—–

For professional football players, the six days between games are jammed with practice, gym workouts, and travel. They also include time spent watching the film from the previous game, play by play, evaluating, learning, and preparing for the next game. I don’t know as much about other sports, but I’m guessing that professional basketball, hockey, baseball and other players have similar routines during their seasons.

It’s true that for pro athletes, everything they do during the week amounts to preparation for game day. Game day performance is what matters. It’s also true that many pro athletes are supported by extensive coaching staffs, sophisticated video recordings, and powerful analytic tools to help them understand what they did and how they might improve.

But a lot of what nonprofit folks do is similarly performance-oriented: every time you present on a panel at a conference, every time you pitch a prospective donor or funder, every time you talk to a reporter. You prepare (or not), and then you perform well (or not). And even without the same kind of evaluation and training resources at our disposal, we still have tools and capacity to carefully evaluate our performance and plug it in to fast-cycle feedback loops so we can continuously improve. Nearly every nonprofit has a video camera now, tripods are cheap, and it’s easy to set up to record right before you begin your presentation. When you talk with reporters, it’s easy to evaluate the print story or broadcast (not just reviewing it, which everyone already does, but studying it to figure out what you did well and what your screwed up). You may not have someone with you on every funder pitch, but it’s not hard to arrange at least some of those conversations with a colleague who won’t do too much talking during the meeting, so someone else can pay more attention to how well you do. For much of what you do, you can figure out ways to intentionally review your performance, identify what you did well and what you need to work on, and then craft a strategy for improving.

For most nonprofit folks, the limitation isn’t about resources but about how serious they are about improving.

Incidentally, it’s the coaches who really immerse themselves in the film after every game, studying the game film on the flight home or first thing Monday morning, grading every player on every play, and then reviewing the films with the players. What if the more senior folks in your organization were explicitly responsible for coaching the newer members of the team? And what if their job evaluation was based partly on how effectively they are at coaching the more junior folks?

An organizational culture that emphasizes evaluation, feedback loops, learning, and intention improvement doesn’t happen by accident. For most nonprofit folks, the limitation isn’t about resources but about how serious they are about improving.

(Photo credit: Flickr rburtzel)

I’ve included my interview below, but you can also read it and join the conversation on the NetSquared blog. The other interviews include Sylwia Presley from Gobal Voices, and Claire Sale from NetSquared. I definitely recommend them both!

Q: What does “online” add to the community organizing?

Successful community organizing across history has always been networked. It may have been a network of organizers in various towns or locations coordinating with each other and then operating locally. Or a team of volunteers that manage communications (from phone trees to canvassing). Or even the networked influence from news coverage and stories from one group or city to the next.

When you bring the Internet, online social tools, mobile technologies, and all the rest into the equation, you do not fundamentally change how communities organize or make change. You do, though, change the scale and the opportunity. Online networking means communities can form that aren’t based in the same physical place. It means community organizers and leaders can communicate with their communities and with other leaders asynchronously. It even means that individuals and groups who thought they “were the only ones” before, are now able to find each other, work together, and do even more.

In the most basic sense, online organizing gives figurative legs to impact and reach.

Q: What makes a community?

To me, a community is a group of people (even if it is organizations, it is still the people within them) who have opted in to participate. It may be a community of geography, cause, or topic. But the opt-in is essential. Simply because I live in a given city, does not mean that I am participating in organized decision making, meeting and collaborating with my neighbors, or even communicating with those around me. Similarly, because I am a certain age, have a certain allergy, favor a specific political party, or even care about a certain social issue, I do not automatically belong to a community with a shared experience. I find that community (today, most likely online) and opt in.

Q: How do you combine working on the ground with online organizing?

We should approach offline action as one of many channels available to us to reach our mission. Many organizations and groups currently consider multi-channel approaches for a message to include email, website, social media, and blogs. We should expand that view and definition of multi-channel to include offline action and mobile messaging/text. If we put out a call to action and want to organize our community to not just respond but share and distribute the call, we need to think both about where we send the message, but also how the action can be completed. For many organizations and groups, the offline actions are most critical and yet most often forgotten.

Q: What are the current trends in the online community organizing? What is changing and why?

The biggest shift with cause-specific organizing is that organizations don’t necessarily need to be involved. This can be great, or it can be scary. With campaigning tools readily available, and the economy of the web centered on content and adoption, if passionate individuals work together to create compelling content, achievable and measurable goals, and clear calls to action, they can make an impact – from fundraising to policy change – without an organization being involved. Note, though, that those same steps to success are true for an organization. Basically, online organizing tools have leveled the playing field between for-profit and nonprofit groups, as well as between organizations and communities.

Q: Any advice you’d like to share with the other online community organizers?

Start small. Don’t be afraid of failing. And invite people to lead with you at every stage.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, questions, and feedback!

(Photo credit: Flickr jakubsteiner)

I caught up with Rob Wu, co-founder of CauseVox, the platform used to support this fundraising effort, to learn more about the process and campaign.

How did you co-created the campaign?

That morning, I saw the jaw-dropping photos and videos from the Japan tsunami disaster. The news agencies were reporting that hundreds of people have died and tens-of-thousands were missing.

Within 30 minutes, I registered a domain name, launched a fundraising site on CauseVox, and seeded it with key influencers on Twitter to help build momentum. Meanwhile, bloggers Leigh Duncan and Deb Ng were starting a grassroots effort to raise awareness and support for the Japan disaster too.

A few hours later, we quickly found each other through Jessica Lin and unified our efforts as SXSWcares. The original goal was to raise $10,000 within 5-days. SXSWcares began truly as a grassroots campaign with a handful of SXSW attendees.

What were successful techniques or elements of SXSWcares?

There were a lot of factors that made SXSWcares successful. Many of them were really driven by the community. Here are some of the biggest ones:

• Community Branded – We used a co-branded (with the Red Cross) site to maintain credibility with our 1500+ donors. The site was hosted on http://www.sxswcares.org, which used a URL and design that supported a strong sense of community around the campaign. We also used branded Twitter accounts (@sxswcares and @sxsw4japan) to promote the campaign.
• Personal Fundraising – In order to extend our reach and to leverage personal networks, we encouraged people to create fundraising pages. Businesses gave away products for donations, attendees held competitive fundraisers, and hundreds of others used other creative means to make fundraising personal.
• Influencers – We grabbed session leaders, keynote speakers, bloggers, and social media influencers to extend our message across to their audiences.
• Media – The campaign featured compelling video footage of the disaster and testimonies from Japanese attendees. We also leverage media opportunities to drive traffic to the campaign site.
• Partnerships – We partnered with as many groups and sponsors as we could. This included SXSW organizers, the Red Cross, Hurricane Party, the Hanson Brothers, and many more to promote the campaign. Hanson led a 12-hour telethon that featured over 40+ artists.

What you will change the next time?

Hindsight is always 20-20. There are two things we’d do a bit differently.

First, we would tell a more compelling personal story. We should have created more videos of personal testimonies of Japanese SXSW attendees to add more of a human aspect to the campaign.

Second, we would focus on taking the campaign to off-line events as much as possible to facilitate meaningful connections between the online and offline world. We would tie fundraising to real-world events, people, discussions, meetings to foster stronger bonds in the community.

What factors contributed to the success?

At inception, seeding the half-baked campaign with key influencers helped determine if the campaign had traction. Hustling around the conference to get session speakers, key note presenters, and others with audiences helped us reach a social media critical mass near the beginning. Personal fundraising helped carry the campaign after the initial interest in disaster giving started to wean. Lastly, partnering with groups such as Hanson helped us carry forward the campaign to broader communities — audiences that we would not have been able to reach on our own.

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Were you at SXSW this year? Did you participate in SXSWCares from Austin or around the world? What did you learn, what would you have changed, how did you find the campaign?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the fundraising effort, whether you participated or not – questions, feedback, and ideas. I’ll be sure that Rob sees your comments as well!

I recently caught up with Mazarine and asked her, “If there was one example or story you could share that exemplifies why you wrote this book, and a few examples of the kinds of content and resources included in the book, what would it be?” And here’s what she shared:

Mazarine Treyz, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising

When I was growing up, people loved to argue around the dinner table about how people could try to change the world, but every nonprofit was corrupt. (No one in my family has ever worked at a nonprofit, and we definitely don’t have a tradition of giving to causes in our family.) After I graduated from college, I thought about all of the conversations I heard back at home, about how there was just nothing you could do to stop injustices. That you just had to let things go. And I thought, “Wow, really?”

So, I moved to Asia, learned Indonesian, and volunteered at Yayasan Emmanuel, which had just started to run mobile health clinics in Jakarta’s poorest slums. My first day in the clinic, we picked up the doctors who were donating their time, and got to Tanjung Priok, a slum on the water in the center of Jakarta, in the early hours of the morning. The smell of garbage and burning hit my nose as I climbed out of the van. People were living in concrete boxes with only a door, no windows, and sleeping on pieces of cardboard. When the slum flooded, their houses got flooded too. People made a meager living picking garbage and selling what they could. I had all kinds of preconceived notions about what I would find in Jakarta, but nothing prepared me for the massive skin diseases, people with all of their skin flaking off, people who had leprosy so badly that most of their fingers and toes were gone, and their skin was so mottled it looked like it was sliding off their bodies. I didn’t know that you can get leprosy from having a cut on your foot and then stepping into some dirty water, but you can.

Standing far away, I had no idea what people needed. Being there, I realized that people clearly needed access to clean, fresh water. Now WatSan has helped people in Tanjung Priok get filters for creating fresh clean water, and they have started selling it to other slums, creating income, a cottage industry, and money for uniforms for their children to attend school, breaking the cycle of poverty. All from water.

It was an experience that changed me forever. I realized that I could help make people aware of these situations overseas by writing about them. When I returned to America I began my career as a nonprofit consultant. I co-founded a nonprofit called “The Moon Balloon Project” and worked for arts in healthcare nonprofits.

But what I found was that the books for getting started in making a difference with your writing were just DULL. I tried some courses at the Foundation Center, and looked at some books, but couldn’t really get into anything I read. All fired up from my time in Indonesia, I thought, “Changing the world is so exciting! Why do these fundraising books have to be so BORING?” So flash forward to seven years later, I’ve worked full time at nonprofits and consulted part time with nonprofits, and I’ve raised a lot of money. In 2010 I completed my book, the book that I wish I had had when i first started. This book is about every fundraising method, tip and trick that I’ve learned on the way, for people who would like useful fundraising advice written from a cheerful, fresh, graphically rich, interactive perspective that they can immediately apply to their cause.

Some examples of things you’ll find inside my book:

• a CD with 80 pages of templates, FAQs and more that you can open up and instantly customize for your fundraising office.
• a series of quizzes and worksheets for your board members designed to get them to help you fundraise
• a sponsorship letter that has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for me in sponsorships. And it’s helped readers too! Example? Heather writes, “I customized your corporate sponsorship ask letter to put together a package for an event we have coming up, and I’ve already gotten two sponsorships.” -Heather Davis, The Telling Room”
• a cover letter that has generated many interviews for me and others who got nonprofit and government jobs.
• a chapter on how to manage conflict at your nonprofit, something I really wish I had learned in the beginning!

Free Book Giveaway

Want to have a chance at a free copy of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising? Simply leave a comment here sharing your biggest hurdle or burning question. Mazarine will be weighing in with the conversation and one commenter will be selected at random to receive the book. We will select a winner from the comments on March 7th.

Thanks to Mazarine for providing a free copy and for participating in this valuable conversation!

Samsung pledged to contribute up to $100,000 through this social action challenge, providing a donation of $5 to the Dan Marino Foundation each time someone pledged their support of autism awareness by sharing an infographic with their Facebook friends or sending a tweet with the hashtag, #teamautism. And in just 72 hours, they reached their goal of $100,000 through TeamUpForAutism.com.

Interview: Online Campaigning Success Story

That’s a whole lot of donations in just 3 days! So, I connected with Sloane Berrent, Founder of The Causemopolitan to learn more about this success story – she’s working with JESS3 on this entire campaign. They created the infographic and pulled her in for the overall digital strategy.

Going into the campaign, did you really expect to hit your goal in just 3 days? What were the goals/expectations you had set for the campaign internally?

It was truly a surprise to reach the goal in 3 days. There was a campaign they did in December with a very similar look and feel. That campaign had an infographic and charity partner and a set amount of money Samsung were donating based on social actions taken online. That campaign reached the goal, but it took a month to do it. Which is still amazing to take your online community and engage them in the process. A big success. That said, this time around, Samsung, The Dan Marino Foundation and JESS3 were looking for more bite. The goal was $100k and we were given a month, but were definitely hoping for two weeks. It was absolutely amazing to reach our goal so quickly and it’s because of all of the hard work we did beforehand that it happened. That and a bit of groundswell.

What kind of post-campaign planning did you do before launching; what do you plan to do?

We really focused on building our team of advocates before we launched the campaign. I know a lot of campaigns where people feel that you launch and put it out there and then you bring people in and have them share in the experience. But for this campaign we really baked them in early. We contacted autism advocates and let them know this campaign was coming. We didn’t have all the pieces finished, but we drafted outreach and pulled together lists. It’s really important to be prepared when you hit the gate. Sometimes campaigns change when they’re live and that hard work you put in gets discounted and sometimes it makes all the difference. It’s not a gamble though. You have to do the work, identify your target groups and know who your advocates are. You have to pay attention to what happens in that first 24 hours and be willing to change your strategy to fit what the market is telling you because you never really know what’s going to happen with a campaign until it’s live.

How do you see the social media engagement and outreach involved in this campaign impacting the post-campaign social media use by the Foundation?

We really worked on educating Dan Marino and The Dan Marino Foundation on how to effectively use social media. They both were aware of what was out there, but we talked a lot about engagement and creating conversation. Both have seen a rise in their numbers of followers and fans and sometimes that quantity helps to get to quality. I don’t think nonprofits should have to fight tooth and nail for every follower. Spikes like this campaign are good for nonprofits and then they can back into these tools and find a way that works for their bandwidth on a day-to-day basis.

To others looking at your success as an inspiration for their own campaigns and fundraising plans, what tips or recommendations would you share?

Thank people one time too many. I’m serious! Say thank you and then say thank you again. That’s a bit of secret sauce but you can never say thank you enough to people who do things for you because they want to and not because they’re paid to or work for you. That’s a powerful change agent. It’s like the idea of second gifts. Someone makes a gift, they get a thank you and then they make a second gift because they were impressed with the thank you. It’s a cycle. When people feel recognized and valued, truly valued, they are willing to go to bat for you. Social media is complicated and wily at times, sometimes you’re the hare and sometimes you’re the tortoise. But the key is bringing your supporters along with you to your next campaign. Then success will follow you because people love being a part of not only your cause but the feeling they get from helping your cause.

Has your organization looked to partner with another organization or a company (the way the Dan Marino Foundation partnered with Samsung – with dedicated matching funds) for a campaign? Have you tried a Twitter campaign with donations per tweet? What lessons would you share – what questions would you like to ask Sloane?

Check out the interview below to learn more about how My Colorado Project is empowering local change!

How did My Colorado Project come about, how did it get started?

My Colorado Project is a website that highlights the attributes and interests of a new generation of givers. Rather than try to get younger donors to fit into our existing programs, we’ve built a site that encourages young people to do what they’re best at – connect online, build networks of like-minded people, and make philanthropy fun. Based on the “giving circle” concept, we’re giving donors a new way to personalize their giving and support their favorite causes.

My Colorado Project started out as a project of our current CEO Alyssa Kopf who was frustrated with the popular perception that young people don’t give.

“Working as a professional fundraiser, I knew that I was giving and my friends were giving but our common donor tracking systems weren’t capturing how the diversity of our interests and frequent smaller donations added up to a sizeable amount over the course of a year. My Colorado is our attempt to build a new fundraising model for peer-driven giving and create new tools for planning and tracking your philanthropic footprint.”

Alyssa and I talk about the creation of My Colorado Project often and my perception was that she took it kind of personally as a young person and as a nonprofit professional that she and her peers weren’t on the radar screens of their favorite organizations. I don’t think that anything really great gets done without having a serious personal interest and now we’re ready to give a significant asset to young people all over Colorado.

How do you define e-philanthropy and how does MCP align with that vision?

We hope that MCP will better illustrate the difference between transactional and transformational e-philanthropy.  We believe that the latter offers a more sustainable giving experience and that MCP can help young donors along the road to becoming thoughtful, strategic, and happy philanthropists.  The bulk of the online giving tools currently available focus on the transaction.  Hey, we need that, no doubt, but when you focus only on the transaction and on making donations more efficient you miss something even greater! We want young donors and nonprofits alike to know that there is a richer, more fulfilling, and more financially rewarding experience that they can have.  Not only can you provide financial support, but you can tie your cause to your self-identity and transform not only your community, but yourself.

If you do your generational research you’ll find an awful lot of evidence to suggest that this is how younger donors want to get involved. My Colorado Project builds on that interest and offers a very personal and meaningful way to be introduced to giving and develop as a philanthropist.

What was the process, costs, and development of MCP like?

The greatest obstacle for me as the manager of the project is to create a website which meets the user-experience standards of the average Millennial. Do you know how hard that is?! We Millennials (I stand accused with a b-day of 1980) are a fickle bunch and our expectations are high. We’re used to cruising around multi-million dollar websites that have teams of designers, copy editors, and testers.

My Colorado Project has had to make the most of every dollar invested in the project. Every Nonprofit Pro reading this is going to laugh at my feeble attempt at pity!

But we have one thing working in our corner. We have 7 skilled and wicked smart nonprofit Pros who know our community, know our sector, and know philanthropy. We’ve been doing it for 25 years and have proven that our accessible, inclusive, and incremental model adds value.

We’re fortunate to have been able to present this idea to funders who have given us a great start and we recently struck up a relationship that we’re very proud of with one of Denver’s most innovative nonprofits, the Open Media Foundation. They are helping us build the next phase of development  and we hope that our relationship will extend above and beyond that relationship and into entertaining and valuable content development.

My Colorado is completely replicable and we hope that we can share it with other communities.

Can you share some examples of how groups have used the platform so far?

It has been super enjoyable to see both our nonprofit members and passionate individuals use My Colorado Project in its Beta stages.

First are those I call the Ambassadors. About a year or so ago Community Shares started using different terminology to describe our volunteers.  We wanted to refresh how our most committed supporters think of themselves.  Not only are ambassadors treasured donors and drivers of a mission, but in this age of social media they have also become the most important spokespeople and storytellers a nonprofit can have.

Fundraising 101 tells us that the most impassioned and successful messages are the stories that come right from the mouths of people who have shared a significant life experience with that organization. Many giving circles are started by a single individual with an extraordinary attachment to a cause or organization in particular.  They tell their stories, recruit their friends, and use use mainstream social media tools to expand their cause. The cause becomes part of their personal brand and they wear it with pride.

If they are really savvy, they ask for help from the organizations to build trust, and keep the giving circle growing.

One of the giving circles I like is the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Denver.  They’ve used their giving circle to bring in current and past board members to establish a foundation of donor support that they can count on year in and year out. This is a great first step for an organization which is largely staffed by the board of directors themselves.

“Annie’s Amazing Animals” is another inspiring effort.  Annie, who is 8 years old, posted a video asking for donations to her favorite nonprofits instead of gifts! She far exceeded her giving goals and posted a video thank you to her supporters.

My Colorado allows donors to start giving circles and support up to four different nonprofits with as little as $5 a month. The purpose of this is to give donors flexibility to be themselves and support multiple causes. I like to think of some of them as “nonprofit mutual funds.”

One of my favorite moments was when Robert Egger, the founder of DC Central Kitchen and V3, came to visit us a while back and his advice to me was to “keep it local and make sure it translates offline.” I have my notes from that meeting on the bulletin board above my desk.

There are very few things that are as empowering as the internet. I’ve noticed my own personal tendency to want to take projects that were originally small in scale and offer them to the entire world!  But, I think that social media will see a slight correction after its astronomical rise and more and more people will try to fill in the local gaps that really big national websites have missed.  I think My Colorado Project will be attractive because it is small and community based.

What were you most surprised about with the process and adoption – what were you least surprised about?

After this next phase of development is over in February – monthly contests – we’ll take a break from development for a second to focus more on the promotion of the project. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am by the adoption of the program with so little marketing on our part. We’ve really only just begun the extended roll-out phase and already we have thousands of new dollars circulating through the community. We’re a long way from our potential but it is a rewarding start.

What was the role of community in building this platform and now in the further improvements and development?

We’re very conscious of building a Colorado asset with the input and needs of the Colorado community in mind.  Community Shares is first and foremost an organization committed to the 100+ member nonprofits we serve.  Our role in the community is unique in that we interact regularly with local funders and associations, thousands of individual donors and employees, more than 150 businesses, and our 100+ nonprofits and those they serve.

In addition to our staff’s ability to be in 20 places at once, we also did our homework before embarking on such an ambitious goal. As a part of Community Shares’ capacity building program we sponsored a study and subsequent toolkit for Colorado nonprofits titled, Engaging Tomorrow’s Donors Today, which surveyed over 700 donors on generational differences in giving and analyzed the role of social media and e-philanthropy in a rapidly changing sector.

We’re entering the fun part now where we get to more widely market My Colorado Project, but our My Colorado 25 – our first group of giving leaders – and more than 100 nonprofits stand at the ready to tell us what they think and what they want. The time to stand aside and let the comments roll in is near!

What’s on the list for next developments?

The Personal Philanthropy Plan is next. The first phase of that robust effort will be a monthly contest which will use creative and thought-provoking questions to help Coloradans have fun and think more about the values and interests they are most interested in pursuing from a philanthropic perspective.  After that we’ll begin building a more robust plan that each participant can fill out to set goals and put a plan into place to become more strategic and focused in their approach.  Wow – that doesn’t sound like fun! But it will be! It will be, I promise that it will be super fun!

The neat part about My Colorado is that there is always another cause and another organization to hear from and learn about. Always another donor perspective and content to view. The showcase for our community’s nonprofits is going to be more vibrant than ever before.

How can people join or follow your work?

Community Shares and My Colorado Project are both really easy to follow and learn about. If you want to know more about My Colorado Project, please visit the website and take a test drive by forming a giving circle. Whether you’re from this great state, have relatives or friends here, visit occasionally for recreation, or have just been here to catch a connecting flight we hope you’ll support our grassroots initiative. If you’d like to form a giving circle but don’t see your desired beneficiary, you can suggest any 501 c3 as a beneficiary of your giving personal circle.

• @mycoloradoproj
• www.mycoloradoproject.org
• @csharescolorado
• www.cshares.org
• Community Shares FB

Interview: Rob Wu, CauseVox Founder

What inspired you to start CauseVox?

A few years ago, Jeff and I went on a pro bono IT consulting project to Uganda to serve a Action for Children, an NGO that fights poverty by preserving families and delivering micro-finance. Like a lot of pro bono projects, we had to fundraise our way to get there, but there weren’t any good tools to make that happen. Long story short, Jeff built a prototype fundraising platform, and we were able to raise more than enough funds to go. We saw the power of grassroots and peer-to-peer fundraising and the impact that it can have. From there we were inspired to scale social good through technology.

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60+ different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, we had just a handful of pioneering platforms in microphilanthropy.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter light bulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about API’s. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the social definition of Social Actions API – the purpose?

There’s a groundswell in interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually. was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities,  which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently-added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was a biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In Spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised to the say least. Defeated in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community.  Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discreet knowledge, or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do API’s, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done?

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository – news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

A lot is also owed to Doug Puchalski, a programmer with Definition who helped lead the development of ViewChange.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to described. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

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The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

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Kedar is an activist of sustainable living and collaborative creation. He is involved with BarCamp events, TwtrTales, a twitter based story writing project and Picky Polly. His learnings come from experiences that span an education in electronics and telecommunications, multi-cultural professional engagements in software development and communications, a business administration student life in pretty Paris and experiments in implementing technological solutions for social challenges.

Since turning vegetarian over a year ago due to self consciousness about the unsustainable nature of meat production, he has been trying to think of solutions that could better engage people to change their current habits for collective good.

Where did the idea for Picky Polly come from?

Since moving to Dubai over 3 years ago, I’ve observed that this city is the epitome of excessive consumption. UAE residents also have one of the largest ecological footprints on our planet. Using this behavior among residents as inspiration I felt compelled to do something about it.

Taking the lead from other measurement tools like the Google Power Meter that helps people take control of their energy usage and alter behavior, I felt mobile devices could act as an even more powerful tool in providing information and changing they way we shopped and used things in addition to household energy consumption.

Thus came along the idea of a personal ecological footprint measurement tool that helps people make better choices and transform lifestyles, Picky Polly.

What’s your goal for the new tool?

As a society we have largely stopped being picky about things we consume. But as co-inhabitants of this single planet we need to take more control and responsibility for the types of lives we lead. This consciousness and reason to change for our collective sustainability can only come from the awareness of our individual impact due to over consumption. Picky Polly aims to deliver that information for every item used by us and also help transform us by learning from our peers’ behaviors.

What’s different about Picky Polly from other “consumption + competition” tools people may have used before on facebook or elsewhere?

Numerous websites and mobile applications currently exist to help us get a rough idea of our ecological footprints by asking us questions to approximate our lifestyle patterns e.g. number of people in a household, distance driven in a month, miles flown in a year, vegetarian/ non-vegetarian, etc. These are good measuring tools in raising awareness about the ecological disaster that lies ahead, but they do not sufficiently motivate me to alter my behavior with using plastic bags at the corner store or buying a cup of coffee on my way into work or eating a burger from a popular fast-food chain. These are the kinds of purchases or behaviors, if changed will result in significantly larger social change.

I have not yet come across a robust and handy mobile solution that takes all the disparate pieces of information available to help people track their current impact and alter it based on self improvement, peer reviews and expert recommendations.

Picky Polly is simply an open and collaborative technological tool, firstly providing people a better way to measure themselves and secondly to provide relevant and contextual feedback (with incentives/ rewards) to alter their lifestyle patterns/ choices.

What are the implications of such a tool on our production-heavy consumption-driven society?

There are numerous way this tool can improve the way the consumption cycle of our society change. It is meant to work it’s way from the conscious measurement of people’s behavior.

1. Social Change: Better inform people to make the right choices
2. Information Transparency: Better labeling of products and inquiry into resource usage, labor use, toxics, health, etc
3. Government policy: Rewarding citizens for their behavioral changes and better regulating toxic products.
4. New product development: Helping businesses learn from changes in social behavior and better adapt products/ packaging to people’s sustainable needs.
5. Community production: Encouraging entrepreneurs to find community solutions to meet the localized needs.

These are just some ways, that come my mind, Picky Polly can assist the different parties mentioned from its measurements of local lifestyle patterns.

What help could you use at this stage?

I am no expert in the field of sustainable living, rather a passionate fellow citizen of this world who could use help and collaboration from

• the Netsquared community in the form of feedback on the idea,
• experts in understanding the footprint life cycle consumables,
• game designers to help design compelling social incentives,
• 3. mobile application developers to build a robust prototype.

Additionally, I’m aware that such a project requires reasonable commitment of time from the above people and hence any financially support from a believer in the idea for the creation of a working prototype is also most welcome.

PS: Financers will of course be rewarded a stake in the eventually funded entity.

What else are you working on?

I’m also involved in TwtrTales, a project that would like to leverage the creative potential of twitter users in writing collaborative stories. This project has many similarities with Picky Polly, like co-creator credits, collaboration between participants and peer reviews which I’m learning more about as I go along.

How can readers get involved or follow your work?

I have recently started a Tumblog at www.pickypolly.com to document efforts by others providing practical information on sustainable living and to include podcasts with individuals and organizations that help make better everyday choices.

Additionally, I’m can be reached on Twitter, would also love to converse with you over email at kedar dot iyer at gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn.