As part of the new YouTube for Nonprofits, Google has integrated Google Checkout donation processing for organizations in the program. What this means is that if you are in the program, viewers will see a “Donate” button both on your channel page and when your video is playing in a standard page.
If you are a 501(c)3 it’s a no-brainer to sign up. Why not?
What we don’t know yet is whether it will work. If a decent percentage of people who view a nonprofit video actually give, then we have a revolution on our hands. The viewers/donors might look similar to what we see on Facebook causes but we will wait until we have some real data before speculating further.
What we at See3 would like to propose to Google is an addition to their nonprofit program that could greatly enhance the value to organizations. We all know that a newsletter sign-up or advocacy ask is an easier ask than a donation. Imagine if next to the Donate button we had a “Join This Cause” button. And when a registered YouTube user clicked on it, the email address (and other info) of the user was transfered to the nonprofit. (Like with comments, the system could tell a non-registered user that they needed to register.)
Another approach — not as good for the nonprofits but maybe more acceptable to Google — would be more like the Facebook approach. Don’t give me their email, but connect me to them through the social network. I think there has to be something more than Subscribe — which they already have. There has to be a way to say, “I am a supporter, but this doesn’t mean I have to watch every video you produce all the time.” A one-click to Join would have the most benefit if it enabled the nonprofit to message the viewer on a regular basis beyond pushing out new videos.
Facebook has taught us that people will opt-in to support the cause far more than they will donate. You can see the evidence in the mostly small donation totals in the Causes application.
Maybe we can make this request to Google through out friends and partners at NTEN. What do you think Holly?
The last session at the Convio Summit in Austin was well attended, and a fun way to finish the event on Friday. Called “Web 2.0 – New Outreach and Fundraising Techniques,” the topic of this workshop is something every nonprofit marketing manager and online communications professional wants to talk about. The presenters were Carie Lewis of the Humane Society, and Tim Fullerton of Oxfam America, who both gave great insight on what’s happening in the trenches – actual day-to-day examples of how nonprofits can work online communities to gain new supporters, coming directly from the people writing the blog posts, friending people on MySpace, and testing new strategies.
Carie opened with an intro to social media. She says social networks are “not just a bunch of lonely teenage boys.” 84% of people comment, 82% message others, and 39% create content. She notes that people really rely on social networks for influence on decision-making. To me, this confirms as viable the strategy of finding those community leaders who will carry your torch for you, and then messaging them with content to distribute to their friends. She acknowledged it can be very time consuming, and reiterated a suggestion See3 often makes to our clients: get interns and volunteers!
Both HSUS and Oxfam’s primary efforts are on what Carie calls “the big four”: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I agree based on sheer traffic volume, the first 3 are no-brainers for any nonprofit to start. However, neither Carie nor Tim discussed social bookmarking or social news strategies in any depth, and Digg, Stumble Upon, and del.icio.us certainly have enough traffic to warrant a deep approach.
On MySpace: Both Oxfam and HSUS prove what we already know from Greenpeace and others – MySpace is a great place to get new advocates. How did they get so many friends? One at a time. When she started the MySpace page, Carie literally requested friends one by one. Tim started by seeing who was already talking about Oxfam. They recommend spending an hour per day building your network. Oxfam now has a very nice custom page. They both use the MySpace blog, which reminds us again to speak to the community where they are, don’t try and drag them over to your main blog. HSUS is now getting 200 friend requests/day. Of the people that friend them, 29% found their page via search, and 13% came from their website. If you are a small organization, you won’t get that traffic. But 36% discovered them through a friend’s profile. This shows the viral potential of raising awareness in the social networks. Tim says MySpace is not good for fundraising, although we have seen some examples of orgs running successful fundraising campaigns, such as Dollars for Darfur.
On Facebook: I think everyone agrees it’s very early. So far, the only real strategy to analyze besides creating groups is the Causes application. Tim says it’s great to see thousands of people join the Oxfam cause, but he does not know who those people are and has no way to follow up with them. Carie says HSUS has raised $20k through the Causes app, though I’m not finding that in my search of Causes. Regardless, very few orgs (though some) have raised real cash via the Causes app. Developing custom Facebook apps may be the way to go, as already discussed on this blog.
On YouTube: everyone loves video. Oxfam ran a campaign against Starbucks with a video being crucial to the resulting success. HSUS ran a video contest during the outcry over the Michael Vick story that received 22 submissions, over 43,000 views of the contest intro video (featuring Hulk Hogan), and garnered 2,000 new list members. They ran their contest on YouTube, but See3 has a private label, fully customizable video contest hosting, management, and marketing solution.
On blogging and blogger outreach: They both moderate every single comment on the blog (they recommend not to allow auto-posting), and someone responds personally to each comment. They also suggest: make it personal, using your real voice; don’t reprint press releases or other web stories; be concise (advice I am not following here ). There was a question from the audience on blogger outreach, from someone who got no traffic from buying an ad on a relevant blog, and got no love from the blogger either. Carie and Tim say customize and personalize each message to bloggers, warm them up, and sell your story. Carie suggests offering exclusivity on a news story in return for promotion, and reminds us to always ask them to link back to your blog. Shana Glickfield of Issue Dynamics Inc., a blogger and consultant on blogger relations, added that your first contact with a blogger should not be an ask. You should touch base with them prior to your campaign, send them swag and information of interest on an ongoing basis.
I just left session about Convio open. I will write more about the API later, but everyone is really there to see the Facebook opportunity.
Convio has built a Facebook application builder as part of their Open initiative. For organizations on the Convio platform, the Facebook application is a no-brainer and a HUGE improvement from Causes.
The main difference between Causes and the Facebook application powered by Convio is that with Convio your application on Facebook will have all of your content delivered directly from your Convio database and CMS. So the pages of your app have your content and to change this content all you have to do is use the Convio backend in the way you would normally do. Causes uses information created within their program and data from Guidestar. It doesn’t allow people to take your organizational actions or sign-up for your newsletters the way Convio’s application does.
They have also made it easy to build.
There are a couple of limitations to this. First, you can only create one Facebook application. So if you have different initiatives going on, you can’t create different applications for each using this tool. My assumption is that you could custom build a Facebook application using the API, but if you wanted to use their Facebook connector, you would have to only have one. Another thing mentioned in the session is that using conditional content is complicated. So it might not be so easy to deliver specific messages to specific people within Facebook the way you might elsewhere.
It will be interesting to see how many organizations roll this out in the coming months and to track the success with it.
Today is the first full day of the Convio Summit. More than 700 people are here in Austin, both clients and partners, to learn about what Convio is up to, and to learn from each other about best practices for nonprofits online.
This morning’s keynote address was from Convio CEO Gene Austin. He made an engaging presentation, the highlight of which was his demo of their Facebook application. He started by putting on a baseball hat backwards, saying he needed to get into his Facebook clothes. He then described (in a very funny way) how upset his college-age kids were by being “friended” by their father on Facebook.
I am genuinely impressed by what I am seeing here. The main thing for me is the level of transparency they show in terms of issues. Gene Austin talked about issues they had this summer with their infrastructure, he talked about their “patient investors” and the IPO as a way to reward them in addition to being fuel for further grown, and he talked about the GetActive merger in a very transparent way, admitting that some things were good from Convio and some things better from GetActive and that it took a couple quarters for them to figure out where they were taking it.
The biggest buzz here is about the API and the initiative they call Open. “The proof” of the success of the Open initiative, Gene Austin said, will be 12-18 months from now — when we see what people are doing with it. The other thing he did that was interesting was take a big swipe at Blackbaud. He said, “we got religion” on the issue of openness. Our product can stand on it’s own and we are confident. Blackbaud, in contrast, wants you to only use their products and only live within their system. “We don’t think that’s good for the environment.”
In addition to conections to Facebook, they have built connections to Raiser’s Edge (without the benefit of a Blackbaud API). They have also built connections to Flickr, a Plaxo tool for importing contacts and Salesforce. He described how much easier it was to work with Salesforce, with a published API, than to work with Blackbaud.
Convio is announcing the launch of their API and open platform, called Open. They join Kintera and the gold standard of open API’s Salesforce.com in allowing outside developers to tap into their data and extend the functionality of their applications.
How is this useful?
Imagine you run one program for your main donor database and another program for your email and online data. Until recently, the main way to deal with this was cumbersome import and export of data from one system to another. With an API, you can write new software code that hooks one application into another. Or, more likely, you can use code developed by a third-party that does what you need.
Convio’s system is looking really cool. And in addition to the typical API, they also announced a Facebook application builder. This will let an organization create a Facebook application by tapping into the functionality and content they are already using with Convio. I will learn more about this this week when I attend the Convio user group meeting in Austin.
The talk of the nonprofit world — and the world more generally — is about Facebook. Are you on it? What can we do with it? Can we raise money with it?
Are we all taking this too seriously? From Alice Mathias, a recent college graduate and today’s Op Ed contributor in the Times:
Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.
And…
It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.
What the Orthodox Jewish sect can teach us about how to use Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and the emerging social web.
It would seem that the ultra-orthodox Chabad Lubavitch have little in common with your nonprofit. Whether you are a direct service provider, an international relief agency, an advocacy group or a trade association, you probably couldn’t imagine what a bunch of black-suited, black-hatted ultra-religious Jews could teach you about outreach, marketing and fundraising. And it seems far fetched to imagine that they have something to say about social networking and internet strategy, in all of its universalistic narcissistic decadence.
But alas, they have a lot to teach us.
I don’t know what you know, if anything, about the Chabad-Lubavitch, so first, a little background. Here I am going to quote extensively from the Wikipedia article on Lubavitch.
Chabad-Lubavitch (also known as Chabad, Habad or Lubavitch), is one of the largest branches of Hasidic Judaism and one of the largest Jewish movements worldwide, especially in the United States, the Former Soviet Union, Europe and Israel. Chabad (חב”ד ) is a Hebrewacronym for “חכמה Chochmah, בינה Binah, דעת Da’at” (”Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge“). Lubavitch, taken from the Russian Любавичи, Lyubavichi, is the name of the town that served as the movement’s headquarters for over a century. In 1993 there were over 200,000 adherents to the movement some estimate today that there are over a million.
OK, so we have this Jewish sect with maybe a million members. If you live in New York, or a college town, you have probably seen some Chabaniks around town. They look like this.
Chabad, unlike other ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects, don’t keep to themselves. They have it in their DNA to go out into the world and, with incredible passion, reach out to every Jew they can.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson spurred on the movement to what has become known as shlichus (”being emissaries [performing outreach]”) after becoming Rebbe in 1950-1951. As a result, Chabad shluchim (”emissaries”, sing. shliach) have moved all over the world with the stated mission of helping all Jews, regardless of denomination or affiliation. They assist Jews with all their religious needs, as well as with physical assistance and spiritual guidance and teaching. The ultimate goal is to encourage Jews to learn more about their Jewish heritage and to practice Judaism.
The movement, motivated by Rabbi Schneerson, trained and ordained thousands of rabbis, educators, ritual slaughterers, and ritual circumcisers, who are then accompanied by their spouses to many locations around the world. Typically a young Lubavitch rabbi and his wife, in their early twenties, with one or two children, will move to a new location, and as they settle in will raise a large family who as a family unit, will aim to fulfill their mandate of bringing Jewish people closer to Orthodox Judaism and encouraging gentiles to adhere to the Seven Laws of Noah. They will carefully seek out and search for and recruit Jews they have identified and contact them and start the process of encouraging them to observe Judaism, encourage Jews to strengthen their commitment to Judaism. All over the world Lubavitchers (including those not formally in the position of emissaries) assist and support the religious needs of tens of thousands of Jews.
Chabad Houses
Chabad today has centers around the world. Centers are called a Chabad Houses. They are Jewish community centers providing educational and outreach activities for the Jewish community. Level of observance is irrelevant; no minimal level of observance is a requirement for using facilities. The centers are informal in setup. They primarily serve both educational and observance purposes. Effort is made to provide an atmosphere in which the nonobservant will not feel intimidated by any perceived contrast between their lack of knowledge of Jewish practice and the advanced knowledge of some of the people they meet there.
Mitzvah campaigns
Chabad aims to attract non-Orthodox Jews to become Orthodox, and believes this is part of the process of bringing the Messiah. This practice is called “mivtzoim” - meaning “campaigns” or “endeavors.” At one time, Schneerson issued a call to every Jew: “Even if you are not fully committed to a Torah life, do something. Begin with a mitzvah - any mitzvah - its value will not be diminished by the fact that there are others which you are not prepared to do”. Schneerson also suggested ten specific mitzvot that he believed were ideally suited for the emissaries to introduce to non-observant Jews. These were: lighting candles before Shabbat and the Jewish holidays by Jewish women; putting on tefillin; affixing a mezuzah; regular Torah study; giving charity; purchasing Jewish books; keeping kosher; kindness to others; Jewish education, and keeping the family purity laws.
Camps
Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Rabbi Schneerson for the first overnight camp. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children—most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes. Of these, 500 camps are in the United States.
Campus
In recent years Chabad has greatly expanded its reach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide. Professor Alan Dershowitz has said that “Chabad’s presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial”, and “We cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world”.
So what we have here is a group that is mission driven. They have created a vast network of people able to carry their message out to the world. And they are investing in young kids and college kids.
I must mention that the Chabad are not without controversy. Rav Eliezer Shach, who was the patriarch of some of the largest ultra-orthodox communities around the world acerbically called Chabad the “sect closest to Judaism” because of the movement within Chabad to proclaim their late Rabbi Schnerson the messiah.
And while I have a serious problem with both of those issues, there is no arguing with their success in building communities of active supporters all over the world. There is no arguing with their success in getting secular Jews to take on some aspects of Jewish observance (a high priority among those who believe intermarriage and assimilation are the biggest threats to Jewish continuity). There is no arguing with their success in getting high-net-worth individuals to part with their money. And there is no arguing with their success in getting people who don’t even believe in their world view to support them every year with donations large and small.
And don’t think that they have this massive centralized fundraising machine that makes it all happen. More from Wikipedia:
Fundraising
Funds for activities of a Chabad center rely entirely on the local community. Chabad centers do not receive funding from Lubavitch headquarters. For the day to day operations, local emissaries do all the fundraising by themselves. The monies fundraised in the local community is invested in that local community. The emissary takes a minimum salary and seldom goes on vacation. Sue Fishcoff writes, “Emissaries in the field may sink millions of dollars into their center, synagogues and Mikvahs, but their own homes are modest, again patterned after their Rebbe’s lack of personal ostentation.”
So how have they done it? How have they been able to get people who will never adopt their lifestyle or world view to support them financially? How are they able to send ultra-Orthodox rabbis to places like Boise, Idaho and expect – know – that they will make it somehow? How are they able to bring non-religious Jews into their synagogues and to their events when their world view and lifestyle is so foreign? And finally, what can their success teach us about fundraising generally and online social networks specifically?
A Theory of Acceptance – Or At Least Tolerance
If I went into a typical Orthodox synagogue in a t-shirt and jeans during the Sabbath service, I would likely have someone ask me to leave. They would tell me that, while they mean no offense, that my clothes are not appropriate for the day or the place and that I am welcome to return in more appropriate attire. If I walk in to a Chabad synagogue on the Sabbath in a t-shirt and jeans I am likely to be given an Aliah – a special honor when you are called to participate in the Torah service. From the Chabad perspective, the one who doesn’t know enough to wear the right clothes is just the person who needs to be brought in and cultivated, not turned away.
Another example. Most Orthodox synagogues close off their parking lots on the Sabbath. Why? You are not allowed to drive on the Sabbath according to Orthodox rules, so having the parking lot open is an tacit invitation to drive, an invitation to break the Sabbath. Makes sense, no? While the Lubavitch take their Sabbath observance very seriously, their parking lots are open and they won’t tell you not to drive. If you drive, drive. Just come.
When Conservative or Orthodox synagogues have group Friday night meals (the beginning of the Sabbath), the evening will include rubber chicken that you most likely had to pay $35 (in advance) to get in the first place. In a Chabad House, you will often get a more elaborate and home-cooked meal (usually prepared by the Rabbi’s wife) and a side order of rousing singing and flowing alcohol. It’s a lot of fun. In fact, the feelings of camaraderie are infectious. No one will ever be made to feel that they are bad or wrong for not taking the Lubavitch path. And no one will ever be asked to pay!
In these three examples we get the core of Lubavitch success that I will try to distill into a few principles:
· Show acceptance and understanding for where people come from
· Never make people feel bad about what they don’t know
· Make them feel welcome in your space
· Teach them by first by example and only explicitly when they ask
· Give them small, non-threatening steps to advance their connection
The most secular person in the world can have a terrific time at a Lubavitch event or even attend their services on a regular basis. They can enjoy speaking to a rabbi whose life is light-years removed from the secular world. And they routinely go out and tell anyone who will listen about the amazing soul that accepts the visitor and gives of themselves without asking for anything in return. That’s magic. Imagine people talking about your organization like that!
Taking the Lessons to Our Fundraising
The lesson I take away from their success for organizational fundraising is that guilt is a losing long-term strategy. Yes, it can work in the short-term. But instead of making me feel bad about what I haven’t done or what I need to do, make me feel good about what you are doing. Inspire me with your dedication. Allow me to participate in a small way, but don’t treat me like a small person for it. Cultivate those who take the first step as if they can become the biggest donor you have and make them feel important for whatever it is they have chosen to do.
The number of organizations that use guilt is staggering. It’s an easy strategy to implement and we see it a lot in direct mail. I recently received a mailing with a nickel in it. “Don’t let this nickel go to waste” they begged me. The same is true with mailing labels. Here are these things with your name on it and you will surely feel guilty is you use them and don’t pay us. This is not how you create deep connections and long-term supporters. (Here is an article in Fundraising Success Magazine that looked at and ranked emotional motivators for fundraising. Guilt was near the end of the list.)
Another lesson that organizations can take from the Lubavitch is in having people on board who are passionate about what they do. Now I don’t expect that most organizations can get to the level of passion of the Lubavitch. These folks believe that their lives, all of our lives, and the future of the universe is at stake. That’s strong motivation and most people who work at your nonprofit won’t come with that level of dedication. But if you are choosing between two employees and one is deeply passionate about your mission and the other one, though more qualified, is seeing it as just another job, pick for passion. (You can see this dedication at work in many organizations. I am seeing it more and more with environmental group staff who are genuinely scared for our collective future and energized by the change that is possible. You can see this dedication in the staff of the New Israel Fund — those in Israel in particular — where I was once a fundraiser. The Israel staff wants desperately to live in a democratic Israel and so they live the change they want to see every day.)
Lessons for Social Networks
The reason I wrote this post was because of a eureka moment I had in connecting the Lubavitch success with social networking. I had this moment last week when I was in Manhattan and I passed the Chabad Mitzvah Tank in Midtown. I had my handy-dandy video camera with me, so you can see:
(I have to pause thank Beka Economopoulos here for planting the seeds of this idea. Beka works for Greenpeace. I saw her speak at the Yearly Kos conference and then suggested that we at See3 invite her to co-present with us at the Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Boot Camp in New York a couple weeks ago. Beka runs the Greenpeace online organizing program and has seen some amazing success with it and we are grateful for her participation with us in what turned out to be a terrific and well-attended session.)
The average organization, if they have a social network strategy at all, think of social networks as a way to meet people, with the goal of then convincing those people to give the organization their email address, go to their donation link or otherwise become members/donors/activists of the organization in the same way everyone else is. Meaning, they will get the same emails, see the same website, and take the same path to further activity as other prospects. They are using the social networks to meet people, but only see their outreach as successful if they can get those people to do what everyone else is doing.
Part of the problem here is that organizational management hasn’t yet internalized social networking metrics. For Greenpeace, those 68,000 friends on MySpace are just like 68,000 email addresses. For most organizations that would not be true. You are looking at email opens and average gifts from your online donations and these metrics are not really reflective of the potential you have in social networking. (Allan Benamer, a big believer in these tools, writes about this problem on his blog. You should also be reading Beth Kanter and Ruby Sinreich on these subjects.)
Now think of the Lubavitch philosophy. You are a MySpace person. You are comfortable on MySpace. I build a MySpace page to show you I can speak your language. This is where you live. Acceptance means I have to stop trying to get you to leave. Acceptance means creating things you can do right there on MySpace. Acceptance means treating my ability to message you on MySpace the same as if you are on my email list – without forcing you to change.
When you start to care enough you might come on over to our site. When you are impressed with how we “walk the walk” you might get out of your comfort zone by doing something offline. I am not going to force you to change. I am not going to limit your access or the information you can get because you live this “alternative lifestyle”. I am going to respect you for who you are! (Or at least I am going to pretend to.)
All of this is connected to the permission-based marketing society we are in today. Top down advertising is working less and less. Word-of-mouth is more important than ever.
Showing people what you do and why it matters is critical to capture people’s attention. Getting your supporters to recruit others is becoming a central strategy. Your content and your passion are what will carry the day and bring people to your cause. Social media marketing is not about tricks or techniques as much as it is about finding your authentic voice and inviting people to share in your passion at the level they are most comfortable in the venue of their choosing.
[The irony of all of this is that Chabad-Lubavitch does everything wrong on their own MySpace page, which I assume is run by one person in a decentralized way. They don’t follow their own script for offline engagement, which would also bring them online success. On MySpace they seem insular, political and shrill – everything they don’t seem in person.]
In Sum
Be passionate in your work and be grateful to those who come and take interest – at every level. Meet people where they are without judgment or condescension. Make your programs and your content accessible to those who come from a different place than you do. This philosophy is the core of what you need to be successful in social networking strategy.
Tell me how you do or don’t apply these principles to your own online and offline marketing by leaving a comment.
The big news in social networking and tech is the new open platform of Facebook. Facebook is a hot social networking site and the open platform means that I can build an application and have members of Facebook spread this to all of their online friends. Project Agape, a company that built the first causes application for Facebook, has surpassed 1 million users to their application and raised over $100,000 — in about 1 month. Their application is called Causes, and when you sign up you can pick from many causes, such as Save Darfur or One.org. An icon of the cause shows up on your profile page and your friends get notified about it and anyone on your page can then click to donate or learn more.
There are problems with this Facebook thing, the biggest of which is that the application you build has to run on your own servers, which means only those with the resources to serve data to millions need apply. (If you are interested in these issues read Marc Andreessen.) But I digress.
This is only the beginning and I will write more about where this is going and all of the other players working on bringing nonprofit causes to Facebook.
Most commentators say Facebook’s move to open up is a game changer. MySpace, the biggest of the social networks, has allowed widgets for a long time. Widgets are embedded mini-applications, such as a video player or slide show of my photos from Flickr. But a widget doesn’t harness the native functions of the network in the way Facebook’s platform does. And MySpace has limited what you can put in a widget, not allowing you to have advertising for example. Facebook has not such restriction — meaning they are allowing the companies that will develop application to monetize those application — which will obviously attract more developers.
So today I heard that MySpace is working on opening up as well. The business idea here is that a platform is more valuable than an application. People will use an application. But if many people build many interesting applications on your platform, they make the platform indispensable. It’s kind of like Windows (used to be?) — the platform (Windows) supported and made necessary by all of the applications (Word and Excel and games, etc.) built on top of it.
The open platform idea is not limited to the social networking folks. A pioneer of this has been Salesforce.com. Salesforce is an online application to manage your contacts and sales information. They realized a while ago that they had a very strong database application and invested a lot in infrastructure. So they allow others to use this base and build on top. So, for example, companies have built applications for the tracking of donations on top of Salesforce.com. There is even an application to track blood donations. The buyer of any third-party application must also subscribe to Salesforce.com. For the company producing the application, they don’t have to worry about anything other than the presentation layer, they can hook into Salesforce for the rest.
Amazon has gotten into the act as well. Of course they have big servers and know how to manage data. So they said, in addition to selling books and music and everything else, why not let people use our infrastructure. For example, want to put your products in our warehouse and utilize our mailing and software to pick and ship? Why not? Among other things, they launched a service called S3, which means Simple Storage Service. They are saying… you build a web-based application and you need to store something — data, photos, video, whatever. And you can keep adding servers and paying lots of money, but we already have this, so why not use our servers and pay-as-you-go a small fee per gig.
There is word that Blackbaud (Nasdaq: BLKB), the largest company in the fundraising software space, is moving toward opening up their systems. And I saw something about Kintera (Nasdaq: KNTA), a company that is bleeding cash, thinking of opening up as a way to attract developers who will make the product more useful. I just read that LinkedIn, the business networking site is working to open up as well. I think we should expect this trend to continue.
It seems opening up and that open API is indeed the new black.
There is a lot of talk in the nonprofit world about a social networking strategy. More recently the talk is about a Facebook strategy. I stumbled upon an essay about the emerging class divisions between users of Facebook and MySpace. On the surface it seems Facebook would certainly be a better place for nonprofits looking to find future donor prospects.
Here’s a relevant quote:
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
The Facebook news is big. First a little background. Facebook is the second big social networking site behind MySpace. Facebook used to be only open to college students but, realizing they couldn’t play with the big boys, opened to the public about a year ago. They are growing like crazy. Try 100,000 new subscriber A DAY! And they aren’t all kids. Facebook is still independent — they haven’t been bought by any big company yet. And their pages aren’t nearly as ugly as MySpace pages.
These sites are places where I can make my page, connect with friends, ect. You know all about that. But then you also have widgets. Widgets are big. Widgets are little applications that live on some other page on the web, where the info in the widget comes from some server somewhere else. Technically, an ad server is a widget - displaying a banner coming from DoubleClick, for example. Embedding a YouTube video is a widget, as are fundraising widgets, Flickr photostream, Photobucket, Slide and many others. Widgets make the web mashable - meaning you create your own web with pieces of this and pieces of that. My Google home page has a weather widget, clock widget and of course RSS feed widget. All the data in these widgets come from different places and are assembled for my convenience.
So widget makers have put things like video and photos on MySpace for a while. But what if I want to put an ad in my video? MySpace don’t play that! The VOICE from on high says… “You are a guest here at MySpace with your fancy shmancy widget and please do not even think for a minute that you can monetize my eyeballs! I am Murdoch the Great and I own these users and you cannot have them! We are the only one allowed to run ads. So show your photos or embed your do-dad, but watch out, or we will cut you off at your knees.”
Now comes Facebook. They say… We want to be THE PLATFORM. So we aren’t going to worry so much about whether you make money off our people, in fact, the opposite. If you can make money you will spend a lot of time and effort developing really cool applications that can integrate into Facebook, which will keep people on our pages longer, which will attract more users and so on. So Facebook said go and develop. And they opened up their own development tools to the developers. Go and develop not a simple embeddable widget, but go and development in a native environment that makes use of all the tools we have, the connections between people, for example.
So, Amazon says, OK, we will create an application that allows people to publish book reviews right on their own Facebook profiles, fully integrated into Facebook, but also back into Amazon. Forbes, Twitter, Washington Post… are among the 70 companies that developed applications in time for the announcement. And my assumption is that people haven’t even begun to think about how they can use this. I can imagine almost any application that’s online going native with Facebook.
For us nonprofit types, we have heard that Change.org is going to be developing for the platform as did Project Agape, the temporary name for “a new startup that is applying viral principles to altruism and social causes.”
This feels big. It feels like a moment when we might be seeing the development of another Google, another company that is able to grow very big very fast and stay independent. Just to make you feel a little sick, the CEO of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg and he is 23 years old.
). There was a question from the audience on blogger outreach, from someone who got no traffic from buying an ad on a relevant blog, and got no love from the blogger either. Carie and Tim say customize and personalize each message to bloggers, warm them up, and sell your story. Carie suggests offering exclusivity on a news story in return for promotion, and reminds us to always ask them to link back to your blog. Shana Glickfield of 
