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

The very word “pandemic” can sow panic, activating dystopian nightmares of mob rule and societal breakdown keyed to cultural memories of movies like Outbreak and 28 Days. As the swine flu epidemic kills scores of people in Mexico and leaps borders and oceans in this modern transcontinental age with alarming ease, it’s tempting to bite down hard on the urge for news and an emotional response short of mass hysteria.

And while Twitter and social networks can satisfy the hunger for information with amazing speed, it’ll be interesting to see what role they play in either feeding or tamping down societal panic. In other words, will Twitter and Facebook and all the other forms of sharing links (and fear) assist our global society in dealing with a kind of virality none of us wants to see expanded.

In the early stages of what threatens to be a major worldwide health challenge, the flow of information from my “follows” at Twitter beats any other amalgamation tool. The death toll postings, news of new outbreaks, and government warnings and policies hit my own Twitter stream faster than they do my email inbox, and from a much wider variety of sources. The #swineflu hashtag is a seriously central spigot for information – it took my, for instance, to a Google map created by “niman,” described as a biomedical researcher from Pittsburgh, which seems to be the most complete, up-to-date graphical tracker of the outbreak I can find.

But the #swineflu hashtag is also a virtual spinal tap into the core of societal fear over the kind of pandemic we’ve always been warned about – the one without a cure that jumps species and borders and threatens civil society. Spend some time the hashtag on the pandemic (of course it’s number one) and you’ll peer into that fearful “group soul” – or rather, the fearful group soul of early adopters and techno geeks. Some try to undersell the danger, with playful (hopeful?) references to “hangnails” and government over-reaction and having a good excuse to skip work. But I also sense in some of the joking a rather wishful urge for gallows humor, as if a few good tweets can make it all go away. “More people are currently sick from eating bad alfalfa sprouts than from the #swineflu,” is one such tweet. And yet the WHO and the White House and the EU aren’t freaked out about alfalfa sprouts.

Yet others are far more serious, and the near-instant access to statistics and information about the epidemic clearly forces what is already a well-informed crowd to pay attention to seriously dark news. Here’s one such tweet: “up to 149 deaths in mexico city from #swineflu. That’s .09% fatality. But geez. Its going up so fast! Last nite was .05% fatality.”

One aspect of this pandemic-related information flow is crystal clear – in times of crisis, people turn to their governments for guidance and assistance. The US government’s PandemicFlu site is cited in hundreds of Twitter posts, blog posts, and Facebook feeds and clearly, some wired civil servants are working overtime to keep the official view as up to date as possible.

Clearly, we don’t yet know how bad this pandemic will be – and pandemic it is, with news of cases in Scotland and Spain to go along with Mexico, the U.S and Canada – but I for one find some comfort in a personalized flow of information that didn’t exist a few years ago. After the disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the San Diego wildfires (among others) it became clear that online networks would carry more of the societal weight during times of crisis, that they hold the potential for drawing citizens together to help. This is a new kind of crisis an along with the health warnings and news, we’ll be following the performance of social media in providing information … and in calming fear.

UPDATE: Via Andy Carvin, here’s Wikia’s flu wiki, by Jimmy Wales.

UPDATE II: The Google map has real accuracy problems, and wasn’t created by the Google team. I posted on it @techPresident.

• The New Free | outlandos music: blog
  Fascinating post on the "limits of free" (h/t Allison Fine): "The biggest idea I came out of SxSW with this year was that free is dead. Over. Overdone. We killed it. Because so much is free online, we expect it; where’s the value in that?"
  (tags: socialmedia music)
• A "Twitter Revolution"? A Second Look at the Uprising in Moldova | techPresident
  Nancy Scola bucks the hype: "Daniel Bennett, a PhD student embedded at the BBC to study the impact of new media on war coverage, isn't so sure. "As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth," he writes. Bennett traces the spark of the protests to a core group of young activists…"
  (tags: politics twitter Moldova)
• Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Twitter for Activism Tool VS Strategy Debate and A New Twitter Activism Guide
  Beth Kanter: "There is an inherent tension between strategy and tactical implementation of using social media to support a campaign's objectives or nonprofit's mission, whether the goal is fundraising, marketing, or taking action. Those who are just beginning to incorporate social media into their strategic thinking struggle with: "How do we get to know and understand how a particular tool can help us meet our goals, but not let the tool drive our decisions?"
  (tags: socialmedia twitter bethkanter)
• Meeting 6 Billion Neighbors | PhilanthroMedia
  Nice tip from Dana Variano: "6 Billion Others is a video project organized by GoodPlanet.org which sent 6 directors off on trips around the globe, where they filmed the life stories (told first-hand, oral history-style) of 6,000 individuals. Using close-ups and realistic filming techniques, directors attempted to capture the stories of these people, in order to portray their experiences in the most true-to-life method possible. The purpose? "6 Billion Others tries to draw a portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values," and "raising awareness regarding the world's problems and sustainable development."
  (tags: socialmedia video)
• Gift Hub: Philanthropy with a Humble Heart
  A great link (and comment) from Phil Cubeta: "Small grants given locally by donors who made their mony locally and who are embedded in the local networks of business, worship, conviviality, rooting for the home team, volunteering for Rotary, showing up for PTA meetings, is this not about as good as philanthropy gets?"
  (tags: philanthropy local)
• The Center for Effective Philanthropy Thesis | Tactical Philanthropy
  Sean Stannard-Stockton's excellent report on the Center for Effective Philanthropy conference: "At the core of CEP’s message is their belief (backed by data) that foundation effectiveness has three core essentials: 1. Clear goals; 2. Coherent, well-implemented strategies; 3. Relevant performance indicators. They call this the What, How and How Will We Know of philanthropic effectiveness."
  (tags: philanthropy foundations)
• PHILANTHROPY 2173: Mapping the social economy
  Lucy Bernholz: "It was my kid who cried “stop!” as the flipping briefly revealed the ever-familiar DC Metro map. Except it wasn’t the Metro at all, it was an imagined map of the expanding DC bus system developed by an independent computer programmer in the area."
  (tags: socialnetworks)

SKW_09_265 copy copy.jpg

Originally uploaded by Greg Smolonski/Photovibe

Great shot by Greg Smolonski of our panel at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford two weeks ago – that’s Premal Shah of Kiva.org (doing a great job working a certain book into the shot), yours truly, Mari Kuraishi of Global Giving and Mads Kjaer of MyC4. A smart, open group that encouraged a real dialogue with our audience in 90 minutes – I very much enjoyed it.

• PHILANTHROPY 2173: Moving markets
  Must-read from Lucy Bernholz: "I've been thinking about philanthropic and social capital markets for several years now. … We are currently in one of the most dynamic periods in this area that I've seen in almost a decade. To better explain what I'm seeing, let me clarify the analog from commercial financial markets that I use to watch what is going on."
  (tags: philanthropy lucybernholz socialcapital)
• onPhilanthropy: Articles: Skoll World Forum and the Social Commons: Amidst Oxford's Spires – and in the Twitter Feeds – the Order Is Changing…
  My wrap-up post on the Skoll World Forum: "Even as we witnessed drastic shifts in the very system of capitalism that supported the growth of social entrepreneurship in its more enlightened margins, 800 delegates from 60-odd countries flocked to the 900-year-old University of Oxford last week for the annual Skoll World Forum – the sixth formal gathering of the leadership of the blended social sector that may well have to redefine its own model on the fly to keep up with a decimated marketplace."
  (tags: twitter socialentrepreneurship skollworldforum swf09)
• A. Fine Blog
  Allison Fine: "The spread of Social Actions data through Twitter Action Pack raises two interesting issues worth further exploration. The first is the supply side struggle facing traditional nonprofit organizations by these micro-models. [The second is:] We don’t yet have the language and the measures to get our hands around these micro efforts."
  (tags: twitter socialactions allisonfine)
• Sharing Information to Drive Impact | Tactical Philanthropy
  Sean Stannard-Stockton: "Given how many professional grant makers work on improving education, it is a shame that a parent who wants to support education does not have easy access to their accumulated knowledge."

  This lack of information about what works and what does not is a major obstacle to the most-effective nonprofit organizations of all types receiving the money they need.

  (tags: grants education)
• Gift Hub: Law Outside the Market: The Social Utility of the Private Foundation
  Ah, the concision of Phil Cubeta: "What we need is not more accountability and more peformance measurement, but more imaginative grantmakers who would, as Erza Pound once said of poetry, "Make it new!"
  (tags: philanthropy philcubeta foundations)
• A Control Freak's Guide to Social Media Influence
  Paul Worthington: "Losing control is a primary reason stated by brands who are unwilling to open themselves up to the conversation – and a major reason why most continue to use social media as little more than a brochure on the web. And yet the illusion of control is just that – an illusion. By not involving yourself you actually do more to remove control than if you did."
  (tags: socialmedia twitter)
• Civic Engagement the Silver Lining in Today's Clouds? | PhilanthroMedia
  I hope Susan Herr is right: "We may not be able to pay our mortgages for long, but I'll willing to bet that NCOC will have a different story to report at its next annual conference in September, 2009. while Teach for America seems to be growing like the national deficit."
  (tags: socialventures volunteers)
• Last 24 Hours to Remix the Web and Mobile for Change! – Social Actions
  Voting on the fabulous Change the Web Challenge from Social Actions begins today! Can't wait to see the winning mash-ups, apps and widgets.
  (tags: socialactions contests changetheweb)
• Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: What Are Your Best Tips for Organizing or Facilitating a Charity 2.0 Event?
  "There is a long history of charity balls, in the early years organized by the "Ladies Auxiliary" and chronicled in the society pages of major newspapers. As Millennials start to come into their own, we're seeing Charity 2.0 events morph and change."
  (tags: fundraising millennials bethkanter)
• How to promote your cause on Twitter and Facebook (without being annoying)
  What is the etiquette on soliciting people through Twitter or even Facebook to get donations? Is there a way, without breaking any major etiquette rules or harassing people, to help with my fundraising?
  (tags: facebook twitter)
• Four lessons learned in optimizing a wiki for massive campaigns | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org
  "…Out of this work came four lessons that can be generalized for other non-profits that use a wiki to help coordinate massive campaigns like the kind Earth Hour is running (they're aiming to have more than 1 billion people in 1,000 countries shut off their lights for 1 hour on March 28)."
  (tags: wikipedia)

Here’s a great example of CauseWired story-telling online: the Global Network on Neglected Tropical Diseases launched the End the Neglect 2020 Campaign to raise public awareness and support from corporations, foundations, and individuals to control and eliminate some of the most devastating and deadly NTDs by 2020. The new campaign features a consumer-driven microsite that educates users about the impact NTDs can have on children and communities and illustrates the incredible difference that even a 50 cent donation can make. The Just Fifty Cents Initiative is designed to give individuals the chance to make an impact on the worlds poorest people by simply converting the change in their pockets- nickels, dimes, quarter- into meaningful change in the hardest hit regions.

A terrific overview of the emerging microphilanthropy sector by Peter Deitz of Social Actions, from his visit to Google last fall. A few months old, but well worth listening to: “individual fountains pouring out opportunity get involved.”

P3091100

Originally uploaded by Epic Change

Brilliant job by the folks at Epic Change in following up on their successful Tweetsgiving fundraising campaign to build a school classroom in Tanzania via Twitter. The Tweetsgiving team raised over $11,000 in just 48 hours from 336 contributors – and Epic Change found a great way to say “thanks” and keep donors interested in the cause. When the classroom was painted, students from the school in Arusha put the Twitter handles of all the donors on the wall – and then uploaded the pics to Flickr. And yeah, there I am. Kind of gives new meaning to the term Twitter “follower,” as I’ll be following the progress of this school. An authentic donor connection in the CauseWired world.