Sometimes impact can be achieved without money, an adult or a car

This post was written by Beth Kanter, co-author of the new book Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World. She and co-author KD Paine appear at TechSoup headquarters, 525 Brannan St., Suite 300 in San Francisco on Wednesday from noon to 1:30 p.m. Register to attend the free talk.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers, general public.

Guest post by Beth Kanter
beth’s blog

The New York-based nonprofit DoSomething.org has a big social change goal: To harness the energy of young people 25 and under and unleash it through national campaigns on causes teens care about. The call to action is always something that has a real impact and does not require money, an adult, or a car. Their measurable goal is to get 5 million active teen members engaged in social change campaigns by 2015. They use social media, mobile, and data to reach that goal.

A recent example is their “Pregnancy Text” campaign featured on their quarterly dashboard. This clever sex education campaign is an updated version of the teen pregnancy education program where young people carried eggs around and pretended they were babies. It was a text campaign where teens opted-in to receive texts on their mobile phones from the “baby.” Once they joined (and they could share it with their friends), they received regular annoying text messages at all hours from the “baby”  that poops, cries, and needs their immediate attention.

The team at DoSomething.org uses data to determine the program design, key performance indicators, and a hypothesis to be tested.

They looked at survey data from the National Campaign: 87 percent of young people surveyed said it would be much easier for teens to delay sexual activity and avoid teen pregnancy if they were able to have more open, honest conversations about these topics with their parents and/or friends. So, success of this campaign would mean that participants talk with their family or friends about the issue and delay sexual activity.

Text messages as a powerful platform for social change

The basic design had those who signed up challenge their friends to take care of a text baby. They could either:

1. Go to the DoSomething website and select five friends to challenge, or
2. Challenge friends after reading a quick stat on US teen pregnancy sent via text from DoSomething to its 300,000 mobile subscribers.

Participants who accepted the challenge would then start receiving texts the following morning from the text baby. After completing the challenge, participants were prompted to send it to their own friends. DoSomething also followed up with 5,000 of the users with a text-based survey to measure impact.

Once they defined their goals and identified the right data collect, here are some of the insights they gleaned, according to Nancy Lublin, CEO, and Jeffrey Bladt, chief data scientist:

• SMS as a platform: In monitoring engagement per communication channel, they determined that SMS (text messaging) was be 30 times more powerful for getting their users to take action as compared to email.
• Challenging five friends: They tested various group sizes for SMS experience and have found the a group of six (one “alpha” inviting friends) leads to the highest overall engagement.
• Research-based messaging: The general messaging for the campaign was based on survey findings that found

1. Big scare tactics — for example, getting pregnant equals not going to college — were not as effective as highlighting how being a teen parent changes daily life (for example, can’t go to the movies because the babysitter canceled)
2. A report by the Centers for Disease Control found, “The impact of strong pregnancy prevention messages directed to teenagers has been credited with the [recent] teen birth rates decline.”

• A/B testing: DoSomething pre-tested different messages and frequency of sending the messages to smaller test groups of  teens to optimize the number of messages the baby would send during the day, as well as the content. They ended up doubling the frequency and rewording several interactions as well as building in a response system (so the baby would respond if the teen texted an unsolicited response). The insights from these tests pushed up engagement and likelihood of forwarding at the end.
• Impact: They did a survey to measure this. One in two teens said participating in the Pregnancy Text campaign made it more likely they would talk about the issue of teen pregnancy with their family and friends.

As you can see from the above insights, DoSomething does more than gather and analyze topline data:

• 101,444 people took part in the campaign with 100,000 text babies delivered.
• There were 171,000 unsolicited incoming messages, or one every 20 seconds for the duration of the campaign. During the initial launch period (the first two weeks), a new text message was received every 10 seconds.
• For every one direct sign-up, DoSomething gained 2.3 additional sign-ups from forward-to-a-friend functionality. The viral coefficient was between 0.60 and 0.70 for the campaign.
• One in four (24%) of teens could not finish a day with their text baby (texted a stop word to the baby).

I heard Todd Park, Chief Technology Officer at the White House, say this about Big Data at the Mashable Social Good Summit: “Data by itself is useless. I can’t feed my baby daughter data, as much as I’d love to because I love data. It’s only useful if you apply it to create an actual public benefit.”

You can’t do that unless identify your results, collect the right data, and generate insights.

How is your nonprofit using data to change the world? Share in the comments below.

The post How DoSomething uses data to change the world appeared first on Socialbrite.

How 15-second videos are taking advocacy campaigning to the next level

This is the third part of a series on how nonprofits can use video. Also see:
• Part 1: What to consider when investing in video
• Part 2: 7 top video editing tools for nonprofits

Guest post by Mike Kondratick
Director of Strategy, See3 Communications

Nothing tells the real, impactful human stories of actual constituents like video. In the years that I spent as an advocacy program director, collecting user-generated video from our supporters – advocate stories, testimonials, and messages to legislators – was always high on the priority list.

These programs, no matter how well conceived or how good our intentions, were always difficult to manage. Folks would use a variety of ways to capture the video: Flip cams, their laptop’s camera, their smartphone, etc. The video got back to us in different ways: email, links to YouTube pages, posted to our Facebook fan page, etc. Organizing the footage to make the desired impression on potential advocates and/or legislators was a time suck. And, regardless of how well we crafted message points for our supporters to simplify the process and make it less stressful, the video that came back had varying levels of usability. In short, these programs were a hot mess.

Enter Viddy, the latest mobile-based, social video collection/sharing app. Viddy has created a platform that streamlines and simplifies video production, collection, and display. And, in my opinion, it’s the best available tool right now for advocacy organizations to make user-generated video campaigns at once easier to manage and more impactful.

This post won’t focus on the laundry list of Viddy’s features. You can find good feature-based reviews and comparisons of Viddy vs. Socialcam elsewhere. I’ll note only the features that I think make this app unique for use in the nonprofit and advocacy space.

A focus is on keeping mobile video short & simple

Viddy’s focus is on keeping mobile video short and simple — in other words, perfect for users with varying levels of experience and comfort with video. In fact, it’s been described as “the Instagram of video.” Setting up your organization’s presence couldn’t be easier. Just go to Viddy.com or download the app from the AppStore, enter a username and password, and upload your logo. (Viddy video can only be collected via mobile device, so regardless of where you sign up, you will need to download the app.) The main drawback, as of now, is the lack of an Android version, but that’s coming soon. The sign-up process for your supporters will be just as easy. Finding and following other organizations and friends requires a simple search.

The video collection process is where Viddy really shines. Response rates from advocates on video asks are low for lots of reasons — the biggest being that people are just going to be nervous capturing themselves on camera. Though Viddy can’t change this aspect of human nature, it does smash many of the other barriers.

First, it limits the length of any video to 15 seconds — a limit that does not exist on Socialcam. Some are going to look at this as a drawback, but to me it’s a key differentiator. After you spend some time looking at the video on the Viddy platform, you start to realize just how long 15 seconds really is and how much you can communicate.

Returning to my advocacy program experiences, no matter how few message points we gave people for their videos or how well-written those points were, our supporters always stressed over ‘performance’ aspects—how to combine the points, how long they needed to talk, etc. Because the video ask was still so amorphous in their minds, few attempted it. A 15-second limit provides all the structure you need. There’s only time for a name, key message points, and an ask for a legislator (or a one or two sentence story). A short time limit reduces the level of effort and stress.

Do you really need more than 15 seconds from an advocacy video?

This also got me thinking about just how many times I needed more than 15 seconds from an advocacy video. I couldn’t really think of any. Whether it was a testimonial for our program or one of our events, a message urging a legislator to support our issues, or a thank you message for a legislator, pretty much all of them could be accomplished in 15 seconds or less. And, invariably, I’d find myself having to edit down the longer videos I did get to combine them with other clips or to fit with typical short attention spans that people have with most online platforms.

Second, Viddy provides just enough in the way of production effects to improve the overall video quality without overwhelming the user. As you get ready to shoot, it gives you tools to track your audio and light levels —just enough to make sure the video looks good. After the video is completed, you have only three options (should you want them): choosing a thumbnail image, adding a visual effects package, and choosing a soundtrack.

The troubles I described above with collecting and managing the video I received? Viddy solves these as well. Each Viddy production can be tagged. So, you can give your supporters specific instructions to tag their video with your organization’s name, an issue name and/or a legislator’s name. As these videos are completed, they’ll show up in your feed (assuming you’re following your supporters). You can also search by tag to see your videos nicely grouped. The quality of the videos will also be consistent since they’ll all be generated by the higher-quality video cams available on iPhones and, soon enough, Android-powered phones.

Social sharing with Viddy, as you’d expect, is also very user-friendly. You can quickly share your advocates’ videos on your organization’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or Google+ page. (The one caveat I noted is sharing through your organization’s fan page. You can do this through Viddy.com using your page admin’s Facebook accounts but, from what I see, you can’t do this through the mobile app. Let me know if this is possible in the comments below.) You can also grab the embed code for your website or blog. Through the mobile interface, you can also quickly post the video to your Tumblr or share it via SMS.

To be sure, I’d like to see additional features added over time, most notably the ability to include overlays to drive additional advocacy actions. And, for Viddy to be a feasible mobilization platform the Android version will need to be reality. But once that happens, issue campaigners will have a widely available platform that:

1. Limits the stress of video collection by providing a short time limit
2. Provides for a higher level of quality by using higher-quality video cams and basic production effects
3. Makes video collection and organization drop-dead simple
4. Facilitates social media campaigns around user-generated video by making social sharing quick and easy

How can Viddy help your cause?

Think about how Viddy can build your video library and how you can roll this user-generated content into your future video projects and production. Mashups of constituent messages? Check. A wall of advocate message videos on your website? Check. A quick solution to create video contests? Check. A constant stream of simple and direct advocate testimonials? Check.

Has your organization tried Viddy for an advocacy campaign? What do you think of the overall feature set? Share your thoughts with us below!

The post Video for your cause: Get giddy over Viddy appeared first on Socialbrite.

Issues of storytelling, transparency & disclosure come to fore

The big social media story of the year so far has been Invisible Children’s 30-minute film on Joseph Kony. I mean, you just couldn’t get away from it last week — 75 million views on YouTube and counting.

I was fascinated, not so much by the video, which I agree was beautifully produced, but by the amount of conversation it generated. So I talked to a few of my colleagues in the nonprofit world, all powerhouse professionals, to get their take on the video and the cultural hubbub that ensued.

And while much has already been written about the campaign, including this terrific Forbes piece on social media lessons, here are a few things nonprofit organizations should keep in mind when using digital media to further their causes:

You must let the truth get in the way of a good story

1One of the primary criticisms is that the Kony 2012 video doesn’t accurately represent the current state of affairs in Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, not to mention the fact that warlord Joseph Kony hasn’t been in that country in a while. Invisible Children said that in order for the story to resonate, they had to simplify it, and basically admitted via the statement on their site that they left out a lot of detail:

“In our quest to garner wide public support of nuanced policy, Invisible Children has sought to explain the conflict in an easily understandable format, focusing on the core attributes of LRA leadership that infringe upon the most basic of human rights. In a 30-minute film, however, many nuances of the 26-year conflict are admittedly lost or overlooked.”

Yes, the story is complicated. But with the expert talent at their disposal, I have a hard time believing Invisible Children couldn’t have given a sense of history by date-stamping the different interviews and so on.

Beth Kanter agreed, saying, “I believe nonprofits, in a day of social media connectedness, really have to understand transparency and that they can’t get away with not being transparent.” Beth elaborated further on this in a recent post, reiterating that “for responsible social change, you need transparency.”

How much storytelling is too much storytelling?

2Kami Watson Huyse raised an interesting point: “It was clear to me that this video was a storytelling exercise, and stories by definition are personal and take a particular point of view. I was more concerned with his use of his own son’s reaction as part of the story.

“The truth is a matter of interpretation. I think that this video was designed to get people to act, not to be a realistic documentary.”

While I’m not a parent, I would imagine this would resonate with many of you who are. We’ve seen time and time again that good stories are those are easy to understand and that pull on your heartstrings. But do you really have to bring your kids into it?

From Beth on storytelling: “Successful messaging is compelling, visual, emotional and simple. Some highly effective online activists told me that one of their secrets is that their messaging is at sixth-grade level because that makes it clear and simple to understand. That’s a good thing to do.”

Kony 2012 did that in spades. But at what price? At what point does the story take over the agenda — or become the agenda? It goes back to being transparent – which pretty much everyone I asked agreed was key. Nancy Schwartz summed it up perfectly: “The end doesn’t justify the means.”

It’s tough to say no to kids

3I first heard about the video from my Johns Hopkins students. Granted, they’re not kids, but they’re exactly the demographic of young activist and activist-oriented people that the film was trying to reach. Beth said she first heard about it from her 12-year-old son. JD Lasica, my Socialbrite colleague, first heard about it from his 12-year-old son. (By the way, JD interviewed one of the founders of Invisible Children for Socialbrite in 2009.)

My guess is that versions of this scenario played out in countless homes across America last week. (How about yours?)

What happens when your kids, or young people you are responsible for, announce a new fact? You go look it up. What happens when they tell you they’ve just learned about ____ cause and are going to support it? You go look it up — because you want to support them, you’re proud of their developing a social conscience, and you don’t want to let them down. Right?

And if they ask you to support it along with them, it becomes really, really hard to say “no,” especially if they are convinced that a particular cause is going to hunt down a “bad guy.” Because if you refuse, doesn’t that make you a bad guy by association?

If you’re going to try and generate social change through young people, you have a responsibility to them to make sure they understand exactly what they’re getting into. Yes, this goes back to telling the truth. Because if you don’t, it could backfire.

Be prepared for everything to be scrutinized

4Invisible Children started out trying to raise awareness — in their own words, to “make Joseph Kony famous.” But now everything about the nonprofit is being scrutinized, from its financials to its motives. To its credit, Invisible Children has posted several years’ worth of 990s on its site and clearly reiterated, time and time again, the approximate breakdown of expenses.

Did it anticipate having to do this? Probably. But it probably didn’t anticipate the amount of criticism that would be leveled at it. In fact, yesterday CNN reported that director Jason “Russell said he had been a little surprised by some of the criticism. ‘I didn’t know there was that much tension,’ he said.”

Personally, I find this a little naïve. If you’re dealing with an issue that is emotional at its core, it’s going to create, or reveal, tension. The nonprofit world, while doing a lot of good, has its share of competition and politics. After all, there is only so much attention the rest of us have to direct toward causes, and there is only so much our pocketbooks can take. Of course there’s going to be tension.

So even if you don’t think your mission will generate controversy, prepare as if it will. Be prepared for everything – everything – to be scrutinized. And though your original message might be co-opted or broken down in ways you hadn’t anticipated, at least you will remain part of the conversation.

Be clear on what you classify as direct services

5One of the major criticisms that’s been made is that only about a third of the money Invisible Children raises goes to direct services, with the other approximate two-thirds going to film production and marketing. Russell has been unapologetic about this, basically saying that this is how they function, and that raising awareness — through videos, marketing, social media, etc. — is critical to their cause.

This is a conundrum that a lot of nonprofits have to face. Because without marketing, you can’t raise awareness. Without awareness, you can’t get donations. Without donations, you can’t fund your programs.

And since the percentage allocated to programs is one of factors in ratings issued by nonprofit evaluation sites like Charity Navigator — note it gives Invisible Children only two stars out of four for accountability and transparency — you have to be really careful that the public is given as accurate a picture as possible about not just how you raise money, but how you spend it and what exactly classifies as a “program.”

Should rating sites change the way they evaluate nonprofits, particularly to account for the increased importance of marketing? As Kami pointed out, this has been an ongoing debate for a while.

But one way that Invisible Children could do this is, as Nancy pointed out, to “consider marketing as the program. If raising awareness is the goal, this stuff is the program!” (If you look at Invisible Children’s description of its programs, they all seem to be direct service-based.)

What do you think about the Invisible Children video and ensuing firestorm? Do you have other lessons for nonprofit organizations, or do you think I got any of the above wrong? And many thanks to Beth, Nancy, JD and Kami for helping me put this post together!

Related

• The story behind Invisible Children (Socialbrite)

• KONY, Networked Nonprofits, and Transparency (bethkanter.org)

• The best tools for advocacy campaigns (Socialbrite)

• How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos (Socialbrite)

• Writeups on advocacy campaigns (Socialbrite)

The post 5 advocacy lessons from the Kony 2012 video appeared first on Socialbrite.

A look at the most effective techniques to advocate for social change

Guest post by Kyle Henri Andrei
Idealware

Advocacy organizations often encourage their grassroots supporters to influence politicians and corporations using different methods, from promoting a cause or opposing legislation to challenging ad campaigns or policies. A large display of public opinion can have a powerful message, and advocacy groups often help to focus and channel this support to make the most impact.

This was traditionally done with mail. The sheer bulk of hundreds or thousands of letters was a strong visual stand-in for the people behind the cause. Today the tactic hasn’t changed, but the message is more likely to be delivered by email, telephone or social media, and the physical presence of the message replaced by the easy, constant barrage of communications

Let’s look at a few of the tools available to help advocacy groups direct grassroots communications to a target.

Email-based tools

While once a strong alternative to physically mailing letters, high-volume email campaigns have become more difficult at the national level. Most Congressional offices now use Web forms and other filters to restrict the flow of email to their in-boxes, minimizing their impact. The majority of mid-range and higher-end tools are able to navigate these roadblocks, but it’s a game of cat and mouse; as the email tools become more effective, so too do the defenses.

On the other hand, state and local politicians have lower email traffic and therefore tend to have fewer restrictions on the emails they receive. This makes them more effective targets. Corporations also tend to be more vulnerable to such efforts than Congress, and are more sensitive to attacks on their brand — and, in turn, more responsive to a campaign.

Web forms, filters and other obstacles do more than limit the volume of email that makes it to an inbox — they also request contact information. By requiring a street address, zip code or district, they make it possible to verify that the email is coming from a real person who’s a constituent of the targeted legislator. There’s growing concern among advocacy organizations that email is no longer the effective tool it once was, but a number of software applications can help with such campaigns.

Free and lower-cost tools

CitizenSpeak: The free tool CitizenSpeak provides a simple, straightforward method for advocacy organizations to create an email and then allow supporters to modify, personalize and send the message. Organizations must provide a single target email address, however, which makes it difficult to spread an email campaign across multiple voting districts. CitizenSpeak emails will not automatically navigate through Web forms or other filters, making it better suited to a campaign targeting state or local politicians, or corporations.

Votizen: The startup company Votizen provides an alternative to email that lets your supporters create profiles, and then verifies their congressional districts and voting histories. Once their profiles are approved, they can support causes, sign petitions and pledges, and send messages to their state and federal elected officials. Not all states currently provide voter history to Votizen.

PopVox: Similar to Votizen, PopVox matches your supporters to their representatives and verifies them by name and address. Approved users can then support or oppose legislation by selecting from upcoming bills, or send messages to their representatives.

For larger organizations

Capwiz by CQ Roll Call: Capwiz has long been a standard tool for email advocacy for those with a more sizable budget. It integrates into your website, allows you to look up legislators by zip code, and can navigate through most Web forms and filters. The vendor also now offers Capwiz for Facebook, which integrates your website with a Facebook app.

Salsa: Salsa offers email advocacy, list management, petition functionality, website content management features and survey capabilities. Email blasting and online donations are also available for additional fees. The package is quite flexible, and can be seamlessly integrated into a website, but you’ll need substantial HTML expertise to set it up. (Disclosure: Socialbrite is a partner with Salsa Labs.)

For those with expansive needs and more substantial budgets, a number of high-end tools provide strong, advanced features— for a cost. These tools begin at around $1,000 per month. For instance, Blackbaud Sphere (formerly Kintera) and Convio are fairly widely used among large advocacy organizations and combine advanced email advocacy capability with robust online features and constituent tracking. Several newer options from major advocacy consulting firms include ActionKit, put out by We Also Walk Dogs (which is closely associated with MoveOn.org), and a built-to-order offering by Blue State Digital.

Using your existing tools

If your targets aren’t hiding behind a filter or other roadblock, and you’re willing to get a little creative technically, you may be able to adapt one of the tools already used by your organization to send your message.

Most website Content Management Systems (CMSs) — such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress or Plone — provide the ability to create email website forms. You could pre-populate the form with the text of an email for supporters to modify or personalize, a method very similar to CitizenSpeakin functionality. This option has the advantage of being easily branded for your organization and is fairly easy to implement. However, it relies on your CMS’s broadcast email functionality, which might be less reliable than other options included here.

If you’re running a national advocacy campaign, you might want to help your supporters to identify and contact their appropriate representative through your website. Cicero API, from Azavea, allows you to connect your supporters to their representatives when they enter their zip code. You’ll need a programmer to help you implement it.

Other campaign methods

Email is just one method being used to replace the traditional snail-mail campaigns. Telephone-based efforts and social media can both work well in different circumstances.

Click-to-call telephone tools
Congress has typically been more responsive to phone calls than emails, and staffers are more likely to answer a phone than reply to — or even read — an email. Technology is emerging that will allow your supporters to make a phone call by entering their phone number on your website and clicking a button. The tool will then call their phone to connect them with your campaign target. There’s no well-known software that’s available out of the box to provide this functionality, but consider Twilio if you’re able to work with a program to implement an Application Programming Interface, or API, which is basically a way for a programmer to access the data or functionality through the code.

Social media tools
As politicians and corporations have adopted social media, those channels have emerged as locations for advocacy campaigns. Social media channels like Facebook and Twitter are public locations that allow for more public exposure than calling or emailing a congressional office. Many national politicians seem to be embracing Twitter, in particular, and many national and multinational corporations and brands have similarly taken to both Twitter and Facebook.

Remember, because corporations have more at stake to protect the image of their brand, they are more likely to respond to campaigns. While your supporters can take action directly on Facebook, or using hashtags and retweets on Twitter, some purpose-built tools have emerged to help with these efforts.

For instance, Act.ly provides a free tool that uses Twitter to target politicians and corporations. You can only target those already using Twitter. Act.ly also provides GovLuv, which helps supporters find their representatives on Twitter based on their residential addresses.

Wrapping it up

Whatever method you use, advocacy campaigns can be an effective way to show the support for a particular piece of legislation or policy or a similar cause. There are enough different ways available to spread the message that it’s worth taking the time to choose the one that best fits both your supporters and your target.

For more information

To learn about different ways of conducting petitions and pledges online, read our free article, A Few Good Online Petition Tools.

To learn about advocacy in the age of social media, read Influencing Public Policy in the Digital Age: The Law of Online Lobbying and Election-Related Activities.

This article was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Thanks as well as to the following nonprofit technology professionals who provided recommendations, advice and other help:

• Matt Stempeck, MIT Center for Civic Media
• Colin Delaney, Epolitics.com
• Heather Gardner-Madras, gardner madras | strategic creative
• Jon Stahl, jstahl.org
• Charles Lenchner, Online Organizing Consultant for Social Change

Related

• 9 online petition tools: How to make a difference (Socialbrite)

• How to set up an SMS campaign system (Socialbrite)

• 24 tools for fundraising with social media (Socialbrite)

The post The best tools for advocacy campaigns appeared first on Socialbrite.

One client’s data-driven approach multiplied its supporter network exponentially

Guest post by Jason Zanon
Salsa Labs

Talking from the heart may be what motivates supporters, but when it comes to building a long-term social network strategy, there’s no substitute for having your head in the game.

The Environmental Working Group, whose disciplined and data-driven outreach has multiplied its supporter network by nearly a thousandfold since joining Salsa, generously shared its social media playbook with Salsa, and we thought Socialbrite’s readers would like to see how this unfolded. It includes a few common-sense strategies that any organization can put into effect — and a whole lot of shoe leather.

“We’re really aware of our audience and meeting their needs,” said Colleen Hutchings of the Environmental Working Group. “When we post an action, we’re being really conscientious of who our audience is and of meeting them where they are, which may not always be the same as an email audience or a blog audience.”

The thousands of nonprofits and campaigns that, like EWG, count on the Salsa online communications platform can light up sharing features on any page with the flip of a switch. Salsa Sharing helps visitors channel the message to their own friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Curation that targets each social network

Hutchings credits its burgeoning Twitter and Facebook footprints to the extra effort EWG puts into curating specifically for each social network. Some of her tips:

• Craft custom suggested sharing messages (under 140 characters, natch) to make sharing super-easy for your social network people.
• Have appealing linked images in the action page — essential for making Facebook shares pop.
• Use a trackable link shortener like bit.ly to capture metrics. EWG’s last campaign as of this writing: 2,344 Facebook shares on an action with 31,095 online advocacy messages sent.
• Try (gentle) cross-channel recruitment. For instance, suggest a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ share in your acknowledgment auto-response to folks who take the old-school webform action.
• And most crucially, care for your community beyond your asks.

“We get into the comments and foster dialogues and direct people to resources they ask for,” Hutchings said. “People are coming to our Facebook page because they are involved in a conversation. We try to talk about actions in a way people care about, and care for the community that cares about them — and we do see new email signups and actions as a result.”

EWG is definitely a power user that keeps the Salsa team motivated, and our social media feature set has been expanding like gangbusters to help our managers execute their own smart social media strategies. Here’s a sampling of the social media elements that our clients deploy:

• Custom share content: Specify channel-specific share messages for each social network (and, for Facebook, a share image).
• Event sign-up via Facebook: Allow one-click registration via Facebook Connect for supporter sign-up and event registration. We’ll fill in their registration from their public Facebook profile, making sign-up quick and simple.
• Ask email recipients to share: Add sharing code to an e-mail blast. Just copy and paste the code where you want it to appear in the blast. When the blast goes out, all e-mails will contain links to share the corresponding web version.
• Tracking: Track how many times your pages have been shared on Facebook or Twitter, then monitor it with our handy Sharing Statistics sticky. Plug into your own bit.ly account, or just use Salsa’s default.
• Link Facebook ID: Need to link your Salsa sharing utilities to an organization’s Facebook account? No problem, just give us your ID and we’ll take care of the rest.

Contact us if you have any questions. And please share your campaign success stories in the comments, whether on Salsa or another social action platform.

The post How Salsa Labs enables positive social action appeared first on Socialbrite.

How the power of collective buying is helping local cause campaigns around the country

Guest post by Patty Huber
G-Team Manager, Groupon

By now you’ve likely heard of Groupon, which allows consumers to get local deals on the best things to do, eat, see and buy in their own cities.

But do you know about G-Team, which uses the same concept of a collective buying power to connect people to causes in their local communities? G-Team, Groupon’s main philanthropic program, launched a year ago this month in Chicago and was modeled on the original vision for Groupon as a platform for collective action and fundraising.

G-Team provides a platform for organizations and causes to garner the support of their local community and even solicit money for campaigns or project-based initiatives. Through the G-Team page, nonprofits, cause organizations and individuals can apply to have their campaign featured.

G-Team runs campaigns that focus on project-specific ideas, allowing participants to see tangible results in their community. When a campaign goes live, the featured organization is encouraged to gather as many participants as possible to reach the tipping point. If enough people buy in, the project is funded and the campaign organizer receives a check to accomplish his or her intended goal.

G-Team campaigns are currently operating in 12 Groupon markets, and each week a new campaign is selected to be featured on the daily deal site for its city. The Groupon markets with G-Team campaigns include Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In the coming months, G-Team will be expanding to about 70 more Groupon markets.

Watch the video below to learn more about what G-Team does and how it can benefit your cause:

G-Team eyes 2,000 campaigns in the coming year

The photo at top shows an example of a recent G-Team campaign for the Save-A-Pet Adoption Center. It raised enough to supply a week of food for 1,532 dogs and cats, which freed up additional funds for other rehabilitation services. Put another way, for every $700 G-Team raised, 100 dogs and cats were fed for one week. In this way, each subscriber was able to identify the tangible results of their $7 dollar donation to the Save-A-Pet Adoption Center. With the tipping point set at 100 buyers, the power of collective action proved to be an important motivation toward reaching the set goal.

Since its launch last year, G-Team has run 217 campaigns, ranging from funding a local after-school program, to building a community garden and collecting supplies for a local food bank.

G-Team has a unique model for supporting philanthropic fundraising, civic engagement and social events. We do not however, support fundraising that is intended for general operating funds. Organizations interested in participating can apply to be featured through a link on the G-Team home page. The application is a short process in which the organization identifies and provides information about its project-specific needs. G-Team coordinators then review the application and determine if the campaign is a good fit for the G-Team model. With our expansion into new markets, we hope to be able to feature more than 2,000 campaigns in the coming year.

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And download these 3 flyers on tools & platforms for social change

Last night I gave another in the series of Mobilize Your Cause mini-camps at the Hub SoMa in San Francisco. It went well, with representatives from Women’s Film Institute, CBS Interactive, Small Act and a number of startups and consultancies coming by to do a deep dive into how to use social media to move the needle for your cause or organization.

My partner and colleague Sloane Berrent wasn’t in town for the joint presentation, but Pamela Hawley, founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, came by and offered some great thoughts about the importance of stepping back and identifying your organization’s story — its core value proposition — before diving into the toolsets. Her recent trip to the White House with 50 other social entrepreneurs drew a number of questions from people eager to connect with the social enterprise community.

Handouts on social action hubs, mobile apps & more

For the event, Socialbrite produced three new or modified flyers — download them for free and repost on your site!:

• 12 Social Action Hubs — Online communities and crowdsource platforms (shortener: bit.ly/12socialhubs — PDF)

• 10 Mobile Apps for Social Good (shortener: bit.ly/10mobileapps — PDF)

• 12 Steps to Mobilize Your Cause (shortener: bit.ly/12steps-flyer — PDF)

A presentation to get the ball rolling

The presentation was intended not as a comprehensive survey of social media tools or strategies, but as a way to introduce concepts that can be plumbed more deeply in the weeks ahead. In the main, it consisted of three main parts:

• Case studies — successful cause campaigns by Equality California, Tweet for a Cure, Grassroots Mapping, charity:water, Greenpeace, Egypt’s Women & Memory Forum and Nawaa, a group of political activists in Tunisia. (What they did with Google Earth blew me away!)

• 12 steps to activate your supporters, starting with listening and ending with real-world events.

• Tools and action hubs for social change, including Google Earth, Creative Commons, Google Sidewiki, widgets, word cloud visualizations and more.

A technical glitch: Any theories?

We spent a half hour before the session began tackling a technical glitch I had never seen in 10 years of presentations: My videos were playing fine in Keynote on my MacBook Pro, but when the image was projected onto the wall, only the QuickTime still image was visible — nothing that “moved” was displayed through the projector during the entire evening. Which threw me for a loop, since my presentations are intensely media-rich. Have you ever seen that before? What do you think could have caused that?

Despite that, it was a great gathering and I hope to be back at the Hub soon! If you’d like a Mobilize Your Cause workshop held at your organization, drop us a line.

Related

• 12 steps to a successful cause campaign (Socialbrite)

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About 50 people — social activists, nonprofit executives, political campaign strategists — turned out for the first Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp on June 2 to kick off Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

Above is the first part of the presentation on Slideshare: 12 steps to a successful cause campaign (or, if you prefer, advocacy campaign or e-campaign).

While there are other steps that can take your campaign to the next level, these 12 steps are the building blocks you need to get started:

1. First, listen and observe. Engage before the Ask.
2. Set clear goals & define metrics to measure
3. Define a clear theme
4. Frame it with a personal story
5. Create a simple call to action
6. Create a conversation hub for participants
7. Give your campaign social love handles
8. Consider a mobile component
9. Identify & enlist evangelists
10. Create ongoing mini-actions & provide updates
11. Use immediacy: Headlines & deadlines
12. Measure results, reconnect, refine, refresh

The bootcamp — and the Slideshare presentation — flesh out these recommendations in more detail. And we’ve just added a “Mobilize” section of Socialbrite to pull together the most relevant resources and pointers.

We’ve already had a couple of inquiries about holding another day-long Mobilize Your Cause Bootcamp. If you’re interested, let’s discuss.

Here are about 70 Flickr photos I took of the bootcamp and the rest of the conference. While I focused on social media strategies and tools, Katrin Verclas, Nicola Wells and Rachel LaBruyere provided a look at using mobile in your campaign.

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