Reflecting on “Make It Your Own”

The Case Foundation has just released an evaluation of their innovative “Make It Your Own” program.

The assessment was conducted by Peter Levine, Peter Deitz and Cynthia Gibson. One would be hardpressed to find more knowledgeable, thoughtful folks on civic engagement and social media. The Make It Your Own program was a grant program in 2007 created by the Case Foundation to promote “citizen centered” approaches to local community building. With nearly 5,000 applicants and more than 15,000 voters. It was one of the first efforts, perhaps even the first, to use online voting as a way to crowdsource grantmaking.

The key findings of the evaluation include:

• Two years after the grants were awarded, 80 percent of grantees were still highly engaged with their projects and said that they planned to continue to build on them, indicating that the MIYO was able to provide a solid foundation for this work.
• More than half the MIYO grantees had achieved concrete and significant outcomes at the two-year mark, among them:
  • Replication of the citizen-centered model used in Dunn County, Wisconsin in other communities across the country and Canada (Dunn County Community Visioning).
  • Passage of a charter amendment mandating a citizen participation initiative in New Orleans and that the city may subsidize; there will also be a chapter on citizen participation included in the master plan for the city (Citizen Participation).
  • Public recognition and “100 percent support” from the police department in one New York City community for a project to convene police officers and community citizens; it started slowly but now, some of the project’s most committed participants are NYPD officers (Conversations for Change).
  • Statewide participation in an online community-building project in Vermont, which now has 20,000 users and more than 100,000 postings—accomplishments that were recently featured in Yankee magazine (Front Porch Forum).
  • Presentations to Philadelphia’s Department of Health and Human Services about the approach being used by a youth-led initiative that works with young people in the juvenile justice system to reintegrate into their communities. It has also just created a similar effort focused on young people in the foster care system (Juveniles 4 Justice).
  • The creation of four committees—one of which is now part of local government—and requests to partner with other community organizations in convening residents to identify and take action in addressing environmental problems in several Florida neighborhoods. Recently, Good Magazine and a local college of art and design partnered with one committee to run a campaign to encourage students to design new solutions to the community’s water problems (Summit for Environmental Action).
  • Expansion of an effort to recruit young people from Chicago’s southwest side to address community issues using social media and hip hop music. In its first year, the effort reached 400 community residents who took part in the project’s activities. The first class of young leaders also agreed to assume leadership in raising funds needed to financially sustain the project (Leaders of the New School).
  • Raising money for and building a community pavilion and holding public conversations that led to the establishment of a new organization to “boost up the scale”of green activities in nine towns in Massachusetts. That network persuaded seven town governments in the region to join together to be certified by the State of Massachusetts as a “green community”—a designation that allows the community to compete for a portion of a pool of state money for renewable energy projects (Hands Across North Quabbin).
  • In northwest Washington, hundreds of residents, health and community group leaders, government officials, and businesses held several convenings that led to the creation of an action plan addressing a health issue citizens identified as important: improving supports and service provision for children and youth with special health care needs [CYSHCN]. This has led to a new organization—Taking Action for CYSHCN—which now has four action groups, a development team, and a coordinating council that continue to use the citizen-centered approach in all its efforts (Making Health Our Own).
  • While the stories that stem from the Make It Your Own projects are inspirational, so are the numbers. From the Top 20 projects…
    • More than 800 community meetings were held with over 5,500 participants.
    • More than 1,500 action projects took place with more than 3,300 participants.
    • Nearly 20,000 individuals were engaged in some aspect of the projects.
    • Over 600 collaborative partners were involved.
  • Within two years of grant awards,three projects had ended or been forced to close, due largely to the inability of the original leaders to continue serving in that capacity. Also, the Foundation was unable to locate one of the Top 20 projects.
• Other challenges faced by MIYO grantees at the end of two years were county and local budget cuts (which grantees also viewed as opportunities to spur support for their efforts in the community); keeping people interested in the projects; language barriers; and funding (although this was not one that precluded them from moving forward).
• At the end of the one-year grant period, 13 out of 20 grantees (65%) considered themselves at an “advanced” level of citizen-centered work, compared to 11 grantees (or 55%) at the interim stage.
• The grant award enabled winners to conduct public meetings which otherwise may have not occurred. Winning a MIYO award allowed organizations to conduct public meetings that would otherwise have been too expensive or difficult. These meetings attracted diverse groups of people in communities where having opportunities to connect with fellow residents were relatively rare. Most grantees indicated that the meetings were quite productive, suggesting they have the potential to serve as a foundation for ongoing work in these communities after the grant period ends.
• People who participated in MIYO projects believed this participation would increase their civic engagement in the future. MIYO winners were more likely to report that the people they had recruited to participate in their community-based projects said this participation had increased their interest in “doing more” for their communities, now and in the future.
• Even though only 20 projects received funding, a majority of the 4,641 MIYO applicants moved their projects forward. Of those, 28 percent started what was proposed , eight (8) percent completed what was proposed, and 19 percent went beyond what was proposed. Only 18 percent of all applicants reported that they hadn’t done anything.
• Applicants generally liked the grant process, especially learning about the concept and having the chance to describe what they planned to do in that area. Among applicants, the highest-rated aspects of the grant program were learning more about the citizen-centered engagement approach and being given the opportunity to flesh out their projects in more detail via the online application form. Nearly half the applicants (46%) said that what they’d heard and learned about the citizen-centered process was very helpful to the work they did or are doing on their projects. For some of these applicants, the concept was completely new; for others, it “filled gaps” in their knowledge and was “exciting because it completely fits” with what they were already doing.
• The overall applicant pool was not especially strong in terms of its reflection of “citizen-centered” efforts as defined by Citizens at the Center. Despite the Foundation’s efforts to include definitions of this concept in all its materials—including grant guidelines, website announcements, and the applications themselves—applicants tended to interpret the phrase as synonymous with community service, volunteering, and/or “effective or fair delivery of services to citizens,” rather than with community problem-solving that involves citizens.
• The MIYO winners, however, did reflect the citizen-centered concept, suggesting that using a combination of both experts and external reviewers at the final stages of the effort to score and assess proposals was effective in surfacing projects that best illustrated the concept.

Go and read the full report, it’s great stuff.

Org Tips for Network Builders

I thoroughly enjoyed sitting with and learning from an amazing group of nonprofit network builders at The Case Foundation. The tension that participants talked about within their own organizations about taking the walls down and allowing these talented network builders to do what they do best – having conversations with supporters, and potential supporters, wherever they are and going in whatever directions the supporters want, arose throughout the conversation.

So much of the writing and thinking about network builders is focused on what the individual builders are doing with their communities. In our book we also focus on what organizations and their leaders to do to become networks.

For a post on the foundation’s website, I outlined the following key steps and activities that organizations need to do to support their network builders:

Tips for the C-Suite on Network Building:

1. Face the Bogeyman. The fears that organizations have about bad things happening if they take down their walls far outweigh the reality of what happens when they do. It is important for organizational leaders to engage in frank discussions with their network builders about what could possibly go wrong and what is likely to go right rather than allow their unfounded fears stop them. One way to help the c-suite over this hump is to use the growing array of stories and case studies of traditional organizations like Autism Speaks, American Cancer Society that are turning themselves inside out.
2. Challenge the Default Settings. Organizations need to challenge their internal default settings for responding to the world. These settings speak directly to the kind of organizational culture that exists. Metaphorically, organizations need to tie a string around their finger as a reminder of what needs to change in their everyday interactions with the world. Are we open or closed by default? Are we proprietary or open source? Do we let people create things on our behalf or we are prescriptive?
3. Board Engagement. Our roundtable participants described a level of removal from their boards that was frustrating and disappointing for them and ultimately counterproductive for their efforts. Boards need to become hands on with the concepts of network building and social media. It’s as important as reviewing the financial statements, because their organizations cannot be successful in the future without strong growing networks.
4. Touching All Departments. Social media isn’t just a communication or fundraising function. Andrew Rasiej is fond of saying about social media: “It’s not the pizza slice, it’s the pan.” Social media skills need to be built or strengthened throughout the organization and experimentation has to happen across departments. In particular, social media has to be woven into programs and services, the real “it” of nonprofit work.
5. Have Joyous Funerals. Organizations by nature are risk-averse. Through that lens, anything new tried that doesn’t work as expected is considered a failure. Organizational leaders need to celebrate these efforts and focus on what was learned not what was lost. Senior management needs to create space internally for network builders to experiment and learn.
6. Share the Rule Book. It is important to outline the social media policies, the dos and don’ts of social media use, for organizations. What are we allowed to do and say? Where are the lines we can’t cross? This isn’t just to provide legal cover for organizations; it provides permission and clarity for staff to use social media. Approval of the policies can only come from the top, but if organizations want social media use and network building to spread they have to articulate the rules of engagement. Here is a great post from Wild Apricot on how to create nonprofit social media policies.
7. Focus on Social Media Capacity. When the summer intern is asked to “Get us up on Facebook,” it is a wasted opportunity for organizational capacity building. Social media aren’t just tools and platforms, they’re an opportunity to create a robust and resilient network that is ready to respond and act at a moment’s notice. It is an abundant resource of creativity, good will, energy, passion and skills. The network builder, whether it is a summer intern or a staff person, needs to build the capacity of everyone within the organization to help build the network on an ongoing basis. The c-suite needs to focus on social media capacity rather than immediate productivity.
8. Practice Patience. As we discussed in the post on the future of nonprofit network building, redefining success for network building is a work in progress. Organizational leaders (and funders) need to understand that the results will look and feel different from the past habit of counting heads and beds and declaring the battle was won. Building networks takes time and patience and trying to predict their pathways is a fool’s errand. Organizational leaders need to let these efforts unwind and learn along with the builders and the network in real-time what is working and what isn’t.

But this is just a start. This has always felt like the central issue, the core divide within organizations about whether or not they will become networks.

Learning From the Network Builders

I have the honor next Tuesday of facilitating a conversation at the Case Foundation of an amazing group of nonprofit network builders.  The goal is to learn more about what they do and how they do it to inform the field and, hopefully, spur more nonprofits to engage in network building. Here is my post on the Case site more thoughts about the session.

Attendees scheduled to participate are: Scott Beale of Atlas Service Corps, Kate Bladow of Pro Bono Net, Jake Brewer of the Sunlight Foundation, Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Foundation, Deborah Drysdale of the Women Donors Network, Sethi Dushyant of Aid India, Tammy Gordon of AARP, Wendy Harman of American Red Cross, Caitlin Johnson of the Forum for Youth Investment, Carie Lewis of The Humane Society of the United States, Dave McMurtry of Habitat for Humanity International and Jenn Roccanti of Miriam’s Kitchen.

I am enormously grateful to the Case Foundation for their continued support and constant forward leaning efforts to experiment and learn about this new networked environment and its impact on social change.

And, of course, none of this work wouldn’t be possible with the pioneering efforts of June Holley, Valdis Krebs and Jack Richuito have been doing for years at networkweaving.com.

Looking forward to sharing the outcomes of the conversation next week!

Conversational Case Study for America’s Giving Challenge

I’m cooking up some fun with Beth and the Case Foundation again. We are engaged in the evaluation of the second America’s Giving Challenge contest that the foundation sponsored last year. We did a survey and we wanted to do some in depth case studies to better understand the experiences of some of the winners. But rather than do it behind closed doors we decided to do it networked style!

So, here’s the lowdown. Beth has posted the first of what we’re calling a Conversational Case Study on the foundation’s blog.  This first one is about Darius Goes West – they’re a small nonprofit that did a great job of using videos and personal appeals to activate their network to become a winner in the Challenge.  Read their story, it’s really fun and exciting. But their story also raises a couple of interesting questions that Beth outlines in the case study:

• Whether you’re participating in an online contest or implementing a fundraising campaign using social networks, you’ve got to engage your fans and make it easy for them to share your organization’s story with pride and joy. What techniques are you using?
• How have you used social media to personalize your interactions with potential supporters?
• If you are with a small organization, how have you used social media successfully without a big marketing budget?
• How can we put to rest the assumption that large organizations have an automatic advantage using social media?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Please comment on that post or share your insights on a tweet using the hashtag #agc2.

We’ll be posting two more Conversational Case Studies in the next two weeks.  Thanks for participating!

Beth’s Birthday Party

Today is Beth Kanter’s 53rd birthday. I wouldn’t have shared the number with you, but she already has here and here and here on her blog! My friends Amy Sample Ward and Stacey Monk organized an effort by bloggers, a surprise bloggy birthday!, today to wish Beth a happy birthday and help her to reach her birthday goal of sending 53 Cambodia children to school. I’ve just donated $25, I hope you’ll do the same here on Facebook.

But, Amy and Stacey also asked us bloggers to do one more thing for Beth’s birthday. They asked that we share how Beth has impacted your work. Well, that’s might sound like an easy thing to do, but for me it isn’t easy at all. The problem is that Beth has impacted how I think about social media, what I know, who I know and what I do in so many profound ways it’s hard to capture it all! I’ll just highlight a few so you get an idea of how important she is to me as a friend, teacher and partner.

• Beth was the first blogger to review my first book, Momentum. That’s how we met, and I was so struck by her humanness then- she wasn’t an aloof reviewer, she was a full person who just told you what she liked and why without any pretense, and certainly without any snarkiness (unlike yours truly, too often, I’m afraid!)
• We partnered on the assessment of the first round of the Case Foundation’s Giving Challenge last year. We had fun doing it, and I learned so much from her about how Causes and fundraising using social media. But, again, Beth doesn’t just watch from afar, she is a passionate doer and user of social media and her first hand experience as a participant in the Giving Challenge on behalf of the Sharing Foundation was invaluable to our efforts.
• And, finally, Beth is my co-author and partner for our book, The Networked Nonprofit, that Wiley & Sons will be publishing this year. Her insights, experiences, thoughtfulness, and practices are central elements to making the book what I thought it finally became: an important and useful work that perfectly captures this moment in time for nonprofits and social media.

So, my friend, happy birthday, many, many happy returns, and thanks for everything that you have done with me and for me!

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!

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 http://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.

My Giving Guru-ness

I had a fun time last Thursday doing a video chat with Kari Dunn Saratovsky of The Case Foundation in preparation for the upcoming Giving Challenge.

Kari and I chatted for an hour taking questions via Twitter and by email. It wasn’t easy to be that chatty and pleasant for a whole hour but I tried my best!

Here is the video conversation in its entirety. And here are a few links to specific topics you may find interesting:

1.) How much time should small non profits expect to spend using social media?

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2177112/highlight/18811

2.)    How do you convince your CEO to get your organization to engage in social media?

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2177112/highlight/18814

3.)    How do you develop social culture through social media?

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2177112/highlight/18815

4.)    How do you separate the personal from the professional?

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2177112/highlight/18816

Folks should definitely take a look at the other guru conversations as highlighted on The Case Foundation’s home page.

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.

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.