As I travel around Southeast Asia for GlobalGiving, I’ve been holding workshops on online fundraising, a large portion of which I devote to talking about social media. I think to a lot of people working at NGOs here, many of whom are only hazily familiar with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, it can all sound like a lot of fluff. I can sense people thinking, “You really expect me to believe that my organization can make money through the website college kids use to post photos of their drunken escapades?” At first I was backing up my assertion with vague assurances that GlobalGiving sees donations coming in each week from various social media sites. “In one week in December we managed to raise $15,000 off Twitter alone!”

I now provide a textbook example of using a coordinated and dedicated social media effort to drive not only wider recognition but significant donations online courtesy of my wonderful colleagues back in D.C.

In the workshops, I tell people that the first step is just to get in the relevant conversations online: Alison, our social media guru, has done a great job of that; we have over 13,000 followers on Twitter.

Then I tell them to create interesting content: Alison recently riffed off the jokes going around online following Apple’s unveiling of the iPad:

“#iPad and #iTampon jokes are funny. But in #Uganda girls leave school for lack of sanitary pads: http://bit.ly/clXetd”

Our CEO, Dennis Whittle, also posted a blog, which drew off the buzz surrounding the iPad.

I tell participants in the workshops that interesting information is easily passed around online: The number of people who had this Tweet pass through their Twitter feeds, either directly or when mentioned by someone else, was on the order of hundreds of thousands. Dennis’s blog was mentioned on another blog on NEWCONNEXTIONS.

And I tell people that most givers are motivated by family and friends: GlobalGiving staff posted the iPad message to their personal Facebook pages. It caught their friends’ eyes, they donated and told others that they did on their Facebook page. All told, about 40 people gave over $1,600 to provide sanitary pads to girls in Uganda from our iPad social media messages.

[tags social media, twitter, Facebook, fundraising, iPad]

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Lesley Perlman and Nick Marx of the Wildlife Alliance talk about how they have a relatively easier time raising funds for the care of tigers and elephants(!) than for the protection and restoration of their natural habitats. Jo Owen and Thomas Hansen of HOPE speak of the drop off in funding for orphans as they get older. Kim Sokuntheary of the Cambodia Health Education Media Service says it can be difficult to raise funds for TV shows like the ones her organization produces which seek to educate the public and prevent gender-based violence. An organization working after the fact with abused women would have an easier time, I would imagine (not to say it’s “easy” for any non-profit).

Before I left for Southeast Asia, I was heading up GlobalGiving Green for projects which address climate change in a sustainable manner. All of this reminds me of the financing available to climate projects. Carbon offsets and an alphabet soup of schemes (CDM, REDD, VCS) only provide funding to efforts that directly reduce the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere. But there are so many necessary activities to which it’s impossible to assign an exact number of tonnes of CO2 because the impact is indirect. Educating children about the environment, training farmers in organic agriculture or helping youth start eco-businesses can have an enormous impact over time but such things are not eligible for the typical climate funding.

During the tea break of the workshop I held in Bangkok yesterday morning on online fundraising, Vena and Somkid of Foundation for Life (FFL) told me about the great work their organization is doing to empower the next generation by engaging young people from a wide cross-section of society and teaching them about leadership and the power and benefits of volunteering and service. I said, “That’s great. Now the challenge is to take that 10-minute conversation and distill it down to four or five words.”

Like President Obama, I think some organizations are rightfully reluctant to rely on a few words to describe the nuanced work they are undertaking to address complex problems. But messaging, particularly online, needs to attract busy eyeballs and be easily understood by a brain that’s quickly sifting through an enormous amount of information for anything interesting or relevant.

I wish I had an easy answer of how to accomplish that for the more nuanced projects. One approach could be to tie the primary pitch to the meta-goal and holding off on details of “how” until after attention has been grabbed. For instance, with FFL we took the title of their project on GlobalGiving from “Character and Leadership Training for Thai Youths” to something like “Empowering Tomorrow’s Leaders in Thailand”. It seems catchier, but only time will tell if donors agree.

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Sent: Friday, January 29, 2010 4:36 PM
Project ID: 4559 / IMC provides medical care to Haiti
Project URL: http://www.globalgiving.org/projects/haiti/

It gives me a first hand account of what medical relief is taking place as oppose to what’s being transmitted over the airways showing de-humanizing conditions with no relief nor help in sight!! They’ve aired trucks of food being returned to warehouse while Haitians are starving and waiting for FOOD!! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!! YOU ALL ARE IN MY PRAYERS!! IF I COULD GET THERE, I WOULD!! GOD’S PROTECTION FOR ALL OF YOU AND IMMEDIATE SALVATION FOR THE HAITIANS!!

We currently rely on our partners and their staff to provide eyewitness accounts of the ongoing work. But there’s no reason we couldn’t open it up to any eyewitness. Mobile phone texting may be an easy way for us around the world to get to know each other better. Great innovators like Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS and Erik Hersman of Ushahidi are turning phones into web 2.0 reporting tools. Highlighting this pressing need, Washington Post Writes:

“Much as truth is the first casualty of war, reliable information is one of the early casualties of natural disasters. Until fairly recently, disaster responders relied on their senses, and their common sense, to identify problems. The notion of measuring what you could see was viewed as an academic and slightly effete response to things such as earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis.

The survey this week didn’t ask questions of a random sample of Haitians in the way that a medical trial would. That would have been a huge and time-consuming undertaking. Instead, it sought out individuals expected to know what was happening to the people in their area: mayors, village directors, health officials. The places weren’t chosen randomly either. The designers chose fairly evenly spaced sampling sites, with extra ones in the heavily damaged Port-au-Prince area.”

What they [the CDC] found is that you can gather most of what you need to know to manage a crisis in real time with anybody, going anywhere, asking for feedback using a less formal system. To me, as a neuroscientist, it makes perfect sense. You need rigorous controlled trials to assess medical benefits that are small - like a 10% difference. But when the questions are knock-you-over-the-head obvious, like “who’s dying on this block” or “who’s handing out supplies?” and there’s no ambiguity from one witness to the next, you can do away with conventional sampling.

About a week before the electronic ink was dry on this Washington Post article, Ushahidi’s Haiti immediate SMS-based crisis response center had already logged hundreds of eyewitness reports from regular people about everything from looting to service delivery. See for yourself at haiti.ushahidi.com .

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There is a movement to brand certain companies as “B Corporations” if they meet certain social and environmental performance standards.  Some states are even considering a new type of business entity called an L3C, which is sort of a hybrid for-profit/non-profit structure.   This structure is specifically for organizations that want to marry the advantages of the for-profit model (efficiency, scalability, and ability to attract capital) with the social mission of a non-profit.

The For-Benefit concept takes this idea even further.

We support this type of experimentation.  Though the vast majority of projects on GlobalGiving are run by non-profits, we have had a handful of projects run by for-profits.  For years, IRS guidelines have permitted for-profits to accept donations for activities that have a charitable purpose and that cannot be carried out under normal market conditions.  We welcome such projects as long as they comply with IRS guidelines and our due diligence processes.  Making the world a better place requires a combination of for-profit companies that generate wealth and jobs along with non-profit organizations that make sure that public goods are provided for everyone, and in particular, that the less fortunate have a fair chance in life — i.e., that the poor are able to participate in wealth creation and employment. Donations to these projects are fully deductible for tax purposes.

Giving the growing interest in this concept, we are now going to specifically highlight projects on GlobalGiving run by for-profit companies.  Though there are currently only two projects on the site run by for-profits (Building a Library in Morocco and Building a School in South Africa), there could be more in the future.

Look for the following text in the project description:

This project is being run by a socially-oriented for-profit company.

From time to time, GlobalGiving posts projects run by socially-oriented for-profit companies, whose work includes charitable activities in the public interest. ALL projects on GlobalGiving have a bonafide charitable purpose, and are required to submit extensive documentation for due diligence. GlobalGiving reviews all due diligence, and vets the projects to ensure they are legitimate, well- run, and satisfy IRS guidelines for international grantmaking as well as the new voluntary guidelines for anti-terrorism set forth in the Patriot Act. Provided projects meet all these criteria, the IRS allows public foundations such as GlobalGiving to make grants in support of this work.

Projects in this category are required to undergo an expenditure review - meaning they must detail the charitable activities for which they are requesting funding, and provide an actual review of how the funds were spent.

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It didn’t occur to me until I arrived that I was, in some respects, more of the media than an attendee of the event. It was my job to talk about the event and report on it to people who weren’t there.  Shoot. I wasn’t prepared. Who, exactly, were all these people in the program? What were their stories? Where did they work? Why were they being honored? I had no idea. *GAH*!

Good thing I had the internet at my disposal. Whew. Bullet: Dodged

It was only when I Googled all of the award winners and presenters to see if any of them or their organizations were on Twitter that I realize that I recognized one of them.

Aleta Margolis, Executive Director of the Center for Inspired Teaching, was honored as a 2009 EXCEL Award Honorable Mention. Aleta is a rockstar Project Leader with whom I’ve become more familiar because of all her Tweeting! We like to encourage Project Leaders to reach out on all different types of networks and find creative ways to fundraise, and Aleta her team do it with flair.

Congratulations to Aleta for all of your accomplishments and your award. Keep up the good work!

Check out the Center for Inspired Teaching’s project on GlobalGiving, follow them on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook!

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A number of commenters have asked me to weigh in on the lively debate that emerged from David Roodman’s Microfinance Open Book Blog about transparency–not only on Kiva, but really about all attempts to make philanthropy more direct, starting with the pioneering efforts of Save the Children in 1940.

I’ve hesitated about weighing in–mostly because we have shared war stories, best practices, and worst moments with our friends at Kiva. We know that they are classy folks who know how to work constructively with feedback. And no one has written more openly than Matt Flannery has about the ups and downs of starting a new organization. So I have wondered what we could add to the debate.

Upon reflection, though, I do want to add a couple of things. It’s partly because, as I reflect on this nascent space of direct philanthropy enabled by technology–including GlobalGiving, DonorsChoose, GiveIndia, and others–I think we have a collective responsibility to keep pushing the envelope on transparency and authenticity of the experience.

Let’s face it: since the space is so new, we don’t always know what works. So we keep trying things, based on what we think will work. Sometimes we get it right, and often we find we can improve.

Overall, we provide an enormous amount of information and transparency to our users about the organizations and projects on the site. We try to put the salient information on project home pages and provide links to more detailed information. At the beginning, we provided far too much information on the home pages. Users told us they couldn’t see the forest for the trees - they felt overwhelmed and were paralyzed into inaction. Over time, we have gotten better in achieving a balance, and users tell us that they like our presentation much better now. Most of them feel we are giving them what they want.

But we can always do better.

For example, though the overwhelming majority of projects on the site are run by the equivalent of US 501(c)3 non profits, a few are run by self-help groups and community coops, which are sort of a hybrid type legal form. We even work with a handful of socially oriented for-profit companies that represent a new wave of entrepreneurs trying to leverage business principles to promote the common good. According to IRS guidelines, all of these different organizations are eligible to receive donations as long as they are carrying out a charitable purpose that is not possible under normal market conditions. Regardless of their structure, all are subject to our rigorous due diligence process. When these organizations list projects on GlobalGiving, we monitor their expenditures to make sure they are not making a profit from the donations.

We’ve received feedback that we should make this information more prominent on the project pages to make it clear to potential donors. That is a fair point, and we have in fact been considering making these categorizations visible, including a “for-benefit” category for these organizations that aren’t equivalent to US 501(c)3s. My guess is that we will find that some donors are specifically attracted to this type of organization.

One of the positive things about the web is that we can get feedback - and respond to it - much faster than we could imagine back in the 20th century. Case in point: we recently piloted getting beneficiary feedback (via text message) in Kenya. We ended up with an incredibly rich dialogue between beneficiaries and donors that ultimately led to the beneficiaries moving on to work with another organization, and the original organization closing up shop.

We’re constantly looking for more ways to get that feedback more quickly, and from more people. We even put in place what may be the first-ever philanthropic guarantee - the GlobalGiving Guarantee. This give donors a powerful way to tell us if they are unhappy in any way, and signals to them that we are serious about listening. And it gives us a chance to address the issue not only for that donor, but for all donors.

I admire how Matt and Premal have responded to the debate over at Kiva. Their response sets an admirable standard for speed and transparency. (And in that context, if you have any ideas about how we could get more feedback from more people faster, please let us know…!)

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Getting creative in the streets is one way to show your solidarity with people all over the world for global action on climate change. Another important approach is supporting projects in communities around the world working to encourage new, low carbon paths to sustainable development. GlobalGiving Green projects are making significant contributions to reducing emissions, promoting new clean technologies and helping communities adapt to local manifestations of climate change. Consider taking time out from your underwater scuba-assisted protest to donate today!

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