could not find a nonprofit named “Water for Life” that had Ken Surritte listed as the contact.   On the Water is Life site there is not a fleshed about “About” page that tells me anything about the organization’s board, founding, budget, or a donation link.  After a bit of googling, I discovered that the nonprofit has a different name “Hearts and Hands International” and the Water Is Life is a project. (Still couldn’t find them on Guide Star or Networked for Good perhaps their 501-c3 is under a different name?)

Should it be that difficult to track down a legitimate cause?

A few thoughts.

First, radical transparency has to become a standard operating procedure for nonprofits and companies using social media.  The onus isn’t on us, the user, to figure out who you are. The responsibility lies with you to explain who you are and what you’re doing.

Second, if you’re in the business primarily of making money, please tell me rather than hide behind phrases like “giving power”.  I’m not fragile, I won’t crumble because a dot com has found out that millions of people give millions of dollars to causes every year and you want a piece of that.  Of course, it’s a crowded field and others are already doing it, and doing it well, like Network For Good and Change.org.

Third, nonprofit organizations have an even greater responsibility to be radically transparent than businesses — and no reason not to be.  Please put up your tax returns, your board minutes, your strategic plans, org charts, whatever you have, put them up and show the world that you have nothing to hide. It’s going to be a very difficult year to raise money, and transparency will help you to do that.  It used to be that all you needed was a heart-tugging cause.  There are too many causes and too much need to rely only on that strategy now. We need to know why you need money, how you use it, and, most importantly, who you are to make our giving decision.

But most of all, I need people to talk to online.  I need to see the faces of staff people, I need someone to answer questions who has a name, I need to connect with them personally.  So, please, tell me Who You Are!

The Social Giving Network.