Time and Social Action

Note: The transcript below if from my keynote presentation at Connecting Up Australia in May 2009.

Thank you for the introduction.

A little more background on what Social Actions is building. We are an open source database of actions people can take in support of the nonprofits and causes they care about most. The database currently has 90,000 opportunities and is updated every 30 minutes.

Rather than create a destination search engine with this database, we want to distribute its contents to the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. We are encouraging third party developers to connect to the Social Actions API, and create innovative firefox extensions, WordPress blugins, iphone Apps, Facebook Apps, and other kinds of utilities that effectively distribute the calls to actions everywhere and anywhere.

Our mission is to make the web more action oriented.

We don’t want people to have to seek out opportunities to take action. We want the actions that are most relevant to them and would get them the most excited to find them. This sounds more difficult than it actually is. Think about distribution models in other sectors, particularly news and advertising. I learned about the Swine flu a few weeks ago, but I don’t know where. News of the swine flu found me (probably on Twitter).

We can make the web as action-oriented as we like. But if the actions themselves don’t get people excited in a social media context, then they will be ignored. For this reason, I am increasingly focusing on and giving attention to the kinds of calls to action that translate well on social networks.

I’m going to share with you a few campaigns and platforms that have done really well in the last year.
Interestingly, they all share one thing in common. They treat seconds, minutes, and hours as perfectly reasonable units of time in which to raise money, coordinate volunteers, and communicate with supporters.

Let’s start with fundraising.

Last year, during U.S. Thanksgiving, a woman named Stacy Monk decided to conduct a social experiment.

She put together a fundraising campaign called Tweetsgiving and invited people who are active on Twitter to state what they are thankful for in 140 characters or less, and to back that expression of gratitude with a donation of $10 to EpicChange.

The proceeds would be used to help build a school in Tanzania.

In 48 hours, Stacey’s Tweetsgiving campaign raised $11,131 dollars from 372 donors. Compare the success of Tweetsgiving with a fundraising campaign that my organization launched 7 days later.

In December, Social Actions launched a 2 month annual fundraising campaign to support our work. We invited people to donate $20.09 to support 9 goals that we came up with for 2009.

In 2 months, we managed to reach 75% of our goal with donations from 148 people. Tweetsgiving engaged twice as many donors in a 48 hour period than our campaign engaged in 2 months.

This difference can be explained in part by the friendly looking turkey that accompanied the Tweetsgiving campaign. But I don’t think that’s the only factor.

A few hours after launching the Social Actions’ fundraising campaign, a donor sent me this message…

Even though this woman donated to our campaign in the first 48 hours, she was bothered by the fact that our campaign had a 2 month horizon. As it turns out, the majority of donations to Social Actions arrived within the first 48 hours of our campaign and the last 48 hours. Whether we intended to or not, our 2 month campaign was experienced as two 48 hour campaigns separated by 8.5 weeks.

These two stories serve as evidence that people are hungry for opportunities to coalesce around real time opportunities and events, whether they are fundraising related or otherwise
.
The 48 hour online fundraising campaign has an urgency to it that can drive donations and help you reach new donors, but it’s also an opportunity for your nonprofit to build community in the seconds, minutes, and hours that real life is experienced.

Let’s turn now to volunteering in small units of time…

Out of curiosity, raise your hand if on March 28, 2009 you turned off the lights in your apartment or office from 8pm to 9pm. And raise your hand if you did the same thing as part of EarthHour in 2008.

For those who don’t know, EarthHour is campaign that calls on people to turn off the lights in their apartment or office for just one hour a year, all at the same time.

The call to action was simple to respond to. Not surprisingly, the call to action traveled far and wide.

According to an official EarthHour press release, the 2009 campaign engaged people in 25 time zones, across 88 countries, and from 4,000 cities.

Social media factored heavily into the success of EarthHour this year. The organizers relied in large part on Facebook and Twitter to get the word out. In fact, I believe I learned of EarthHour through Twitter. This is a perfect example of the action finding me, instead of me finding the action.

EarthHour saved the planet a lot of electricity. But it also succeeded in feeding people’s desire to connect in real-time around a cause and to experience the present together.

What I find most interesting is that EarthHour took a private activity – using less electricity at home and in the office – and converted it into the cost for membership in a global, if momentary, community.

The question that all of us should be asking is, “What other kinds of routine private activities are actually micro-volunteer opportunities in disguise and can be rewarded with membership in a community?”

A group based in San Francisco and Washington DC is building a cell phone application called The Extraordinaries. When it launches, the application will connect people with 20 minute volunteer opportunities that they can complete through their mobile phone.

Like EarthHour, The Extraordinaries has the potential to create tremendous social impact, if for no other reason than it operates under the same economic model. The Extraordinaries converts a private activity – killing 20 minutes while you wait for a bus – into an opportunity to do something good and plug into a real-time volunteer community.

Prior to the social web, it wouldn’t have been cost effective or even feasible to organize a group of people for 20 minute volunteer opportunities. The cost of finding the volunteers, assigning them tasks, and ensuring that the service opportunity was completed responsibly would have outweighed the benefits.

As a result, organizations became accustomed to thinking of volunteer opportunities in terms of days of service, weeks of service, and even fulltime volunteer positions. But the social web is challenging us to come up with more innovative opportunities so that busy people can also take actions that support our missions.

EarthHour and The Extradordinaries are just two examples of what volunteering in small units of time could look like. I am sure there are other examples.

I’d like to turn now to a few observations about communicating with supporters in small units of time.

Communications is not normally considered a call to action. But when it’s done frequently enough and in small enough chunks of time, then a conversation emerges. Each small message that a nonprofit distributes becomes an opportunity to respond in some way or forward the message to someone or a group of people who could be helpful.

In 2007, a woman named Tori Tuncan launched a website called Lend4Health. Tori is a mother of two in Virginia. Her youngest child had an undiagnosed mild form of autism. She started doing research online about biomedical treatments for Autism and discovered two things:

(1) Biomedical treatments of child autism aren’t covered by most health insurance plans; and

(2) Many of the parents would happily lend each other money to help cover the expenses.

Tori put together a very simple website (inspired by Kiva.org) that allows anyone to make an interest free loan to cover a portion of the month-to-month expenses for treating a child with autism. A community quickly developed around this website.

Depending on the cashflow in a given month, a parent can lend money or receive money to help cover the treatment schedule. Lend4Health is one of many online marketplaces that is serving the nonprofit sector.

What makes Lend4Health unique is the way in which Tori has been telling the Lend4Health story. As far as I know, Lend4Health doesn’t have a monthly e-newsletter and it hasn’t published an annual report.

But more than 1,000 people are aware of her deep commitment to seeing the Lend4Health website grow and prosper. People know about Lend4Health because Tori is active on Twitter and she posts regular blog entries and video updates about the project.

Through her frequent communications, Tori has attracted a pro-bono developer to help her build a more advanced version of the website.

Kjerstin Erickson of FORGE has a similar story. In November or December of last year, Kjerstin’s organization decided to replace the paid volunteers from overseas, who were helping to build capacity among Rwanda’s refugee population, with the refugees themselves. This decision, which was empowering for the refugees, had the effect of cutting off critical revenue for her organization. As a result, FORGE was short roughly $100,000 for 2009.

Kjerstin’s response to this situation was to start blogging on SocialEdge.org about her organization’s situation. Leading philanthropy bloggers heralded her approach as the ideal model for nonprofit transparency. Her story-telling in small units of time turned into a call to action for philanthropy bloggers, family foundations, and pro-bono consultants – who all offered their time and resources to help her put her social venture back on stable financial ground.

Tori and Kjirsten are using social media to tell the story of their nonprofits in the same way that people use social media to provide personal updates. In fact, for them, the distinction is difficult to make.

There’s no better example of this trend to tell a nonprofit’s story as if it were an individual update than the recent changes to Facebook’s fan pages. A few months back, Facebook changed their Fan pages so they look more like individual pages. Facebook was essentially inviting organizations and companies to tell their stories in the same way that individuals with Facebook profiles share their news.

Lend4Health and FORGE are creating an as-it-happens archive and interactive story. Anyone online is welcome to join the conversation. The conversation takes less time to produce and disseminate than a monthly e-newsletter. And it does more to demonstrate the impact they are having than either an e-newsletter or an annual report could accomplish.

People want to connect and hear from people who are committing themselves to change.

For the last ten years, nonprofits have been extremely cautious in their communication to supporters. But there’s an opportunity, in fact, an imperative to participate in an ongoing conversation with supporters. The effect of participating in that conversation is to create many points of engagement in which supporters can reply and engage with the messages your are putting online.

I feel strongly that asking the question, “What is our nonprofit’s strategy for engaging and communicating with people in small units of time?” will help your board and staff set aside preconceptions on what raising money, coordinating volunteers, and communicating with supporters has traditionally looked like, and will lead you in the direction of more innovative strategies that work well on the social web.

I want to be very clear that I am not advocating that the nonprofit sector becomes a slave to the last ten minutes of status updates and then next 2 minutes of video footage. That would be a completely dysfunctional and tragic destination for our sector.

The kinds of fundraising, volunteering, and communications that I have discussed should coexist and reinforce traditional nonprofit communication and engagement strategies.

But the fact is that real life is experienced in seconds, minutes, and hours. Adding opportunities for engagement that are rooted in the present will strengthen the rapport between your nonprofit and the people and communities who support it.

If developing a seconds, minutes, and hours approach to conducting the work of your nonprofit is too uncomfortable for your organization right now, then stick to the more conventional approaches to fundraising, volunteering, and communications -- and leave the social web for later.

That said, the next time your board of directors comes to you and asks, “What’s our nonprofit’s social media strategy?” tell them to be patient and that it’s just a matter of time.

Thank you.

Links:

www.tweetsgiving.org
www.socialactions.com
www.earthhour.org
www.theextraordinaries.org
www.lend4health.org
www.forgenow.org