App puts social actions in the palm of your hand

Guest post by Glenn Vander Laan
Co-founder, Crowdshout

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, activists, general public.

The idea for Crowdshout hit my business partners and me back in November 2011, a few months following the Arab Spring and during the Occupy Wall Street protests. We realized that despite all of the tools and technology out there to support advocacy, something was missing. The advent of social media and the smartphone was helping to change the world right in front of us, but it was clear to us that all of the puzzle pieces were yet to fall into place to fully enable and empower groups of people.

Social media is providing real-time visibility to the social, political and consumer issues that affect us as individuals and as a society. The rapid dissemination of information has changed the game for governments and corporations in both positive and negative ways.

While social media has been embraced as a large part of an overall communication strategy, it can also be used as a powerful weapon by people in reaction to unpopular plans and policies. Institutions must now consider how to react to public opinion — from a Change.org petition, Facebook campaign or a viral video on YouTube.  In addition to this, the portability and capability provided by smartphones to access social media have allowed groups of individuals to communicate and organize very quickly and effectively in support of causes.

What was missing?

As we looked around at the advocacy landscape, it was clear that while a few high-profile causes have had a tremendous amount of visibility and success, the majority of worthy, important causes do not generate enough attention and action to reach their goals. Perhaps what’s even more important to consider is that the attention and support they do generate does not lead to any specific actions that could make a difference. This has been the main complaint that many have raised regarding what’s referred to as “slactivism” or “clicktivism” — that the actions are too insignificant or detached to have any lasting value.

While Change.org, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and blogs are viable platforms to disseminate information and raise awareness, they do little to assist in shaping a strategy and directing behavior to effect change over time.

Thus, the need for a new generation of digital advocacy tools that contain built-in action and that can be used to help build and drive an ongoing campaign.

Social action at your fingertips

Crowdshout redefines social activism for the mobile age. We built Crowdshout as a mobile application to put social action in people’s hands so you can stay involved and connected to the causes you care about. By leveraging the power of the smartphone, we use location and calendar-based information to drive coordinated actions designed to make a difference.

On the Crowdshout platform each cause is configured with a set of action tools to help promote the cause.  Action tools include sending email messages, tweeting on Twitter, posting to your Facebook wall, making phone calls, and reading the latest news items about the cause. We also have plans to incorporate more than a dozen unique action tools into the platform to drive targeted group behavior in support of causes.

Our goal was to make it very simple for cause participants to take a series of actions. We leverage a concept we call “micro actions,” a number of small tasks taken by individuals that get magnified through group participation. When you join a cause, the tools for that cause are configured into the notification system of your phone to remind you to perform the actions at a specified time. The tools are predefined email templates, filled out phone scripts completed, suggested Tweets and Facebook posts, and individuals are asked to take action at specific times over the course of the cause campaign. The timing aspect is important because one of the unique capabilities of the Crowdshout platform is coordinating actions by many people at the same time for maximum impact.

Think about creating a “tweet storm” on Twitter, or initiating a phone campaign blitz to light up the telephone switchboards of U.S. senators or representatives.

Crowdshout is offered in two ways. First, as an open platform we invite individuals to join and create causes and action plans, and invite your friends or other Crowdshout users to help you in taking actions to make a difference. If you are an organization or a group and would prefer a “branded” experience, Crowdshout is also offered as a service. The Crowdshout app can be rebranded to fit the look and feel of your organization while leveraging all of the Crowdshout tools and infrastructure to provide a specific branded experience for your supporters. You can check us out at crowdshout.com, download the Android app on Google Play or look us up during SXSW Interactive starting Friday.

What do you think? Would you use Crowdshout?

Related

• 10 top tools for cause & advocacy campaigns (Socialbrite)

• Resources for social advocates (Socialbrite)

• Social Advocacy Toolkit (Socialbrite)

• E-campaign resources (Socialbrite)

• Social fundraising tools for nonprofits & causes (Socialbrite)

• Advocate Interactive: Blending nonprofit advocacy with for-profit tactics (Socialbrite)

• Growing nonprofits and social movements with NationBuilder (Socialbrite)

• Empowered.org: Out to grow grassroots movements (Socialbrite)

• Causes reinvents itself as a campaign center (Socialbrite)

The post Crowdshout: Social advocacy made simple appeared first on Socialbrite.

Social Actions moves the open source ball forward for the cause community

Guest post by Amy Sample Ward
amysampleward.org

I’ve followed and supported the work of Peter Deitz and Social Actions ever since hearing about his passion and ideas a few years ago. There’s a lot happening with Social Actions right now, but one bit of news is really exciting and needs to be highlighted: some incredibly important technical enhancements have recently been made to the Social Actions API. (Here’s what an API is.) Earlier this week, I got ahold of Peter to get the full scoop! Here’s our exchange:

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60-plus different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, microphilanthropy had just a handful of pioneering platforms.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter lightbulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about APIs. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the purpose of Social Actions’ API?

There’s a groundswell of interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the Web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities, which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was the biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised, to the say least. Defeated, in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community. Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discrete bits of knowledge or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do APIs, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done?

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository – news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

A lot is also owed to Doug Puchalski, a programmer with Definition who helped lead the development of ViewChange.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to describe. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic Web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

Cross-posted from Amy Sample Ward’s blog.

Related

• Social actions toolset (Socialbrite)

• Social Actions: Toward a philanthropic Web (Socialbrite)

• How open standards can benefit nonprofit tech (Socialbrite)

• A new open database about social entrepreneurs (Socialbrite)

• All for Good: A Craigslist for service (Socialbrite)

• Making social causes actionable (JD Lasica’s 2008 interview with Peter — Archive.org)

The post Want to take action on a cause? The road ahead just got easier appeared first on Socialbrite.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I attended a dinner on the “Future of Philanthropy,” which was a really great talk about the role of philanthropy across nonprofits, family foundations, corporate partnerships and how individuals can get involved.

The dinner sessions at Davos I heard were a must. They’re expensive add-ons to the experience, but provide you an opportunity to sit at tables with a facilitator and go through topics related to the issue at hand.

Nancy Lublin is the CEO and “Chief Old Person” of Do Something, a nonprofit organization that gets young people excited and involved with voluntarism and getting involved in cause. Nancy is one of the Young Global Leaders, a subgroup of the World Economic Forum. Some 200-300 people each year are chosen from around the world who are making a difference and contributing to their communities.

Nancy identified three trends important to teens right now:

1. Mobile – the ability to give online
2. Slacktivisim – the ability to click a button and have something delivered to a person in need. Examples include Free Rice.
3. Crowd-sourced giving like the Chase Community Program through Facebook that recently ended and the Pepsi Refresh Project (which by the way started this past weekend — if you have any idea on how to change the world, you really should check out this program and see what Pepsi is doing instead of placing a Super Bowl ad on TV this year).

If you’re interested in getting more involved in your community, consider attending one of DoSomething’s Bootcamps coming to a city near you this spring.

This post originally appeared on the MySpace Journal.

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It was fascinating to watch the disparate elements that came together through a single powerful idea: President Obama’s call for Americans to volunteer — for us to give back to our communities — through “a Craigslist for service” and similar efforts. The result is All for Good, a comprehensive Web presence intended to help people across the country find volunteer opportunities.

Here at Socialbrite we love silo-busting initiatives that harness the collective power of seemingly odd bedfellows — social entrepreneurs, nonprofits, political reformers, open source developers and citizen media types — to achieve a social goal.

Among those on the call were Jonathan Greenblatt, a member of the Obama transition team (note: the White House has no official role in the All for Good project); John Lyman, an associate at Google.org (who spoke at NetSquared last year about how social benefit organizations are using Google Apps to collaborate); Peter Deitz of SocialActions, who has been working with his team for more than a year to network nonprofits’ social actions together under a single interface; and representatives from cause organizations big and small (mostly small): FirstGiving, DonorsChoose, Better the World, the Extraordinaries, Network for Social Responsibility, Points of Light Foundation, Causecast, Care2, NGOPost and many others. Craigslist Foundation has been involved in this as well but I didn’t see them in the chat room.

At its simplest level, All for Good is an open source database of causes and opportunities that make a difference in people’s lives. It’s a way to gather up thousands of volunteer actions across the social-good ecosystem and put them in one place so that people can volunteer at the community level.

“If we can give more Americans the opportunity to serve in meaningful ways, then it’ll be worth it,” Greenblatt said.

A tool, not another website

As I understand this, All for Good represents the overarching collaborative project, which organizations can plug into to bring greater visibility to community volunteerism. (I haven’t seen any fact sheets so forgive me if my impressions are slightly off base.) One large spoke in that wheel is the Social Actions platform that Peter Deitz and his team have been working on for more than a year, bridging wide-ranging cause efforts so that volunteers in a city like Atlanta or Des Moines can see local opportunities for service. Participating organizations can showcase social actions on their sites, through a widget or on mobile devices. (The organizers weren’t out to create another destination web site but rather a tool that other sites can use.)

The All for Good site says this:

Are you looking for ways to give back to your community? All for Good makes it simple to find and share volunteer activities with friends and family.

Inspired by the call of President Obama to engage more Americans in service, a group of individuals from the technology, marketing and public sectors came together to build an open source application currently managed by Google that allows you to find and share volunteer activities. All for Good lets you browse activities and find events based on your location or interests. The site is in the process of being transferred to a new non-profit organization, Our Good Works, that was formed by some of the people who initiated the project and who support the product’s growth.

Socialbrite is looking forward to working with other supporting organizations to advance this worthy initiative. We hope you’ll support All for Good as well, perhaps by request their source code or by contacting them about developing apps.

The site is already operational, so check it out. Christine Egger will soon post a transcript of the call.

Update:

My takeaway: All for Good strikes me as potentially as significant an undertaking as the Peace Corps was in the 1960s. The digital generation will be peering at their broadband-connected mobile devices to decide which volunteer opportunities to participate in. As a society, we’re now much more likely to zip in and out of projects rather than focus on just one charitable cause for months on end.

I would do one thing differently than what I see on the site today, however: Emphasize connections between people (volunteers) rather than focus exclusvely on the volunteer projects. Bring All for Good into the age of Web 2.0 social networking.

Christine sends along the transcript of the call. (Thanks, Christine!)

And I just came across a brief backgrounder that Social Actions circulated in advance of the call, to provide additional context:

The All for Good platform, formerly known as the Footprint Initiative, comes out of discussions between White House staff, President Obama’s transition team, Google staff, and Craigslist Foundation staff.

All for Good is an open source aggregation of service opportunities and will serve as the back end of several high profile volunteering websites, including Serve.gov. From our discussions with the creators of All for Good, we understand that they intend to expand into other forms of social action, including donations.

Related

• The Chronicle of Philanthropy has this coverage: An Obama-Inspired Volunteer-Recruitment Web Site Will Soon Debut (MSNBC republished it here).

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Change.org: Helping you take action online from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One of the most impressive and influential sites in the causes space, Change.org, has really come into its own in the past six to eight months. The social enterprise is helping raise awareness about important social causes and empowering people to take action, chiefly through the efforts of leading nonprofits.

Here’s an interview I conduced with Ben Rattray, founder and CEO of Change.org, after a meetup at TechSoup’s offices in San Francisco. Ben describes the organization this way: “We’re an online community and media network for social issues, focused on engaging and informing people about the most important issues of our time — global warming, homelessness, fair trade — and compelling them to take action.”

Actions might range from joining an organization and making a personal pledge to signing an online petition or calling a congressperson’s office about an issue. “This is one of the things we’re most interested in innovating on and partnering with other organizations on — finding the most powerful actions possible for people to advance issues they care about.”

Thousands of nonprofit organizations have signed up and “claimed their profiles” on Change.org, allowing them to add additional information and interact directly with supporters and donors.

The video is a little dark because we were placed in a room not set up for video interviews. But the organization’s story is compelling. The interview is 5 1/2 minutes long.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Download video in high-quality H.264 from Archive.org

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How KidsAreHeroes Uses Twitter from John Haydon on Vimeo.

I had the incredible opportunity to speak with Gabe O’Neill of Kids Are Heroes a couple of weeks ago and was completely blown away by two things:

1. His unwavering sense of mission.
2. He uses only Twitter for social media actions.

Kids Are Heroes recently won the competition for Richard Branson’s first ever PitchTV show! In this video, I talk about my meeting with Gabe and the four success factors that contributed to his success:

1. Solid sense of mission
2. Remarkable content
3. Be active with social media
4. A reason to fight

Follow Gabe on Twitter and watch Kids Are Heroes on YouTube.

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