Wired Causes

You are browsing the archives of 2012 January.

Infusing Social Into Social Justice Organizations – Guest Post by Daniel Jae-Won Lee, Executive Director of the Levi Strauss Foundation Time Magazine provocatively named “The Protester” as its 2011 “Person of the Year” for its riveting influence on last year’s social and political events. As courageous citizens connected with each other to express dissent and organize [...]

I heard a great presentation yesterday from DonorsChoose at the Social Media for Nonprofits conference.  Marketing Manager Anna Doherty shared six lessons her organization - which is fantastic at engagement - applies to its social media work.

1. Join the conversation around the cause: She listens first - always a good rule for social media - and chimes in on conversations others are having about her cause.

2. Share content and collateral that’s unique to the organization.  One of the strengths of DonorsChoose is its stewardship.  When you donate more than $50, you get wonderful thank you notes from students helped by your contribution.  She posts some of the best (and cutest) notes on the DonorsChoose Facebook page.

3. Celebrating big news.  Don’t be meek about posting good news - like crossing fundraising milestones.  Give your community cause to celebrate.

4. Share staff culture.  DonorsChoose staff tweet each other messages about birthdays and other events to reflect their fun, tight-knit culture.

5. Remember the medium.  Think big picture – people on Facebook respond to different things than Twitter.  Anna tried trivia questions on both, and they were popular on Facebook but flopped on Twitter. 

6. Balance quality and frequency.  Don’t just post for the sake of posting.  Anna learned the hard way that if she posted because she felt she must and the content wasn’t meaningful, it lowered engagement levels.

Good advice.

And although this wasn’t on Anna’s list, she was doing it, so I’m adding it:

Set a goal and test and measure against it.  DonorsChoose counts conversion to donations - with followers or likes secondary aims.  That helps them know where to focus, what to do and how to measure. 

We are very excited to announce the members of the 2012 Global Leadership Council:

• April Kyle, San Francisco, California, USA
• Aysegul Guzel, Istanbul, Turkey
• Eduardo Bejar, Guayaquil, Eduador
• Eli van der Giessen, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Ivan Boothe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• John Wells, Sydney, Australia
• Maria Zaghi, Guatemala City, Guatemala
• Moorthi PV, Silicon Valley, California, USA
• Steven Flower, Manchester, United Kingdom
• Tierney Smith, Toronto, Canada
• Yudi Emmanuel, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire

Congratulations and welcome! This inspiring group of NetSquared Local leaders will work together to help us improve NetSquared programs and services. We cannot wait to see what ideas and solutions surface over this coming year.

Meet the 2012 Global Leadership Council members, say welcome, and connect with those in your location.

As mentioned in our previous posts (here and here), Global Leadership Council members will share their experiences and expertise in ways that help to foster programing, events, and growth associated with the NetSquared Local groups. The Council will also help to identify current capabilities of Local groups, what works and where there are hurdles to improve support, program design, and other desired capabilities of the Local groups and community.

To ensure that the Global Leadership Council is appropriately supported and that all information is communicated to the NetSquared community at-large, the following members of the NetSquared team will part of the support team:

• Billy Bicket, Senior Director, Meet Billy
• Marc Manashil, Community Evangelist, Meet Marc
• Claire Sale, Community Curator, Meet Claire
• Anka Kuliberda, Global Community Builder, Meet Anka
• Vanessa Rhinesmith, GLC Organizer, Meet Vanessa

We held our inaugural meeting on Friday, January 20, 2012 with a discussion that centered around participation norms, member and NetSquared expecatations, and a conversation about challenges and opportunities of NetSquared. Stay tuned for a complete wrap up of the call later this week.

In the meantime, stay connected by:
    •    Following and participate the conversation on Twitter using #net2glc
    •    Reading the NetSquared blog for reflections from the GLC members
    •    Sending me, Vanessa, NetSquared Local topics for the GLC to address

This last blog in the Net2 2012 Look Ahead blog series focuses on the mobile world, and how it is revolutionizing the way we think about social change. I talked it through with Dale Zak, a mobile software developer passionate about helping people in need.

Over the past three years, Dale has contributed to Ushahidi’s crowdsourced crisis mapping platform (to learn more about Ushahidi in the context of Net2 watch this net2allstar video), helped The Extraordinaries build their micro-volunteer system, as well as developed open source plugins for FrontlineSMS. He also coordinated several social good initiatives including organizing Mobile Tech 4 Social Change conference in Halifax, formed Apps4Good to bring together software developers to build apps for charity, established Repurposed Labs to re-purpose used computers into public internet terminals for low income communities, and deployed I Vote Because map to spark a pro-democracy movement why voting is important in Canada. This past December Dale travelled to Lusaka to teach Zambia’s first mobile development workshop at the BongoHive.

Dale’s interests and experience intersect with these of NetSquared on many levels — the technology one, the social change one, as well as the international reach one. Dale has lived and traveled to different countries; he understands the diversity of social problems, and has worked his way through global projects. 

Read this short interview with Dale to learn more about how mobiles can change the world, and what they will be changing in the technology world in 2012. I also strongly encourage you to check out Dale’s blog, especially the articles on Building Technology vs. Solving Problems and Harnessing The Power Of Mobile, as well as the blog post from the iHub Nairobi in which he shares his thoughts on mobile design.

Q: What would be your favourite mobile “apps for good” examples?

To understand the true power of mobile, one must appreciate the full spectrum of device capabilities. Even low-end devices with basic SMS, MMS and USSD can be a powerful platform for collaboration. On the high-end side, smartphones with accelerators, touch screens, NFC, GPS capabilities can be an incredibly powerful suite of tools. My favorite mobile apps are the ones that combine these individual device features in an unique way to help solve a problem.

One of my favorites is Safety Siren, an iPhone and Blackberry app developed by YWCA Canada that turns your smartphone into an emergency SOS system. Shaking the device or touching the safety button activates a loud siren which automatically shares your location with an emergency contact. The brilliance behind the app comes by combining the touch-screen, accelerometer, audio, GPS and internet capabilities into an emergency SOS system helping protect the user in an unsafe situation.

M-Farm is another one of my favorites, SMS-based solution that helps empower farmers with accurate market information. The tool utilizes SMS as a platform allowing any SMS-capable phone to obtain accurate market prices. For example, a farmer in Kenya can simply send a text message ‘price tomatoes nairobi’ to 3535 and receive the suggested market price. M-Farm is a great example of using an appropriate technology and that even the low-end devices can be a powerful tool for collaboration.

Another one of my favorites is Good Guide, a mobile app that helps empower consumers to buy safe, healthy, and green products. The app utilizes the devices camera as a barcode scanner to provide ratings and personal recommendations for over 120,000 products. Good Guide is a great example of mobile being used a decision making tool, providing valuable information on the demand.

Q: You have worked in many places and environments — how would you say that social innovation in North American and Europe differ from the one developed Africa?

Last summer I spent four months living in Nairobi and working from the iHub. While there, I noticed a sharp contrast to North America where developers are ‘building technology’ rather than ‘solving problems’. At home, companies are focusing on creating another social network, building another photo sharing app or developing another groupon clone, none of which are solving real problems. In Nairobi, most developers were trying to solve local problems, and in the process finding creative ways to make money. A good example was Pivot25, a mobile development competition in Nairobi where every startup at the event pitched an innovation solution that was aiming at solving a local problem.

There was a great article in The Next Web on The Problem With Silicon Valley Is Itself which really highlighted this issue, “one of the reasons for lack of innovation in the Valley is that entrepreneurs are not exposed to enough real-world problems.” Innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines by identifying a real problem, defining a practical solution, finding an appropriate technology and targeting a local market. Software by itself isn’t very interesting, but applying that technology is where real innovation happens.

A good example is here in Saskatchewan where we have an agriculture based economy, one of the best agriculture colleges in the country and a strong tech community. My question is, why isn’t Saskatchewan a world leader in agriculture software? I believe, one of the reasons is that developers are not having a conversation with farmers about the challenges they are facing. We are missing a huge opportunity because we are focusing on building technology without asking what problem we are trying to solve.

Q: What do you think will 2012 bring into the mobile driven world of social efforts?

We are going to continue to see explosion in mobile driven by the ‘perfect storm’ of connectivity, availability, speed, power, features, and price. The processing power and capabilities of devices and network coverage and data transfer speeds to these devices is continuing to increase, while the overall cost of handsets is decreasing.

A good example is Huawei’s IDEOS Android phone which sells for 8000KSH (~$80USD), saw massive adoption in Kenya this year. The upcoming release of the Datawind’s $35 tablet and OLPC $100 XO-3 will lead to an explosion of tablet devices for the bottom of the pyramid. The trend of faster devices in the hands of more people with increased connectivity will also drive demand for more mobile apps. This creates new opportunities for developers to build innovative tools for this emerging market. We will also see more initiatives like Orange providing Wikipedia free in the Middle East and Africa. The smartphone and mobile apps will begin to challenge SMS as the appropriate technology for the bottom of the pyramid, many already predicting the decline of SMS as a result.

Q: What are the challenges that mobiles will have to face in order to solve even more social problems?

Accessibility is one challenge often overlooked, how can we develop solutions that are accessible to all groups of society? 

In December I had an opportunity to meet with Hendrik Knoche, a professor from EPFL in Lausanne specializing in accessible mobile interface design. Hendrik is developing a mobile application for illiterate farmers in India and also helped create EasySMS which empowers illiterate people to read, compose and send text messages through text-to-speech. The question he posed to me was, how do you design a mobile app for a person who can not read? Our conversation really challenged my notions on mobile design, and exposed a lot of misconceptions on design strategy. 

Multilingual is another aspect of accessibly often overlooked. So many mobile applications are English-only, making them useless for non-English speakers. Translating apps to other languages as well as local dialects will need to become the norm, rather than the exception. As mobile expands into more aspects of our lives, it is important that we strive to ensure the tools we develop are accessible to all, especially vulnerable populations whom can often benefit the most.

Content Curation for Nonprofits View more presentations from Beth Kanter Here are my slides and curated resources materials for a talk called “What Can Nonprofits Learn from Robin Good,  the Best Content Curator on the Planet?” that I will be presenting at the Social Media for Nonprofits.   This area, content curation, is a social media competency that [...]

One of the best books I have ever read to strengthen my marketing skills was Influence, by Robert Cialdini.  If you’ve never read this book, you really should.  In the book, Cialdini covers six principles of persuasion:

1. Reciprocity - People tend to return a favor, thus all those annoying address labels charities send out as a fundraising ploy.

2. Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people whom they like. That’s why you want your champions spreading the word about your cause among their friends and family.

3. Scarcity - Perceived scarcity fuels demand. “Only four memberships are left” prompts action!

4. Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.  Just check out the well-dressed man in a suit jay-walking in the below video.  Everyone on the street corner follows.  When he wears a sweatshirt, no one follows. That’s the principle of authority at work.

5. Social Proof - People will do what other people are doing. That’s why it’s great to show who is taking action for your cause - others are likely to conform.

6. Commitment and Consistency - If people commit to an idea or goal, they are more likely to follow through.  I’ve covered that several times on the blog lately.  It’s why pledging is a great option for people who aren’t ready to take action.

If you don’t have time to read the book, watch this wonderful 30 minute interview with Cialdini from Swedish television (don’t worry, it’s in English).  He walks through each principle, with vivid examples of these ideas being used for social good, for manipulation and for propaganda.  It’s well worth your time.

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Due to the technical issues connected to recording a skype interview with Dale, I have been forced to push the publishing date to next Monday. It will still be January, so it totally makes it as a perfect closure for the series (let me remind you, that so far you read about SOPA & ACTA, the  Green Tech trends, as well as the future of Web Design). Dale Zak is a mobile developer passionate for social change, with plenty of experience in running and supporting social projects. Stay tuned, and trust me — it will be worth it!

With the Network for Good team, I just created a mini-course on thanking donors.  It’s a self-guided tour to writing great thank-yous and treating donors well all year - so they will give again!  (It’s not free, but I immodestly think this guide to stewardship is worth every penny.  Learn more here.)

So do you treat your donors well?  To figure it out, take this quiz.  (It’s free.)

And remember the rock bottom, bare minimums when it comes to donor stewardship!

1. ALWAYS THANK YOUR DONORS: Always.  No exceptions.
2. THANK THEM EARLY: You should thank your donors within a few days of their gift. 
3. THANK THEM OFTEN:  Thank your donors several times, over time, and keep reporting back on the difference they have made.
4. THANK THEM ACCURATELY: Make sure you have correctly spelled the donor’s name, stated the amount and date of the donation, included appropriate language for taxes and carefully noted if the gift was made in honor of someone else.

If I had a dollar for every charity that didn’t do these four things when I gave…