See What’s Out There

A client of ours, One Economy Corporation, has some terrific job openings in Washington D.C. and in Chicago and elsewhere.

I just watched a nice presentation from Alec Ross from One Economy who makes a strong case that giving low income people access to technology is simply a requirement for allowing people to participate in the greater economy. You can watch it on Google Video. One example he used: McDonald’s announced that they will begin only taking job applications online. So imagine that, even hamburger flipping is now tied to the digital economy. Another example he used: College applications. If you are a high-school senior and you want to go to college you upload everything electronically - no more big envelopes and hand-written essays. Go to a low-income community in the Spring and try to get on a computer in the library - it is full of high-school seniors with no access at home. One more example… there is lots of data that says a 30-something white guy like him is most likely to use the web for entertainment and pornography while low-income people are more likely to use internet access for asset building activities and education.

Today at the NetSquared conference a new online social network for charitable giving launched called Bring Light. Bring Light joins an increasingly crowded field of sites trying to change how we give and get more people to donate money, volunteer and otherwise get involved with organizations.

Some of these organizations are nonprofits and many are for-profits companies trying to figure out how to make a business out of doing good — which you know I am all for. What I am not all for is hiding important information about how you operate. For example, I am not really happy that Change.org is a for-profit with a .org extension. Call me old-school, but I think the dot-orgs should be for the orgs and not for businesses.

I think Bring Light is starting off on the wrong foot this way as well. It takes a little digging to figure out that they are not a 501(c)3 charity but rather a business. I am all for them being a business — and I will say it again — I am all for it! We are also a business in service to nonprofits. But they are not clear about how all of this works.

From their site:

How does Bring Light make money?
Bring Light was founded to provide a more efficient and cost-effective way for charities to realize the promise of web-based fundraising and connect with new donors. Traditional fundraising methods are expensive and often do not generate a high return. For example, a direct mail campaign entails design and production fees, printing and postage costs, etc. And since a very small percentage of people respond (typically less than 2%), much of those costs are wasted. On Bring Light, charities pay a service fee (on a sliding scale, but never more than 10% of funds raised) after their project has been funded. We also offer optional services (such as online fundraising and marketing consulting) that charities may purchase if they desire.

10%… Holy Moly. Change.org’s fees are maybe in the 4% range. Changingthepresent.org’s are less than that. 10%?? Wow. Now, is this less than it might cost you for direct mail? Sure. Is it less than an event might cost per dollar? Sure. Is that the point? I don’t think so. If this is found money for a charity it might be OK, I guess, but that fact that there are lot of other sites with much much lower fees I think makes me wonder whether donors and organizations are better off going elsewhere. If I am a donor, why not hang out at a site that offers similar functions but gets more of my money to the charity.

OK… It gets worse. If they want to charge 10% and they are upfront and clear about it, no problem. If someone wants to pay it, fine. But it is buried in a place a regular user will not likely see. And then came the email.

I donated $10 to what is surely a great cause and then I got an email acknowledging my gift. In the email it said:

“American Endowment Foundation collects donations in the Bring Light Donor Advised Fund. Based on your recommendation, AEF then assembles grants to the charities that you selected on www.bringlight.com. When a project is complete, 100% of the funds raised are granted to the charity.”

On their help page, above where it says they charge a 10% fee — it says:

How much of my donation goes to the charity?
100% of your donations go to the charity.

Hmmm. Which is it? 10% fee or 100% of funds raised granted to the charity? This is terribly misleading. 100% of my donation goes to the charity. Later, the charity gets charged 10%. So… really 90% of my donation goes to charity.

Guys, you have to clarify this and quickly.

The innovation at Bring Light is the ability to put money in a donor-advised fund. Similar to the funds of Fidelity or community foundations, a donor-advised fund allows the giver to get immediate tax benefits of a donation but to distribute the money to charities over time. Another question this raises that is not clear is what happens to the carry on this money. My guess… the American Endowment Foundation that manages this takes a piece and shares a piece with Bring Light.

In another post I will offer a run-down of all of these sites with some notes on each.

I had a conversation recently with a community activist about politics and the web. This person told me that the behind-the-scenes phone calls and pressures, public meetings and traditional press were still how they did their work — and quite successfully. My thought was, “Sure, it works and it will keep working, but you ignore the web at your own peril.”

Two things that made me think about the web and politics today. I saw Al Gore on the Daily Show. (He was excellent — relaxed, funny, knowledgeable, compelling.) One thing he mentioned was how the web was beginning to become a check on the lame political coverage of the mainstream media. Traditional media might ignore an issue, but the web is all over it. And this pressure from the bloggers acts as a feedback loop to the press, a loop that we never had before. Gore suggested that if the net was as powerful six years ago as it was today, that maybe we wouldn’t have had so many yes votes for the Iraq war because the press would have been pressured to tell the American people more directly that Iraq was not responsible for 9-11 (which 70% of Americans believed and 50% still believe.)

The other item that got me thinking politics today was the most recent column from David Pogue. He stumbled upon a website called MAPLight.org. What they do is connect money given to politicians directly to the votes those politicians make. So for example, you can look up a bill, see which groups supported it and which groups opposed it, then see which of those groups gave money to which politicians and then connect the dots to how those politicians voted. This is all public information, but the web is making it much easier to connect the dots.

Pogue writes:

Now, not all bills exhibit the same money-to-outcome relationships. And it’s not news that our lawmakers’ campaigns accept money from special interests. What this site does, however, is to expose, often embarrassingly, how that money buys votes.

I probably sound absurdly naive here. But truth is, I can’t quite figure out why these contributions are even legal. Let the various factions explain their points till they’re blue in the face, sure — but to cut checks for millions of dollars?

And I think that as more of this information becomes easy to track, more people are going to demand reform and explanations from their representatives. You can watch MAPLight’s video tour here.

Continuing to jump on the political bandwagon, MySpace recently announced a series of in-person events that it will host on college campuses with presidential aspirants. This report from CNET also says MySpace is working with Mark Burnett (Survivor) on something called Independent “a new program that uses television and the web to discover budding political minds.”

In a meeting with a major nonprofit this week, I was asked about the tension and issues related to Web 2.0 and losing control of content. It’s the magic question. How do we take advantage of user-generated content and user-controlled forums such as MySpace and YouTube without totally losing control of our brand? The answer is, very very carefully.

Even the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which has put big resources into these issues couldn’t escape serious problems. Their case is special, however. There are laws about having people doing things on behalf of the campaign — either they are “on-the-books” and you as the campaign have to account for everything they say and do, or they are totally “off-the-books” and you can’t even talk to them without fear of breaking federal election laws.

The Obama MySpace page was originally created by a volunteer, and originally didn’t say “official site”. It then grew and grew and grew and the campaign wanted — needed — to take it over and control it. Some of the info on the site wasn’t right, for example. This was not a random fan site, but the one MySpace page with his name in the URL. The person who created it then wanted to get paid for all the work he had done. Not happening. They should have spent the money and kept the fan. Now they have people running around all over the web calling them bullies.

You can read all about it on the techPresident blog.

Something I meant to report last month… The Onion has gone video. It looks great. It’s funny. And they did a nice job with the integration. I will try to find out which provider they are using for the video feed. Here’s a story on immigration.

Immigration: The Human Cost

Our fearless leader Katrin Verclas, the Executive Director of the NTEN, the nonprofits and technology association, was on ABC News and got a whole 7 minutes to talk about nonprofits and technology. It’s a big topic, but notice how much time she spent on web video! Unfortunately, Katrin neglected to mention DoGooderTV, but we know that next time she will give DoGooderTV, which hosted the NTEN - See3 Nonprofit Video Contest, a big plug.

You can watch the video here.

Something I have written about in this space before is how new web tools, user generated content and the ability of the user community to identify what’s important is changing the mainstream media. Where does authority come from? How will these new sites and tools impact what reports write? The Onion puts it nicely, as usual.

‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times‘ Newsroom Apart

NEW YORK—Nearly two dozen staffers, including four Pulitzer Prize winners and a Baghdad correspondent, have requested transfers to the Times’ Home and Garden and Travel desks.

One of the things all this user-generated-content of blogs and personalized pages has opened up is the development of something called cyberbullying. This is the phenomenon of publishing negative comments about someone that go beyond criticism and into the world of threats. It is the playground bully writ large.

The web allows for a lot of anonymous communications, which is the first factor. When people can hide they often do things they otherwise couldn’t get away with. When you combine anonymity with the ease of publishing you get the cyberbullies coming out of the woodwork.

Today has been designated “Stop Cyberbullying Day” and so this is my excuse to tell you about the problem. The issue has been around for a while — particularly among high school students with MySpace pages — but it has recently come out strong because of outrageous online death threats to a prominent blogger. (The previous link is to the story of how Kathy Sierra has been under threat and it is very disturbing, so be advised.)

If you want to know about this issue and what is being done about it, check out Cyberbully.org

Nonprofits are, and have been, talking a lot about “Web 2.0″ technologies over the last couple years and how to use them for their benefit. Blogging, RSS feeds, social networking sites, user generated content of all kinds, and of course video streamed in embeddable video players. There are few “best practices” for these things, but they are emerging.

We are lucky to have the political campaigns to help move the ball. The politicians, particularly those running for President, are highly motivated to push the envelope, be aggressive and use whatever tools there are to use. The Howard Dean campaign is widely credited with having mainstreamed the idea and execution of tapping online social networks for support, for example.

But as they push the envelope and act aggressively, they also screw up. And thank God we have Jon Stewart to be there to make fun of them. Check out this recent Daily Show clip which is a cautionary tale about being open in open networks like MySpace and YouTube. I also noticed how Dennis Kucinich is made fun of for being low-tech — because of the location of his online video! This is progress.