Code, Camera, Action

PACE presented its research into civic participation and non-college-bound youth at the Case Foundation yesterday. The audience was spellbound.

http://www.casefoundation.org/case-studies/inequitable-invitation-citizenship-non-college-bound-youth-and-civic-engagement

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1
Lens: Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f1.5 (Leica thread mount)
Adapter: John Milich LTM-G1

So I’m growing a mustache—for cancer.

Participatory fundraising has become popular for very good reason. We run races, we walkathon. And—around here anyway—we grow mustaches.

Movember = Mo(ustache) + (No)vember

Movember is just like a walkathon, but with facial hair. Enterprising mustache growers sign up, then fundraise for the cause. In the US, that’s cancer research: both the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Livestrong benefit from donations.

Yes, my mustache fights cancer. With your help --

• Donate today if you can, or 
• Grow a mo' and join the Itchy Lips team
• Spread the word about how Movember fights cancer

And check out Itchy Lips, our team blog, for mustache updates like this one --

How does 100% authorship change your business?

• In philanthropy, might it reduce the cult of the expert? Contests and competitions give rise to their own results-based expertise. Scaling, as always, becomes an issue, and people with scaling expertise even more valuable.

• Fundraising comes to look like what Kiva’s Matt Flannery calls “the larger trend toward more connected experiences.” At home, we are all walkathoning (or growing mustaches) and asking our friends to help.

• In journalism and publishing, it looks like the rise of the individual reputation and the individual voice. Blogs over mainstream publications. Aggregators will still be important, be they search engines, social networks, or perhaps mainstream web properties.

• The shift to short, quick, forms like Twitter reduces the influence of professional copywriters. Amateurs have the time to write influential micro posts. Sharing among friends becomes the measure of influence.

• This changes the search engines’ power as the reference source. Right now Google is struggling to keep up with real time publishing. Here’s Jeremiah Owyang on what the search engines’ shift to realtime means for reaching people:

  Search marketers must understand that blasting marketing information through Facebook or Twitter won’t be effective, as search engines will filter out irrelevant messages that nobody listens to.

It comes down to content that’s useful, that other people can share. In a future where everybody writes, will anybody notice if your organization doesn’t?

My post for the Case Foundation blog this week looks the explosion of authorship (with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) -- and what that means for nonprofits. Click through to the original post on casefoundation.org, or listen to the audio above ipodding pleasure.

1. “Empathy increases generosity. The pictures and stories on the Kiva site increase understanding between various parties that would otherwise operate in completely different universes.” That’s Matt Flannery, Kiva’s CEO and co-founder replying in his guest post on David Roodman’s blog.

2. “If you’re going to advertise yourself as giving choice to the donor, you’d better do it.” That’s Mike Everett-Lane, formerly of Donor’s Choose, commenting on tacticalphilanthropy.com.

3. Openness buys an organization benefit of the doubt. Even in his initial post, David Roodman acknowledged that statistics in plain view on Kiva’s own website caused him to question Kiva’s message. There was clearly no skulduggery involved.

4. Listening pays. Kiva responded to the criticism with action. It altered those marketing materials, and Matt Flannery responded quite graciously in a guest blog post. But before any of that, Kiva’s staff listened.

   That listening, and that response, ultimately drew praise from the critics. David Roodman summed it up:

   I think Flannery’s response to my criticism blended grace, humility, and quiet confidence. The world would be a much better place if all charities, all organizations for that matter, were as open and responsive to criticism as Kiva has been. I trust the Kiva folks will keep refining. I will visit them today.

For more Kiva conversations – a post on my blog, Code, Camera, Action, outlines the story. The comments in particular, summarize how Kiva resolved the issue. For more detail, see this list of excerpts from the Kiva debate or Tim Ogden’s post linking to the major blog debate.

 

My post on the Case Foundation blog this week sums up the debate over Kiva and person-to-person fundraising. Plus audio, for your pod-listening pleasure.

Sure, today’s unprecedented technology allows us to reach new audiences, or connect advocates to share their stories, but the call to action must be clear, it must be actionable, and it must show impact. Today’s volunteers may be savvier when it comes to finding volunteer opportunities on their iPhone, but they expect an experience that matches the ease to which they found it.

My colleague Kari Saratovsky on iPhone volunteering. While the technology holds so much promise, it's not clear that nonprofits are ready to provide the personalized experience that users of the technology have come to expect.

These networks can enable storytelling and storysharing -- but the volunteering business has yet to tap this power.

By storytelling I mean the way that a nonprofit presents its mission—what it does, how effective it is—and how supporters can help. Since we’re all content producers now, I thought it would be a good time to share some examples this sort of nonprofit storytelling online.

In this week's post on the Case Foundation blog, I look at some great examples of nonprofit storytelling, with examples from text and video blogs to games.

Monday’s news that Facebook acquired FriendFeed made a big splash in the (comparatively small) pool of FriendFeed users. According to the announcement, “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being.”...

The announcement got me thinking about contingency planning.

We use FriendFeed and other free web services at the Case Foundation. My post this week looks at contingency planning for using free web services. Sometimes it's good to be reminded that free and forever seldom mix.

Lew Moorman is the CEO of Rackspace, a company that operates computer data centers for companies. Rackspace’s business, while touching racks and racks of servers, is concerned primarily with less glamorous things—electricity, for one, and air conditioning. You might think that Moorman leaves the software to his clients, which include lots of internet startups among the longer-established firms. Yet more and more, Lew says, Rackspace finds itself in the software business.

All of which got me thinking of how the trend toward software affects the nonprofit business.

In my post for The Case Foundation this week I look at several nonprofits that find themselves in the software business. Should software be a core for your nonprofit, too?