MycroBurst offers readers special discount to try out service

Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, foundations, NGOs, cause organizations, startups.

When I was at BlogWorld Expo in New York earlier this month, I spent quite a bit of time walking around the exhibit hall.

One of the companies I came across was MycroBurst, a marketplace that helps you crowdsource any kind of design – website, logo, stationery, T-shirt, you name it, there’s a community of designers signed up there to vie for the honor of creating your project. Similar crowdsourcing communities include crowdSPRING and 99designs (website and logo designs), uTest(software testing) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (data entry and verification).

Special offer for Socialbrite readers

The MycroBurst team gave me a discount code to give out as a special offer, which waives the standard $19 set-up fee for anyone who uses it. So, in essence, you can post a free project (you’ll still have to decide on the amount of your prize money, etc.) and probably get some great designs to help you along. If you’d like to take advantage this special offer, just plunk in the code B222 when you post your project.

if you have any trouble, please let me know. The code is valid through July 17, which gives you a few weeks to get a new project going.

How MycroBurst works

First, you select what kind of project you want crowdsourced and post the details along with how much of a “prize” you’re offering. MycroBurst suggests $149 as a good starting point, but if you offer a higher prize, you’re likely to get more entries. Once you’ve posted your project, a contest starts among the designers on the site to present their best idea (see examples in the main image above).

Throughout the project, you can review the entries, give feedback and then at the end of the contest select your favorite as the winner. Give the designer his or her prize money, and you’re done – probably for far less than you’d pay otherwise.

There is typically a $19 set-up fee for MycroBurst to run your contest, along with a 7.5% credit card processing fee and various options for you to select from in terms of promoting it. You can head over to the MycroBurst site to learn more about the details. I’ve seen other crowdsourcing design sites, and I really like the way this one works. No doubt the fact that Joe Witte, one of the people behind MycroBurst, took some time to talk to me and give me a demo made a difference.

Here is some other information about the site that may be helpful:

• There are currently an average of 104 concepts per project posted. A project typically lasts 7 days, unless for some reason you need to extend it.
• MycroBurst is so confident in its model that they offer money back guarantees if a logo project doesn’t get at least 30 concepts. Think about that – 30 concepts in one week – that’s  a pretty promising outcome.
• 80% of MycroBurst clients gave them a “9” or a “10” when asked if they would refer the firm to a friend or colleague (metric based on the “Ultimate Question” book by Fred Reichheld, and his “Net Promoter” question).

How to make your MycroBurst project successful

• Give good feedback to the community during the project, and give star ratings.
• Invite designers (not just the top designers, they get tons of invitations) to participate in your projects.
• Make your project guaranteed — that means someone will definitely win the prize — since it will result in 70% more concepts.

I’ve been thinking about doing not only a blog redesign but also a website redesign and MycroBurst might be just the thing for me. I don’t have a huge budget, and I’m smart enough to know that I shouldn’t try to design something myself. I’m great with concept, but the technical execution not so much.

Happy MycroBursting!

Tell us: Have you used a crowdsourcing service? Did it work for you?

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I‘ve been impressed every time I’ve stopped by VolunteerSpot, a tool that makes it easy for anyone to coordinate and organize volunteers.

At BlogWorld Expo, I got to chat with founder Karen Bantuveris shortly after she appeared on a panel about fueling real world action through social media.

“Just by making it easier to volunteer,” she says, “we find that 20 percent more people show up to volunteer, and what we call the flake rate — people who don’t show up — drops to almost nothing, because we give them reminders and we give them a chance to change their commitments.”

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Steps to spur offline actions

How can nonprofits and cause organizations spur supporters to take real-world actions, whether it’s a fundraising action or volunteer action? Other participants in the BlogWorld session tackling the topic were Jessica Kirkwood, VP of Social Media, HandsOn Network, Kerala Taylor of KaBOOM and Robert Wolfe of Crowdrise.

Karen offered some quick tips:

1. Ask people to make small, specific commitments. “So instead of asking in a broad way, say, ‘Can you help me Friday at 2 pm clean up the lot on the corner?'”

2. Next, move those smaller actions toward generating a larger goal, like building a playground.

3. Start with your immediate social networks that contain people — friends and family members who are already engaged — and then solicit those communities to engage their friends.

4. Use social media to publicly thank the people who are supporting you and your cause.

At the Hands On blog, Jessica has some additional ideas:

• Make a personal appeal.

• Tell a compelling story.

• Make folks feel part of something larger than themselves.

• and several other suggestions.

The Real World Action Challenge, by the four panelists, is a great game to use for social media training

VolunteerSpot is one of the nonprofits profiled on our Cause organizations page.

A production note: My Panasonic HD camcorder went absolutely haywire with the auto white balance halfway through the interview, and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it, so tried my best in Final Cut Pro post-production.

Related articles

• Volunteering Made Easy (entrepremusings.com)
• Social Connections for a Cause (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Using the Social Web to Drive Real-World Social Action (blogworld.com)
• How To Easily Coordinate Volunteers Using Volunteer Spot (makeuseof.com)

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How Twitter helps the social good from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Most nonprofits and cause organizations look at Twitter as a key ingredient of their social media strategy. But Twitter offers a number of other opportunities for collaboration to advance the social good — many of which you may not know about.

Claire Williams Diaz-Ortiz, who heads up Corporate Social Innovation & Philanthropy at Twitter (and who just got married), has long been a member of Socialbrite’s Do Gooders List, so I was jazzed to sit down with her last month at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Some highlights from our chat:

• Twitter’s main hub for social good efforts is Hope140.org. At the site, people can learn about causes to follow on Twitter and organizations can learn how to use Twitter more effectively. Current campaigns focus on literacy, Haiti relief and malaria prevention.

• Cause marketing is part of Twitter’s philanthropic strategy. When Twitter launched its Promoted Products platform earlier this year, it started with six businesses and two nonprofits (“tweets for good“). “Every month we give a month’s worth of free promoted tweets for a nonprofit,” she says.

• Twitter works closely with Room to Read, a nonprofit that partners with local communities throughout the developing world to establish libraries, create local language children’s literature and improving children’s reading skills with an emphasis on educating girls. Twitter has conducted an International Literacy Day promotion and a couple of fund-raising campaigns for them, Claire says.

• Claire, an avid runner, also is co-founder of HopeRuns — check it out — and she blogs at Claire.us.com (see her latest: What are the roots of happiness?).

• At BlogWorld, Claire spelled out some tactics on how nonprofits can excel at Twitter, namely, T.W.E.E.T. — that is, target, write, engage, explore and track.

If your nonprofit has a particularly worthy social cause, get in contact with Claire and see how Twitter might be able to get your message out to tens of millions of users.

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When you moderate a panel at BlogWorld Expo, ironically, sometimes you’re the last person to blog about it.

Such is the case with the Oct. 16 “Mobilizing your social network” panel with this all-star lineup: Andres Glusman of Meetup.com, Justin Perkins of Care2, George Weiner of DoSomething and Giselle Diaz Campagna of Free Speech TV. There were some valuable resources mentioned, so I’ll try to assemble them here into a neat package.

• JD Lasica (that’s me) offered a one-stop shop for resources on how nonprofits and cause organizations can use social tools: http://bit.ly/mobilize — a landing page that aggregates resources on social networking tutorials, handouts, top fund-raising tools and much more. This includes the short presentation I gave during the panel on steps to mobilize your supporters. Also, download this free flyer on 12 steps to mobilize your cause: bit.ly/12steps-flyer

• Andres Glusman of Meetup.com (8 million members) offered a powerful presentation that went beyond showing off the organization’s cool Meetup Everywhere feature — a way for you to mobilize your constituency. “Recognize people who are active on your behalf,” Andres urged the crowd. “Create a regular routine that can be annual, quarterly or monthly. Build a routine that people can set their watch to, to build up momentum around an organization.”

See Meetup Everywhere on Tumblr for best practices and examples.

• Justin cited the campaign Care2 did for climate change advocates 1Sky. They recruited an email list of 10,000 people, used data mining to determine which Facebook and Twitter users would be most the most active and created a funnel that let to five or six precinct captains who canvased door to door and organizing house meetings on behalf of a campaign. I may have gotten a detail or two wrong but the overall point was that organizations should take steps to move from online action to offline activity.

• Justin also pointed to this article on how to bring social network avatars to life and an essay on how slacktivism is a misnomer.

• Giselle Diaz Campagna offered to work with nonprofits interested in having their stories told through video on the freespeech.org site and DirecTV Channel 348 and Dish Network Channel 9415. Don’t step away from controversy, she advised. “We loved it when Glenn Beck did a piece on us,” she said.

• George Weiner gave a passionate presentation that showed how social media and video could be used as part of an educational campaign to curtail violence against teen girls and young women. One out of three teens will be abused online. If your nonprofit has any programs for young people, you should collaborate with DoSomething.

• Several of the audience members were with political organizations rather than nonprofits, such as two representatives of evoiceamerica, which makes it easy to email your elected reps.

• Justin also pointed to this resource of 17 nonprofit benchmark studies.

Other highlights from BlogWorld’s nonprofit track

I was darting in and out of sessions during BlogWorld — juggling interviews I was giving, interviews I was conducting and networking in the hallway — but managed to capture a few other highlights:

• Learned more about mobile fundraising service Mobilecause from its CEO, Douglas Plank.

• According to Douglas: 70% of all US households donated to a nonprofit last year, totaling $227 billion given by individuals. 7% of the US gross domestic product comes through the nonprofit sector. 8% of Americans work in the nonprofit sector.

• Mark Horvath of InvisiblePeople.tv led a great discussion-in-the-round. Snippets: He recommends YouTube for video hosting because of its nonprofit program, while others said nonprofits should use Vimeo because the site supports Creative Commons licenses and lets you actually download the damn video. (In either case, read their Terms of Use.)

• Horvath said YouTube turned over some of its front page programming to the subject of homelessness one day this year, and fully one quarter of the views came from mobile devices.

• One participant recounted the funny story of trying to live-stream the CTO of the federal government from his Washington, DC offices. “Live streaming from a government office? One of the most difficult things in the world to accomplish.”

• Quote of the conference came from Mark Horvath, talking about importance of audio in any video. “I was once told by an audio guy, ‘Without us you’re just surveillance.’ I will go with audio over video.” Excellent!

• This got rise from crowd: “I just went to live-streaming panel and they started 20 minutes late because they were having big problems live-streaming the event.”

• Jessica Kirkwood clued me in to Spredfast, an enterprise social media management system (with “semi-open APIs”) that’s worth a look, even for nonprofits. Prices start around $40 a month.

• Learned about UnitedStatesArtists.org, whose mission is to “illuminate the value of artists to society.”

• Judy Chang showed off the PayPal mobile app, which lets you take PayPal with you wherever you go.

• I did interviews with the wonderful Mera Szendro Bok of New Media Rights and Karen Bantuveris of VolunteerSpot and hope to get those up soon.

• Thanks to Chris Noble, Marijane Miller, Jim Turner and WhatGives? for their amazing work in pulling the nonprofit track together.

A message to Twitter

I’ve noticed that the shelf life of tweets has become shorter and shorter in recent months. All the dozens of valuable tweets using the #bwe10mob hashtag we created — only 11 days ago!! — have already disappeared from Twitter search (but not Google search).

That’s not only disappointing. It’s socially irresponsible.

The post Tips on how to mobilize your supporters appeared first on Socialbrite.

Can individuals and organizations mobilize their online social networks to advance the social good and create meaningful change?

In his Oct. 4 article in the New Yorker, author Malcolm Gladwell argues no. The revolution will not be tweeted, he says. “We seem to have forgotten what activism is. … The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t [deep] at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

I’ll be moderating a panel at BlogWorld Expo on Saturday in the nonprofit track that addresses just this topic. I plan to open with a 5-minute presentation, above, that looks at a few examples of how organizations and nonprofits have used social media to bring about significant change. And I lay out 5 steps to mobilize your cause. Session details:

Mobilizing Your Social Network

Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Mariners B11, South Pacific Ballroom

When: 11 am Oct. 16, 2010 (Saturday)

Panelists:

• Andres Glusman, Vice President Strategy & Community, Meetup.com
• Giselle Diaz Campagna, Development Director, Free Speech TV
• Justin Perkins, Director of Nonprofit Strategy, Care2
• George Weiner, CTO, Do Something

Moderator: JD Lasica, founder, Socialbrite

Hope to see you there. If you can’t make it, follow the #bwe10 and #bwe10mob hashtags.

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At BlogWorld Expo, tools and strategies for nonprofits

The first Causes/Activism track at the just-ended Blogworld Expo in Las Vegas drew some 1,500 participants — a promising showing by the nonprofit community. I moderated the Tools for Nonprofit Organizations panel, with panelists Judy Chang of Paypal, Justin Perkins of Care2, David Levy of SocialVibe, James Sutandyo of Causecast and consultant Scott Henderson.

Here’s my Flickr photo set of BlogWorld Expo, about 60 photos in all. I also put together this Delicious tag — delicious.com/bwe09 — to aggregate many of the the services, tools and platforms that nonprofits and social change organizations can use to raise funds to advance their missions online.

About 100 people, chiefly from nonprofits small and large, attended our panel and you can follow what they tweeted about the session at #tools4npo

The panelists collectively came up with these recommendations:

8 tips for raising funds online

1. Make it a specific project, not for the overarching nonprofit or a general fund

2. Tell a compelling story with a strong human-interest angle

3. Create a feedback loop from the recipients to the donors to form an emotional bond

4. Have a hard stop — set a date to donate by

5. Pool your efforts by collaborating with reputable like-minded partners (including trading space in partners’ email newsletters)

6. Don’t pussyfoot around — have a clear and specific “ask” or call to action

7. Consider using contests or drawings to draw in more people

8. Your destination website doesn’t matter as much as it once did, so spread your efforts across several social networks

Successful social media efforts

Panelists pointed to several initiatives that nonprofits could learn from:

• charity: water’s September birthday campaign. “They make it about you,” said Henderson.

• LiveStrong, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, has a strong community outreach program.

• America’s Giving Challenge, allowing users to vote for daily and overall causes they want to support.

• The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre of Rainforest program — for every 10 gifts you send, you’ll save 1 square foot of Rainforest.

• Invisible Children’s Visible Children Scholarship Program.

Kudos to eBay for underwriting the Causes/Activism track, and to Cause Media Group for organizing the sessions — not an easy undertaking.

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I‘m flying to Las Vegas early Thursday to moderate a panel on social media tools for nonprofits at Blogworld Expo. I know a lot of the keynoters: Laura Fitton, Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Brian Solis, Kara Swisher, Scott Monty, Jay Rosen, Leo Laporte, Guy Kawasaki — the list goes on.

This is the first year the Expo has added a Cause/Activism track geared toward nonprofits, and it’s a welcome addition. The track, organized by Casemedia Group and funded by eBay, aims to provide a forum for nonprofits and bloggers to learn more about how to use social media to spread awareness and raise funds.

eBay and PayPal are sponsoring a Charity Smackdown Arcade at the show, allowing 10 charities to attend the show for free and be featured in the Arcade. The top 10 voter getters were Alex’s Lemonade (2,817 votes), Best Friends Animal Society (2,652), Surfrider Foundation (2,189), Mothers Fighting For Others (2,063), Spirit Jump (1,658), LA’s Best (1,475), 3for5 Foundation (1,466), Stepwise (1,303 votes), Heifer International Portland (1,152) and Canine Companions for Independence (1,143).

Blogworld still hasn’t updated its (badly designed) schedule — even though the Expo starts tomorrow — so here are the latest details on the nonprofit track:

All cause sessions are on Thursday, Oct. 15, in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s eBay PayPal Pavilion, Room 219

Tools for Nonprofit Organizations

When: 11am to 12:15pm (time change)

Topic: What social tools are out there to help organizations raise awareness about social causes? How can we use those tools to generate support and raise money? What strategies should nonprofits use to recruit members, evangelize causes and advance their missions?

Panelists:

Judy Chang, Paypal
Justin Perkins, Care2
David Levy, SocialVibe
James Sutandyo, Causecast
Scott Henderson, Media Sauce
JD Lasica, Socialbrite.org, moderator

Kick Cancer’s Ass

When: 10-11am

Topic: We all want caner gone. The panelists will talk about how they’ve built proactive communities that are passionate about kicking cancer’s ass.

Panelists:

Drew Olanoff, Blame Drew’s Cancer
Natalie Lent, Stand Up 2 Cancer/ ID PR
Meaghan Edelstein, Spirit Jump
Jay Scott, Alex’s Lemonade Stand
Christine Lu, moderator

Online locally, acting globally

When: 1:30-2:45pm

Topic: There are no small towns online. One click literally connects you with a worldwide audience you can reach and inspire. The panelists will talk about how they’ve shared their passion with others and made a global impact using basic social media tools

Panelists:

Amanda Rose, Twestival
Cameron Sinclair, Architecture for Humanity.
Andy Sternberg, Live Earth
Robert Chatwani, EBay, Director of Global Citizenship
Jess McCarter, Samasource
Shira Lazar, moderator

Making America Less Invisible: Homelessness in America

4-5 pm, A special session with Mark HorvathThursday

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