Some kids with their new Night Night Packages, courtesy of Project Night Night

Project Night Night world headquarters, 2009

“Good morning, Kendra.”
“Good morning, Syd.  Avery, say hi to Syd!”
(Sheepishly) “Hi Slid.”
“Good morning Avery, nice shades.”
This is my co-worker Avery who often wore her bespeckled pink sunglasses to the office (the office was in her kitchen).  She was two and a half years old and helped me with our mailings.  Whoever invented self-adhesive stamps has my regards.

After a few minutes of chit chat about Avery’s outfit and animal prints in general, I would get to work doing the kinds of things one does at a small (read: 3 employees) nonprofit: processing donations; depositing checks; writing thank you notes; emailing tax receipts; mailing invitations; packing and dropping off Night Night Packages (I’m still convinced that Kendra only hired me for my minivan); etc.

Eventually, I left my part-time job with Avery to join Causes, gaining insider access and information (that also happens to be available here) to help PNN bring comfort to even more kids.  After some light recruiting efforts to build up our cause community, last December PNN started a fundraising project on Causes and, well, here’s what happened.

Woot! Woot! Woot!

That’s the email I got from Jessica Silverman Bryan, PNN’s Deputy Director, when we broke the $10,000 mark.  Woot is right!  Each Night Night Package costs about $20 to put together and get into the hands of a child, and we had originally put up the project with a $1,000 goal, 50 packages.  The project raised that in the first few weeks so I thought, “let’s go for it, $10k!”  Lo and behold, a month later we had hit it.  We’ve almost achieved our new goal of putting Night Night Packages in the hands of 1,000 kids, a HUGE impact, having raised almost $20,000.

Not magic, generosity

The fundraising project page earlier this week, almost fully funded.

So how did it work?  The answer isn’t sexy, or magic, or an anonymous billionaire benefactor — it’s a lot of small donations.  We added specific donor choices to the project page so that people would know exactly where their money was going and what impact it would have — $25 for a Night Night Package, $100 to sponsor a family, $500 to sponsor a shelter.  We were fortunate to be selected as one of Causes’ featured fundraising projects.  This meant that people starting Birthday and Holiday Wishes could see the project and choose to raise money for us, and that people donating with Causes Gift Cards could select the project as a beneficiary.  We sent a few bulletins to our supporters but the donations largely came from people who were new to Project Night Night and thought that $25 was a fair price to bring comfort to a homeless child.  I think they’re right.

To learn more about Project Night Night, get involved, or join their crowd of 10,000 volunteers, check out their cause.

Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel challenges Twitter impostor

A couple weeks ago, Rahm Emanuel (way back when he was just a candidate and not Chicago’s Mayor-elect), made an offer to the then unknown person behind the @mayoremanuel Twitter account: the real Rahm Emanuel would make a $5,000 donation to charity if the account’s author would come forward.

Then, when Rahm Emanuel was elected to be the next Mayor of Chicago, @mayoremanuel bid his farewells without revealing himself. But, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sweeten the deal and made an offer to match Mayor-elect Emanuel’s donation late last week in hopes that the combined $10,000 donation to charity would inspire the impostor come out.

Then it happened. On Monday, The Atlantic posted their exclusive interview with the account’s author, Dan Sinker (of, among other things, Punk Planet fame) and suddenly one non-profit organization was about to land $10k in donations thanks to the work of the hilarious, yet foul-mouthed, impostor.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juggernautco/

Last Friday Barbara French, UCSF’s Vice Chancellor, and Lena Shaw, Director of Social Media, joined us at Causes for the first of our monthly happy hours at our new office in San Francisco. We believe that with great digs comes great responsibility, so once a month we are hosting talks by a wide variety of thought leaders in the Bay Area; we’ll host individuals and organizations who are actively using social media for social good.

French and Shaw came by to talk about the UCSF Challenge for the Children project and to discuss the growing role social media is playing in their long-term vision for the university.

For Barbara French, Causes and social media are resources to help them expand their reach and raise awareness outside the normal channels. UCSF funds its life-saving research and world leading hospitals through federal grants, the patients they serve, and increasingly, American philanthropy. “For us,” said Barbara French, “social media is an opportunity to reach new demographics and constituencies to raise awareness about the life saving services we provide and the game-changing breakthroughs our research delivers.”

Just a little primer

Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker(R) has proposed a bill that would end collective bargaining agreements for all state workers except for Fire, Police and Inspectors. This effort is part of a larger effort to erase the state’s $3.6m budget deficit.

Included in the bill is the proposal to nearly double the workers’ contribution to their benefits plans to 12.6% of earnings as well as an additional 5.8% contribution to their pension plans (note that these amounts are less than half the national average). In exchange, Governor Walker has promised the affected workers no furloughs or layoffs. However, if the bill does not pass, Governor Walker has stated that the state will be forced to lay off approximately 5,500 state employees.

In addition to the financial terms of the bill (which the public employee unions have agreed to) Governor Walker remains steadfast in his intention to end collective bargaining for state employees. This debate goes much deeper than the budget deficit – after all, the unions have agreed to meet the financial demands in the bill – and is more about union vs non-union labor.

Not activists – just regular working folks

Causes users Josh Beck and Matthew Haugen sit on opposite sides of this debate, and while neither consider themselves to be activists, they’ve both created large communities on Causes.com in support of their arguments.

Both Beck and Haugen chose Causes because they wanted the ability to share information, news, and personal stories with large numbers of people. They’ve been very active on the platform, sending out regular bulletins and recruiting people to join their causes–key components in building an active community on the Causes.com platform.

Beck and Haugen are both 30 years old – Beck is a high school English teacher and Haugen works in manufacturing.

Beck’s cause, Vote No on Walker’s Budget Bill has grown to over 75k members in just 12 days while Haugen’s, Support Scott Walkers Budget Bill, is nearing 11,000 members in 10 days:

Admittedly, Beck’s been more active as a cause administrator than Haugen, which does help grow a community. He and other members are sending out several bulletins a day; members of the cause then have the opportunity to share, comment on or otherwise promote the bulletins to their network of friends on Facebook. Active participation in a cause sends a signal to your Facebook network that there’s something going on that might be worth their attention. The viral loop continues to expand as people join and participate in the cause and that, in turn, signals interest to their network.

Matthew Haugen: “Support Scott Walker’s Bill”:

“The people elected in November are only following through on campaign promises”

Haugen describes himself as an “everyday 30 year old, blue collared worker” who, concerned about employment in the state, simply wants public employees to pay their fair share. As a private sector worker, he funds his own retirement and pays about “3 times as much” for his healthcare than public sector workers.

“Everyone has the right to express the way they feel, I respect that. I also have a great deal of respect for those that dedicate their life to public service. I feel the protesters should have gone about things differently. For example, they could have come out to protest after work and on the weekend. That way they could have fulfilled their duties at work as well as being heard. The teachers weren’t making a lot of friends when parents had to take time off from work or find childcare on short notice. The teacher sick out was an illegal strike and they should face consequences for their actions. Also the doctors handing out “sick notes” should be ashamed of themselves.”

When it comes to protecting workers’ rights, Haugen sees OSHA (The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency within the Labor Department established in 1971) as being the right organization to protect workers’ rights, while contending that unions protect workers’ privileges. In his eyes, unions have been made outdated with OSHA standards in place as the primary aim of OSHA is to protect almost the entire work force from job-related death, injury and illness. What OSHA doesn’t protect are workplace conditions, benefits, policies, complaint procedures and the hiring, firing and promotion of workers, among other things. Labor unions, when a workplace has been unionized, handle these negotiations for their members.

Josh Beck, “Vote No on Walker’s Budget Bill”:

“Collective bargaining in the education world has positive impacts on students”

Public education teachers use collective bargaining for more than just pay and benefits. Collective bargaining can be used for everything from limiting class size, the use of technology in the classroom, to how much prep time teachers receive to how much professional development they are offered and more. According to Beck, professional development helps teachers more effectively educate and reach struggling learners and challenge advanced students. The loss of collective bargaining will result in classroom sizes reaching 40 or more students per teacher in his district. He asks, “How can one person be expected to meet the diverse needs of 40 students per class and 130+ students per day?” Beck worries that he won’t be able to differentiate instruction for students who have diverse needs and, “differentiated classrooms have a high rate of success on all assessment methods.”

When asked about what we can do to ensure our schools and education systems are keeping pace with the rest of the world, Haugen contends that educational policy should not be legislated with the teachers’ primary interest in mind. “The potential to get fired if you don’t do a good job (like any other successful business in the United States) is what spurs competition among faculty, ultimately resulting in teachers expending as much effort as possible to create and execute a successful lesson plan,” states Haugen.

On the other hand, Beck is deeply concerned about what the loss of collective bargaining will mean both for his own job, and the effect he believes that loss will have on the quality of public school education in Wisconsin.

“To help ensure our schools can be competitive, we need to change how we fund schools. We need to change our funding system so that it is more fair and equitable. It’s not right that the largest school district in the state can only afford to spend $10-15,000 less per student than some of its neighboring districts. We’ll only be able to get as far as our weakest members of society are able to go, and the unfair funding system in WI hurts the poorest areas of the state. We also need to truly invest in schools. If we shifted money from the prison system and shifted it into reading and education programs, we’d see less people end up in prisons. Research shows that the average reading level of an inmate in America is between 3rd and 4th grade, yet most things in our society is written at a 6th to 7th grade reading level.”

Given the opportunity to talk with someone from the other side, what would you say?

Haugen says, “I basically want to show people what many private sector workers deal with every day. I pay about 3 times what many public workers do for my healthcare and I fund my own retirement. I have paid a lot more for my healthcare at previous employers, but now I work for an employer that respects quality workers and rewards us with a good healthcare plan.”

Beck says, “…to truly educate them about what’s all included in the bill. It is so much more than just public employee’s pay and benefits. It includes things like Medicaid oversight, BadgerCare funding, more centralized power for the governor and his office, less oversight of those new executive powers by the legislature, loss of federal funds for transit, loss of collective bargaining rights, etc. It’s so much more than money.”

The other day, I heard someone suggest that it’s not possible to change someone’s mind or behavior based on passionate pleas alone – that in order to affect change, one must have some sort of intimate connection with an individual or direct experience with the issue at hand. Protests aren’t going to convince one side or the other to step across the line, but they do give a voice to those who feel the need to be heard. The anti-Walker protesters have been loudest and largest in number, yet those who voted for Walker have, perhaps, already said what they had to say when given the opportunity at the polls. Right now, the issues in Wisconsin are divisive, the outcomes will be historic — and both sides have passionate beliefs around them. All we know is that until the state’s democratic lawmakers return to the legislature, this bill will remain on hold. While it’s possible that Governor Walker will make some concessions and propose a changed bill, at this point we’ll likely see an end to Wisconsin’s 52 year old law protecting public employees’ rights to collective bargaining.

Your turn: Given the opportunity to talk with someone from the other side, what would you say?

Well, he did it – Rahm Emanuel ran a successful bid to become the next mayor of Chicago.

That’s not the story here, though. In early September, 2010 an enterprising smartaleck created an impostor Twitter account purporting to be Rahm Emanuel: Twitter.com/MayorEmanuel. The profanity-laced account has amused the man himself to the point where the real Rahm Emanuel has offered to make a $2,500 or $5,000 donation to the charity of the impostor’s choice (we’re not sure what it would take to get Emanuel to up the amount to $5k, but whatever) if that person steps forward and identifies themselves. That’s nice, Mayor Emanuel, but we want more.

As far as we know, the hilarious writer behind the fake account remains unknown to the masses. Last night the account posted a series farewell tweets culminating with, “And now all I can hear is that music, and suddenly everything just fucking…”

Everything just what, @mayoremanuel? How about everything this: you culminate your run by creating a cause for the charity of your choice on Causes.com, reveal yourself there and then once Mayor Emanuel makes the promised donation (out of his own pocket, of course), Causes.com will match it dollar for dollar. I bet $10 that we won’t be the only ones making donations (of course, if I lose, I’ll donate that $10 to the cause which means I win, and that just gets confusing).

Our goal is to inspire households in these villages to construct sanitation improvements which, in turn, will help prevent infectious diseases that can cause unnecessary illness and deaths, particularly amongst vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and people living with AIDS. The community members are by and large subsistence farmers, who must work hard in the fields during the day for household food or income. This fact makes creating lasting behavioral change even more of a challenge than it typically is. Many of the people we serve have lived with infectious disease as a fact of life, and accepted that it is a common and tragic occurrence in their lives. They are skeptical that making lifestyle changes such as sanitation improvements will alter these facts. Our sanitation push campaign is an effort to use a variety of local partnerships to motivate and ‘push’ the communities to change.

How the push works

Our staff works closely with a group of respected community members who we have trained as community health workers, known as the Village Health Team. Initially, our staff demonstrates how to construct the sanitation improvements at the Village Health Team’s own households, ensuring that all team members have all the sanitation improvements installed and can act as ‘model households’ in the campaign. New faces visiting the village always attract attention, and neighbors become interested in the improvements being made as they watch our teams in action. Even in Uganda, peer pressure can inspire neighbors to ‘keep up with the Joneses’! In the next phase of the campaign, we bring in a larger team composed of our diverse partners, such as the Village Health Team, Uganda Village Project staff members, local governmental officials, and students from local schools. This team splits the village up into sections and works house-to-house over the course of a few days, making demonstrations on how to construct the sanitation improvements, and sharing the hard work with their neighbors and friends. All the sanitation improvements are made from cheap locally available materials. A tippy tap, for example, is a simple handwashing device in which the user can step on a lever to tip a can of water onto their hands for washing.

A little boy in a rural Ugandan village uses a tippy tap to wash his hands

A bar of soap can be attached with string. In communities with no running water, a tippy tap represents a lifesaving innovation that greatly decreases the barriers to good sanitation.

Our sanitation ‘push’ campaigns have been remarkably effective, harnessing the energy of a community to churn out large numbers of small, simple, but lifesaving sanitation improvement devices. Thus far, we have run ‘push’ campaigns in 7 of the 10 Healthy Villages communities. We constructed 953 tippy taps improving hand washing coverage in our villages on average by 81%. We also constructed 62 latrines. We built over 473 plate stands, to aid households to sun-sterilise their plates and get their eating utensils off the ground. Over 565 rubbish pits were dug to reduce fly infestations, the cause of many eye infections in children. And using Causes, we were able to share this success with our supporters one household improvement at a time.

Using a Causes Fundraising Project

We created a Causes Project to provide our supporters with an easy way to see how we could turn their modest donations into lifesaving sanitation devices. A tippy tap only costs $2-$3 dollars to construct and can be made from string, nails, a plastic bottle, and wood pieces. The major challenge with latrines is the hard work of digging, which is provided during the push campaign by young enthusiastic volunteers. Once we were able to translate each item into a dollar amount, friends of our organization became interested in how they could help us make those things a reality in the villages.

Reflections on the Causes Fundraising Project

The Causes Project we used to raise funds for our sanitation programs was funded over time, not all at once, but it gave us a nice focal point to communicate with our Cause supporters about our progress towards a goal. We now plan to post a new project each time the current one gets funded, and to communicate with our supporters to give them a sense of how those few clicks of the mouse really are making a difference in Uganda.

My main tip for other Causes users is that the best way to get the attention of your supporters is to create a bulletin that will go into their Facebook newsfeed, which will appear in their feed along with their friends’ posts. Currently it is a bit difficult to determine how to make this happen when creating your bulletin (Ed note: when creating a bulletin, we automatically select to have the bulletin posted to the members’ news feeds, but the admin must choose whether or not to have the bulletin also emailed to members who have chosen to receive emails), but hopefully this will be clarified in future iterations of the Causes platform. Until then, one secondary strategy that has been very successful for us is to create a public event and invite all our supporters to it. This raises the profile of any project we’re currently fundraising for and attracts attention and discussion from our supporters, although not all of those who signal that they are ‘Attending’ the fundraiser will donate funds, it is still a good reminder as the fact that supporters are Attending will pop up at the Event’s start time on their friends’ news feed.

For more information, or to join one of the causes supporting The Uganda Village Project, visit their Causes beneficiary profile page.

Following Ali’s departure, we decided to take a look at traffic from the region and noticed a pretty serious spike in visits to our Facebook app page on January 15 from Tunis:

A couple of the larger causes related to Tunisia were created and grew swiftly in the days following Ali’s departure:

The cause, 1,000,000 Tunisians for a parliamentary system, giving power to the people, is actively managed by an activist in Tunis named Chiheb Arfaoui, who regularly updates members of the cause with bulletins and other calls to action. One thing that’s clear is that well timed, informative updates to cause members helps increase membership as people interact with and share the information via Facebook.

Cause admins using the application to connect with and inform people from around the world about events in Northern Africa

During the early days of the revolution in Egypt, the government shut down all access to the internet. Previous to those three days, around 2% of all visits to our application on Facebook came from Egypt. Since the internet has been restored, we’ve seen a significant increase in visits from Cairo bringing their number up to around 2.5% of all visits:

Last week I had the chance to sit down with Stephanie Rudat, an activist in the US who is using Causes to increase awareness of the Egyptian revolution. Her cause, Solidarity with Egypt’s Movement for Democratic Freedom has grown to over 13,000 members in just a few weeks. She sends out pretty regular bulletin updates using everything from simple, but powerful, single images or simply sharing a news article. My full interview with Stephanie is linked below, but I’ve included a couple of key points about her goals with the cause and her plans on creating a sustained group of activists using the platform here:

Stephanie’s full interview is a great peek into how an activist uses Causes to build a community around a specific issue or goal – she’s an experienced community organizer and shares some great insights into activism, in general, and being an effective activist on our platform.

I’ll leave the discussion about whether the protests, and Ali’s departure, in Tunisia sparked the non-violent protests in Egypt or if those protests were already brewing to the political scholars. That being said, two revolutions in one region within days of each other can’t be totally distinct. (I guess I couldn’t stay out of the conversation – which is typical.)

Have a good one -
Jen
jen@causes.com

Their cause, Help Homeless Animals Nationwide with Petfinder.com Foundation started off with a small community and was run by one of their employees, Vicki Fragasso. Vicki learned the ropes of social media and Causes and quickly and grew the community from about 1,000 people to over 92,000 people over the duration this campaign. I asked Vicki if she’d recommend that other nonprofits start fundraising projects on Causes.com. Her reply? “YES Yes and Yes.” She attributes her fundraising success to “Birthday wishes, measurable impact messaging for the donations, consistent messaging on a regular basis, and videos.” I also think the Donor Choices that she put on her project by detailing that $10 would give four dogs a vaccine really helped motivate people to donate. Congratulations to Vicki, the Petfinder.com Foundation, and the 2,000 dogs that will now be safe against kennel cough and hopefully find homes soon!

This birthday wish is made is honor of the kids we couldn’t save: Abishek, 4 years; Asa, 2 years; Vesta, 2 years; Guddu, 3 years; Guddu, 9 months; Unnamed, 1.5 months; Unnamed, birth; Gila, 5 years. May your little hearts and grown up souls rest in peace.

How $.07 Saved a Life.

Six months ago, my dear friend and volunteer Sophie Pisztora and I began a little fund. We were both new (I as Program Manager, Health and Nutrition for the Real Medicine Foundation and she as a volunteer for Jeevan Jyoti Health Service Society) and working our hardest to try to keep kids alive (naturally, we started at the peak time for malnutrition, malaria, and disease), but found that our best efforts were thwarted by the most serious of cases. Issues of psychosocial development, abandonment, and disease ran rampant and, after our first death, we quickly realized that we needed to be a little more creative.

The hospital we worked at in 2010 is a force to be reckoned with. The facilities are lacking, doctors minimal, and desire to actually do something to help “tribals” practically nonexistent. In absolute desperation, we “aid” workers (including Caitlin McQuilling, RMF’s Director of Programs) began to tap into our own funds and more or less, get creative. We began small, with at home production of therapeutic food (peanuts, milk powder, sugar, and oil), and bootlegged every “best practice” possible, from low-sodium ORS to RUTF.

In India, a little goes a long way, and our fund began with the 3Rs (approximately $.07) change we received when purchasing a bottle of water at the hospital canteen. Then we just started spending and spending, getting new medicines from pharmacies when the hospital refused to provide and going to the market to figure out how to con kids into eating high-calorie nutrient-dense foods. Suffice it to say, we definitely pushed the limits of “national protocol.” Fortunately, our moral ethics prevailed.

We named this fund the Vishal Fund, after a little boy named Vishal. He came in with severe acute malnutrition (SAM), refused to eat and requested his mother’s breast constantly—his mother was pregnant and no longer able to provide milk (one of the most common reasons for malnutrition is contributed to inadequate birth spacing), and was apathetic about his condition at best. The doctor at the time refused to administer NG tubes (part of World Health Organization protocol). We attempted a supplementary breastfeeding technique, but he was too smart for that. So, we spiked his roti with oil and tried to trick him into eating peanuts. When that failed, we just watched. He would eat chips and biscuits, but nothing else. So Sophie and I ran to the canteen, grabbed some biscuits, and spread a bunch of home-made RUTF on them. He did, in fact, eat. The first time we saw him eat we were overwhelmed with joy–and hope.

Unfortunately, Vishal wised up and stopped eating, but his grandmother (his most avid caregiver) got the gist. Two months after we had to discharge him and refer for higher treatment, Vishal returned smiling, walking, and fat. The grandmother had figured out how to trick the little bugger into eating, and eventually he stopped requesting his mother’s breast milk. He was finally the hyperactive 2 year old we had so hoped to see.

“I am not concerned that you have fallen. I’m concerned that you arise.”
-Sion Hospital Pediatric HIV/AIDS Department, Bombay

Taking life for granted

What we take for granted in the Western world is intangible out here. Healthcare is lacking, people willing to endure the rigors scarce, doctors scarcer (half the time we have to email the US to have doctors give us prescriptions and dosing advice), and even the best of us can only take it for so long. But this is the life of billions. I’m able to get on an airplane, fly home, and be surrounded by warmth and love and food. Shelter is never a question and if I’m sick, I know there are doctors available. My life is easy. Naturally, I felt the need to complicate it and decided to dedicate my life to rural “aid” provisioning.

Make a difference

The really fortunate thing is that change is possible. Most of these kids just need a little extra help, and while I’m here I intend to provide it. I may not be able to fix an entire country, but I can certainly impact the lives of a few. And so can you. I mean, Gandhi did say “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” So why not?

The Real Medicine Foundation in Madhya Pradesh does a lot of work with a lot of heart. It’s a fairly small organization, so I have 100% security that all funds donated will go directly where I want them to, and you’ll get your tax deduction! 
As I move from country to country, job to job, I know that there will always be someone who needs just a little bit of help. In the larger scheme of things, I hope to help create sustainable programs that will one day influence international policy and change the face of development. In the realistic scheme of things, I want to do something gratifying for those around me (and myself) now.

I am unbelievably fortunate to have the ability and support necessary to run around the world and do what makes me happy. I know that not all have the ability to pick up and leave, and I offer you the ability to contribute to a cause far greater than yourself, myself, or any one for that matter. Maybe not now, tomorrow, or in the next few years, but if, one day, you have the ways or the means, please remember Vishal, and how a few cents spent at the canteen saved his life. I’ll probably still be running around somewhere, sending out emails and fighting for change. Look for the famous J-Shaff O+.

Donations can be made through the Real Medicine Foundation cause or on my Causes Birthday Wish.

For more information on Jaimie’s experiences in India, read this post on the RMF blog.

^{Photos compiled and used with permission from Sophie Pisztora, Terry Lo, Caitlin McQuilling, and Jaimie Shaff.}

Happy Valentine’s Day from Causes!

We’re excited to announce a new Valentine’s Day program to help you give smarter (and faster). When you buy Valentine’s Day flowers or other gifts, we’ll donate $10 to the nonprofit or cause of your choice at the same time. Our floral partners (ProFlowers is our U.S. partner) are ready to help you give back.

The program is really very simple and there are a couple of ways to participate:

• Go to your Causes homepage and click on one of the causes to which you belong. From there, follow the prompt to buy flowers or other gifts through that cause. We’ll make sure the nonprofit gets the $10 donation.
• Go to http://causes.com/valentines and either choose one of the five partners listed or use the drop-down menu to choose one of the causes to which you belong, then click “Continue” and you’ll be on your way.

Go on! Buy some flowers for your love and then be sure to tell them that the gift came with a $10 donation to charity for extra bonus points. Way better than a bouquet from the supermarket. Trust me.

Note: You don’t need to be a member of Facebook to take advantage of this offer, and the prices and flowers are just the same as they are for anyone else.