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All For Good launched very recently as an aggregator of service opportunities within the United States.  Earlier this spring I got involved with Social Actions, which is an aggregator of worldwide service and micro-loan opportunities.   Both offer APIs for creating apps and republishing their data, and both are open source projects of one form or another.  Both exist to solve the problem of universal publishing of non-profit/NGO sector public involvement data, created by the dozens of mostly closed or non-uniform databases and websites such as Volunteer Match, Idealist, Craigslist, etc.

Now that there are two competing aggregators with different formats, support structures, and emphases, it seems that the problem isn’t going away.  Instead of having to maintain accounts, profiles, and data on multiple websites, non-profit/NGOs will potentially need to do the same for multiple aggregators.  On one hand, competition is good, and forces each of them to innovate and give their data sources a reason to stay involved.  On the other hand, they are likely to reinvent each other’s wheels.

Social Actions was, to put it mildly, a little ticked off that AFG didn’t reach out more to them or their community of supporters to develop a cohesive, shared strategy.  This conference call transcript reads tensely, but I wasn’t on the call to really say for sure how heated it was.  (Don’t mess with Peter, got it?  He’ll nice you unconscious.)  So it made me think:  Where do they go from here?

By the way, a couple of things first:

• All For Good has a ton more weight behind it.  Google, MTV, Huffington, Craigslist Foundation, HandsOn Network, and the non-profit company created to manage it (Our Good Works, which apparently doesn’t have a website yet) has some serious heavies on their board.   Oh yeah, and the ‘effing President!  In comparison, Social Actions is small, scrappy, and came into being by winning third place in a Net Squared contest, rather than by divine Google proclamation.
• Social Actions is sustained, in part, by running a social media consulting business on the side.  This reminds me that in order to work effectively in the Non-Profit Technology (#nptech) space, you must always be mindful that your desire to earn a living is almost always orthogonal to doing good in the best way possible.  There are always compromises.
• All For Good is in “Alpha” which is a great way to excuse everything that’s not perfect about it.  I applied for both an API key and for a copy of the source code, but have yet to hear back.  Generally the site, especially the volunteer feed form, lacks polish.  In fact, I think they might have been pressured to launch during the National Conference on Volunteering and Service and were not ready.
• The work of convincing 50+ disparate data sources to aggregate has been done, and will be a substantial and positive legacy for Social Actions even if nothing else goes well.  They helped plant seeds that AFG may eventually get credit for growing.

At first glance, you might say that Social Actions has been pwned, or is at least at the mercy of whatever All For Good decides to do.

AFG already has the biggest servers in the world, many times the publicity, multiple ways to sign in (but for what purpose?), location awareness, and some other bells and whistles that Social Actions needs the community to supply, via efforts such as the Change the Web Challenge.  AFG also has a mountain of clout while Social Actions is still not well enough known even within the #nptech circles, and they list on their website that only ~1,000 public searches were run last month.

However, I don’t think Social Actions should despair.  Instead (after updating their Linked In and Idealist profiles just in case) I think they might concentrate on the following:

• Own the non-US market.  All For Good is closely tied to the Obama administration’s service pushes, and as such is likely to stay out of the messy, foreign NGO scene.  There is a HUGE opportunity to perform great works in consolidating and organizing the world’s nonprofit/NGO opportunity data.  Two good ways to do this is to be the first to work with extra-national sites, and to get the best translation features possible working as soon as possible.
• Go after micro-loan, donation, and other opportunities that are tough to categorize or traditionally sidelined.  AFG seems content to concentrate on service opportunities.
• Don’t try to compete with All For Good.  If possible, leverage - use their infrastructure and build upon it, just like people are building on the APIs.
• Continue actually being open by practice rather than just claiming to be open and embracing (ahem, AFG?).  Nice roadmap!

I also think they could find a revenue stream closer to their mission.   Now that there are (at least?) two aggregators:

• Be consultants and subject matter experts for orgs who are trying to figure out best practices for publishing their opportunities.  Help orgs do a better job publishing, refining, mining, and managing their posted opportunities.
• Make best-of-breed apps to help nonprofits and NGOs use these tools without any muss or fuss, including writing glue code between the APIs and their databases.

I’ll definitely be following the All For Good goings on as I have Social Actions’, including Paul Rademacher, Adam Sah (@adamsah), and Jonathan Greenblatt (@jonathan_g).  I will be excited to get my mitts on the API and the codebase.  More to come!

Read more at http://www.fispace.org/category/personal-change/

1) Where do you live? “Live” is a interesting word for the working poor and homeless. Mostly we walked. From downtown Austin to Threadgills to listen to music over the fence. From 5th street we caught a bus to Sunken Gardens and Barton Springs. The best part of that? You can’t tell the homeless from the hippies at Barton Springs! You live where you are. Whether that’s in an alley behind Fox7 or sleeping in a parking lot behind the old county courthouse. At night we slept under the stars on a parking lot.

2) Where do you eat? If you have your wits about you, you can always find a meal here in Austin. The problem is that all the meals are provided by churches and non profits. Where the heck is the city of Austin or the State of Texas in this? Big time Fail on that. These are people not animals. The trick is to know where to be and when. Such and such church at 8:30am breakfast and 5:30pm at Woolridge park for Mobile Loaves and Fishes trucks, etc. We picked this up by talking to other homeless people on the streets. Also if you go outside Veggie Heaven and hold one finger up they will bring you a meal. I love them even more now.

3) Where do you get water or use the bathroom? This was the “easy” part for us. Second floor of Whole Foods. Cold water and ice. Also the Public Library, HEB by the bathrooms, most buildings at UT. Same goes for Bathrooms. Want to take a shower? Find a river or use the sink in a bathroom.

4) What do you own? Homeless people and the working poor have some interesting stuff. Cell Phones. Ipods. Old broken laptops. Shoes. Shirts. Shopping Carts. Cardboard to sleep on (like I did). Watches. It all depends. That like asking what I own versus what the readers of this blog own. It all depends. The thing that brings them together is that they are poor and don’t have houses/apts of their own.

5) How do you get money? You panhandle, do odd jobs, hang with the day workers. Asking complete strangers for money was not hard for me. I am a trained actor. I simply put myself into a character and had at it. BUT the rejection was hard. The way people look at you, treat you, simply loathe you for asking was something I have never experienced. It made me sick to my stomach to be treated that way. DON’T EVER IGNORE ANOTHER HOMELESS BROTHER AND SISTER AGAIN. If you are in your car give them a pair of socks. Or that crappy old high tech/startup.com AMD/DELL shirt you got for free. Don’t have money? Don’t want to give them money? Tell them that. Just don’t ignore another human being.

6) Were they nice to you? The simple answer is yes. They were very inclusive and friendly. We talked to a ton of people who had been their from a year to a week. People who weren’t all there to people who choose to live life like this. It was an amazing eye opening experience.

7) How can I help? STAY TUNED. In the meantime check out this sustainable plan for getting the Homeless lifted off the streets and into a better life. It’s worth your time. Habitat on Wheels.

No cell phone. No watch. No bed. No car. No wallet. No blankets. No money. No A/C. Just us and the streets. Starting at 4pm today they will drive us to downtown Austin and drop us off. I’m going to try and smuggle in my flip cam and hopefully will have some video for you later in the week. I know Mike is going to try and smuggle his phone along as well so he can tweet.

Why are we doing this? To show the social media people out there that this medium can be used for good and to let you know what it’s like to be homeless. We are going to tell our tale through Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and Video. Hopefully it will inspire you to think twice the next time you tell a homeless person to “go get a job” once you see how tough their lives really are here in Central Texas.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=4E0SQ46fpolJIVTnin0cwQ_3d_3d

Thank you for your time!

We hope to have up to 500 attendees, so if you’re interested please let me know! john.turner@unitedwaycapitalarea.org