ONLINE EVENT-Online Social Networking/ Intro

Silona,

Maybe in your post about wanting someone to attend your conference, you could be specific about whom you are inviting. With our current platform, it is difficult to know who is speaking to whom.

Thanks,

Susan

Brian asked if any of the people doing social networking were having success raising funds through this process. I'd like to repeat that question.

While the Internet is a low cost, virtual meeting place, in the end much of what we discuss needs to become action in place based activities in many locations around the world. At these places dollars are needed for rent, staff, services, etc.

Thus, if we've not yet found ways that our networking draws resources to the various members of the network, will be be able to keep these members involved, or will they go elsewhere?

While I get about 4,000 visits a month to my web site, I get very few donations via the Internet. I do know that some donors have found my site and used it to make donor decisions, and I do know that almost all of the participation in conferences I host comes from on-line networking.

Who has success stories about raising money for the cause, or raising money for small neighborhood non profits, operating in thousands of locations.?

Just to give folks an idea about the size of some of the social networks relative to one another.

There's a great site called Alexaholic that pulls this info together from another site called Alexa. Note that the numbers aren't always the most accurate but gives you a relative sense of how big some networks are in relation to others.

This is by Pageviews. Note that Orkut is quite massive.

RE: Raising funds
So I see online social networking as a good friend-raiser kind of tool which may eventually lead you to some fundraising through specific campaigns or activities. A good friend of mine ran very large real-world events for a big non-profit and she mentioned to me that events like "walks, galas, etc" don't raise that much money compared to their costs; but what they do, do, is to build the base for other follow-on fundraising.

So I would be also interested to hear about how online social networks can help build a base of direct "friends" which could lead to better fundraising success. Of course, this sort of goes against the "tell-a-friend" premise of traditional FOAF-style networks.

Neal?

John Lorance
CompuMentor/TechSoup

On using new web tools generally for fundraising, check out the Net Squared case studies on the subject:
http://netsquared.org/catlist/tid/72/flexinode-1

At least a couple of those probably fall under the social networking paradigm.


On login, someday there may well be a standard for a single digital identity that only requires logging in once and gets you into all of your accounts everywhere. Folks interested in this and related questions may enjoy the blog of Identity Woman, http://www.kaliyasblogs.net/Iwoman/

Regarding the NPTech Attention Stream for items tagged as being of interest to nonprofit technologists, check out a feed I pulled together that combines del.icio.us with several other services where people are using the tag nptech (like upcoming.org and flickr). That's at http://feeds.feedburner.com/NptechMetaFeed

If you subscribe to that one and not just to the del.icio.us feed you'll get to participate more fully and we'll have a better idea how many people there are involved (right now there are 33 subscribers to this feed.)

While I've got y'all too, I gotta say - if you like Bloglines you really might like Newsgator even better. I know I do. #1 reason is the 'river of news' option, where you can turn off the 'seperate by feeds' option and see what the newest items across any of your feeds is. If you want to check it out, see http://newsgator.com username: marshalldemo pw: welcome

John,

We really beefed up Care2 Connect's network messaging
feature recently and now we call it Care2 Share. Here's the console you use to publish on it, which will give an idea of how it works:

http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/share_compose.html

The cool thing is that you can send all types of what
the community calls shares. Shares can be a blog, journal, photo album, poll, recipe, tribute, activist
alert, or just a text message. Given the positive dynamics of members sharing content and causes, we wanted to empower them to do more.

Shares can go to just your friends or to the entire network. This definitely makes it easy for our members to share content. You can also pull in blog feeds from sites outside of Care2.

Neal


--

Neal Gorenflo
Online Campaigns
Care2.com

650.622.0871 (o)
415.867.0429 (m)
866.704.8089 (f)
neal@earth.care2.com

[ulist]tutormentor said:[/ulist]

"Who has success stories about raising money for the cause, or raising money for small neighborhood non profits, operating in thousands of locations.?"

My vision on the money raising (looking from the perspective of my Helpalot project; a decentralized charity site with social network aspects):

The Helpalot site itself will generate money by giving companies the opportunity to have an official company page that will cost them some money. The company can state what charities they support. It's good PR for them, and also for the charities that get support. And the site get's some funding.

For charities I think we must give the charities a platform and the tools to make the best of it. Personaly I like to focus on all the really small charities that are outshouted now. If they can find some support, it might not be so hard for them to get some donations once they're on radar.

[ulist]silona said: [/ulist]

"yes much overlap - I am having a programmer event in June. Maybe you could attend? it would be great to have someone else with a similar vision present to help be wrangle cats (aka programmers);-)"

I'd love to, but I live in the Netherlands, and the event will probably be in the U.S?

[ulist]jlorance said:[/ulist]

"Perhaps a way to do this (virally spread messages) on distributed networks is a combination of directories, taxonomy/free-tagging, and RSS that can propegate.
...
This, still mostly speaks to virally spreading information by subscribing to something that is pushed.. Perhaps the ultimate discovery engine then becomes things like Technorati.com"

Perhaps a nice link for you: David Heinberger speaks about taxonomy and tagging.

For Helpalot, I'd like every person and every charity to be able to blog. Every person could also subscribe to blogs (like RSS) and therefor have on his/her personal page a nice collection of news items about stuff that's important for them.

I think if you have a good 'viral' message and people have the possibility to communicate, then the message will spread itself. Technorati is great as it makes the internet links go both ways. From the point of emergence that's really important, if we want to get to some quality floating upwards.

Perhaps a nice link on the viral (marketing) aspect:
Seth Godin, a marketing guy, speaks at Googles about marketing and how the product will market itself if it tells the right story.

I just found the Net Squared list of examples of social networking tools in action. It's at http://netsquared.org/catlist/tid/61/flexinode-1

John,

We have members who use Care2 Connect to do their end of organizing for such things as walk-a-thons. So it is a useful in fundraising, but not so much in a direct marketing sort of way. Or at least we haven't figured that out yet.

And on a sort of related idea, nonprofits have been started from people who met on Care2 Connect.

One case is Puppy Passions who do animal rescue and place pets across the country using a pony express style delivery. Animals go from one volunteer to another until they reach their new caretakers.
Check it out: http://www.puppypassions.com/

So this is a case where real value was created, it
just didn't translate directly into funds raised.

Neal


--

Neal Gorenflo
Online Campaigns
Care2.com

650.622.0871 (o)
415.867.0429 (m)
866.704.8089 (f)

neal@earth.care2.com

(It's late in the Netherlands so I'm going to sleep now. I'll be back online tomorrow.)

Hi Everyone!

This is such an exciting discussion.

I add my comments on the subjects of:

1) my experience with using numerous social networking sites / burnout
2) networking in a box / ways i've seen users interfacing between numerous social networking sites

Here goes:

1) 1) my experience with using numerous social networking sites / burnout

Friendster:
I was an "early adopter" of Friendster. I had something like 250+ friends with an unbelievable amount of people I was "connected" to.

All was well until one day I found myself checking my Friendster way too many times in one day to be healthy. I also found that I had people on my "friends" list that I didn't really like ... or I felt were contributing in ways that I found to be less than "nice" but I couldn't just unfriend them or "flame" them the way old lists would have done. There would be hurt feelings, etc. My solution: I closed my account without notice and focused my energies on my LJ, which, at the same time, made friends only.

Somehow this all made me feel more in "control."

Tribe:
I really like how Tribe has evolved. I Moderate a great tribe that I am really proud of. Proud in the way that people have been able to support and offer resources to eachother when they really needed it. I also like that it's a "hybrid" sort of networking tool ... next generation from a Friendster type model. People were engaging and there was more to do than just looking at people's profiles. (of course Friendster has evolved from that as well.)

I kept my Tribe account, even after I quite Friendster. Mostly because of the tribe I Moderate. I couldn't imagine not being in touch with those folks. Also, I am involved with other tribes that I see as actively trying to make the world a better place. Good stuff.

Orkut:
I didn't last long on this site at all. I found the early interface less than appealing (imo). I think I still have my account, but I never check it.

LiveJournal:
I've had a LJ for years. And it has evolved from me just writing what I wanted and posting to the world to see. To a more private blog that I keep on a friends only level. Filters are great also.

Flickr:
My new obsession. Not just your average photo hosting site. I love that you can blog your photos easily. Organize them. Share as you desire. Link with friends, etc.

MySpace:
I don't know why I haven't closed my MySpace account yet. I guess I find it facinating who contacts me on there. I find this community very "forward" for my likes. But I still watch in amazement at the people who contact me.

Blogs:
I have more public blogs on Tribe and Net2. This is for when i feel i have something to say to the "public".

//// My note on burnout:

I stay when I feel that a site is enabling me to: a) make true connections with people vs. just superficial i'm looking at you and your looking at me, i like it and tend to stay. (note: i think this is about finding the right communities to connect to or having irl connections that lead you to the online counterpart .... or the old programming saying: garbage in, garbage out.)

b) have control over who sees what i want them to see, when i want them to, i stay.


on the subject of:

2) networking in a box / ways i have used/seen users interfacing between numerous social networking sites

many folks talk about the issues of connecting between numeous sites.

the best tool:
RSS > many of my friends use one main blog to publish to numerous sites. for example, you can have a lj site that filters content to only your lj friends/sub-filters or to other public sites that you have set the feed into.

I used to publish from my LJ, my public posts to Tribe & Friendster. I know many folks that do this. It is one way of connecting sites.

I blog my flickr photos to my LJ. People have found me on both sites that way.

/////////////

These are my thoughts. I hope they have contributed positivly to this discussion.

Regards,
Erin

John,

I key premise of social networks and online communities for any organization is this: If you can engage people around a topic or initiative they are passionate about then you are more likely to drive these people to action, whether that action is buying your product, volunteering their time or donating to a cause. The more you can engage people, the more loyal they become.

In just the last couple of days, we had The Nature Conservancy set up a group on Gather.com as a way of promoting their organization, engaging their own members and supporters, and reaching out to our audience of public radio listeners. The goal is to educate people, create a dialogue around their content and hence create support for their organization and drive donations. The openness of our site allowed them to cross promote their content in mulitple groups on Gather and make their content available to our main site. People can also find their content through keywords and tags. This allows people to find their content in a number of different ways. We will be promoting their content on Earth Day and they will soon be promoting this site to their members - and then I'll have more of a case study to report.

Here is a link to their group:
http://tnc.gather.com

David

David Woodrow
Vice President, Groups
Gather Inc.
www.gather.com

Sorry Susan,

I was talking to Julius as he was talking about programming and creating something overlapping. I thought I could see multithreaded views but I see that it doesn't work in this interface portion.

All very interesting. I'm thinking about my specific context in Mexico, and getting civil society organisations on board with social networking. Jlorance made reference to this - promotion/evangelization with npo's. (sorry, but I am having a lot of trouble navigating the forum spaces and understanding the logic of the threads, let alone finding the comments I want to refer to...)

In that sense I really appreciated Jlorance's comments imagining a new person coming on board in a NPO. He said something along the lines of, "in addition to getting their email account they get a personalised dashboard of social networking tools and spaces to help them do their work." That is one side of it, of getting civil society organisations aware of the tools and plugged in. It's exciting to know there are caring, activist people concerned about the same issues as you all over the world - this would be an initial element of encouragement, but not enough.

In terms of really making it worthwhile for a CSO to invest their time in learning these tools, I'm less clear. I'd really like to get even more examples of concrete campaigns. Care has mentioned some interesting examples; fund-raising suggestions, too, but also burn out has been a big theme. - and the learning curve is steep if you are working in a non-techie world with dial-up access and non-native english. We've given workshops where cso's feel so stretched that they don't even want a web page, afraid of getting too many demands for information!

Are there more examples of successful campaigns - informational or action-producing - using a combination of social networking tools? For example, in Mexico we have the severe problem of feminicide in Ciudad Juarez and in many interior states. Also in Guatemala the number of women being murdered is astonishing. How would such cases use diverse tools of social networking to further their cause effectively and efficiently? What would all of you experienced social networkers recommend for such a case?

I know one person mentioned her network around domestic violence, and I was interested in more details there of peer support, too.

I'm a trainer, and have been thinking of a promotional workshop on social networking for civil society organisations here in Mexico, a hands-on experience where (now it occurs to me thanks to jlornace) folks would build their own personalised dashboards.... and plot out a campaign using the tools... musings for now.

Thanks for the event,
Erika Smith
Association for Progressive Communications
APC Women's Networking Support Programme
ItrainOnline

Great (albeit disjointed) discussion. I'd like to add an example of using a social networking tool within a nonprofit organization to help clients... www.streettech.org provides computer training and job placement for low income and underserved adults in the San Francisco East Bay. One of the problems that many vocation training programs in underserved communities face is that their clients often lack a social network to tap into once they have been trained and are ready to go to work. Seeing the power of a professional network like LinkedIn, and not having the resources to create our own online network, we had all of our students and staff sign up as LinkedIn users and then conducted outreach using our employer and supporter databases to have them sign up as well. The results were quite promising. Not only were the students empowered by the experience of being able to create a professional network almost instantly, but with some fairly simple training they were able to begin the networking and job search process using LinkedIn. Another advantage we found was that although many Street Tech clients found it daunting to call employers directly (even with intensive life skills training), but emailing through their online network was much more comfortable and therefore proved more effective. I am not sure how many students ultimately got jobs from their LinkedIn connections, but at a minimum they and we were able to add another very useful tool to our job search toolkit – and it didn’t cost a dime. You can read more about this experiment in a piece I wrote for Salon.com called "Get up, stand up, social network"

Paul Lamb
Principal
Man on A Mission Consulting
pauljlamb@gmail.com
Tel: 510-815-6091