Social Action Platforms

ZaZengo screenshotWhat happens when an ex-Microsoft developer and a repeat social entrepreneur join forces? In the case of ZaZengo co-founders, John Rae-Grant and Vicki Saunders, the result is a groundbreaking new initiative for creating and executing person-to-person social actions.

Unlike many social action platforms—Facebook Causes, Change.org, ChangingthePresent, and others—the user-generated projects on ZaZengo will not emphasize raising money or leveraging support for existing organizations. Instead, projects on ZaZengo will focus on creating impact in and of themselves, through the unpaid efforts of individuals working outside of organizations.

The ZaZengo model draws heavily on SourceForge.net, an open-source software development community founded in November 1999. SourceForge.net has been credited with the creation of numerous high-impact software projects. Audacity, one of the most popular tools for producing podcasts, is one such project. SourceForge.net boasts over 150,000 projects and more than 1 million users. Using SourceForge.net, companies can find and underwrite existing projects that address the software needs of their businesses.

By the same token, managers at nonprofits and program associates at foundations will be able to affiliate their organizations with specific ZaZengo projects. An organization can then list the impact of these projects on their website and ZaZengo profile. Example impact metrics include trees planted, meals served, resources shared, and events held. “Our platform puts the power of individual action in the hands of organizations. It’s an ‘outside-in’ process,” Rae-Grant said.

SourceForge.net also encourages software developers to publish an inventory of their skills. This feature allows project leads to find co-developers with relevant expertise. ZaZengo’s user profiles will permit individuals to list their social change skills and areas of interest. Project initiators can then recruit support from other users in the community based on this information.

ZaZengo is incorporated in California as a for-profit business. Saunders, a repeat social entrepreneur, sees the for-profit status as a potential force for good. “Business changes the world,” she said in our telephone interview last month. For Saunders, Rae-Grant, and their investors, the challenge is to turn a profit while building an innovative “project engine” for social transformation.

ZaZengo will make money by selling highly-targeted advertisements. The ads will appear on ZaZengo’s website and on nonprofit branded profile pages and widgets. A portion of all advertisement revenue will be shared with the nonprofits. At least one foundation has already taken note. The Case Foundation, co-creators of this year’s Giving Challenge, is helping ZaZengo to find nonprofit partners.

Rae-Grant left Microsoft for a career in social entrepreneurship after reading Paul Hawkin’s Natural Capitalism. In our interview last month, Rae-Grant said that his new mission is to “raise the IQ of the species.” A graduate of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, Rae-Grant has since worked on numerous social innovation projects. Saunders first contacted Rae-Grant following a 1997 article in FastCompany that profiled TeamWorks, his previous company. They have been collaborating ever since.

ZaZengo version 1.0 will launch in mid-January 2008. If successful, ZaZengo will revolutionize the way organizations relate to their constituents. Anticipating this effect, ZaZengo’s slogan is “The quickest path to action.”

In a statement released yesterday, NetworkforGood and Change.org announced the following partnership.

Yesterday, I received an email from Change.org founder Ben Rattray about the launch of their Ning-style Social Networking solution for non-profits. Ning is a social network that shares a common user-base but allows individuals to setup stand-alone social networks with their own look and feel.

Nonprofits can now build branded social networks on Change.org that have many of the features a non-profit would want to offer its supporters: individual project listings, a news section, fundraising pages, fundraising widgets, and more.

The branded service costs US$20 / month and comes with Facebook integegration. The actions that an individual takes in support of a non-profit will also show-up on the supporter's Facebook profile, provided they have added the Change.org application in Facebook.

TechCrunch covered the story on Sunday night. Check the comments section for a range of responses.

In Ben's words, here are more details about the program:

• Branding – similar to Ning, these branded networks will have the look and feel of a nonprofit's website.
• Data – organizations will be able to capture a significant amount of supporter data (all of which users can opt-out of) – including contact and demographic information as well as information on who in their network is the most active and effective at recruiting additional members, etc. As you know, this is hugely important for most orgs.
• Integration – we are working on integrating with several of the major nonprofit CRM/CMS providers (Democracy In Action will be the first) so content that organizations post through their CMS (such as an email campaign targeting congress) automatically appears on their Change.org network, and data captured through Change.org from donations or actions is automatically dumped back into their CRM as if the transaction occurred on their website. Our aim is to be a social layer on top of an organization's website and to plug directly into their existing CRM/CMS infrastructure.
• Features – the branded networks have all the social networking functionality nonprofits might want along with enhanced features for starting social fundraising campaigns and online advocacy campaigns and allowing users to create their own personal fundraising pages. We'll be expanding these features in the next few months (and are currently working on making many of these features portable through OpenSocial).
• Communication – organizations can now send broadcast messages to all their supporters on Change.org and pro-actively recruit Change.org users from around the site to join their community. We'll be enhancing these communication/recruitment tools over the next couple months as well.

Screenshots of branded networks on Change.org:

On Friday, I received a mass email from PayPal announcing a ChipIn style widget for raising money on MySpace and Facebook. PayPal's entrance into peer-to-peer fundraising is no surprise. I wonder what the long-term effect will be on the existing group fundraising platforms. Until now, the likes of ChipIn, NetworkforGood, and FirstGiving haven't had giant tech companies as competition.

Exceprts from the PayPal email:

Today, Change.org launched a news section (beta), featuring the top stories from various sources matched with relevant giving opportunities. ChangingthePresent (click on the left hand categories) and GiveMeaning (click on the "news" tab) have also added news sections within the last few months.

News stories -- the theory goes -- sometimes inspire "do something" moments in an otherwise passive audience. By adding news sections to their distributed fundraising websites, Change.org, GiveMeaning, and ChangingthePresent are hoping to guide more people to meaningful and relevant action.

Examples:

For the last few months, my friend Frerieke van Bree has been working on a social action platform called Umeebee. Her site will connect donors with the beneficiaries of group fundraising campaigns through the use of video, images, and blogs.

Initially, Fre plans to focus on projects that help children in Africa. Eventually, the site will also profile projects that are created elsewhere in the world across a range of topics. Umeebee will primarily feature projects that receive support through person-to-person fundraising.

Last week, I recorded some footage of Frerieke talking about Umeebee. She has edited the footage and created an inspiring introduction to the project.

SixDegrees and FirstGiving both launched RSS feeds today. The SixDegrees feed contains links to Charity Badges with at least one donation. FirstGiving's feed consists of new fundraising pages with the greatest 'velocity' (many donations recently). I have added both feeds to Social Actions:

• Fundraising Pages on FirstGiving
• Charity Badges on SixDegrees

Although the form of these feeds is RSS 2.0, I'm calling them RSSA feeds (short for Really Simple Social Actions). You can learn more about RSSA here and on RSSA.org.

I just received this email from the FirstGiving team.

Check out this example

Last week, SixDegrees.org announced new matching grants of $10,000 for the six charity badges that recruit the greatest number of individual donations between July 19th and September 16th, 2007.

SixDegrees is a web site that permits anyone with an internet connection to create a person-to-person fundraising campaign in support of a non-profit organization registered in the United States.

Person-to-person fundraising campaigns are supporter-driven efforts to raise money for an organization through the use of blogs, video, images, widgets, and social networking web sites. SixDegrees is one of sixteen platforms for person-to-person fundraising.

NetworkforGood launched SixDegrees in January 2007 at the Sundance Film Festival with the endorsement of Kevin Bacon and other Hollywood stars. At the same time, the organization announced its first round of matching grants. The combination of celebrity-appeal, matching-grants, and a fixed deadline for raising funds resulted in $600,000+ in charitable giving, most of which arrived in the final days of the competition.

With the marketing reach of Hanes, Inc. along with improvements to the underlying technology of the SixDegrees charity badges, the new matching grants are poised to generate at least as much in charitable giving ahead of the September 16th deadline.

The winners of the first round of matching grants received between 795 and 2,313 individual donations.

Assuming the bar remains at the same level, winners of the second round of matching grants will have to recruit 50 times the benchmark average for individual donations to a group fundraising campaign and five times the benchmark average for individual donations to ‘successful’ group campaigns.

See Show Me the Numbers: Can Group Fundraising Help You for more information on the benchmark figures and a definition of ‘successful’ group fundraising campaigns.

Since SixDegrees.org emphasizes the number of donations as opposed to the amount raised, it is not surprising that the average donation size to the winning charity badges is lower than the benchmark average of $43.30. The winners of the first round of matching grants averaged donations of $21.22.

The lesson for participants in the second round of SixDegrees matching grants: Ask for very small donations from everyone you know, and then ask everyone you to ask everyone they know!

More tips can be found here.

A $10,000 matching grant can do wonders for a small non-profit. The benefits for participating organizations, however, have more to do with deepening the relationship with loyal supporters while reaching new ones.

If your organization’s supporters are like Robin Maxwell, who won a SixDegrees matching grant for her local chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, they might end up on the evening news of the E! Entertainment Network.

With the launch of Causes on Facebook and ‘digital bumper stickers’ on LinkedIn, non-profits can now benefit from the rocket success of the two social networking web sites.

Causes is a Facebook ‘application’ designed by Project Agape that adds the ability for friends on Facebook to raise money for any registered non-profit. LinkedIn’s digital bumper stickers are the equivalent of ‘donate now’ buttons for non-profits that a LinkedIn user can add to his or her profile page.

Colleagues on LinkedIn and friends on Facebook can use either system to affirm their connections with one another through a contribution to a contact's featured non-profit.

Facebook and LinkedIn have spent the last several years building web sites that mirror real world friendships and professional contacts. The resulting communities combine the always-on quality of the internet with the high trust-factor of actual friendship.

I can’t imagine a more ideal setting for experimenting with person-to-person fundraising. Person-to-person fundraising—also known as group fundraising—consists of individuals creating online campaigns on behalf of non-profit organizations, and then emailing friends, colleagues, family about the initiative and the intended outcome.

Facebook and LinkedIn remove an important step in conventional person-to-person fundraising: the email solicitation. Until now, the essential component of any group fundraising campaign was the email that an organizer had to send to his or her personal network in order to let people know about the giving opportunity.

With the launch Facebook Causes and LinkedIn for Good, a new group fundraising campaign can get syndicated to a individual's personal network instantly through the news feed on Facebook or by the appearance of a donation button on the initiator’s LinkedIn profile.

This evolution in the syndication process of group fundraising is quite significant. News of a campaign can reach its niche audience without the hassle of gathering together email addresses or the awkwardness of emailing a solicitation to friends and family.

I’ll be curious to see how the existing group fundraising platforms respond to these developments.

Related links:

• ChipIn’s difficulty integrating with Facebook
• BeaconFire’s blog entry Facebook Causes and Effects
• Interview with Joe Green of Project Agape
• Tutorial on how to use Causes on Facebook
• Craigslist, Idealist, and Philanthropy Classifieds
• How to Use the Internet for Group Fundraising