Author Archives: johnrougeux

Some challenges for Facebook’s Graph Search

Facebook’s upcoming Graph Search feature has already been plenty hyped, even though its weeks away from a significant portion of the public being able to try it out. But in order for Open Graph to be meaningful, it’s going to have to tackle some significant barriers.

Let’s take one of it’s core promises – that users will have powerful search tools for local businesses available to them, by tapping into data about what one’s friends have Liked. Ostensibly, a user could utilize the recommendations of his friends to, say, find a good restaurant in a town he’s visiting. “Social curation” is the idea. But in order for this to work, let’s break down what has to happen first.

Let’s say I plan to visit Atlanta and want to find a suitable place for dinner. I have a handful of friends there (I live in KY), so this is a viable scenario. I search for “Restaurants my friends in Atlanta have Liked”. In an idealized world, I’d have a nice little list of places my friends have visited, and a few moments later, I’d have made a reservation and moved on.

OK, but not so fast. How many decent recommendations am I likely to get? I’m not sure it will be many, if I look at the filtering that has to happen first:

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I’m going to do some back of the envelope math here. I don’t have any data on this, so this is just pure guesswork. Let’s say I have 30 friends who live in Atlanta. 5 are ultra concerned about privacy, so they’ve kept most of their Like data private. Another 12 use Facebook regularly, but don’t care about Liking or Checking In every place they visit. I can’t expect decent data from them. Down to 13. Let’s say that 7 of the remainder don’t really share my tastes – they’re acquaintances, in-laws, or people who simply enjoy different things that I do. OK, so I’m now left with all of 6 people who have Liked restaurants on Facebook in Atlanta. But I’m not done yet – Atlanta is a big place, if a recommendation is across town, then forget it. And what if I have a recommendation for a fast-food cajun place nearby, but I’m actually looking for something upscale?

You get the idea. Even though the amount of information Facebook has in aggregate is mind-bogglingly massive, the amount of useful data that an individual user can obtain through her friends is quite different. Presented with the scenario above in real live, I’m still going to turn to something like Yelp, Urban Spoon, or TripAdvisor.

All of this isn’t to say that Graph Search won’t work or be useful. It could be tremendously useful. But in order for that to happen, Facebook is going to have to provide users with more of a reason to share data about where they visit and what they do. Otherwise, I’ll take the recommendation of 500 strangers over 5 friends any day.

A little inspiration from Detroit

The picture of me that was printed on my temporary ID badge made me look creepy. The security guard had taken the photo just as I let my smile go, so I looked slightly sinister. But I wasn’t allowed inside without a badge, so I stuck it on my jacket anyway. He handed me my driver’s license back, and motioned me to pass through the metal detector. I was already a bit unsettled; locked doors and video cameras were the only things that had greeted me outside the facility. Having to pass through more security than required at the airport didn’t help. Once inside, the heavy heels of a security guard’s boots against the polished linoleum floor were the only sound punctuating the silence…

This was my first time visiting a place like Western International High School, based in urban Detroit. Have you ever read one of those articles about the difficulties U.S. schools are having, with dismal test scores and rock-bottom graduation rates? This is one of those schools. Not only are things tough academically, but students have plenty of other challenges as well. Nearly all of them qualify for free lunch because their families are too poor to afford much food. Many are asked to join gangs, and do. Some have even had family members murdered. What’s most telling of all is that when students do succeed, teachers say that they do so “in spite of their parents.”

In Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Outliers, he postures that one’s success in life is necessarily a direct function of one’s IQ, test scores, or even hard work. Rather, he believes that circumstances play an overwhelming role in determining the outcome of one’s life. Well, the circumstances for these high schoolers are about as poor as they can get. And one of the most frustrating things about visiting a place like this is that as an outsider, changing those circumstances seems impossible. So while I expected my visit to leave me feeling despondent about grim outlook for these kids, that was hardly the case.

Why? Nearly 100 students at Western International HS take part in an after-school program coordinated by a non-profit called buildOn (disclaimer: buildOn is a partner of Sojo Studios, where I work). These students surprised me because they exuded hope and confidence, not despair. I had a chance to listen to several of them speak about their experience with the program. They weren’t any more gifted or talented then the rest of their class, but they were setting an example for others. They talked about how they had come to begin valuing their education. I listened intently as they described how they enjoyed doing community service on weekends. One boy talked about how he was able to finally develop self-confidence, something that had always eluded him. Another girl shyly boasted about the full scholarship she’d won to college. Her friend talked about the eye-opening experience she’d had helping build a school in Nicaragua – braving a huge step way outside her comfort zone to help kids in another part of the world.

This wasn’t a program students had been forced into by their parents or teachers. They’d joined because they were interested in taking a stop towards improving their chances in the world. These were students, whose peers were statistically likely to end up jobless or in prison, now talking about how empowered they felt in being able to improve their lives, their communities, and the world. In case those examples don’t adequately illustrate how these students defy circumstance, here’s the clincher: 95% of them will go on to college. That’s in a school where less than half will even finish high school.

While there are nearly 1400 students at Western, those 100 illustrate that the cycle of poverty and desperation can be broken. They show us that kids don’t have to be brought down by a poor environment. Not only are they improving themselves, but they’ll inspire their friends and their community, too. Fundamentally, they want to achieve the same things as any high schooler does, and they’re willing to work for it. They just need to be shown the way. For me, coming to that realization is one of the most hope-inspiring experiences I’ve had.

Game mechanics for causes – Catalysts for Change

Nothing is more captivating than a well-thought out game. That’s why more and more initiatives are building games (or using game mechanics) to create positive social change. Here’s a new one that launched today – it’s called Catalysts for Change, and it gives players a game-like competition for sharing and responding to ideas about solving the world’s social problems. It’s a bit like Quora meets Twitter meets Trivial Pursuit. Here’s a video they put together that provides a brief overview:

One you sign up, you’re asked to submit “cards”, which are basically suggestions or responses to specific issues. From there, you can browse individual cards and “chains” of cards composed of a string of responses from various players. A scoring system gives you points based on your submissions and the responses the’ve received, and there’s even an achievements system for those who really commit to playing. Here’s what the game’s dashboard looks like once you start playing:

The challenge with any game-like initiative is that if the game itself isn’t fun and engaging, then it’s a missed opportunity to really connect with people. Traditional game developers will readily admit that it’s not easy to create captivating titles, and socially-oriented games have an even bigger hurdle with the added goal of educating or empowering their players. Can Catalysts for Change pull it off and accomplish something really meaningful? Give it a try and find out for yourself! The game ends in less than two days, at 12:00 EST on Wednesday, April 5, so hurry.

Adopting failure and risk in the non-profit world

For-profit businesses publicly fail all the time. When they do, it’s not the end of the world – learning from one’s mistakes (and those of others) can be an enormous factor in long-term success. In the non-profit world, though, failures are often swept under the rug. But since non-profits deal with lives, not dollars, why isn’t “learning from failure” a more widely adopted practice?

A new service called Admitting Failure wants to change that. In this post, we’ll look at why the for-profit world is able to learn from failure, and examine what Admitting Failure is doing to help the non-profit world achieve the same thing.

Failure is natural in business

Failure never tasted so good.

When Apple came out with the $700 Newton PDA in 1993, it didn’t exactly vault the company to success. In fact, it was one of the company’s most ridiculed products. And when Pepsi launched a massive marketing campaign to convince us to drink Crystal Pepsi, the clear cola didn’t live long. But even successful companies prepare to fail from time to time. What makes failure such a natural part of the business world?

Reward for taking risk. Trying something new is often what allows companies to achieve breakthrough success, and that requires risk and the occasional failure. Sometimes “playing it safe” by not taking any risks is a sure way to slowly kill a company.

Investors tolerate failure. A good investor diversifies his portfolio, knowing that some companies will yield negative returns. It’s an expected outcome that factors into any good investor’s calculations.

Failures are made public. Talk show hosts and business blogs alike love to poke fun at “game changing” products that no one bought. Business schools thrive on doing case studies on corporate mistakes. Since everyone is exposed to failures in business, they’re not always a surprise. And even better, there’s a wealth of information out there for anyone who wants to learn from the past.

Non-Profits aren’t allowed to fail

Warfare might be a bit too risky for non-profits, but you get the idea.

If the world’s most successful companies fail from time to time, it goes without saying the even the world’s best non-profits are going to make mistakes too. But unfortunately, non-profits aren’t allowed to fail publicly the way businesses are. For one, there isn’t a massive reward for taking massive risk, so non-profits aren’t as encouraged to experiment.

Secondly, donors aren’t yet comfortable with their dollars being used for experiments, which means non-profits are less likely to try unproven ideas. And there’s no forum for failures to be widely publicized, so logistically, sharing failures in the non-profit community would be hard to pull off anyway.

Can Admitting Failure change the status quo?

Admitting Failure addresses the problem of “private failures” in the non-profit community primarily by addressing the logistical issue – no common forum for non-profit failures to be disclosed and discussed. The platform is a good start; take a look at this post from charity: water about the failure of one of their metrics:

…you have probably heard us say, Tweet or write: $20 can provide clean and safe drinking water to one person for 20 years. But earlier this year, we removed the “20 years” part from that messaging.

As with any retraction, this sparked a discussion with our staff about how we deal with failure… we knew that if we continued to promise that each $20 donation would provide one person access to water for two decades, we’d be using a number we’re not certain about. In effect, we’d be failing the faith of the public and our mission to “reinvent charity”—to restore peoples’ trust in charitable work…

In a way, showing the public where we’ve messed up or why we want to suddenly move in a new direction is like taking a deep sigh of relief. We’ve given ourselves the chance to share the hard stuff. We’re sparking important conversations and welcoming scrutiny because we really have nothing to hide.

Donors need to think like investors

Donors should be more like this guy.

charity: water deserves praise for taking the lead on admitting their own mistakes. But while Admitting Failure solves an important part of the problem, real change won’t happen until donors begin to act differently. In the business world, successes and failures are disclosed so readily because consumers experience and discuss them, and because investors demand disclosure.

So while example like charity:water are fine, non-profits won’t ever widely disclose failures until donors begin taking the approach of an investor. Donors need to encourage the non-profits they support to experiment, make mistakes, and share their learnings. They need to diversify their donations, to improve the odds of them supporting a truly successful project. And most of all, they need to let non-profits know that it’s OK to fail once in a while. Here are three ways Admitting Failure could help them do this:

  1. Give donors tools to encourage their favorite non-profits to participate on the site. They could even take a page from Invisible Children‘s playbook and give users a one-click method to target high-profile non-profits on Twitter.
  2. Rate charities, in the fashion of Charity Navigator, based on the knowledge they’ve contributed to the non-profit community. Messaged correctly, charities who developed a reputation for being honest could benefit from additional donor support.
  3. Allow aid recipients themselves to share their perspective on a non-profit’s work. Nothing’s more authentic than the experience of a person who was targeted by an aid program, so this would be a great way to build a 360-degree perspective of a non-profit.

What do you think – are non-profits likely to admit more mistakes, if only given the right tools? Or do donors need to become more involved before any real change can take place?

Being Humble when you’ve raised $12.6 million

What would your reaction be if you walked into Starbucks and the barista told you that you could pay whatever you wanted for your coffee? Oh, and if you wanted all the money to go to charity instead, that’d be cool, too? In addition to buying 17 carmel macchiatos with the 13 cents you found in your pocket, you’d also probably wonder who in Seattle lost their sanity.

Well, that’s exactly the pricing model Humble Bundle offers. They provide limited-time offers on bundles of video games, in which buyers set their own price, and then choose how much goes to charity. The latest bundle, simply called “The Humble Bundle for Android 2″, was released just this week. How does it work? Instead of being one of those blogs that just regurgitates content found elsewhere, I’ll just point you to their video:

Here are some stats on their success: 2 years old, 2 million transactions, and $12.6 million raised for developers, charity, and themselves (the exact breakdown to each party isn’t made available). It’s an interesting pricing model that’s likely raised a handsome sum for charity, but could it be applied to other types of products as well? Let’s take a look at what makes the Humble pricing system tick and see where that leaves us:

Acting like the boss

When you learn that your boss at your new job doesn’t come into the office until 10:00 AM, you learn that’s OK if you don’t want to arrive until after 9:00. When he shows up in jeans, you can confidently come back to work the next day in that acid washed denim that’s been in your closet for 26 years (right?). He sets the norm; you feel better because you know what’s expected. Humble Bundle does the same thing. They start buyers off with a default split of 55% to developers, 30% to charity, and 15% to Humble Bundle. Hard to feel anxious about getting the allocation wrong, when a strong suggestion is made for you.

A gentle guilt trip

Humble Bundle does a couple smart things to encourage you to pay a legit price. First, they show real-time data for the average purchase amount. If you decide to pay less then that, they’ll remind you with a nice blue warning banner before you pay. Secondly, if you pay more than average, you actually get an extra game. It’s a slick combination of guilt and rewards to keep buyers honest.

Freeloaders don’t (really) count

Some users are going to pay only a few cents for these games. But in addition to not being cool, they’ll also be negated out by the thousands of buyers who do pay a reasonable price. A high transaction volume (over 70,000 just three days in) keeps the moochers at bay.

Standard fare

Downloading video games is becoming pretty standard. You do have Angry Birds, yes? Even though the pricing model is strange and new, everything other aspect of the promotion is standard fare. That’s important, because if potential buyers are asked to digest too many unfamiliar pieces, they’ll leave.

$0 marginal cost of distribution

This one’s pretty boring, but it’s one of the most important. Downloadable digital goods cost next to nothing to distribute. Each copy sold costs about $0.00 to make and deliver. So if a user pays a mere penny, no one is any poorer for it.

Obscure quality

It’s indie developers who submit games to these bundles – newer companies who are relatively unknown. Even if these developers don’t make much per copy sold, they still benefit from the increased exposure and gross sales. Gamers benefit, too, by being exposed to quality games they may not have discovered otherwise.

Limited time

If “set your own pricing” were available all the time, then that would customers to expect such treatment all of the time. That’s not sustainable, and it certainly won’t make developers happy. (Is there any reason why an “add your own donation” piece couldn’t stick around forever, though?)

That’s a long list of things that contribute to the success of the model. Could this work elsewhere? Not at Starbucks, but I think there’s plenty of ideas here that could be applied to online retail, for one. Where else do you think a Hunble-esque offering would do well? Let’s hope that Humble Bundle continues to be successful, raise gobs of money for charity, and encourages others to follow suit.

Is the criticism of KONY 2012 legit?

 It’s been a full week since Invisible Children launched their now-famous “KONY 2012″ film, which seeks to raise awareness of Joseph Kony, an African war criminal who’s responsible for the death and abduction of thousands of children. Seven days old, and KONY 2012 has garnered nearly 100 million views. With all this attention, both the film and Invisible Children itself have received their fair share of critics. Are the attacks warranted? In this post, we’ll deconstruct the criticism and find out.

But first, if you haven’t seen the film, watch it now:

Here’s a short list of what the critics have been saying:

There are several issues raised, but we’ll examine three of them here: (1) the way in which Invisible Children allocates its funding; (2) a critique of the film’s message and it’s “truthiness”; and (3) that the film and Invisible Children promote “slacktivism” instead of real action. Let’s tackle each of these directly:

Finances

Invisible Children has been called out an apparent lack of funding that is used on “direct” programs, i.e. work on the ground. Things like building schools and building radio towers. A cursory glance at their finances reveals that “only” 37% goes towards African programs. Typically, non-profits that primarily engage in “on the ground” work will allocate 80-90% of their expenses to those programs, and the rest towards overhead and fundraising. If Invisible Children were a traditional non-profit, then that number would be appalling. But Invisible Children isn’t a typical charity; instead; filmmaking and advocacy are also core parts of their mission. Making documentaries and educating people about Joseph Kony is what they do. If you look at their expenses used on all three of these programs, you’ll find that they’re just about as financial efficient as any non-profit. So as long as Invisible Children makes it clear that direct work is just one of their focuses, along with film-making and advocacy, this shouldn’t be an issue. And for someone who wants to educate others about Joseph Kony, supporting Invisible Children would be a great way to do that.

The Film

How many documentaries are you aware of that have universal appeal, and were made without bias? I can’t think of many either. Much of the criticism of the film itself has to do with it delivering an over-simplified message. Other critics point out that the film promotes that idea that Americans (and white people) are the “saviors” and that Africans aren’t capable of helping themselves. Those are valid points, and the film isn’t without its faults. But let’s also consider a few other factors. Who is the film intended for? Invisible Children focuses mainly on educating high-school kids, college students, and young adults, many of who are unlikely to know very much about foreign issues. And their audience isn’t as interested in sitting through a lengthy, comprehensive documentary as a foreign policy expert would be. So the fact that the film focuses on delivering a simple, easily understood message makes sense, considering its target audience. If the goal of the film is to engage a young generation around a pressing issue halfway around the world, then KONY 2012 is an astounding success. If it were to educate viewers on the long and nuanced history of war crimes in central Africa, then it would a failure, but that was never its intention.

Slacktivism

“Slacktivism” is a disparaging term used to describe feel-good actions that don’t have any real impact. When someone merely tweets about a cause and says “I’ve done my part”, that’s slacktivism. You’ll find Invisible Children accused of promoting slacktivism in more than one critique. If KONY 2012 campaign merely engaged 100 million people for 30 minutes and nothing else resulted, then yes, Invisible Children’s efforts would be pretty meaningless. But let’s not forget that no real action can start until people are aware of an issue. Sure, merely watching or sharing a video won’t do anything to directly change anything in the world. But that’s just as true for a film about Joseph Kony as it is for an IMAX movie about rescuing orangutans and elephants. But I don’t hear many people cracking down on IMAX movies, do you? Educating people about a cause is a first, and necessary, step to get people involved. In fact, Americans already suffer from a pretty severe lack of global awareness, so films like these are a great way to prevent future generations from becoming ignorant and passive about the rest of the world. Efforts to enlighten others about issues that cause human suffering in the world shouldn’t be criticized, they should be championed.

Invisible Children’s Response

This post wouldn’t be complete without including Invisible Children’s own response to criticisms KONY 2012, which they’ve done here. Their CEO also did a decent job of addressed detractors in this video, which he posted today:

Whether you agree with Invisible Children’s KONY 2012 campaign or not, the important thing to watch is the results. What will happen now that nearly 100 million people have seen their latest film? Will our government change its support African troops in arresting Kony? Will children in central Africa be any safer? These questions are the ones that matter. If Joseph Kony is brought down and kids in central Africa can begin live without fear, then Invisible Children should be applauded for their efforts. Share your own thoughts in the comments below.

Does Giving Get Any Easier?

Concepts that turn people into first time givers are always interesting. Converting a “non-giver” into a “giver” isn’t an easy hurdle, but it’s a crucial one: no one will ever be a lifelong donor until that first dollar has been given. So while it’s not uncommon for non-profits to ask for $5, $10, or even $25 for a first time ask, a new site called Philanthroper rachets that number all the way down to a buck. It’s as easy a donation experience as I’ve found anywhere.

Here’s how it works. Each day, Philanthroper features a new giving opportunity. One day might offer the chance to send a child to school for a week, another, a way to support bone marrow transplants. All users are asked for is a dollar, and it takes only three clicks to donate via PayPal. Users can even give more if they’re so inclined. Philanthroper delivers a clear, straightforward way to get involved each day, and it boils down the decision to give to merely a few clicks. For someone who just wants to help out a bit, this is about as painless as it gets.

In addition to creating very low barriers to giving, Philanthroper also promotes the idea that the small actions of many combine to make meaningful results. They’ve done a great job of quantifying the impact its users have had, as this iconograph illustrates. Instead of talking about only the dollars donated, Philanthroper celebrates what those dollars meant, by counting things like the “days of education”, and “number of immunizations” provided. Donors who’ve only given a dollar don’t feel like they’re being cheap; they’re made to feel like they’ve actually made a difference. Powerful stuff.

Is the “dollar a day” model enough to keep users around, though? There’s not much to keep donors engaged beyond the opportunity to give more money, so Philanthoper will likely need some “power user” features for users who want to step things up a notch. They have started a stats page (here’s mine), but there’s not a whole lot there that’s worth revisiting. But altogether, Philanthroper is great “gateway” into causes – it’s low friction, very easy to use, and with wide variety of causes featured, there’s something that’s likely to nearly anyone into a first time donor.

Give it try (come on, you can at least give a buck!) and share your thoughts.

Will Causes end up the Yahoo! of web philanthropy?

Causes.com was one of the more exciting things to happen in the online philanthropic space when it launched in 2007. Here was a charitable platform that offered something truly unique at the time – deep integration with Facebook – just as the social network’s user growth started to chart skyward. Moreover, Causes founders Joe Green and Sean Parker had close ties with the early Facebook team, giving them a strong connection that any startup would envy.

Early advantage doesn’t sustain

But these things do not a successful startup make. Causes did accomplish some amazing numbers – over 170 million people have used Causes at some point, and they’ve raised over $40 million for charity. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at. But where is Causes headed form here? Take a look at their monthly active users since September 2009, and the answer isn’t pretty:

A massive user base, impressive numbers, but users headed out the door. Remind you of anyone? How about Yahoo!? There’s more than one similarity that the two platforms share:

  • Identify crisis – like the purple web giant, Causes doesn’t seem to be sure of what it wants to be. Is it a site for non-profits to raise money? A platform for individuals to raise awareness? A better way to share your philanthropic activity with your friends? A campaign tool for corporations and non-profits to deliver messaging? It’s tried all of these things. It does some of them well, but none of them better than anyone else.
  • Scattered content strategy – Yahoo! was all over the board here, publishing content from its partners, producing material itself, and even allowing its users to generate and share content. Causes isn’t much different. Thoughtful, well-produced campaigns lie right alongside spammy calls to “Abolish the Band Nickelback”. And that material is mashed together with features that Causes develops itself, often with corporate messaging involved as well. The result is a confusing mix with highly diverging styles, purpose, and quality.
  • A “big but cheap” user base – nearly 300 million people are active users of Yahoo!’s services. That’s an asset nearly any web company would kill to have. But what are those users worth to Yahoo!? Are they actively engaging in (or even paying for) a product? Or are they just inactive names in a database? It’s not clear if is a long-term asset for Yahoo!, or just a number. With 170 million users of its own, but declining usage over the past couple years, Causes should question the value of its own user base.
  • Poor UI – do you remember what websites looked like ten years ago? No? Just go to yahoo.com and you’ll see. Causes.com’s UI suffered a different fate – not of being outdated, but of just being plain awkward. It felt like each part of the site was designed by a individuals working in nearly complete isolation from each other, only to come together at the last minute to make things consistent.
Is there light ahead?

Fortunately, Causes is midway through a makeover. The platform has some great things going for it, and it would be fantastic to see it take off again. How are they doing?

Good – The user experience is far more streamlined – each page now feels like it’s a part of the same app. And all of the site itself, (except for payment processing), is now hosted externally from Facebook. Earlier versions of Causes were just Facebook apps veiled as websites, and they gave you this uneasy feeling of not knowing where you were on the web. The new standalone site feels much more solid.

Caution – The whole issue about hosting/publishing/creating content still exists. Causes still needs some streamlining here. And since there are still about a dozen “causes” related to abolishing Nickelback, there hasn’t been done much about elevating the level of quality, either.

Warning – The site still suffers from an identity crisis. Until Causes can focus on doing one thing better than anyone else, I don’t believe users are going to stick around. Who is the site really made for, and for what purpose? I don’t feel like I can answer this question well, and that doesn’t bode well for any web product.

Causes will definitely be worth watching this year. This should’t be the last of its improvements. But there is no shortage of other cause-based startups who’d like to bite off a large chuck of its users for good. Stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

What do you think – will Causes turn into a the Yahoo! of philanthropy, or can it turn itself around?

A platform for social business

I wrote the post below this week for my friends at Design Impact, a wonderful non-profit in Cincinnati that uses design thinking to tackle poverty around the world. The original post can be found here.

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“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” says Simon Sinek, visionary thinker and speaker. In other words – being genuine matters. This isn’t true just for people; it also applies to businesses. And consumers are increasingly demanding that businesses to take “genuine“ to a whole new level – by actively creating positive social change in the world. But accomplishing that isn’t something corporations can do alone; they need strong non-profit partners who can help them turn good intentions into meaningful outcomes.

According to Havas Media, “nearly 85% of consumers worldwide expect companies to become actively involved in solving [global] issues.” Not only that, but 44% of consumers are willing to “punish” a company for acting socially irresponsibly. Furthermore, a separate study done by Cone Communications, with Duke University, found that “79% [of consumers] say they would be likely to switch from one brand to another, when price and quality are about equal, if the other brand is associated with a good cause.” It couldn’t be clearer: businesses can no longer get by with only making a good product. Instead, they have to be able to say, “Because our business exists, the world is a better place.”

Me on a visit with one of our partners at Sojo Studios.

While it’s a nice idea, how many corporations can actually make this claim?  Havas also notes that “only 28% of consumers worldwide think that companies today are working hard enough to solve our social and environmental challenges,” and that “20% trust companies when they communicate about their social/environmental commitments and initiatives.” Ouch.

Why such a discrepancy?  Sure, you can shop at Starbucks and support the fight against AIDS and malaria through The Global Fund. Whole Foods will support causes like the animal shelter when you use your own grocery bags. But these are one-offs, not the standard.

Would more be done if businesses were simply better educated on social issues? I don’t think so. Obviously, businesses don’t have much expertise on the subject. But they shouldn’t have to. Pursuing such knowledge wouldn’t allow them to focus on what they do best – building quality products. Instead, businesses should turn to the expertise that already exists, by partnering with proven non-profits that match their brand. By finding a non-profit whose mission is aligned with the values and attitudes of its customers, a forward-thinking business certainly take advantage of the consumer preferences that Cone noted. The non-profit would benefit, too, of course, though increased exposure and likely some meaningful financial support.

Work on the Erikoodu Briquette being conducted by Kaleidoscope.

Here’s a great example: Design Impact has partnered with Kaleidoscope, a product design-firm based in Cincinnati. The partnership is really meaningful, because it goes deeper than surface level. Sure, Kaleidoscope has provided Design Impact with resources such as office space, staff time, and even financial backing. But beyond that, the two organizations also share something more meaningful: they both use a design-oriented approach to come up with products, ideas, and processes that meet the needs of their customers. Kaleidoscope does so with consumer goods; Design Impact with eradicating poverty. Because the two organizations have so much in common, the partnership is one that all their stakeholders can get behind.

Partnerships like these are definitely steps in the right direction, and encouraging for any organization looking to pursue something similar. Unfortunately, though, such arrangements are still uncommon. Regulatory filings, legal contracts, paperwork, and generally not knowing where to start can keep plenty of organizations from ever moving forward. We learned this first-hand at Sojo Studios (my own place of employment), where we had to devote considerable resources to creating partnerships and navigating the associated regulatory landscape. Had non-profit partnerships not been critical to our business model, it’s unlikely that we would ever have found the time and resources to make them happen.

Sojo Studios website, featuring Wetopia.

Without a streamlined way for a for-profit and a non-profit to find each other, that statistic about 28% of companies not doing enough isn’t going to change much. What we really need is an “eHarmony” for cause marketing. Something open, flexible, transparent, and large-scale. This doesn’t exist yet, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t. With an obvious desire from consumers to see the companies they patronize “do good” in the world, and high barriers to entry for-profit/non-profit partnerships, the world is ripe for a better solution. Groupon built one for daily deals, Amazon and eBay did it with retail, and Kickstarter make it happen with crowdsourcing. Why not something for corporate social good? Keep your eyes peeled; something is bound to develop soon.

In the meantime, speak your mind about whether or not the businesses you patronize are doing enough to create positive change. And lastly, share your thoughts: are for-profit/non-profit partnership the best way for corporations to create social good? What needs to happen in order for them to more easily occur?

How do you think of Haiti?

As today is the two-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, you’re going to hear a lot about how much progress has been made rebuilding the country. From both the media and non-profits alike, they’ll be plenty of stories about “how many tons of rubble are left”, or “how many buildings have yet to be rebuilt.”

Those are the same questions that I asked the first couple times I visited Haiti in 2010, and my friends and family did the same after each trip. But after visiting Haiti on several occasions since the earthquake, I thought I’d share how my has perspective evolved since then. My thoughts progressed a little something like this:

  • Visit #1: I spend a week witnessing the impact of an earthquake on an already impoverished country. “This place is a wasteland,” I thought.
  • Visit #2: Still awed by the destruction and the poverty, I began to appreciate the fact that people were able to survive at all. I didn’t know how they did it.
  • Visit #3: It dawned on me that while the earthquake was awful, Haiti had been a terrible place to live for a very long time. This led to frustration of not knowing how a country could remain in dire straits for so long.
  • Visit #4: I finally stopped seeing general bleakness and began to notice hope and happiness – a taxi driver who wanted to go to college in Wisconsin (and later did), and an old lady teaching dance classes in a rural town. Incredible geography. Smiling kids and proud mothers. Soccer games.
  • Visit #5: First thinking that I had Haiti figured out, and later realizing that I actually knew very little. I stopped trying to figure out “solutions” and learned to take things as they were. Only then could I start to appreciate the people and the places I visited.

After all those experiences, all I can say is that life is complicated in Haiti. Smiles, death, dust, friends, sewage, hope, beauty, and chaos blend together to form a place of paradoxes that defies simplification. Situations are often both tragic and cheerful, hopeful and pitiful. How can people smile (and stay sane) when death, lack of opportunity, chaos, and poor circumstance are pressed upon them? The Haitian people have something we lack, but I don’t know exactly what it is. Some type of hope that most of us don’t have to tap into, I suppose. But even if I lived in Haiti for a year, I doubt I’d really be able to understand.

I’m saying all of this because I want you to appreciate Haiti. I don’t want you to see it as a wasteland, like I did during my first couple visits. I don’t want you to think that it’s hopeless and forgettable. And I don’t want you to believe that just because things don’t look much different a couple years later, that Haiti is just a lost cause. Instead, I want you to know that the country and the people have joy, they have beauty, and they have hope. And I want you to think of those things, not of an earthquake, when you think of Haiti.

 

Pinterest is just a bunch of bumper stickers

Pinterest is mainly a site for (mainly) women to share things they love. Recipes, fashion, and furniture abound. But that didn’t stop me from trying it out. After all, Pinterest has been experiencing massive growth, so it must be doing something right. In this post, we’re going to take a look one thing it’s doing particularly well, and what this means for causes.

Pinterest has done a great job of allowing users to curate their own identify, by giving them simple, visually appealing ways to “pin” content available for other users to see. It’s a new concept for the web, but it’s merely a new take on something we already see all the time – the heavily bumper-stickered car, shouting to the world a hundred brief messages about the kind of person who’s behind the wheel.

Here are couple stereotypical classics: first, the eco-liberal Prius (driving 10 miles under the speed limit), with the mandatory Coexist, Free Tibet, and “Topless Mountains are Obscene” bumper stickers, accompanied by a tasteful arrangement of anti-war and local farmer’s market decals. It’s arch-enemy is the “we’ll never run out of oil, I’m not compensating for anything” gun-rack equipped Dodge Ram with 40″ tires. At minimum, a full array of George W. Bush, NRA, and Support Our Troops decals are present, and if you’re lucky, you’ll see the classy image of Calvin taking a leak on the Ford logo.

They seem like polar opposites, but what do these two vehicles have in common? Owners who feel strongly about their identify and want to express it to the world. They’ve simply chosen their vehicles as a medium for doing so, by prominently displaying organizations, attitudes, and movements they associate themselves with.

While most of us don’t drive cars like either of those, we still want to be seen as unique individuals with defined interests. That’s where Pinterest comes in. Users can easily “pin” images of things they love and display them to the world. Visit any Pinterest user’s profile, and it doesn’t take long to see what they’re into. From there, you can probably begin to deduce a little bit about their personality, their beliefs, values, and so on. It’s a quick, lightweight, and addicting.

Essentially, Pinterest has created a virtual version of the bumper sticker-clad car. The difference is that the content is much less tacky, it’s easy to share and “repin”, and there’s no messy glue to remove when you want to move on to something new.

So why should the world of causes care about all of this? Again, most people have a strong desire to tell the world about who they are. And a person’s giving choices are no less a part of their identity than the other ephemera that Pinterest users share. In fact, I’d argue that the manner in which someone supports causes is one of the most revealing characteristics about who they are. Every philanthropic person has a unique “cause identity” that’s made up of the donations they’ve made, the hours they’ve volunteered, and any other talent they’ve shared towards the greater good. So why can’t we just as easily share those actions like we do with recipes and pictures of shoes? It would be a hugely revealing statement about one’s values.

Unfortunately, most of our cause-related activity is private, forgotten, or simply not available on the web. Our “cause identity” is separate from the rest of our identify, but I don’t had a good explanation as to why. But I guarantee that this will change, and I plan to be a part of it!

What do you think – how can causes be better incorporated into one’s identity on the web? What other things can we learn from Pinterest that can be applied to causes?

WeTopia around the interwebs

In case you missed some of the press that WeTopia has received this week, here are some of the highlights. Happy reading!

  • Huffington Post - Facebook Game ‘WeTopia’ Allows Players To Donate To Charity By Building Virtual Village
  • TechCrunch - Backed By Ellen DeGeneres And Others, Sojo Studios Launches Facebook Game ‘WeTopia’
  • Fast Company - WeTopia: What Would Happen If Zynga Made Games For Good?
  • Good.is - WeTopia Transforms Online Gaming Addiction Into Social Good
  • Gamasutra - Wetopia, The Social Impact Social Game
  • Venture Beat - Sojo Studios’ WeTopia social game lets players do good in the real world
  • Games Blog – WeTopia on Facebook: Spreading joy to the globe that you can see
  • The Telegraph - Ellen DeGeneres backs new ‘Facebook’ game WeTopia
  • Business Insider - You’ve Never Heard Of SoJo, But Ellen DeGeneres Invested In Its $8 Million Pre-Launch Round
  • Kentucky.com - Lexington-based firm to launch charitable social-media game
  • Portfolio.com - Ellen DeGeneres Puts on Her Tech Pajama Jeans
Oh, and of course Ellen!

Why did SwipeGood fail?

I’ve written about SwipeGood in the past; I was impressed by the simplicity in which they allowed consumers to set aside a little money for charity. But SwipeGood will be shutting its doors soon, evidenced by this message they sent to their users recently:

Hey SwipeGoods,

It’s with a heavy heart that I say SwipeGood is shutting its doors soon. No new users will be able to sign up. However, existing users will be able to log into their accounts and see their previous donations for several months.

While you may not be able to give your change, please keep up the great support of organizations such as Room To Read by giving to them directly at http://www.roomtoread.org/.

Team SwipeGood

So why did SwipeGood fail? It wasn’t for lack of exposure. They had plenty of coverage, from Mashable, TechCrunch, Simon Mainwaring, Good.is, and Fast Company, to name a few. Backed by the well-connected incubator Y Combinator, endorsed by Ashton Kutcher (right on the home page, no less), and founded by what look like some pretty bright guys, SwipeGood certainly had the financial and human capital needed to get off the ground.

An easy answer might be that their business model wasn’t well thought-out. But I think it was. Here’s some simple math: Let’s assume that the average user charges their credit card 40x per month. Assuming an average “round up” of $0.50, that would equate to $20 of monthly donations. SwipeGood takes out 2.5% for credit card fees and 5% for operating costs, so 5% x $20 equals $1. Each user would be worth $1/month, or $12/year. Now, let’s make some assumptions about SwipeGood’s operating costs. I counted three employees – let’s pretend that the cost of salaries, taxes, etc. for each is $100,000, for a total of $300,000/year. Now let’s assume another $200,000/year for things like office space, legal work, servers, insurance, etc. SwipeGood would need $500,000 each year just to cover costs. Now let’s give them a meager 10% profit margin; they’d then need to rake in $550,000 each year.

Have you done the math already? With those assumptions, SwipeGood would need 45,833 users to make a small profit. Hardly an insurmountable user base to achieve. That is, of course, assuming  you have a compelling product. Obviously it wasn’t, so here are my thoughts as to why.

Getting users to try something new requires one of two things: it must allow them to do something they already do, but cheaper, or it must allow them to do something they want to, but can’t. SwipeGood did neither.

To the first point, SwipeGood actually made it more expensive to give to charity: by taking a 7.5% cut, SwipeGood’s model was necessarily more costly than giving directly to a charity. At best, a user might know that non-profits have to pay credit card fees too. But that doesn’t mean he’d be willing to pay additional fees on top of that. At worst, the user assumes that all of the 7.5% cut is money that a non-profit would have received otherwise. Regardless of what the user thinks, he’s not left feeling any better in either situation. Witness another new fundraising startup: rally.org, whose 4.5% fee charged to non-profits covers everything, including credit card fees. It will be interesting to see if they fare any better. At least they are up front about the costs – it is listed right on the homepage, instead of buried in the FAQs on SwipeGood’s page. Anyway, SwipeGood hardly made it cheaper to donate.

To the second point, the giving experience through SwipeGood was neither new nor better. Donors can already sign up for recurring donations nearly anywhere else, so this feature wasn’t novel. But here’s the real kicker – SwipeGood offered no real way for users to build relationships with charities. Instead, it was static experience – it could never improve, regardless of how much a donor gave. To me, the fact that SwipeGood didn’t allow users to further connect with charities reflects a deep misunderstanding of why people choose to donate at all. Giving isn’t a purely mechanical action that one simply turns on and off. It’s an emotional, altruistic action that requires real human connections to work well. A non-profit isn’t necessarily successful at fundraising because it offers the easiest donation process on its website. Instead, successful charities know how to build relationships with their donors, and they are able to create a bond between the giver and the receiver. They know how to thank donors for their support. And they know how to make them feel good about the experience so they continue to give. SwipeGood offered none of this, and left users with a sliver of the giving experience that they deserved and could easily find elsewhere.

SwipeGood wouldn’t be a bad idea, IF it were part of a larger service that cultivated relationships between donors and charities. In that case, it could be a GREAT idea. But on its own, it failed to provide the human connectivity that fuels philanthropy at its core. Hopefully the SwipeGood team will come up with something more compelling next time around – at least their intentions are in the right place.

What do you think – what could SwipeGood have done to create a more engaging giving experience?

Playing for Good

I’ve been waiting a year and a half to write this post. For the past eighteen months, our team at Sojo Studios has been working on WeTopia, a social game on Facebook that allows players to support some of the world’s best charities through game play. Today we announce the “preview” version of WeTopia, which is now available worldwide. What exactly is WeTopia? Our How It Works video explains it best:

I’m extremely proud of what our team has accomplished with this title, and humbled to be part of such a dedicated and talented group of people. I’m also thankful to our many non-profit partners, who have made it possible for the charitable concept behind WeTopia to exist at all.

We have many exciting things in store for WeTopia, so stop reading this blog and start playing today! And be sure to invite your friends.

Evolution of the Online Donor (via Network for Good)

Network for Good recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and they created this iconographic to help illustrate some of the changes in online giving that have happened during the past decade.

Courtesy Network for Good.

Thanking by Giving

My dad once said that the best way to feel like you have enough money is to give some of it away. It sounds counterintuitive, but the act of giving something away does make you feel that you already have sufficient supply of it. While I’m thankful that I was taught to have this attitude, I’m mostly thankful that I am able to give at all. There are a few billion people who can’t make that claim, and it’s only by sheer luck that I ended up on the other side of the coin. The ability to give, even just a small amount, is something we should all be grateful for – it puts in perspective how fortunate we truly are!

Happy Thanksgiving.

When Daily Deals and Causes Combine

This blog is all about finding innovative (and easy) ways for people to engage in philanthropy. Here’s a no-brainer – daily deals site Living Social has started to offer cause-related deals, in which your donation is doubled by a corporate sponsor. The current offering is for Marine Toys for Tots:

Today, we’re offering an opportunity to express our gratitude for all we have by helping those who have less. Donate $5 to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation and Toys”R”Us, Hasbro, and other corporate partners will donate $5 worth of toys for a $10 total contribution up to $1 million.

It’s a great start, and an offering I hope Living Social will continue to pursue. Next time around, here are a few suggestions to make these cause-related deals even more compelling:

  • Offer users a choice. Marine Toys for Tots may not appeal to everyone, so why not take a note from PinkDingo and at least give donors a choice of a few charities?
  • Don’t exclude retail. SocialGoodies understands this. Why not set aside some of the savings from a traditional retail daily deal to causes?
  • Give some reward. Give buyers of cause-related deals some credit for their donations, like early access to deals, or a special “thank-you” from the charity. Something to make your cause offering more compelling than other ways to give.
  • Make them easy to find. If you don’t have the email offer, finding a cause-related deal on Living Social’s site is a bit of a chore. Look hard enough and you’ll find it under “Families”. Shouldn’t there be a dedicated section for these?
The exciting thing about cause-related daily deals is that they start to blur the line between pure philanthropy and pure retail. If companies find that they can better attract and engage customers by adding a cause-element to their retail offerings, we should start to see even more innovation in this space. Offers like this from Living Social are (hopefully) just the tip of the iceberg.

What do you think about cause-related deals? How else can they be improved, and who has the best offerings?

3 Things to Try for National Philanthropy Day

Today is National Philanthropy Day, an event established by the Association of Fundraising Professionals:

National Philanthropy Day®, November 15, is the special day set aside to recognize and pay tribute to the great contributions that philanthropy—and those people active in the philanthropic community—have made to our lives, our communities and our world.

What makes philanthropy so special is that no one is required to give of themselves. There are no national laws or regulations which mandate that you must volunteer or get involved. Philanthropy is so powerful and inspiring precisely because it is voluntary—that through the goodness of our hearts, through our need to connect, through our desire to see a better world, we come together to improve the quality of life for all people.

If knowing that such a day exists encourages you to be a bit more philanthropic, here are three things to try:

  1. Experiment. Pick an online cause-related website to try out, and see how that experience affects your engagement. Doesn’t matter which one – Kiva, DonorsChoose, Razoo, and Causes.com are all great places to start. Use one of these tools to stay connected with a cause you care about.
  2. Micro-give. You’ll be surprised at how much a small amount set aside each day to charity can add up to. Pick a dozen causes and each give them $5, to see which one does the best of job of keep you involved with their programs. Pick your favorite and give them $5/month, for a year.
  3. Try volunteering. Try it just once. Ask a friend to join you. You don’t have to commit a great deal of time, but just the act of thinking and supporting others will go a long way. You might even find that you get just as much out of it as the people you’re helping! Find an opportunity at DoSomething.org.
Want some more ways? Look here and here. Feel free to add your own in the comments!

 

Ask or Engage?

I’m starting to realize how important personal relevancy is when charities ask for money. I believe that a donation appeal from a brand that hasn’t made itself relevant to donors would have to be 10x as effective as an appeal from an engaged brand, in order to have the same result.

Case in point: I received two solicitation letters in the mail this week – both of them mediocre. One was from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS); the other from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC).

The letter from the LLS had a nickel taped to it (what?) and some cheesy Christmas-themed return address labels. I’m not sure what the tactic was, but I think that the money and labels were supposed to make me feel obligated to help the LLS in return. Maybe that’s some tried-and-true tactic in the direct-mail world, but to me it just felt manipulative.

The letter from the ATC wasn’t much better. It relied mainly on a four-page, single-spaced letter; who has team to read that? And despite the fact that the Appalachian Trail is one of the most beautiful parts of the East Coast, the appeal was surprisingly lacking of photos. That’s like dating a supermodel but only telling your friends how your girlfriend is a really safe driver. Kind of missing some key points.

So what did I do with each letter? I threw the one from the in Leukemia & Lymphoma Society the trash and put the nickel they sent me in the change bowl. Meanwhile, I wrote the Appalachian Trail Conservancy a nice fat check. Why such different treatment? It all comes down to relevancy.

I’ve hiked every foot of the 2175-mile Appalachian Trail, so I have plenty of personal interest in keeping it protected for future hikers. I’ve even visited the headquarters of the ATC, and I know first hand how important their efforts are. And while I’m sure the LLS does great work, I know no one whose been affected by those diseases, so I don’t have nearly the same connection.

The ATC could have sent me a cardboard postcard asking me for money, and the LLS could have delivered as glossy, well-produced report (free of money and address labels) and my actions wouldn’t have been much different. So I don’t think that these organizations are even looking at this the right way. Instead of coming up with fancy ways to mail me junk I don’t want or won’t read, these organizations need to focus their efforts on getting people engaged with their work – well before the solicitation letters go out. Anything else is probably just wasted effort.

What do you think? Should charities go straight for the ask, or should they focus on engaging people with their brands and their programs first?