Deep Currents

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics.

General News

Is everything going 2.0? (SocialButterfly, 5/7/08)

http://fly4change.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/is-everything-going-20-health-science-museum-enterprise-philanthropy-birding-etc/

Zeitgeist alert: This collection of links highlights a rash of recent blog posts and news articles that describe new applications of Web 2.0 technology to a diverse group of sectors: museums, health, science, birding, reputation, enterprise software, food, and yes—philanthropy. Of particular interest is the piece on museums, who are using Web 2.0 tools to become more engaging, more community-based, and more central to society. The broader the technology is adopted, the more examples there will be for how to use it, which will continue providing creative stimulus for those in the social sector.

 

Putting the ‘Social’ Back in Network

Six Steps to Social Media Success (Getting to the Point, 5/2/08)

http://www.nonprofitmarketingblog.com/comments/six_steps_to_social_media_success/

This post lays out the basic reasons why people use social media: to be seen and heard, and to connect with each other. It includes six steps to using social media effectively:  (1) stop—be reflective, (2) look and listen—find where your constituency is already congregating, (3) see and hear—use your expertise to contribute to existing conversations, (4) choose—pick the social medium that fits best, (5) be easy to find, and (6) ask—give your supporters opportunities to tell their story and play a meaningful role.

Listening with Social Media: Social Media Archaeologists (Beth’s Blog, 5/10/08)

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/05/listening-with.html  

The need to listen and the opportunity to learn are two of the ways that using social media for marketing is fundamentally different from traditional marketing strategy. Beth briefly describes why listening and learning are important, then provides a set of practical tips on how to listen well and how to use the experience to answer important questions.

Tool-Specific Developments

Google’s “Friend Connect” (TechCrunch, 5/12/08)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/12/google-confirms-friend-connect/

Google launched a groundbreaking new social networking platform last week called Friend Connect (http://www.google.com/friendconnect/). Friend Connect counters the phenomenon of YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site): instead of creating a new site for the sole purpose of social networking, where users can interact only with other users of the site, it is a service that any website developer can use to offer social networking to its users. The explicit target is the many small websites that don’t even have a user login today. One of Google’s examples is a simple one-page site about guacamole where previously users could only read the recipes but now can sign in to join the site, make comments, see who else is a member, and invite their friends. The most revolutionary aspect of the system is that it bridges many of the leading social network sites: MySpace, hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and Google Talk, with additional sites promised to join soon. (While Facebook was slated to join, it recently backed out.) If the technology performs as promised, it amounts to yet another expansion in the number of social groups that will form today that could never have formed before, further enabling personal connectivity and (in some cases) collective action. Ad-hoc activism just got easier.

26 Learning Games to Change the World (Mission to Learn, 4/29/08)

http://blog.missiontolearn.com/2008/04/learning-games-for-change/

Internet games not only take advantage of networked technology but also frequently spread through social networks, and recent years have seen a rise in games that not only while away the time but also educate, inspire, and encourage donations for social causes. This list of 26 games includes some very innovative examples of cause-oriented games available today, such as the incredibly addictive “Free Rice” vocabulary game where every correct word results in the sponsor donating 20 grains of rice to the UN, which to date has resulted in a donation of over 29 billion grains.

• The 5^th Annual Games for Change Festival, which will be held on June 2^nd-4^th: http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2008/index.php
  
  

Donation Dashboard: collaborative filter-enhanced charity (BoingBoing, 4/21/08)

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/21/donation-dashboard-c.html

This new project (at http://dd.berkeley.edu/) uses the same logic behind Amazon’s book recommendations and the collaborative news-filtering site Digg.com to create recommendations for allocating donations. It starts as a simple tool for deciding where to donate: users search for nonprofits of interest, rate their relative interest in donating, and the site divides up the user’s donation dollars in proportion to the user’s interest. Then, as the database builds, the site can use the other users’ choices to make increasingly intelligent recommendations: “Other users who donated a large amount to the World Wildlife Fund were also interested in…” This distributed structure will hopefully give donors a useful point of information as they decide which charity is the most deserving.

Is Causes on Facebook a failure? (Givvy Blog, 4/16/08)

http://blog.givvy.com/2008/04/16/is-causes-on-facebook-a-failure/

The Causes application on Facebook has provoked a good deal of debate among philanthropy bloggers, some of whom trumpet its many members while others wonder if those numbers are meaningful. This blog post adds some numbers to the mix. Causes has roughly eight million users, placing it 69^th among all Facebook applications. But if you consider donations a more important metric than membership, the total donated to the top 5 causes comes to just $135,000, which is an average of about 1.5 cents per member. Since there’s a “long tail” of less-popular causes, Givvy estimates that the total donated by the Causes membership is around $1.5 million. The debate continues: what difference does Causes really make?

Written: May 19th, 2008