Filed under: Uncategorized
After a breezy 37 hrs of travelling, I’m at the hotel in Jalandhar, India. I’ll be here for a week, other parts of India for another week and then back to the US. Coming here was a string of annoyances and near-disasters, but now that I’m here in a near comatose state due to lack of sleep (6 hrs out of the last 48) and a full belly of Indian food (buffet!), everything is peachy.
Our plane from London to Armritsar got rerouted to Delhi (too much fog), where we sat on the tarmac for hours before flying successfully to Armritsar. We had a pool to see who could guess closest to our actual arrival time, which I lost.
I’ll try to update this when I can while I’m here, but no promises.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Fast Company announced their annual 2007 Social Capitalist Awards, and I was surprised to see that Kiva was not on the list. After all, 43 groups made it, which suggests that the editors picked all they wanted and then decided the final tally, rather than cutting off a larger list of qualified orgs at 10 or some other pretty number. I wonder what they thought Kiva did wrong, they certainly sound like the epitomy of social capitalism to me.
Tags: kiva, fast company, social capitalist awards
Filed under: Uncategorized
On Friday I will go to India via London for work, and I will be very close to the orpahange that I used to work for, live at, and help administer. I spent a couple of months there after college, and became very attached (and vice versa) to the 40 or so kids who live, play and learn there. I have the opportunity to go back and visit which would be tremendously cool for me. It’d be neat to see the kids three years later, see how everyone is doing, and splash around in the Ganga (Ganges River) like old times. They would always call me “goonda” (translates to villain or jerk) and then I would roar and throw them in the river or tickle them until they cried. We’d sing songs, play cricket and other games, do homework, draw monsters and all kinds of other fun stuff. Although it was really hard, unending work (we even had to put out the fires that arsonists lit to burn us off the property), I loved it, and told myself I would really try to come back to the little corner of India.
But I worry that my return might be hard on the kids. They’ve probably forgotten me or tried to, and it’s probably easier for them to just add me to relegate me to the recesses of their minds. Lots of volunteers like myself work there for a few months at a time and then leave. It’s probably hard for the kids to get so attached and then have to say goodbye. They made me promise I would come back, but what if doing so would awaken happily buried emotions? I could only stay for a day or two, and they (it they remembered me at all) would want me to stay for months.
Another wrinkle is that one of the kids has a horribly deformed hand. Rebels intentionally mangled his hand and what remains has been fashioned into two fingers and a thumb-like appendage. This is exactly the kind of thing Interplast can help, and we will be only five or six hours away by bus. Does the prospect of helping him justify my return? I have written the director of the orphanage who has not responded to my emails.
Thoughts?
Tags: dilemma, orphanage, child psychology
Filed under: Imagination
That’s the question that ENABLE Scotland is asking in a new ad campaign. They say that 11.1% of the UK donates to animal-related charities while only 6.6% donates to charities that benefit disabled people. While that sounds like a cherry-picked statistic (and no reference or citation is given), I believe it. I definintely see people avert their eyes when I’m with my cousin who has a mild form of Asperger Syndrome more than I do when, say, a shivering puppy whimpers and shuffles along.
I like how the ad hits you in the face and confronts you. No subtlety, no hiding behind excuses, no bullshit. After reading about this on The Intelligent Giving blog (which you really should subscribe to), it really made me think.
Tags: charity, disabilities, philanthropy, donations, animals
Filed under: Uncategorized
I checked back on the 59 smartest orgs online site today, and was surprised to see that many charities had lost votes (Interplast had gone from five to two), the bottom-dwelling groups are now at zero points instead of -1, and the option to vote down a charity was gone.
Huh. Maybe some people went a little too crazy go nuts with the downward arrows. I hope the Powers That Be didn’t take my previous post about people gaming the system as a castigation of the system.
I’d be curious to see which nonprofits would have been down based on merit (or lack thereof) alone had there not been a benefit to voting a group up. I didn’t vote any organizations down, but I wonder if there was a limit as to how many groups you could dock. If there was, there’s a greater chance of the groups at the bottom earning their rank.
Oh well. It was a great idea to have those down arrows, and it’s a shame that the system got abused. I certainly learn more from bad examples than good ones. The lesson that curling irons are hot is a particularly memorable one.
Speaking of cleverness, it was really a great idea to pick the number 59. It’s so random, arbitrary and prime that it makes the site and all related commentary super findable.
Kevin Bacon, famous for the well-known (and really hard) drinking game Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon, has teamed up with Network For Good to create Six Degrees, a charity badge sharing site that lets you give money to the favorite charities of your favorite celebrities or to the charity of your choice. The badges that you or people like Seth Green and Ricky Gervais created can be put on any webpage, and you and your crew can keep track of the donations. The donations are processed through Network For Good, which takes a hefty cut of 4.75% that the donor can choose to absorb or pass on to the charity.
ChipIn is a flash widget that you can also put on any website that allows you to accept and track donations through others’ badges. Unlike the Network For Good badges, the ChipIn widget has a handy-dandy little thermometer that shows you how close you are to your goal, and the donations go through PayPal, which takes only 2.9%. The downside is that you can’t customize the buttons at all, and let’s face it, celebrities’ faces tend to be more attractive than the ChipIn logo.
I think ChipIn is clearly the better project, but Six Degrees has the Network For Good marketing muscle behind it. This is one of those unfortunate instances where the better marketed product is not as good as its lesser-known competitor. Bummer.
The difference in fees is something that really can’t be overstated. And ChipIn supports a clear trend in online philanthropy: the preference of people to support individual projects rather than organizations. You can give to a particular project within an organization, which might annoy many orgs but please the new breed of online donors who abhor overhead costs and worship at the altar of efficiency.
Plus, there are plenty of worthy causes that are not charities registered with the IRS that ChipIn can support. If your kid’s soccer team needs new uniforms or your neighborhood wants to buy the local homeless guy a sleeping bag, ChipIn is flexible enough to accomadate you, while Network For Good will only deal with nonprofits that have been blessed by the IRS.
I gotta admit, Six Degrees is clever and slick. Good site design, a brilliant jiu-jitsu style transformation of a drinking game into a charitable endeavor, and famous celebrities. Not the washed up, B grade ones, either. It certainly has a bright future, and I hope they can steer the absurd cult of celebrity in this country to support worthy causes instead of fragrance lines and shampoo companies.
But I hope people don’t lose sight of ChipIn, a less glitzy but ultimately more solid offering.
Tags: Kevin Bacon, Six Degrees, Network For Good, ChipIn, nptech, philanthropy, donations
Filed under: Resources
Convio and Get Active, two eCRM competitors who shower nonprofits with promos and pleas to use their CRM software, will be merging in holy matrimony. Democracy in Action has an interesting post with good background info and interesting food for thought.
On a related note, I’m tired of integrating and moving data/tools/stuff from one platform to another, so I signed the Integration Proclamation. It seems sorta toothless, and I usually don’t think much of cheap pledges, but in light of today’s merger, maybe the toolmakers will finally see a demand for easy transfer of data as a good thing, not just a scary thing.
Tags: convio, get active, integration proclamation
One of my favorite blogs from the creators of one of my favorite websites posted today about Chugger Chase, a hilarious game where the player tried to avoide “chuggers”, the annoying people on the street who ask you to ostensibly for a moment of your time but quickly try to wheedle money out of you for a charity.
One of the charities I dislike the most is PIRG, including all of its evil subsidiaries. They hire bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young people to hang out on busy street corners filled with yuppies and ask if you have a minute for the environment. Who doesn’t? Only jerks, and you’re not a jerk. So you make eye contact and they launch into an oversimplified version of some environmental bill and ask you to sign a petition or give money to support it. You feel like an asshole for saying no, so you don’t. Once you’ve made eye contact and initiated conversation, you’re toast. And a lot of that money you donated went to paying for the salaries of the privileged college kid who stopped you in the first place, who will spend it on beer that night lamenting the fact that the “summer job to save the environment” seems a little sheisty.
Maybe if I play Chugger Chase more I can get better at avoiding them. I think I scored over 51,000 points.
While I shudder at the resources it took to create this mindless little game, it introduced me to Community Channel, I poked around their site a bit and challenged an easily-distracted friend of mine to beat my high score. So it definitely worked as an attention-getter.
Best of all, I like the big blue button in the right-hand corner that says “Boss Coming” that you can click to open up the legitimate, less-gamefied Community Channel website in a new tab/window, a nice touch to finish off a clever little time-waster.
Tags: chugger chase, community channel, pirg, game, fun
Filed under: Big vs. Small, Donations, Imagination, NGO Blogs, Resources, Visionaries, Web 2.0
Squidoo, Get Active and Net Squared teamed up to announce the top 59 smartest orgs online. It’s an interesting list, and while there are several orgs that are noticeably absent, all present seem to be doing interesting things and/or have big enough presences that they get to be noticed. There’s no cash prize, and people can vote charities up or down as long as they are, or want to, become registered Squidoo members.
But wait a minute, can’t this system be gamed? Sure. All you need to do is get your friends/colleagues/mailing-list to sign up for a Squidoo account and PRESTO, your charity, as long as it startedsomewhere on the list, is now ranked above Donors Choose, winner of the 2005 Amazon Nonprofit Innovation Award, which at the time of writing was ranked #55 out of #59 with negative one point.
All groups started with (positive) one point. So either two individuals think Donors Choose is doing a bad job of utilizing the internet to affect social change. Or two folks voted them lower because it would improve their own group’s ranking.
I’m not aware of anyone thinking that Donors Choose is either a bad idea, badly executed, or not in a position to utilize the internet to bridge the web 2.0 and philanthropy worlds. So obviously, there is some manipulating going on here.
That’s interesting. Is it ethical? I don’t know.
There’s nothing at stake here except for pride, and there’s no rulebook that says “don’t get your fellow charity staff members to create Squidoo accounts just to vote up your charity and vote others lower”. In fact, some organizations (which are ranked quite highly) are quite obviously pandering to their community to vote for them, even by mistakenly implying that there is a financial benefit for the group to do so.
So that seems wrong to me. Obviously, each of the people in charge of marketing or communications at these orgs got a pat on the back when their bosses learned what happened, especially at small orgs (look, we’re better at communicating online than The One Campaign/Gates Foundation/Greenpeace/etc). But what else is there to be gained by cheating?
I know, there’s no rules, it’s not illegal, blahblahblah. But it feels wrong.
Is your group great? Sure. When I saw that Interplast made the list at #31, I signed up, voted, hit the ‘ole refresh button and watched us jump to #25. My coworker did the same and we were at #18. Pretty good for 15 seconds worth of marketing. It was fun, but it left me with no illusion that we do a better job of empowering people to change the world than Kiva or TakingITGlobal. We eventually jumped peaked at #10, and we never voted anyone else down. Were we unethical? I don’t think so. We honestly believe that we are doing a good job, and I’m sure that Squidoo is more than happy to let us vote in order to bag a couple of new subscribers. We didn’t spend much time on it, got a good chuckle and a warm fuzzy, and went back to work.
But we used to have five points, and now we have four, so again, even though there’s nothing at stake an I shouldn’t really care, someone’s screwing with the system.
It looks like someone who either works for or is a supporter of some group near the top is voting everyone else down. At the time of writing, 12 groups were at -1, which means that two people voted them down.
But here’s the problem with your plan, evil voter-downer-people. If any person familiar with nonprofits, technology, web 2.0, fundraising, marketing, etc sees a list with (all rankings current at time of writing):
- —Ferrets Unlimited as the #1 smartest org online
- —Groups like Donors Choose and New Orleans Voices for Peace, languishing near the bottom
- —The #8 charity not having a website that loads
Then they will simply dismiss it as an unreliable source and ignore it. If, on the other hand, they see a reasonable list where groups at the top seem to be really innovative, then the story might get picked up by bloggers, MSM journalists, and other chattery types who would catapault the list and all orgs on it onto their radarscreen and into their publications. Everyone wins.
Seth Godin, the founder of Squidoo, made a big hubhub a while back in the nonprofit blogosphere by questioning the way that many charities market themselves, especially the ones that didn’t have a Squidoo lens. That didn’t win him many friends in the NP blogosphere, but it sure garnered him lots of links, discussions and yummy stuff which he probably prefers.
I think Seth Godin is really smart, and although I don’t quite get Squidoo and why it presents a credible alternative to blogs and/or wikipedia, I think that this list is a smart move. Squidoo will garner new subscribers like me or folks who like ferrets, and people will talking about Seth Godin breathlessly as innovative and clever, which he certainly is. (see? It’s already working.)
I’m curious to see what the list looks like six months from now, and I predict that Donors Choose will slowly climb the ranks until it rivals Kiva. What do you think?
Tags: nptech, ngo, npo, seth godin, squidoo, net2, philanthropy, charity
