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 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.

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.

Social Citizens One Year Later

Just back from the WeMedia conference.  Had a terrific time and will post highlights of my interview with Alberto Ibarguen, President of the Knight Foundation, as soon as I receive them.

As part of my presentation, I wrote a reflection piece on what we’ve learned about Social Citizens in the year or so since the paper was release by The Case Foundation.  This is cross-posted on the Social Citizens blog and here is the entire reflection the paper from the WeMedia site.

Social Citizens One Year Later . .

<p>This time last year we were reading drafts of the Social Citizens paper and wondering whether it was sea worthy, meaning would the findings and assumptions hold up over the course of a few stormy tosses and turns. And now we know the answer: mostly yes. Of course, we missed one big thing coming on the horizon, more than a storm, an economic tsunami really, but, then again, so did everone else!&nbsp;</p>
<p>In preparation for the <a href=”http://www.wemedia.com”>WeMedia</a> conference taking place this week in Miami, I wrote a short reflection piece on the Social Citizens paper a year later.&nbsp; Here is a quick summary of that paper.</p>
<p>Certainly the intensity of interest in social causes, and the rapdity of growth of individual causes and cause events, has continued and perhaps even quickened because of social media. Twitter, the<a href=”http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/”> fastest growing</a> social networking site, has spawned events like <a href=”http://tweetsgiving.org/”>Tweetsgiving</a> and <a href=”http://www.twestival.org”>Twestival</a>, raising thousands of dollars to build schools in Africa and buy drinking wells and filters for clean water worldwide.</p>
<p>But the construct of Social Citizens has also changed throughout the year. One issue in particular that we wrestled with throughout the year was whether Social Citizens are by definition Millennials (ages 15-29). And I think that the answer is, naturally, more complicated at second glance than at first. Not all Millennials are Social Citizens, and not all Social Citizens are Millennials.&nbsp; But there is more movement on the later idea than the former, particularly when you see the <a href=”http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1093/generations-online”>data that the Pew Foundation recently released </a>showing that older people are coming online faster than any other segment of the population.&nbsp; And old in this instance isn’t me (regardless of what my kids say) it means over 75!&nbsp; Your grandparents are on email, your parents are on Facebook, and you’re on Twitter, and we’re all pinging and poking and tweeting about causes. Increasingly, we’re all social citizens.</p>
<p>That’s the good news. Unfortunately the bad news is really bad, the fast sinking economy is the first economic crisis young people have ever faced. Sagging beneath a pile of credit card and student loan debt, unable to find jobs, unwilling to live at home, the patina of effortessness that had clung to Millennials all their lives is beginning to wear off. How this will affect causes is uncertain at this point, but it’s difficult to imagine that the cup of coffee grown on an organize farm by an entrepreneurial native family will do as well today as it would have last year against the less expensive one.</p>
<p>One very interesting issue to watch moving forward this year is the growth of the public sector as the stimulus money begins to move through the system. Certainly the early signals are that Millennials who were very involved in the presidential campaign are not as drawn to the messy reality of governing. However, if the only growth area for jobs in the next year or two is the public sector, that may change the wariness and distance that young people have had from the public sector as a whole.</p>
<p>We’ll continue to watch from our perch here on the blog and on Facebook and Twitter and whatever the new Twitter is and continue to learn how people engage with one another for causes and how those causes affect our relationships and our communities.</p>

Case Foundation Launches “Change Begins With Me” Campaign

The Case Foundation just launched their “Change Beings With Me” campaign to coincide with the new year and new administration in Washington, DC.

Tell the Case folks how you’re going to help change the world in 2009 (in 250 characters or less, think of it as a muscular Tweet!) and a few lucky winners will get:

n Inauguration trip for two and a unique opportunity to serve on MLK day! Package includes:

• two tickets to the Inaugural Ceremony & the Hawaii Inaugural Ball
• three-nights hotel stay
• airfare for you and a guest to the Nation’s Capitol
• a Flip video camera

Here are a few of the commitments already up on the site:

Dorothee R: leveraging the power of social media to mobilize volunteers in my community. I plan to use online networks to gather crowds for short and fun volunteer flash mobs to benefit homeless shelters, food banks and local parks.
Keyoka N: Volunteering more, I just recently volunteered helping high school sophmores and I had a blast, I realized how much I enjoy helping kids and young adults make decisions today that will ultimately decide their future.
Josephine T: Making my neighbourhood cleaner and safer. I also plan to make more people aware of the FREE assistance programs that are available to those who are in need of mortgage modifications.

The GiveList is Launched!

The GiveList was launched yesterday as a resource for supporting causes in a year when many of us won’t have the means to write a check (although if you do have the means, please do so!)

The site is a really simple way to aggregate great, creative ideas for supporting causes. Just use the tag #givelist on Twitter or de.licio.ous for ideas on ways to give and support communities and causes and they’ll pop up on the site. Of you can post a comment on the site of a great idea that you have.

The most creative ways of supporting causes without have to spend, buy or donate any  money  (as determined by, well, me!) will be listed under the favorites category. So, start thinking and pinging and tagging!

The idea for the GiveList began to crystallize when my colleagues and I at the Case Foundation began to think about reviewing last year’s Guide to Good Giving for this holiday season’s giving. But, sadly for the world, this year feels very different from last year.  We began to think about providing more alternatives for people to support causes in a really tough economy.

In partnership with my friend, Marnie Webb, the co-CEO of TechSoup Global (really, global!), we did what good Social Citizens do — we put up a WordPress blog overnight, started to populate it with the tag givelist, and away we went.

As I posted on the site last night – wow, what an immediate response!  Here’s more from that post:

In the few hours that GiveList has been up and running, we are delighted and thrilled with the enthusiasm and excitement with which our idea has been received.  Thanks to Beth Kanter for so creatively adding GiveList to an upcoming presentation in Boston, and Lucy Bernholz

for posting about it so quickly.  Thanks to the tens of tweeters using the #givelist hashtag and sharing ideas and helping to spread the word.  Here’s my favorite tweet of the day from Missashe, “swoon #givelist (Hat tip, everyone I follow on twitter…) love, love, love this idea!”

So, thanks again for giving our idea oxygen and love, as someone said to us this afternoon, “Just because I’m poor doesn’t mean that I have to be stingy!”

I’ll provide updates here on the great ideas we’re receiving, but, please help spread the word and put on your thinking cap ’cause it’s going to take a lot of creativity and elbow grease to help our causes and communities through the winter.

The Release of Social Citizens (beta)!

The release of Social Citizens ^BETA today is very exciting for what it isn’t – and what it is. Late last year, Kari Dunn and Ben Binswanger of The Case Foundation asked me to write a paper for the Foundation about the emergence of Millennials, 15-29 year olds, as activists. They wanted to know more about how these young people are using all of their widgets and gadgets for causes.

And that’s when we talked about what the paper isn’t.

We decided to go beyond a simply litany of the ways that young people are using blogs, social networks, and videos to share information about their favorite causes. We wanted to go a step further and ask harder “so what” questions. What does it mean to Millennials to have the ability to become an advocate for their cause instantly, broadly, inexpensively, and what does their ability to do so mean for the rest of us?

The Foundation provided me with an opportunity to cast a wide net across the real of Millennial activism; from Facebook to the Red Campaign, from the presidential campaign trail to the human devastation in Darfur, from Gossip Girls to Invisible Children, a documentary about the difficult lives of the children of Uganda. I followed the trail of email, blogs, YouTube videos, websites, donations, Tweets, and IMs around the country and even across the globe. I interviewed over thirty people, read many articles, papers, books, and websites, and examined the data on who is doing what for causes. And what I found was astounding for its scope, scale, and idealistic intentions.

Marnie Webb, a key informant in the paper, asked, “What, if anything, does all of the clicking, blogging, and “friending” add up to in the end?” And my answer is, “Far more than I imagined, far greater than I had hoped.”

Millennials are doing more than pinging and poking and sharing information about causes. They are radically altering the very notion of what it means to be an active citizen in the process, and that’s why we’re calling them Social Citizens. They are viewing their responsibility to their larger community solely through a cause lens. They are clicking, buying, running, hammering, petitioning, and sharing information with their friends.

And, you, my careful reader, have noticed that there is a “beta” on the end of Social Citizens in the title of the paper. This is to remind that this field of youth activism is changing at breakneck pace. American humorist James Thurber said, “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.” And certainly, in this case, we know that there are lots and lots of questions without answers yet — and this is fantastic news to folks like me and my colleagues at the Case Foundation who like having conversations with other people who are interested in increasing the number of people who are actively engaged in trying to improve our world.

However, as encouraging as this news is, their activities raise serious questions. Is it possible to envision a very large generation of citizens who lead their lives at a great distance from government, even lives infused with causes, volunteering and a hopeful outlook about the world. Can government really be irrelevant to their lives, and, if so, is this a good thing for society? Is it important that young people are engaged in public policy advocacy? Is our tendency to connect only with like-minded people using our on line and on land social networks a good thing for activism or a critical bottleneck to the effective scaling for causes? Are social change institutions critical to the future of Social Citizens and their causes or are they becoming old-century anachronisms of top-down hierarchies that can’t survive much longer?

So, what do you think? I hope you’ll read and enjoy Social Citizens ^BETA, and I’m looking forward to our upcoming conversation and your ideas, thoughts, comments, and questions about Social Citizens.