• Vital Voices Blog » Global Working Session in Italy Aims not only to Commemorate UN Fourth World Conference on Women, but to Breakthrough
  I’m thrilled to be participating: “The gathering will open with a review of past challenges faced by women and strides made to confront them over the past 15 years, with the goals of Beijing and the areas of progress, stalemate or retreat as a starting point. The remainder of the meeting will focus on strategies to address the most pressing challenges facing women across the globe. Participants at the meeting in Florence will ask: Why does inequality endure? What underlies all of these emerging problems? What is needed to turn this around? What has been missing? What will it take? How do we do it? In short, how does a much larger community of institutions and individuals see themselves as stakeholders so that this larger community will act as much out of self-interest as out of any abstract sense of justice?”
  (tags: vitalvoices women international causewired)
• Have Fun • Do Good: Why Women Are the Market for Changing the World, and How to Reach Them: Interview with The She Spot co-author, Lisa Witter
  From Britt Bravo's interview with Lisa Witter: "And we found out that a lot of organizations would come in and they would talk about their target audience as a monolithic gender. We knew that the trends were showing that women give more, women are engaged more, women vote more, women are twice as likely to pass on information, and women make 83 percent of the consumer decisions. So,we just knew that if you wanted to make social change, you had to understand how to connect with women and how to motivate women. Yet, the NGOs that we were working with didn't understand that at all. They thought, men and women, sort of the same."
  (tags: women causewired nonprofits)
• 10,000 Women | What is 10,000 Women?
  For all the bad news on Goldman Sachs, here's the good: "Goldman Sachs is supporting partnerships with universities and development organizations that will lead to 10,000 Women receiving a business and management education over five years. These partnerships are funding innovative business and management education programs in countries around the world. These certificate programs are pragmatic, flexible and shorter term and help open doors for thousands of women whose financial and practical circumstances prevent them from ever receiving a traditional business education."
  (tags: women causewired education goldmansachs)
• The Girl Effect | Facebook
  "The Girl Effect is the powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate. It’s an untapped force in the fight against poverty, and it’s driven by champions around the globe…" including some corporate and philanthropic powerhouses.
  (tags: women international causewired facebook)
• Women of Kuwait Win Again « A. Fine Blog
  Allison wrote about the women of Kuwait using their blackberries and cell phones to email the Kuwaiti legislation in favor of full women’s suffrage.
  (tags: women causewired international)
• Zainab Salbi: Preventing and Addressing International Violence Against Women
  Women for Women International (WfWI) has worked with 200,000 women survivors of war, civil and political conflict and social strife around the world, distributing $79 million in direct aid, microcredit loans and other forms of assistance to women at the grassroots.
  (tags: women causewired international)
• Deconstructing Mobiles: Myths and Realities about Women and Mobile Phones | MobileActive.org
  In our ongoing series on Mobile Myths and Realities: Deconstructing Mobile" we turn to how women are or are not benefitting from the ibiquity of mobile telephony.
  (tags: mobile women socialmedia causewired)

Putting the imperative issue of civil rights and justice around the world for women and children front and center at this year’s Clinton Global Initiative required intense coordination between CGI and the Obama Administration – starting of course with the world’s foremost power couple.

But it also relied on some special sauce that was both unpredictable and incredibly effective: the distribution, discussion and amplification of social media.

This year’s CGI, which brought together more than 1,200 movers and shakers in New York in the cause of social change and international development, became a virtual boombox empowering women…and it’s a two part-story that reaches from the motorcades and presidential suites to digital alleyways of Twitter and blogland.

First, the top-down power messaging.

Fighting abuse and human trafficking of women and children is the signature issue for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who declared in her closing address: “we will put women at the heart of our efforts.”

Her husband, former President Clinton put the theme out front on the meeting’s first day: “Women perform 66 percent of the world’s work, and produce 50 percent of the food, yet earn only 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property. Whether the issue is improving education in the developing world, or fighting global climate change, or addressing nearly any other challenge we face, empowering women is a critical part of the equation.”

And President Obama tied the work of his late mother in microfinance to the “spirit of the Clinton Global Initiative” and work empowering women and assisting children. His Administration was omnipresent at CGI, which coincides each year with the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. Besides Secretary Clinton, speakers included Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, economic adviser Larry Summers, and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett.

One of the highlights was a peppery panel the first day, hosted by Diane Sawyer of ABC News, featuring Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues, Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, and Edna Adan, director and founder of the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital in East Africa, along with the head of the World Bank and CEOs of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs. And the panel brought about one electrifing moment: when Salbi challenged ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson’s statement that funding isn’t the problem – a fairly typical assertion these days. Retorted Salbi, whose organization provides women survivors of war, civil strife and other conflicts with the tools and resources to move from crisis and poverty to stability and self-sufficiency:

But women still get very small, women and girls, get so very small, minuscule amount of funding…One cent of every development dollar, less than one cent goes to girls. So when you look at the larger scope of development money and how much is being invested in so many other things, women and girls get the least amount of funding. Money is not the problem in terms of if it’s available, but the political decision to say we need to invest much more in girls and women is not fully there yet.

You sensed some “shareholder value” vs. “humanity’s needs” tension on the panel, and indeed throughout this year’s CGI – where perhaps the corporate titans are taken for the infallible gurus of finance they were before the recession. Blogger Emily Davila at beyondprofit captured the panel’s vibe, the classic CGI combination of corporate powerhouses with practitioners:

On one hand, the unprecedented high-level private sector participation means that the women’s agenda has gone mainstream; real change will not happen if only women are talking to each other. On the other hand, the panel would not have succeeded if it hadn’t had two women from the trenches who could keep the discussion grounded in the life and death realities many women face.

Those life and death realities were emphasized in a news conference with Secretary Solis, who vowed that the Labor Department would pursue companies with slave labor in their supply chains, and Ambassador Verveer, who said that “modern-day slavery is a global scourge – no country is immune.”

Verveer and Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who monitors human trafficking or the Obama Administration, clearly positioned the State Department as a new activist player on the issue. Indeed, Verveer wondered aloud if civil rights for women around the world hadn’t reached a “tipping point.”

If it has, the combination of star power on display at CGI and the bottom-up effect of social networking are playing complementary roles to U.S. government policy – a rare moment when an administration’s policy is in near-total sync with NGO and grassroots activists.

Star power also played a role. Film star Julia Ormond, who founded the Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking at CGI two years ago, said that “meeting with victims and hearing their story just seals the deal.” And singer Ricky Martin made it personal – and advanced the storyline – during a shutter-clcking appearance in a special session, well-captured by Ari Melber in his Nation blog:

When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton’s 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.

“I feel that my heart is going to come out of my mouth,” he said, recounting his sadness for the “millions of children that didn’t make it.” Martin was followed by testimony from a woman who, along with her two children, was kidnapped and held for four years of forced labor.

Martin made his remarks in what an interesting venue for Twitter reach. His own tweets – “on the CGI it’ll b my honor 2 present heroes tht r doing gr8 thinx agnst human trffckng.will xchange ideas n learn what else needs 2 b done!” – reached more than 338,000 followers.

But the Twitter king – actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) – was also making the CGI scene with his wife, Demi Moore (@mrskutcher); he has a Twitter-leading 3.6 million followers, whilst she pitches short messages to 2.1 million more. The couple tweeted their commitment:

Hubby & I have started The Demi and Ashton Foundation or The DNA Foundation as we like 2 call it. We’re ready 2 help bring an end 2 slavery

And Kutcher sent his followers to the live CGI video stream for the plenary on human trafficking. He also found time to tweak a more senior delegate to the meeting:

Listening to John Glenn mock the social web because he doesn’t understand it. I wonder if people mocked his space program.

Meanwhile, Moore introduced her followers to the nation’s leading journalistic voice on the issue:

Sitting in listening 2 a panel speak on investing in Women & Girls at CGI. In Nick Kristoff’s words Women are the solution not the problem!

Celebrity tweets clearly go to a rather broad audience, but I think they help to reinforce a potential cultural shift in how we view sex trafficking and women’s civil rights. Repetition from the likes of an A-list TMZ-type couple can puncture the social permafrost around a difficult issue like this, and deliver it to the mainstream.

Besides, there’s a core audience for information from CGI that is not celebrity-obsessed: writers, analysts and bloggers who work in and around the “social sector” year-round. To a large degree, they carry a lot of the heavy baggage for CGI in terms of disseminating and discussing ideas and innovation with a wider audience.

It’s this group that sent a couple of dozen correspondents (including me and my CauseWired partner Susan Carey Dempsey) into the chaotic and tightly-controlled CGI press pool – a large-scale operation that is understandably focused primarily on the video and still cameras, there to capture the bigshots and stars. And it’s this group that now uses blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to spread some of the bigger thoughts and developments to an activist group beyond the (occasionally oppressive) Sheraton press room. And you could see a the big theme of women and girls sprouting everywhere you looked.

For instance, tweets with both the #cgi09 hashtag and “girls” appeared more than 200 times over the last week, #cgi09 and “women” was tweeted more than 450 times, and #cg09i and trafficking more than150 times. This doesn’t include the celebrities, who tend to use Twitter more as a broadcast medium and don’t tend to use the hashtags to organize the conversation.

Relatively small numbers – #cgi09 never “trended” into the top ten of Twitter tags – yet the audience for international development and human rights was paying attention around the virtual network. And that’s important for an issue that’s just arriving at its moment, getting its wider organizing chops together under a new Administration with an activist State Department.

That’s important to an undertaking like CGI, I think. Despite its success and the billions committed to helping people around the world, building a network to carry its causes onward – even at smaller scale – is crucial to getting beyond the limitations of one organization, however large and high-powered. Upwards of 30,000 people watched the proceedings via the live stream, which CGI made available this year as a widget anyone could use on their own sites to carry the proceedings.

It isn’t about making the power brokers haul out their iPhones and tweet from the inner circle. As Bill Clinton said in his summation: “Twitter. That’s a funny word.” But he still got the importance of distributing the discussion; he said CGI generated 80 tweets per hour, and that the social network – inside and outside the hall – is heling to power the bottom of the innovation pyramid.

Chat Catcher

• Ricky Martin Fights Human Trafficking at Clinton Summit
  When Ricky Martin took the stage at the Clinton Global Initiative on Thursday, he did not sing, or dance, or even flash his trademark grin. Following the same stage directions as dozens of other celebrities who dropped by Clinton's 5th annual global summit, from Brad Pitt to Bono to Jessica Alba, Martin struck a somber note while discussing the fight against human trafficking.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• PhilanTopic: 2009 CGI: Where Did Our Love Go?
  The rich donors and donor countries that were supposed to save the world almost drove it off a cliff (and still might).
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-23/the-new-girl-power/
  At this week’s Clinton Global Initiative, everyone from stars to CEOs called on the world’s top corporations to invest in women’s empowerment.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• Child trafficking findings go to Clinton Global Initiative meeting | World news | The Guardian
  Only 1 in 10 countries have special police units to investigate sex trafficking of children and young people, a worldwide cam paign backed by Bill Clinton has found.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• Gore: Climate change laws 'crucial step' in crisis
  Former Vice President Al Gore told attendees Wednesday at the Clinton Global Initiative to reach out to U.S. senators and urge them to pass climate change legislation, saying it was the "crucial step" in solving the climate crisis.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• Conference Notebook – Philanthropy.com
  Former president Bill Clinton said the decision to cut back on gifts was in part driven by the economy, but he also wanted to be different than other big world meetings.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)
• Wonk Room » Women For Women International CEO Rebuts Exxon Mobil CEO Over Investment In Women And Girls
  …one of the main thrusts of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) conference is building up human capital. To that end, CGI brought together a rather eclectic group of individuals to discuss investing in women and girls as a way of bolstering human capital worldwide.
  (tags: Clinton+Global+Initiative)

President Barack Obama brought a strong message to the audience of a thousand heads of state, diplomates, CEOs, major philanthropists, and movie stars at the Clinton Global Initiative this evening:  “Real progress doesn’t just come from the top down – not just from govt – it comes from the bottom up, from real people.”

Kicking off this fifth annual gathering with a speech that publicly cemented his growing partnership with Bill Clinton – the husband of his former political rival – the President stressed his community organizing experience and the non-governmental work of his late mother.

“My mother understood that whether you live in the foothills of Java or the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we all share common principles:  justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings,” said the President. “And we all share common aspirations, for ourselves and our children:  to get an education, to work with dignity, and to live in peace and security.”

That meshed well with Clinton’s remarks while waiting the Obama motorcade to wind its way through a gridlocked midtown: the President was the first to come into office with experience nonprofit experience “and that’s a very good thing.”

President Obama praised the CGI attendees and took note of the gathering’s five-year record of achievement, including its 1,400 commitments affecting the lives of 200 million people around the world.

“That’s how we’ll confront the challenges of our time,” he said. “Standing together, working together, building together… That’s the spirit that I see here tonight — the spirit that says we can rise above the barriers that too often divide us.”

The President began his remarks on a light note, razzing President Clinton on his golf score an about monopolizing his wife’s schedule. “I’ve always appreciated President Clinton’s valuable advice and the ideas he’s offered my administration.  I do understand that the President has been having trouble getting a hold of my Secretary of State lately.  (Laughter.)   But I hope he doesn’t mind, because Hillary Clinton is doing an outstanding job for this nation and we are so proud of her.”

Then he praised the former President choice to found CGI. After leaving office, said Obama, Clinton asked, “What can I do to keep making a difference?”And what an extraordinary difference he, working with all of you, have made.  For the victims of disaster, from the Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina, he’s made a difference.  For those in need, from parents and children battling HIV/AIDS to your efforts today on behalf of the people of Haiti, he’s made a difference. It’s no exaggeration:  Around the world, Bill Clinton has helped to improve — and save — the lives of millions.  That is no exaggeration.”

And CGI, said the President, is increasingly important in an interconnected world. “We need a new spirit of global partnership,” the president said. “That is the spirit that guides this organization. I hope that is the spirit that guides my administration.”

Midtown Manhattan is in virtual lock-down, as motorcades shut streets and security agents create instant frozen zones to protect the heads of state here in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Cabs are worthless hulks of immobile yellow metal. Buses are very nearly short-stay hotel rooms. And the commuter trains and subways run under extra vigilance, under reputed threat from terrorist explosions.

Here at the Sheraton, security is as tight as the bedsheets in the presidential suite upstairs – President Barack Obama is due this afternoon to help kick off the 5th annual Clinton Global Initiative, the massive who’s who gathering of heads of state, movie stars, philanthropists and corporate titans (if any can be said to exist in 2009).

Yet the word here in the blogger and media bunker a couple of floors below the CEOs and Nobel types is that Bill Clinton’s dizzying annual confab of development and do-gooderism is more “open” than before.

Oh, not in the most obvious ways: you generally still have to be somebody of serious accomplishment or pony up for a large-scale commitment to the developing world or domestic poverty to get a delegate’s badge. At CGI, Brad Pitt’s the leading voice on New Orleans. And that’s no accident – star power drives this show, which is all about bringing attention to the world’s problems. That is succeeds wildly nearly nine years after President Clinton left office is testament to both his contacts and continued energy – and to the people who make this thing run. Super Bowls have fewer moving parts.

So yes, it’s very much a top-down affair from a messaging standpoint. What President Obama says, what Bill Clinton highlights, what Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ashton Kutcher promote, what Al Gore,  Queen Rania and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comment upon – those items will drive the headlines and the video spots on cable TV.

Yet that summation would ignore a trend that’s as plain as the code on the CGI webcast of the sessions: a Twitter app that allows anyone to ask questions of the participants. It’s a small foot in the door, I think, for a conference that ranks with Davos in high octane policy-making and is unsurpassed in attendance by heads of state from around the world.

This year, you also sense that the Tweetstream – and its ubiquitous #cgi09 tag – isn’t limited to a handful of symbolic tweets from the movie stars and the constant updates from bloggers; many of the delegates are posting as well from their iPhones and Blackberries. Then too, bloggers are now allowed access to some of the smaller speciality sessions – like ‘The Infrastructure of Human Dignity: Protecting the Most Vulnerable’ on Thursday – that we used to have to watch closed-circuit television to listen in on. And last night, President Clinton hosted another late-night roundtable with bloggers; I couldn’t make it this year, but was at last year’s and it’s generally a free-wheeling session on an incredible variety of serious policy topics. This year’s CGI is also streaming video outside the Sheraton more completely than in year’s past – an overt attempt to carry the conversation beyond the hotel walls.

This will never be Bar Camp or Netroots Nation. It’s not exactly the barbarian’s storming the gates, either. Yet despite the wall of hard-nosed security on the way in, CGI is opening up. And given the importance of this gathering to social entrepreneurship and international development, that opening may encourage more bottom-up involvement.

Online marketing guru Seth Godin takes aim at nonprofits in a widely-quoted blog post “The problem with non” today, a diatribe of sorts that repeats a meme that’s been active in American philanthropy circles for at least a decade: nonprofits are afraid of change.

And it’s true, of course – at least on the surface. Most organization, especially large ones, do not race to take risks. But Godin’s piece is both simplistic and under-reported. Sure, it’s easy to say – as he does – that “non-profits, in my experience, abhor change.” Yet in my experience, they hate a change a lot less than failure – and they also hate change less than vast swaths of the corporate world (Wall Street and big insurance leap to mind).

It’s dismissive at the extreme to lob this kind of question: “When was the last time you had an interaction with a non-profit (there’s that word again) that blew you away?” Besides, Godin’s “success” metrics are wacky:

Take a look at the top 100 twitter users in terms of followers. Remember, this is a free tool, one that people use to focus attention and galvanize action. What? None of them are non-profits. Not one as far as I can tell. Is the work you’re doing not important enough to follow, or is it (and I’m betting it is) paralysis in decision making in the face of change? Is there too much bureaucracy or too much fear to tell a compelling story in a transparent way?

[snip]

If you spend any time reading marketing blogs, you’ll find thousands of case studies of small (and large) innovative businesses that are shaking things up and making things happen. And not enough of these stories are about non-profits. If your non-profit isn’t acting with as much energy and guts as it takes to get funded in Silicon Valley or featured on Digg, then you’re failing in your duty to make change.

Twitter followers? Digg counts? Pitching Silicon Valley VC’s? It doesn’t ring true. Sure, passion and the willingness to take risks matter – but I don’t think a simplistic techno-capitalist argument can be spread across the vastness of 501c3-land.

For one, I’m impressed every week by the work of nonprofits – work that does indeed, blow me away. And for another, there is some risk-taking out there – more and more capital directed toward experimentation – and some terrific advances in story-telling, organizing, fundraising, and activism. My book spent much 200 pages covering those stories. You want Twitter? Social change bloggers often dominate the serious discussion of social media’s impact.

This comment is particularly wrong-headed: “The only reason not to turn this over to hordes of crowds eager to help you is that it means giving up total control and bureaucracy.”

Undoubtedly, control and bureaucracy can be big problems with nonprofits, large and small. But does anyone now living believe that the most philanthropic nation in the history of the world should devolve its nonprofit and service sector into a crowd-sourced cyberlibertarian throw of the dice at utopia? Yes, $300 billion annually is less than 2% of GDP – but it’s a vital 2% for those who rely on the services and support that nonprofits provide.

I don’t – and I preach digital change to nonprofits every day. Change ain’t easy when the world keeps moving and you have the keep the lights on – ask the President.

Besides, nonprofits are way, way down the list of sectors that really abhor change. Wall Street, big insurance, government – now they really hate change. More nonprofits need to adapt, to experiment, to take risks, to embrace change. But they need to keep on providing services while they’re doing it.

I think the “non” in Seth’s post relates to its own currency frankly – it’s an old bromide that’s getting kinda stale.

UPDATE: Wow, lots of discussion in several interesting places. Let’s start with comments here. Seth responds to my post, and argues:

My point about VCs wasn’t that non profits should be raising money from them. It’s that we expect ‘real’ companies to be innovative risk takers, but somewhere along the way, the status quo for non profits has become to be boring.

And Seth’s basic point – that nonprofits accept a state of stasis too often (which I also agree with and have worked on for a decade) – won some positive comments, including Brad Rourke’s:

Seth’s description of the board meeting with the silent leaders felt eerily similar to meetings I have been in, where an uncomfortable proposition — perhaps as simple as “let’s eat our own dog food” — gets killed through inertia.

But others accused Seth of not tasting his own cooking – here’s Hildy Gottlieb:

I read the title and prepared to agree with Seth Godin on his post. Instead I laughed out loud. Why? Because Seth Godin is not on Twitter! He has a blog so he can blast out, but no way for readers to comment – no way for Mr. Godin to participate in the “social” part of social media.

And Sheva Nerad argued (persuasively, I think) that consumer marketing rules simply aren’t the same for nonprofits:

Godin’s rant about nonprofits completely ignores history of nonprofit institutions as petitioners as well as change agents. There is a different kind of risk taking involved when you’re marketing a luxury item, and social change is, alas, a luxury. NGOs have to be diplomats.

Further, says Kevin Williams, nonprofits (especially community-based organizations) have to adapt to survive, even if the pace isn’t always what we’d like it to be:

I work for a non profit and we embrace change. In face we have to in order to keep our advocates happy. The point that Mr. Godin missed is that non profits are constantly in the community talking and interacting with their advocates and donors. That’s where the real “change” happens.

Lots of other interesting comments – please read them and post your own. Elsewhere, some interesting commentary. At Beth Kanter’s place, there’s a great conversation around this – read all the comments and jump in – and here’s Beth’s take:

Change is hard for people and for people who work in nonprofits. Social media can also inspire timidness.  Seth’s painted a untrue picture of ALL nonprofits as deer frozen in the headlights. While there are many examples of nonprofits embracing social media and getting results with only a fraction of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter followers – there are organizations that are not engaging.  If anything, Godin has got the attention of those who work in the nonprofit sector and are engaged in the social media conversation.  Whether or not that is only a small percentage of the nonprofit field or not remains to be seen.

Sean Stannard-Stockton did a special post on the controversy with lots of links, and takes the thoughtful middle road in judging the merits of the argument:

…we’ve come full circle. Tom, Beth and Seth are all right in my mind. Change is hard. Too many nonprofits (and philanthropists!) find change scary and by hunkering down instead of accepting uncertainty, they are wasting an opportunity to make a difference. Wasting an opportunity in the social sector means more people in poverty, fewer children with access to education, a quickly deteriorating environment. Seth is right to be pissed off.

But all is not lost! We are in the early stages of a technology and demographically driven Second Great Wave of Philanthropy. Books like Tom’s document the ways that more and more social change agents are getting comfortable with change and embracing new approaches.

Seth’s post was cranky, but he’s right. The work of nonprofits is too important for them to become paralyzed with fear.

Tom’s post was right as well. Everyone hates changes, not just nonprofits. And every day, more and more nonprofits are learning to overcome fear and more capital is being devoted to experimentation.

Geoff Livingston says Godin didn’t delve deeply enough before broadly characterizing nonprofits, and offers some examples of innovation:

My response to this is when was the last time Seth Godin did actual work in the field? Because I work with both nonprofit and commercial entities, and I can tell you which sector is getting it faster: Nonprofits. Much faster. If Seth did actual field work — instead of promoting his personal brand and ideas — he might have practical experience to cite in his lament. Instead, we have an uninformed opinion.

Consider the Humane Society’s efforts or LiveStrong’s or Live Earth’s and the National Wildlife Federation. These are all big brands that I’ve talked to in the past two weeks! Then there’s the CDC actively engaging to combat H1N1.

In any case, the conversation’s a worthy one. Sean’s right when he says that “we need to get comfortable with discomfort.” The blog/Twitter argument is a good one, so it’s fair to recognize Godin’s spark. As Beth says (in comments, above): “Anyway, he got us all blogging, twittering, and Facebooking about it …” Exactly. Thanks, Seth!

To anyone who’s worked in direct fundraising, “churn” isn’t exactly a new concept. Indeed, losing members of any list comes with the territory of appealing for money to support causes. Yet when users leave social networks it seems somehow different than opting out of an email list. That’s because the investment of personal time and informational capital is much higher than signing up for an e-blast. You’ve made “friends” or garnered “followers.” You’ve created an identity. You’re part of an interconnected network sharing not only your favorite causes, but your likes and dislikes, the books you’re reading, the music you like, the movies you love.

When someone signs off from Facebook – someone who’s been pretty active and involved – it feels like the person’s disappeared. When an active Twitterer leaves, there’s a void; a channel of information with a real person behind it has gone dark.

And then there’s the hype factor. Facebook and Twitter have been deservedly promoted as the largest (Facebook) and the coolest (Twitter) social networks ever launched, the new Microsoft and Apple, harbingers of vast societal change. Yet the inevitable “is that all there is?” factor was always heading down the highway. You knew there’d be a backlash, particularly against two private corporations that assumed such important societal positions. Virginia Heffernan’s column in last Sunday’s Times was the roadside flare for that head-on collision, taking on the anecdotal surge in Facebook farewells among the writer’s friends:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Facebook, the online social grid, could not command loyalty forever. If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.

Ask around, and you’d find quitters on Twitter too. And among some of the next rung sites like Digg, Ning and Mahalo. And among bloggers, Flickr photo-sharers, YouTube videographers, and various people-powered networks of all shapes and sizes. Churn happens. Time is limited. Life intervenes. As Heffernan (I writer I admire) says later in the piece: “Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny.”

Exactly. Yet as my friend, venture capitalist Fred Wilson, responded on his blog: “…churn is part of online media, particularly social media. People come and go. Some stick around, some don’t. These stories about quitters are true of course, but they miss the big picture. More and more people are using these services every day.” And then Fred posts the latest Comscore numbers for Facebook and Twitter. About 52 million people visited to super-hyped Twitter in July, makiing it the 47th most popular site on the Web – an incredible growth story that continues. And an whopping 370 million visited Facebook. As Fred says: “Facebook is a global juggernaut. It is the fourth most popular website in the world after Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!”

So if Aunt Sally and that boy you dated back in college drop from site on Facebook – and that social entrepreneur tires of Twitter – it’s interesting from a personal standpoint. But the sheer size and continued growth of the largest social media properties makes them ever more important on the social commons, in my view – particularly as they continue to be places of experimentation and innovation in fundraising and philanthropy.

When you’re relatively transparent in your online social enterprise model, you can expect dissent to show up on the doorstep every time. And to me, public challenges to peer-to-peer funding models come with the territory.

In the last couple of weeks, two of my favorite platforms – one huge, the other quite small – came in for the kinds of public questioning that comes from trying to change the world in full view.

At Kiva, a coalition of lenders is angry at the microlending site’s decision to start offering loans to small businesses in the United States – and their “revolt” online had founder Matt Flannery admitting he’s lost sleep over the situation. Meanwhile, Lend4Health.com, the small microlending start-up created to fund treatment for autistic children, founder Tori Tuncan faced a challenge to her use of children’s faces and real-life stories online.

Both sites, I have to say, reacted well – and began the process of dealing with their issues publicly. Let’s take a look at each situation.

Kiva

When Kiva announced last month that it was expanding microfinance services to the U.S. in a pilot program with OpportunityFund.org or Accion USA, I thought it was a good idea, but a passionate group of Kiva fans disagreed – a loudly.

Led by Kiva user Tom Behan of Seattle, a group of more than 400 registered users protested the organization’s “shift from making loans exclusively where the needs are greatest to where they are the least,” calling it a “shameful, shameful deviation from Kiva’s core mission.”

The group’s “revolt” – organized on Kiva itself – brought about a quick response from the organization’s management. CEO Matt Flannery admitted in interviews that the reaction had surprised him. “It’s stronger than we thought,” he told MercuryNews. “A little more visceral and angry.” Kiva organized a poll on the U.S. lending program (currently running 48-43 in favor) and the nonprofit has slated a community conference call on the subject for next Wednesday.

Kiva has an incredibly passionate base of core users, and the comments on its poll page ran the gamut – from those angrily opposed to the American loans to those very much in favor, as well as plenty of users who suggested other variations on the idea. And in a blog post to the community, Flannery and Kiva president Premal Shah acknowledged the controversy and admitted the jury is still out on the U.S. program:

Thus, we are currently in “wait and see” mode with regard to this possible expansion into the U.S. and other developed countries. For the next few months, there are several things we will be monitoring. For instance, does the U.S. offer increase our lender base so that everyone benefits? Conversely, do the U.S. loans detract from the loans in developing countries? Are we lending to borrowers who can truly benefit from our help in the U.S.? Can we have a demonstrable positive impact for our Field Partners here?

As the summer progresses, we will be looking for answers to these questions and more in order to determine our strategy. We invite your feedback along the way.

Lend4Health

The brouhaha started when Jeff Trexler, Wilson Professor of Social Entrepreneurship, Pace University, and a blogger at JustMeans, wrote a provocative post headlined “Lending for health or borrowing trouble” that accused Lend4Health of infringing on the “privacy of children.” His post keyed off several Tweets by public health consultant Alanna Shaikh, who writes about global health for Change.org, which said that Lend4Health “gives me the creeps” and accusing the site of funding a biomedical approach to autism that she believes is “quackery.”

But Trexler focused mainly on privacy – which in an interesting question for the CauseWired world, considering the success of ventures like Kiva and DonorsChoose, where recipients of loans or gifts are anything but private. Indeed, in large part the very point of peer-to-peer philanthropy and microlending is to break down the barriers between people providing aid and those receiving it. As for children’s privacy for the sake of fundraising causes, parents have long given permission from the days of the March of Dimes to present-day marketing for the Jimmy Fund and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, to name a few nonprofits where real stories sometimes figure in campaigns. And in the era of Jon & Kate, the amount of information on a typical Lend4Health profile is less than most Facebook profiles or five minutes of a reality show featuring minors.

Still, the emphasis should be on leaving the controls in the hands of families. No one recruits families to put their stories on Lend4Health – they do it willingly. And as founder Tori Tuncan said in response to Trexler’s post: “I hope that the options I have given families (photos, location, & names all up to the family to choose/decide) helps different families choose the level of privacy that they feel is comfortable and appropriate for them.”

And her own question is an important one for the CauseWired sector: “… as the person running the site, my question is, where does the site’s responsibility end and the parent’s begin? It’s an important question in this new era, and I wonder if Facebook, Twitter, Kiva, etc have come up with a solution for this sort of thing.”

The conversation in the comments section of Trexler’s blog post was quite spirited, with several L4H parents joining in to defend themselves, the treatment they seek for their children, and the site itself. And Trexler made several excellent points about the evolution of privacy for children below the age of consent in a socially wired world, arguing that stronger regulation may be on its way.

I’m not sure anyone either gave – or won – any ground in the discussion, but to me, the public conversation was in itself a real development.

The Kiva and Lend4Health disagreements – hashed out in public – are a welcome sign that as the CauseWired world grows up, it remains determined to adhere to one of its founding virtues: transparency.

• Mashable’s Summer of Social Good « A. Fine Blog
  Mashable has announced a giving campaign that runs from June 1st through August 28th of this year to raise money for four terrific causes; The Humane Society, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund and LiveStrong. It will be very intersting to see how this effort unfolds. Mashable is a very widely read site with amazing reach on a host of other channels like Twitter and Facebook.
  (tags: socialmedia oxfam Mashable)
• Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Are You A Listening Organization?
  Bwth: “… how are you organizing your social media listening? Is it for marketing and communications functions only? Is it centralized or decentralized? What is an example of your organizational or individual work flow?”
  (tags: socialmedia)
• Poverty in America – Change.org: More Microlending Comes to the US
  Recession or not, it’s exciting that Kiva is bringing its business model home. Beyond the individual economic benefit of small business lending, a less tangible sense of reciprocity goes a long way towards poverty alleviation.
  (tags: kiva change.org)
• Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships – BusinessWeek
  Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they’re beginning to have about our online friendships
  (tags: socialmedia facebook twitter linkedin)

The timing seems right. In the midst of the deepest American recession since the Great Depression, peer-to-peer microlending pioneer Kiva.org has opened the doors to its long-planned domestic lending program – connecting its network of lenders to small businesses like Enrique, a New York cobbler seeking a $5,000 loan for leather, rubber soles and general working capital.

Kiva’s success in enabling small loans to business owners in developing nations – more than $76 million from half a million lenders, $25 at a time – has linked the 30-year-old microcredit movement to western philanthropy, spurring a host of imitators and huge community of fans who drive the success and spread of the four-year-old nonprofit.

While the average loan syndicated online by Kiva (which works with in-country field partners to administer the actual loan programs) is about $415, the organization will make much larger loans in the U.S. The initial roll-out of the program has 45 entrepreneurs, seeking loans ranging from $1,025 to $10,000, enabled by field partners OpportunityFund.org or Accion USA.

In a post by Isabelle Barres, the Kiva blog discussed the organization’s natural progression into the developed world:

…to be a truly global organization, Kiva is expanding into microfinance markets in the developed world. Since over 70% of our lenders are currently from North America, the United States was a natural first choice. We know there is much more to be done to fully achieve our mission of connecting people throughout the world, but we are very excited about this first step. We look forward to the day when money is flowing in all directions around the world through Kiva: a Guatemalan woman making a loan to an entrepreneur in Detroit, a man in Uganda making a loan to an entrepreneur in Rwanda, and an Italian lending to a Filipino farmer.

Two months ago on a panel that I moderated at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, Kiva president Premal Shah noted that Kiva’s impact was still small, considering the world’s vast needs – and he indicated the organization’s large-scale ambitions for changing how people help other people. But the new model he talked about at Skoll was less geographic and more aimed at the community of users: Build.Kiva opens Kiva’s stream of information about its loan opportunities to developers who might use it to build other Kiva-related software tools, like an iPhone application or a WordPress plugin, so that loans can be made “where the people are.”

To me, the community of users that Kiva has empowered and inspired is the real story of the organization’s success, $76 million in loans notwithstanding. Its expansion to U.S. microcredit has the potential for expanding that excitement to helping local people who need a lift up.

In CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley, 2008), which chronicled the rise of online social activism, Kiva founder Matt Flannery talked about the need for risk in the social sector – for blending the desire to do good things with taking the chance on new models for getting things done.

One thing I’m excited about is the democratizing of philanthropy. On the source of funds side, a lot of money is clustered in a few people. There is a big disparity between philanthropists with power and the rest of us, but if you can unlock every twenty-five dollars under the mattress, you can change things. I’d love to see more people take risks. A hundred thousand people with twenty-five dollars each will take risks, but the Gates Foundation with billions won’t take risks. That’s because they have this built-in responsibility to spend the money wisely. We need more venture capital. There is a sense of shame when you make a bad donation, and that’s harmful. We need to remove the shame and have some tolerance for failure.”

It’s clear that the U.S. expansion is an experiment – its relatively small scale and ambition underscore its pilot program nature. What’s interesting is that Kiva, arguably the top brand/success story in the online peer-to-peer social entrepreneurship sector, willing to put its reputation at risk and try to connect small-time lenders with small-time businesses at the edge of U.S. poverty.

In other words, I think it’s a very good thing that Kiva is so obviously restless, despite its success.

And I agree with what Leigh Graham said on the Change.org Poverty in America blog:

…there have always been small and micro- enterprises in this country that lack access to traditional credit.  Recession or not, it’s exciting that Kiva is bringing its business model home.  Beyond the individual economic benefit of small business lending, a less tangible sense of reciprocity goes a long way towards poverty alleviation.

Lucy Bernholz coined the term “embedded philanthropy” a couple of years ago to describe a growing phenomenon in the consumer marketplace – well, let’s let Lucy tell it:

Embedded giving is the (apparently) increasingly common practice of building a philanthropic gift into another, unrelated, financial transaction. For example, rounding up your phone bill to make a gift to charity. Or using your own grocery bag and donating the nickel that the store gives you to a local homeless shelter. Or using a specific search engine because it donates a small portion of its advertising revenue to charity.

This post is part of a series sponsored by Telecom for Charity, yet another “small percentage of charity” premise promising to divert a portion from the sale of something we’d buy anyway (in this case, telephone service) to charity. These offers suffuse our consumer lives nowadays – and despite the cynic in me, I do believe they represent the desire to “give something back” on the part of the entrepreneurs behind these efforts … in somewhat equal proportion to their just-as-strong desire to leverage the proven consumer interest in causes and “good brands.”

But I also think that the basic (and I might add, seemingly majority) reaction in social sector circles that embedded philanthropy just isn’t worth the effort – or worse, may divert real direct giving by giving people a cheap way to feel like they’ve done something good – misses one crucial point. And it’s a very typical one for those who work in nonprofitland to miss: causes should be using these opportunities to broaden the attention they get.

In other words, even if a lot of embedded philanthropy looks like an attempt to take advantage of nonprofits desperate to raise money by using them to hook into a consumer market hungry for causes, so what? If the cause can latch on to a marketing campaign to garner more attention, it may be worth it. Sure, the money is small – especially for organizations who don’t have exclusive fundraising partnerships with the consumer brands and start-ups plying these waters. And I do not believe the money ultimately raised will ever tilt the philanthropy scales by all that much.

That said, causes need exposure in our saturated consumer-dominated culture.

So the key is in the story-telling – in changing the value of perceived embedded philanthropy from raising tons of money to raising tons of attention (with a few dollars as a bonus). To me, the best of the embedded philanthropy schemes work to educate consumers about important causes – with the small-percentage offer serving as merely the hawker outside the door.  In his post for this series, Sean Stannard-Stockton gets at the root of it:

Maybe embedded giving will prove to increase the amount Americans donate to charity each year by presenting consumers with an option that makes them behaviorally more likely to donate. But for now, I have to say that I see embedded giving as an indicator that Americans have an increasing interest in philanthropy rather than as a driving force of that interest.

And just taking Sean’s observation a step further: if embedded philanthropy can be used to bring more attention to important causes, maybe its rise is more than an indicator – but a potentially important tool in recruiting a higher percentage of consumers to become more active philanthropists in general. Has RED increased attention for the African HIV/AIDS pandemic? Have the ads for Tom’s Shoes increased consumer empathy toward children living in poverty? To me, those are key questions to ask – in addition to counting the dollars raised.

This blog post is part of the Embedded Philanthropy Blog Series, sponsored by Telecom for Charity. The blog series was launched in May 2009 to highlight expert thinking and encourage discussions on the state of embedded philanthropy in today’s economy.

Later this week, I’m headed for Toronto to give the luncheon plenary at the AFP’s local Fundraising Day conference there. So in true crowd-sourcing style, I started pinging the network just a bit in order to hit reload on my knowledge of ‘CauseWired’ Canada – and the network responded with some great resources that has me totally jazzed about the action north of the border. Sometimes it’s great to put a request out there in the interest of continuing education in the sector … and the strong desire to be well-informed about my hosts!

Not everything will make it into the 30 minutes I have to speak (plus a follow-up seminar for experienced fundraisers later in the day) but I wanted to share my notes with readers here, so as not to let any of the great projects and resources go to waste. All links recommended.

The Easter-time Orange Day organized by the United Gospel Mission of Vancouver hoped to raise $12,000 to feed and care for people in Metro Vancouver – but hit a total of $23,069.59. This gorgeous campaign blended a simple premise – get outdoors, buy an orange for someone in need (only 32 cents!), and get active in the community. Great photos, a Twitter feed, blogs, video and regular updates organized around the #orangeday tag with a reachable goal – and a really simple ask – made it go. And you just know that the Orange Day social media effort will pay long-term dividends for the UGM beyond the money raised this year. [Thanks to Joe Solomon for this one.]

A related effort unfolded on Twitter in the form of the TweetupHeatup campaign after a homeless woman’s body was found burning in a makeshift shelter built around a shopping cart, a victim of the long winter just past. Almost overnight, the tweets got folks into the streets with blankets, hot soup, and just the basic offer to help a neighbor – and bring attention to a serious issue.

Another winter/holiday effort was the widely-heralded HohoTO campaign, which used Twitter and other social media to unite Toronto’s sizable tech community and raise money for the The Daily Bread Food Bank. The site seems to be down now, but you can read about it at Adele McAlear’s excellent blog, check out the Twitter page, or watch the video. The effort raised $25,000 and more than a ton of food. [H/T to Stacey Monk.]

Not surprisingly, the great team at Social Actions sent me a buncha links – since it’s one of the great Canadian social start-ups ever! And three of the Social Actions’ aggregated platforms – CanadaHelps, GiveMeaning, and PincGiving hail from Canada. [Thx Peter Deitz.] Many of the social entrepreneurs who tend to gravitate to efforts like Social Actions will be attending Net Change next month in Toronto, “a week-long event designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change. Presented by the Social Innovation Generation team at MaRS (SiG@MaRS), Net Change Week will tap into the potential that exists when new methods of communicating, organizing and mobilizing are brought to bear on chronic social issues. ” One of the leading sponsors is the aforementioned CanadaHelps, which has facilitated more than $85 million in donations to Canada’s 83,000 charities since 2000. [Gracias, Christine Egger.]

TakingITGlobal is a wonderful social venture aimed at getting “youth everywhere actively engaged and connected in shaping a more inclusive, peaceful and sustainable world.” That’s a heck of a goal, but the Toronto-based organization has signed up 245,552 members in 261 countries at 1,154 schools in less than a decade – tremendous social impact. I’m also taking a look at BettertheWorld, a browser-based campaign to shift online ad revenues to the charity of your choice. [H/T to Romina Oliverio.]

More stuff to take a look at in the next few days: Global Agents for Change, Save Our Net (Canadian net neutrality), One Million Acts of Change, ChangeCamp, WarChild, and Urbantastic.

Obviously, these are just a small sampling of what’s going on in Canada – I’m hoping to hear more in Toronto on Thursday.

Okay, so it’s not formally a guest post per se – but we think this section of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech to gradautes of Barnard College yesterday touches as much of a ‘CauseWired’ chord as any talk by a major political figure of late:

Some months ago here in New York, I had the privilege of meeting a young girl from Yemen. Her name is Nujood Ali. When she was nine years old, her family offered her into marriage with a much older man who turned out to be violent and abusive. At ten years old, desperate to escape her circumstances, she left her home and made her way to the local courthouse where she sat against a wall all day long until she was finally noticed, thankfully, by a woman lawyer named Shada Nasser, who asked this little girl what she was doing there. And the little girl said she came to get a divorce. And thanks to this lawyer, she did.

Now in another time, the story of her individual courage and her equally brave lawyer would not have been covered in the news even in her own country. But now, it is beamed worldwide by satellites, shared on blogs, posted on Twitter, celebrated in gatherings. Today, women are finding their voices, and those voices are being heard far beyond their own narrow circumstances. And here’s what each of you can do. You can visit the website of a nonprofit called Kiva, K-i-v-a, and send a microloan to an entrepreneur like Blanca, who wants to expand her small grocery store in Peru. You can send children’s books to a library in Namibia by purchasing items off an Amazon.com wish list. You can sit in your dorm room, or soon your new apartment, and use the web to plant trees across Africa through Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt movement.

And with these social networking tools that you use every day to tell people you’ve gone to get a latte or you’re going to be running late, you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking or child marriage, like the two recent college graduates in Colombia – the country – who organized 14 million people into the largest anti-terrorism demonstration in history, doing as much damage to the FARC terrorist network in a few weeks than had been done in years of military action. (Applause.)

And you can organize through Twitter, like the undergraduates at Northwestern who launched a global fast to bring attention to Iran’s imprisonment of an American journalist. And we have two young women journalists right now in prison in North Korea, and you can get busy on the internet and let the North Koreans know that we find that absolutely unacceptable. (Applause.)

These new tools are available for everyone. They are democratizing diplomacy. So over the next year, we will be creating Virtual Student Foreign Service Internships to partner American students with our embassies abroad to conduct digital diplomacy. And you can learn more about this initiative on the State Department website.

Hat tip to the always interesting Nancy Scola at the fab techPresident.com for the quote; as Nancy says, Secretary Clinton does indeed speak with the ardor of a recent convert.

Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

There were three terrific winners announced this week in the first-ever Change the Web contest organized by Social Actions, and that great. But the really big news (to me) is that virtually anyone who applied is a winner, because the open API at Social Actions providing data from dozens of ’causewired’ (can’t help it) platforms lets any social entrepreneur launch something new on any given day. Still, kudos to the big three – here’s the news from Joe Solomon:

After a public online vote narrowed the list to 24 finalists, a team of eight judges selected the three winning web applications based on innovation, usability, and potential for impact.

So without any further ado, the winners of Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge are . . .

First Prize Winner ($5,000) -Social Actions Interactive Map – Submitted by John Brennan

Second Place winner ($3,000) – Zemanta’s Related Social Actions for Bloggers submitted by Jure Cuhalev of Zemanta

Third place winner ($2,000) – SquarePeg’s iPhone Application – submitted by Dieterich Lawson & Isaac Holeman

Congratulations to the winners, the 24 Finalists , and all to all the Projects that were submitted