Philanthropy seems to me to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures. -Oscar Wilde
(Source: Robotson on Flickr)
I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of open standards, particularly when my bladder Direct Messages me with the hashtag #urgent. Open standards (see picture above) guide me to a place where I can @reply in a hurry.
In the non-profit technology community, open standards of a different variety could help us all become more effective at what we urgently need to do: raise money, recruit and coordinate volunteers, promote events, create profiles on social networks, generate reports for grant-makers, and the list goes on.
In June, I hosted a discussion about Collaboration and Competition on Social Edge in which the topic of open standards for the nonprofit sector was raised. Read the rest of this entry »
Note: The transcript below if from my keynote presentation at Connecting Up Australia in May 2009.
Thank you for the introduction.
A little more background on what Social Actions is building. We are an open source database of actions people can take in support of the nonprofits and causes they care about most. The database currently has 90,000 opportunities and is updated every 30 minutes.
Rather than create a destination search engine with this database, we want to distribute its contents to the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. We are encouraging third party developers to connect to the Social Actions API, and create innovative firefox extensions, WordPress blugins, iphone Apps, Facebook Apps, and other kinds of utilities that effectively distribute the calls to actions everywhere and anywhere.
Our mission is to make the web more action oriented.
Read the rest of this entry »
Note: I wrote this article in April 2008 for the Giving 2.0 e-Newsletter by FundRaising Success magazine.
At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, nonprofit techies and professional fundraisers met up to discuss the emerging best practices for fundraising using social networks and social media. Their conversations were overwhelmed by one small detail. Few nonprofits have succeeded in raising large amounts of money using blogs, widgets and fundraising applications for social networks.
Nine months since the high-profile launch of Facebook Causes and well over a year since the first articles on Web 2.0 fundraising started to appear, members of the nonprofit tech community seemed to be turning against the new-fangled tools for online fundraising. The traditional staples of online fundraising — a well-cultivated e-mail list, the ubiquitous “donate now” button and a coherent well-designed Web site — appeared to be making a full-fledged comeback.
The collective reality check succeeded in undoing the media hype that has surrounded initiatives like Facebook Causes, whose founders incidentally chose not to attend the conference. Nonprofits are now better equipped to find the right balance between traditional online fundraising and innovative approaches to community building. Sooner or later, the hard-won online community that forms around a nonprofit’s work may respond overwhelmingly to a fundraising appeal. But, with a few exceptions, it hasn’t yet. Read the rest of this entry »
If a conference can inspire new ideas, clarify one’s mission, and connect the people who can put those new ideas into action, then it rocks! That was my experience yesterday at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans.
After a lackluster performance by David Pogue (I realize that 75% of the conference attendees disagree with me on this point), my day got rolling with an awesome presentation by Brian Reich of EchoDitto (author of Media Rules). Few people can sum up the unique qualities of 30+ niche social networks and then contextualize these distinctions for the nonprofit sector. Reich’s presentation did just that and got the wheels turning in my head.
In the afternoon, I headed over to “APIs for Beginners”, presented by Kurt Voelker (Forum One Communications), Tompkins Spann (Convio), and Jeremy Carbaugh (Sunlight Foundation). This is where my mind really started churning.
I was in the second row, a real keener, thinking about the big elephant in the room: collaboration. Read the rest of this entry »
It is one of the strangest deficiencies of the group fundraising field; of the seven major platforms – GiveMeaning, SixDegrees, FirstGiving, ChipIn, Change.org, GlobalGiving and Fundable – only two sites publish RSS feeds of active campaigns. That would be GlobalGiving (feedburner) and Fundable.org (xml).
I’ve been scratching my head for several months about why the five others all neglect to make an RSS feed available. Are the platforms trying to protect the privacy of the campaign organizers? Is the absence of RSS simply an oversight? Did the creators assume that only direct friends and family of the campaign organizers would contribute, therefore removing the need for syndication? Are the sites worried about diminishing traffic to their domains?
Each platform probably has its own reason for not publishing an RSS feed of active campaigns.
While I wait for clarification on this subject, here are five points in favor of Group Fundraising RSS feeds: Read the rest of this entry »
