Wired Causes

You are browsing the archives of 2011 November.

Note from Beth:   Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.   As I’m sprinting to towards the deadline of my next book on Measurement and Networked Nonprofits, co-authoring with the goddess of measurement, KD Paine,  I’m grateful to have some terrific guest posts like this one. The Networked Nonprofit Response to the Concerted Attack on [...]

One of my daughters just marked her 13th birthday, and she’s busy writing thank you notes for her gifts.  It’s required in our family!  I’m a stickler about that kind of thing.

At the same time, I’m in the midst of putting together an in-depth training on wowing donors with better acknowledgments.

Why am I spending personal and professional energy on thank-yous? I’ll give you four reasons they matter so much to our sector::

1. SURVIVAL: The number one reason that donors stop supporting a nonprofit is the way they were treated by the nonprofit.  They complain about lack of thank-yous and reporting on the difference they made.  Rightfully so! 

2. SUCCESS: Your gratitude helps bond a donor to your cause.  It’s good fundraising practice.

3. DIFFERENTIATION: Most nonprofits are terrible at it. If you’re good, you stand out.  Be the best organization at saying thank-you!

4. MANNERS: Saying “thanks” often and well is simply the right thing to do.

How can you improve your mission statement?

Get rid of all those jargony, intangible words! 

Or, in the words of Dan Heath:

1. Use concrete language.
2. Talk about the why - what makes what you do matter?

Here’s more on that from Dan Heath.  (It’s the all-Dan-Heath weekend here on the blog…)

At Network for Good, we recently tried to do a better job with our vision and mission statements to capture these principles.  What do you think?

Vision: To unleash generosity, with compelling opportunities to do good in the world at every person’s fingertips.

Mission: To deliver the engine and expertise that organizations need to revolutionize giving and unleash generosity on a massive scale.

You could assume people will give more money if you give them a coffee mug.

Or you could assume they might be more motivated by the feeling of knowing they made a difference.

Are you treating your donors as if they are in Maslow’s basement or Maslow’s penthouse?  Check out what Dan Heath has to say about motivating employees - I believe it applies to our supporters as well.

On this Black Friday, when it’s easy to get swept up in our kids’ wish lists and the seasonal buying frenzy, I wanted to offer a little antidote.

Some new research shows that helping our children be grateful for what they have - and teaching them to thank others - makes them (and us) happier.

According to this Washington Post article, researcher Jeffrey Froh found that early adolescents who counted their blessings in a journal every day were more satisfied with their lives, and schoolchildren exposed to a gratitude curriculum reported more appreciation and happiness.

So how do you do this in your own family?  Here are the tips from the article:

1. Be a good role model - thank others in front of your kids.
2. Be positive and encourage reflection on things going right.
3. Curtail commerce - swap out the next mall or Best Buy trip with an outing to the park or a sports event.
4. Help them help others.  In our family, we sponsor another family for Christmas and it’s one of our kids’ favorite parts of the holiday.
5. Take the long view.  Even when your kids are not acting as grateful as you’d wish, try to remember your efforts over time are likely to be internalized eventually.  Like all things in parenting, it’s not easy but it does matter!

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
—Melody Beattie

Here at Net2, we’re pretty excited about the recent Restart Romania social justice challenge. (Maybe you’ve noticed.) The projects, innovators, and ideas, and their real-world impact in Romanian civil society have rightly been the focus of our obsession. The technical home of the challenge, the Net2 beta platform, is a side note at most.

From my perspective as NetSquared product manager, this is as it should be. I want our technology to fade into the background so quietly and nicely that you don’t even notice it.   

Of course, it never happens quite that way. Restart Romania was our first road-test of the Net2 beta platform (the eventual next-gen NetSquared.org), and it came with all the problems and fails you’d expect of a beta launch. But it held up in the end, and Romania now has 5 innovative, world-changing projects and ideas to show for it. For us at Net2, the next question is: how do we do Restart Romania again, do it better, and and do it at-scale?

Beta Lessons from the Challenge

The beta was my first big project here at NetSquared, and it brought together a team of developers and designers who didn’t know each other. So, in other words: New site. New team. Hard deadline. External commitment. And a twitchy product manager completely on-edge about what was going to happen.

And what happened? We crashed. The first day Restart Romania was announced, the site went down. Now, from one perspective, that’s kind of exciting. Enough traffic to crash the site! (I was so proud.) Plenty of people didn’t see it that way, though. Imagine how it must have felt to our partners and friends in Romania who had just announced the challenge publicly and widely, with their reputations on the line.

It took us a few hours to get the site back online, and a few days to ensure we could handle the now-known traffic spikes. We regrouped and re-launched the challenge a full week after the initial crash. OK for a beta, but a turnaround-time and process we’ll definitely need to improve.

We also struggled with the balance between local autonomy and central control. Here at Net2, we wanted to give our friends in Romania all the sovereignty they needed to create a locally-relevant challenge, but still needed to be able to support the site with our own team. Who owns what, how we work together, which way to cede control — we figured all that out as we went along. The whole thing was complicated by the 10-hour time difference between San Francisco and Romania. We’re in a global world, but you still gotta sleep, and sometimes that means many hours go by between a question and an answer — not ideal for rapid-fire development and user response.

Net2 Platform + Community Events: Go-Forward

The Net2 platform is about much more than challenges. At its core, it will be a collaboration engine that helps to surface, organize, and accelerate projects working toward social good. We’re doubling-down on the power of the local event and the reach of the Net2 global network to help bring about on-the-ground impact and social change.

In other words, we want to change the world. Ambitious? Maybe. But our lessons-learned from Restart Romania will help propel us toward this lofty goal as we gear up for the next round of software design and development.

In the meantime, we’re continuing to the kick the tires on the Net2 beta even as we speak. Want to join us? If you have a world-changing idea or project you’ve submitted to NetSquared, we invite you to:

• Join the Net2 All-Star Invitational (and maybe win $500)

• Crystallize your project’s biggest need (and maybe get it solved)

This is the final post of our Restart Romania blog series, but there’s more to come on the Net2 paltform. As we apply these lessons-learned to our platform development and other programmatic work over the next few months, we’ll be sharing our approach and details here on the blog.

In the meantime, I’d love to know your favorite lessons (learned the easy way or the hard way) from betas that you’ve seen or touched. Leave a comment below or @NetSquared.

• What lessons have you learned from beta launches that you’ve been involved in?
• What would you have done differently?  
• What have you seen from other betas you wish they had done differently?

The NetSquared mission is to mix new technologies and social change. How? By connecting people, ideas and enabling discussion. Sounds reasonable and easy, doesn’t it? After all, this concept has its roots in the same idea as many innovation driven offline events have — camps, hackathons and unconferences – it aims to facilitate discussion rather than to impose certain thoughts and topics on a community. Although these new innovative models seem open, natural, and undefined, they actually call for a lot more planning. 

We have recently launched an Invitational targeted at our All Stars, people and organizations who have previously submitted projects (social and tech driven) to the Net2 Project Gallery or a Net2 Challenge. Primarily, we are looking for videos telling stories of impact and expertise. But, again in the light of the Random Hacks of Kindness event, which happens early December all over the world, we are looking for inspiring and cool ideas of how to change the world for the better. We know that coming up with an “easy to implement” idea is hard, and so we have designed a template to help you formulate the idea and make it easy to grasp for a techie. Have you been haunted by an idea for a project for a long time? Or maybe you have never considered coming up with one? Either way we suggest you challenge your creativity and give it a go!

The Translation Exercise

 One of the most difficult elements of the create real-world solution and the most crucial one as well, is that of connecting problems to solutions. In the world of technology and social change, it comes down to translating delicate and nuanced social problems into the binary language of code. It is a cliché that “geeks” can’t communicate with social organizations, but that might just be for a reason. In the Net2 All Stars Invitational we ask you to come up with a name and a brief of your project, we want you to know exactly why would you pursuit the project, and what do you want to achieve. The purpose of the problem formulation template is to ensure that your projects can be very specific and contribute to global change at the same time — we want to help you to frame your idea in an actionable way.

Offline And Online Are Two Sides Of A Coin
 

Yesterday in Poland we have launched an aggregating site dedicated to social hacking. The idea of the portal is to create a database, a forum as well as a point of reference to all social hacking initiatives. It still lacks the most important users input. What we have started with, though, is a short explanation of what social hacking really is, FAQs, as well as international examples of a successful tech driven social projects. Explaining things in words is one thing, but what really counts is practice.  Inspired by an upcoming Random Hacks of Kindness Warsaw event we have planned three meet ups: a NetSquared Local (NetWtorek) to which we invited geeks as well as socially inclined individuals and organizations, a meet up designed to help NGOs in formulating their problems, as well as a meeting for techies, where we will try to explain them the nature and meaning of social projects.

Give The Best Of Yourself And Score Higher

 To share a little (or a whole) bit of your knowledge and expertise for a social cause is like volunteering. It calls for more than time – it is an intellectual effort, but if social change is something that you feel passionately about, it should come relatively easy. And it can be fun!

It might be that by focusing on what your strength is, you will be able to contribute significantly more than you would expect. You may learn and practice applying new solutions to your ideas, which in result can change your usual paradigm of looking at things. You might as well connect with people who think alike, or who challenge your opinions. Eventually, you might even see fruits of your work live or in a form of a prototype. Technology speeds things up – it can all happen in the relative “here” and “now”. We will be sharing your submissions with our friends from Random Hacks of Kindness. Your ideas may inspire and drive this years Random Hacks of Kindndess projects all over the world! 

Be it by submitting an idea to the Net2 All Stars Invitational or checking out opportunities and events such as Random Hacks of Kindness – the new form of volunteering is certainly new, and appealing.  You might as well give it a try!