The Most Helpful Directory of Social Action Platforms Ever

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Comment by Christine Egger on June 18, 2009 at 2:39pm

via Mike Everett-Lane:

Unithrive, which made its debut last month, matches alumni lenders and cash-strapped students, who post photographs and biographical information and can request up to $2,000. The loans are interest-free and payable within five years of graduation. The nonprofit site is the brainchild of three recent Harvard graduates, who hope it can help ease the crisis in paying for college, especially if it is one day rolled out to other colleges that cannot afford to be as generous as their alma mater, which already awards scholarships to all students with demonstrated need.

The appeal of direct donor-to-student loans, Unithrive’s founders say, is that alumni will have a personal connection to current students: those requesting loans list hometowns, majors and classes they have taken. Alumni can lend to students with whom they feel a bond. They are promised updates three times a year from students they support.

Comment by Sylvia Ng on June 17, 2009 at 6:57pm

Two things I'd like to know about the platform / actions:
1) whether a platform offers online actions, offline actions, or both (if it's online only then the geographic location of the end user is doesn't matter)
2) what geographic location a user has to be in to do the action (as a Canadian I can't create an account on Network for Good, for example, or VolunteerMatch doesn't allow support searching for volunteer opportunities in Canada)

Comment by Teleri on March 9, 2009 at 11:02pm

My thought exactly, Christine. I've been mulling how to tie it all together, so watch for it soon.

Comment by Christine Egger on March 9, 2009 at 7:40pm

JD, really appreciate your thoughts. Absolutely agree, user ratings will be key/crucial. Based on all of the feedback we've gotten about that point, it's getting harder and harder to picture the directory without them. Agree, too, that doesn't mean it'll be easy. But will start with it being a high priority and go from there.

Teleri, so much great stuff in your latest comment. I'm a consummate "commenter instead of blog poster," too, so understand the appeal of tucking those observations here, but don't hesitate to create a blog post out of any or all of what you're writing. I can picture an entire series about the social media tools (bet you can, too) with an example given for each of how someone initiating or supporting a social action campaign listed in the Social Actions API might use them.

And lastly, a new social action platform for the growing list, Philoptima, courtesy of Massimo Menichinelli (aka @openP2Pdesign):

"RT @openP2Pdesign RT @jranck: Open innovation platform for philanthropy: http://bit.ly/El7oy"

Comment by Teleri on March 9, 2009 at 5:56am

Today's New Social Media Tools:

1) You guys have to check out Retaggr (http://www.retaggr.com). Have you ever wished you could use one web tool that could aggregate every social media you ever signed up for? This nifty tool not only does that, it generates a sleek little web-style business card (here's mine: http://www.retaggr.com/Card/telerisghost) with links to almost everything in your profile. Widgets can add almost any service you ever heard of, and can also produce badges to post on other profiles. You can add any profile which you can find a proper member id url link to, including blogs, game sites, major netorking platforms like MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, and even ning communities like this one. Once you have the card and profile set up, anyone from any platform can find you. Period. Here's my full profile. Please note that the attractive background theme is one of their pregens. http://www.retaggr.com/page/telerisghost . Apparently, their premium service is free to upgrade for the first 2 months

2) My next new tool is one of those just for fun web tweaks which has the potential to minorly revolutionize office chat. Don't underestimate the power of the virtual water cooler! Have you ever wanted the artistic skill to draw a little comic lambasting the boss, pass around an office in-joke, or just humorously get a point across in a presentation? Well, now you can while away all that free time with stripgenerator.com. Check out my cheesy little first stab at lightening our mad social media plans at http://stripgenerator.com/strip/213789/ .

3) Finally, I present a neat looking little tool with a similar concept. I actually discovered extranormal.com following a tweet thread posted by real-time rock star Dave Navarro. The platform promises that if you can type, you can make movies using its trademarked Text-to-Movie technology. I haven't had time to field test this beta app yet, but apparently text which you type is translated into action by the cute little sim-like guys in the video. Again, this might be great for adding levity to a presentation. Until your own imagination kicks in, check out a fan's rendition of what might happen when rock superstars Dave Navarro and Trent Reznor meet. http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090305155807637

Comment by JD Lasica on March 9, 2009 at 12:32am

First important point: Christine, you rock. :~)

Second, my quick 2 cents:

This is developing into an incredibly rich and valuable resource. As the list grows longer, I think Social Actions needs to keep this top of mind: the vast majority of users will not scroll through scores of listings. So the chief value you can bring is to begin with a search interface and refine-refine-refine iterate-iterate-iterate until it meets the needs of our users. This is more complicated than it sounds.

I may want to find an organization to help me with fund-raising for a cause. Would be great to have a customized set of results that tells me not only what organizations perform that service, but how much they charge, what services they deliver and -- this is key -- what users think of them.

The organizations that have opted into your API may not like it, but I think user ratings from the community are absolutely key here. Let's trust users to share their experiences honestly, in a way that we'll all gain value from. So, I'd suggest a full-fledged user engagement model that includes comments, ratings, and ratings of comments. There are now a number of these services out there and I'm sure some would love to work with you.

Comment by Teleri on March 8, 2009 at 2:56am

Thanks, Christine! For offline connections, you might want to talk to the people at HandsOn Network as well. They have connect volunteers to local initiatives after training. I'm going through their Volunteer training next week (Tuesday), so I'll have more ideas about how to integrate their program with platforms after that, I hope.

Comment by Christine Egger on March 6, 2009 at 1:00pm

You're amazing! Cannot wait for your user review post(s). It might be best, actually, to post about just a few at a time, creating a series out of it.

FYI Social Actions has been in touch with Meetup.com and is excited about bringing their offline-connection opportunities into the API. ChangeThis and OpenZine are new to us (me, anyway!) and I'll be promptly adding them to the list above, so that continues to be a quick reference point for all of the social action platforms we're aware of.

Thanks so much for sharing all of this info. Your experience with these groups will be invaluable to the Social Actions community.

Comment by Teleri on March 6, 2009 at 9:06am

I've found a couple of Social Action and collaboration platforms since this directory went up. Christine Egger asked me to please post them here.

The first is called ChangeThis.com (http://www.changethis.com/content/faq). On ChangeThis, community members have the opportunity to post Manifestos, which are described as "an argument, a reasoned, rational call to action, supported by logic and facts." They are posted in PDF format, but only after readers have voted on 300 word project proposals describing the project and its relevance. After 30 days, top proposals are given the go-ahead.

Another excellent resource omitted from the list is an old one that many networking people may be familiar with. I've been on Meetups.com (http://www.meetup.com) since September 2004, and actually once was administrator for a couple of different groups. The site is very much improved from earlier incarnations, and has social networking media functionality now, whereas the old system was entirely reliant on interested individuals finding and requesting to join your groups. While I hated working with older versions of the system, which were cumbersome and had a very low impact, I am eager to pick a topic and start a meetup just so I can get in the system as an administrator again and see how it works now!

There's one final online tool which I discovered that I think can help any organization forward its mission. Check out OpenZine (http://www.openzine.com/aspx/). This souped up blog editor allows users to "Quickly create an online magazine and collaborate with friends." You can create or clip content, and the platform features a simple graphics editor which allows creation of a fairly slick looking cover page for the project. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd sure be a happier, better networked camper if I could go to one attractive, concise and well edited place for my news on non-profits and social networking rather than an hourly check of my twitter feed to track tinyurl after tinyurl! I also like this idea because it might serve as a happy medium between old-school direct mail mags and cutting edge social media apps. Such a compromise could prove important to financially discombobulated NPO's seeking ways to bridge divides in their contact lists and still cut costs to a managable level.

I'm sure I'll run into more web tools that are conducive to social action before too long. I'll post comments detailing what I find. In the meantime, watch for my first blog entry (coming soon) offering user review of the 40+ Social Action Platforms featured above. I'll get to it soon, Christine, I promise...just as soon as I finish scouring twitterdom for possible links to more cool stuff!

Comment by Christine Egger on March 4, 2009 at 8:25am

Some additional thoughts about the directory's content, specifically where the data would come from and how it would be maintained:

Like all Social Actions projects, the data would be open source, meaning it would be available for any website or individual to search, widgetize, syndicate and republish. We'll clearly need to develop a process for easily collecting the data and keeping it current -- easy for the platforms and for ongoing maintenance. That's a conversation we'll be building as the directory project moves forward: where are the open source datasets where some of this content already exists and what else would the platforms be willing to provide in an RSS or XML feed? How much of the content would need to be collected and updated manually, and what would be the best way to do that?

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