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.

Social Good: Taking Down the Walls of Cultural Institutions

This month’s Social Good podcast is called “How Cultural Groups Can Use Social Media.” My guests are Nina Simon, blogger for Museum 2.0 and Rob Stein, Chief Information Officer of the Indianapolis Art Museum, discussing ways that cultural institutiosn can use social media.That sounds a bit stuffy, really, the podcast is about taking down the walls between institutions and participants.

There were two particular reasons why I wanted to talk to Nina and Rob.  Nina just published a terrific book on the blurring of the lines between cultural institutions and what was formerly called the audience. Her book is called The Participatory Museum. It’s a really smart, fun, well written book. I strongly urge you to give it a read.  You can download it right from Nina’s site or buy it – I’ve done both! Nina’s been in the trenches doing this work for a while and she brings both common sense and idealism to how social media can  remake the relationship between institutions and visitors. As she writes, “By designing explicit opportunities for interpersonal dialogue, cultural institutions can distinguish themselves as desirable real-world venues for discussion about important issues related to the content presented. The growth of social Web technologies in the mid-2000s transformed participation from something limited and infrequent to something possible anytime, for anyone, anywhere. We entered what MIT researcher Henry Jenkins calls a “convergence culture” in which regular people—not just artists or academics—appropriate cultural artifacts for their own derivative works and discussions.”

Rob works for the Indianapolis Museum of Art that has done a wonderful job of creating myriad ways for visitors to discuss the institution and the art work on line. In particular, Beth and I used their online dashboard in our chapter on transparency in the Networked Nonprofit. I love this dashboard not just because of the data that it shows at first glance, but, more importantly, because you can click on any of the data points and see the trends – the good and the bad.

I hope you’ll take a listen to the podcast and hear from Nina and Rob have to say about ways to infuse institutions with social-ness.

Chase Community Giving on Facebook

Chase Bank is sponsoring a $5 million giving program for the holidays. Yup, that’s $5 MILLION they’re giving away on Facebook to nonprofits. Voting ends this Friday, December 11th.

What is so fun about watching the giving challenges and contests unfold is that there are constantly new wrinkles that folks are adding. My Social Good podcast this month was on the proliferation of these kinds of giving contests.

The Chase effort builds on America’s Giving Challenge and the Target’s Bullseye Gives Facebook giving effort had similarities and differences. The Giving Challenge provided matching grants to causes that raised the largest number of friends using Facebook and the Parade magazine site. The winners during both rounds of the Giving Challenge were small, often unstaffed, nonprofits. Bullseye had Facebook users vote for nonprofits to receive part of their $1 million prize based on a pre-selected group of nonprofits.

Chase has taken the level playing field of the Giving Challenge and combined it with the voting of Bullseye. But, Chase has also added an interesting twist by having over 500,000 local nonprofit organizations eligible for the voting. All of these eligible nonprofit organizations are all small, local organizations. One chooses an organization, or searches by zip code. The goal, for Chase, is to concentrate their giving on local communities. This is also part of their business strategy of developing stronger personal relationships in communities with branches of Washington Mutual Bank that they absorbed last year.

Go on over to Facebook and vote for a few of your favorite local nonprofits today, and then let’s see what comes next in terms of contests and giving.

Digital Games for Change

This month’s edition of the Social Good podcast was is up on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s website. The topic this month are the ways that digital games can be used for social change.

According to the Entertainment Software Industry association’s website, $11.7 Billion was spent on video games in 2008 alone and 68% of American households are playing video games. This doesn’t include the growing number of free games downloaded onto iPhones and other mobile devices. Gaming is HUGE, and will continue to grow exponentially.

A few groups are creatively using them to raise awareness and funds for causes. My guests on the podcast are Alex Quinn, the Executive Director of Games for Change and Brian Reich, who has the coolest title ever, Principle Evangelist of a new for profit venture called GamesThatGive, to talk about the ways that digital games can impact social change.

I was struck during our conversation about how both groups are using digital games for change but in diametrically opposite ways.

Alex and the groups that his organization supports are creating games with a serious purpose. Against All Odds has users experience the life of a global refugee. 3rd World Farmer has players experience managing a virtual farm in a third world country. Players learn about issues and even develop action steps beyond the game. Schools are incorporating these kinds of games into their curricula.

Brian’s group is a for-profit start up that is leveraging the large amounts of time people are playing casual games like Solitaire and Gems. By encouraging casual game playing on their site, the company will be donating a portion of the ad revenue the site is generating to donate to causes like nonprofit organizations like the Wilderness Society.

I love the idea that both of these groups arrived at the idea of using digital games for change in entirely different ways. It is a great reminder that there is no one right way to use social media for social change.

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.

Andy Carvin of NPR on Social Good Podcast

The latest installment of the Social Good Podcast is up on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s site.

Andy Carvin, the social media mavin of NPR, is my guest.  We talk about how he is helping NPR, and the reporters, use social media to share content and engage various communities in discussions of issues and contributions to content development.

Andy’s advice to smaller nonprofits is to stay nimble and keep innovating and experimenting.  Don’t worry about failing, he said, just keep learning.

He’s currently in search of a good volunteer management software solution for a Web 2.0 environment.  I found this run down of applications put together by Jayne Cravens.  I know folks have used CiviCRM, but wondering if others have thoughts about any of these applications.

2nd Social Good Podcast is Posted

The second edition of the Social Good podcast that I host for the Chronicle of Philanthropy has just been posted.

The topic this month is whether and how the nonprofits and foundations can take advantage of social capital in light of our reduced financial capital.  Lucy Bernholz and Katya Andresen are my guests and they’re just terrific, smart, straightforward and helpful.

There are also some useful resources up on the Chronicles website, too.  Let me know what you think about this topic and the podcast in general. Enjoy!