good practice

Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan has made a rallying call for a Netsquared this side of the pond - which could be an “incubator for web-enabled social change in the UK & Europe”.

Dan identifies some possible goals:

• To stimulate web-enabled social innovation
• To create a an online-offline community for learning skills, sharing experiences and developing expertise
• To sustain socially progressive activity through alternative business & organisational models

I like the emphasis Dan gives to “activism”, and “the organisational question” in particular…

Perhaps, like the second Netsquared conference, it could aim to incubate a new generation of web-enabled non-profits that use new forms of organising to deliver more directly on their missions.

There is a very real tension between where social media is taking us and how charities are responding (although there needn’t be). Web 2.0 requires Leadership 2.0. Surely two sides of the same coin.

All this may well dovetail with the initiative soon to be unveiled by Bertie Bosredon, the Head of New Media at Breast Cancer Care. Bertie gave me an update earlier this week.

Yesterday, I happened to get a call from Richard Saunders, who is head of website development at NCH, the children’s charity. He also hinted he would welcome a forum along these lines. And Rob Bowker at the BTCV has flagged his interest to me via this blog.

I also know from many of the conversations I had in Brussels last week that there would be an appetite for this elsewhere in Europe, too. Paolo Ferrara left a comment on my recent Buzz Director post to let me know that they are starting to unpick this concept in their own Italian context.

I hope many others will be up for it. But it won’t all be plain sailing; David Wilcox recently held up a mirror to reflect that in the UK at least, the sector has not always been good at being generous in this way.

I’m optimistic. At the start of the year, when I was considering some of the trends that might drive charities in 2007, I wrote that I was “thinking of co-organising an open-space event for those championing social media tools (and change management) within their organisations.” But Dan is right, this is much bigger than a single event.

I would only add that I’d like to see people from all ‘disciplines’ involved in this - I’ve had enough of silo-thinking .

Thank you, Dan; count me in.

Thanks to Steve Andrews of Whitewater for this post pointing to a terrific example of how Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) is using blogs to put donors directly in touch with the work they’re supporting.

Canadian doctor, James Maskalyk, is working for MSF in Abyei, Sudan. He is writing a blog about his experiences. It’s truly inspirational stuff; particularly because it comes directly from him in real time, not in a sanitised quarterly charity newsletter. He shares his doubts, his fears, his hopes and his triumphs. He happens to write beautifully, but it doesn’t matter when he leaves uncorrected typos or uses poor grammar. Because it’s real.

Here’s the link to Dr. Maskalyk’s MSF blog.

One commenter / donor wrote:

I have been a monthly donor to MSF for some time. On Tuesday, I will ramp up by contribution, because I have a house, a job, a healthy beautiful sometimes-maddening daughter, a garden, rain, food - and hope. I wish I could give those things to the mother whose baby you tried to save. I cannot, so I will do what I can.

Steve titles his post “Real Close”, which I think is right on the money.

We can learn a lot from our kids… and how they say thank you. I’m no exception.

But Whitewater’s Steve Andrews says it perfectly:

Saying ‘thank you’ is one of the best opportunities you have to inspire your donors, to make them feel fantastic about their decision to give.

I urge you to read Steve’s post.

Another ‘must read’ blogger, Jeff Brooks, touched on a similar theme recently:

If you want full value from donors, you need to engage them in a relationship and conversation.

Treating donors as human beings. There’s a concept.

Reminds me of something a kid once said to me at youth club. He fancied himself as a bit of a bully. He said something to me in an attempt to provoke a response. I ignored him. He got huffy, got his words muddled up and barked, “You’re talking to a brick wall”. I think he meant to say something else. Anyway, we were teens. It was a long time ago.

People have long memories.

I’ve been having a lot of widgety thoughts recently, so I thought I’d bundle up a few loose ends in the one (long) post.

First though, if you’re playing catch-up a bit, Heidi Cohen has written a good widgets primer on ClickZ.

Now… I happened to replace half a dozen conventional light bulbs at home on Sunday with compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). Over in the US, Yahoo! has launched a campaign in collaboration with Inconvenient Truth producer Lawrence Bender, Wal-Mart, and others, to raise awareness among Americans about the energy and environmental savings afforded by CFLs.

When you purchase a CFL bulb anywhere in the US it will be added to 18seconds.org! And, you guessed it… you can easily and quickly configure your own widget (or ‘badge’ in Yahoo-speak) and install it on your website, blog and / or social network page with a simple cut and paste. Brilliant!

If you’re interested in reading more about the campaign, Lawrence Bender has written a guest post on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog.

Demonstrating impact

The first book I ever read on campaigning was Des Wilson’s A to Z of Public Advocacy, first published in 1984. I can’t lay my hands on my copy (in the garage?) but if I recall correctly, one of Des’s golden rules was encourage you to campaign for something, rather than against something, and the 18seconds widget does a great job of visualising - in raw numbers anyway - the accumulated impact of hundreds of thousands of small actions by distributed individuals to effect positive change.

I emphasise “positive” change, as leveraging Web 2.0 communication tools for good was something that was discussed in a lively ‘conversation’ hosted by Amnesty’s Dan McQuillan during the Uploading Innovation ‘unconference’ last week.

If you hadn’t guessed already… for me, widgets are one of the most exciting ingredients in the emerging Web 2.0 toolbox.

Wear your cause on your blog

Another new kid on the widget block is Carebadges, who aspire to be the yellow bracelet campaign of the web, and while I think the implementation can be improved a lot, I agree with co-founder Saar Gur who told me:

We think that as people express their identities on the web, there is a big gap where social causes ought to be. We want people to express the things that they care about beyond cultural items (music, movies, etc.).

Last year I actually registered the domain name - mycauses.org.uk - and wrote on this blog that I would willingly give it up to any organisation which promised to use it wisely (or hand it over to MySpace if they agreed to establish a “My Causes” tab on their social networking site!)

Anyway, I interrupted Saar…

We want to give people ‘badges’ to help them identify with a cause and have a positive social influence amongst their peers. We use our “impact meter” of impressions/awareness, donations/support to help recognise folks that use their popularity for good. The money [donations] will come later if we can give tools to those who want to create cool badges, email signatures, etc., and we focus on the social impact that each user has in recruiting new members…

I’m not totally convinced in this peer group tactic, in much the same way as I’m not sure how much saying “I’m In” means you’re really anything other than a number. You’re agreeing that Oxfam’s mission is a noble thing.

Widgets have the potential to show you how by taking this or that action, you are making a difference.

Communicating success

This could be the Holy Grail for widgets.

18seconds does this in a visually compelling way… it joins the dots… and it makes it look simple.

But wait a minute. ChipIn’s Carnet Williams says something very interesting in this interview with Britt Bravo (which to Britt’s great credit rather trumps my own interview with Carnet last month).

Carnet says…

What I think 2007 really should be part of is the evolution of the widget into a smart widget. We are going to see widgets that are going to be focused around transactions, such as a ChipIn widget around donations, focused around intelligent content, meaning that widgets will soon be able to identify the users, and where they’re located, so that they can serve our conditional and intelligent content.

I really think that widgets are going to evolve and you’re going to start seeing a whole new breed of widgets that are more intelligent, that are richer in the data, and that have a much more grounded rationale so they’ll move from becoming decorations to part of a business process for companies and individuals online.

Now the slightest hint of ’smart’ widgets is enough for me: if I could only get information I care about - e.g. what difference a project I supported is actually having, or the accumulated effect of campaigning actions, etc. via a widget… now, that would surely become a key driver of my future support for that cause.

The Network Effect

For a great insight into the power of the widget widget web, check out Dion Hinchcliffe’s excellent article, Tracking the DIY phenomenon Part 1: Widgets, badges, and gadgets.

Dion identifies the YouTube ‘badge’ (we’re still talking widgets) as demonstrating the value of ‘chunking’ up content and services into bite-sized reusable pieces.

Particularly because it has so many viral distribution pieces built into it, the YouTube badge is the canonical example of the power of opening up and letting the entire web distribute your content for you.

Not content just to ask you if you’d like to share a video with friends via e-mail (resulting in friends forwarding to friends, and to their friends and so on) but YouTube makes the code snippet for embedding it right on your own site or blog readily visible and available to the right of each video.

Not content just to have their content just on a single site, YouTube realized that it was by mobilizing millions of users to extend the YouTube platform to their own sites that they could achieve lasting and durable network effects. E-mail propagation is powerful but it’s almost certainly no match for having millions of persistent, discoverable YouTube badge installations all over the web.

Dion kindly gave me permission to reproduce the following graphic (originally published here) which illustrates the full potential of the network for extending the reach of your widget / message.

Here in the UK, Justgiving has added badges (these are just badges) to the toolset available to fundraisers (is it just me who thinks all widgets, gadgets, etc… look better with rounded corners?).

Their widgets have been doing pretty well, too. Since their release at the end of December, over 8,000 individual Justgiving widgets have been posted on the web and the highest performing widgets have registered over 500,000 page impressions.

Right now, there are 1,479 “active” Justgiving widgets, all doing their stuff, and this figure is expected to rise pretty steeply as we get nearer to the London Marathon.

Justgiving’s Simon Doggett told me that a Flash version of their widget is in testing, and should be released later this month (fundraisers have been asking for a widget that is optimised for those websites that currently block iframes, e.g. MySpace).

Well, that turned into rather a long post, so I had better think of a way to summarise how I believe widgets can prove a winner for not-for-profits:

• You move beyond the single website model and turn the entire web into a distribution system for your content / stories (Dion Hinchcliffe)
• Smart widgets will (hopefully soon) allow you to report back on how you are making a difference

More on widgets.

One of my recent predictions was that widgets and widget fundraising would make their mark here in the UK in 2007.

A good time then for prolific US-based blogger Beth Kanter to write an excellent case study on her experience using the ChipIn widget for her successful personal fundraising campaign for the Sharing Foundation.

ChipIn founder Carnet Williams hopes that others can learn from Beth to make their own fundraising efforts more successful.

It seems especially appropriate to mention this today, as Beth is celebrating a Big Birthday! A toast would seem in order, then.

Crumbs, I may have just the thing: talking of toast, and talking of sharing… this is another one of those ‘traffic pyramiding’ schemes, but this time in aid of charity. A cool (and slightly eccentric) way to donate to a good cause.

Intrigued? Point your mouse to Your Name on Toast!