New giving platform helps donors direct their dollars to high-impact nonprofits

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

Guest post by Tamara Schweitzer
Social Impact Exchange

The giving season is upon us and it’s the time of year when many around the country are thinking about the greater social good and gearing up to make their charitable donations. With crowdfunding platforms and the opportunity to donate online through social media outlets, the act of giving to charities and discovering new causes has never been easier. But it’s not always easy to determine where those dollars can do the most good, or to truly know if those donations are having a real impact.

The Social Impact Exchange, a national membership association dedicated to building a capital marketplace to help scale high-impact social solutions, hopes to change that with the launch of the Social Impact 100 (S&I 100). The S&I 100 is the first-ever broad index of U.S. nonprofits working in the issue areas of education, youth, poverty and health that have evidence of results and are growing to serve more people in need.

One of the main goals in creating the index is to help nonprofits on the platform find the funds they need to continue growing, while also serving as a site that empowers donors to increase the impact of their charitable giving. Similar to the way the S&P 500 Index provides individual investors with the information they need to invest with confidence, the S&I 100 is an online resource that allows donors to access vital information about an organization’s current and future potential to make a difference.

How nonprofits make it into the index

Unlike other charity ratings websites and online giving platforms, the organizations included on the S&I 100 Index have been rigorously screened for evidence of impact through third-party verified studies and are only included on the index if the NPO has the ability to serve more people in need. In addition to the 100 organizations listed, the platform features nearly 16,000 local affiliates that are implementing their solutions.

All of the organizations that are part of the S&I 100 went through an application vetting process that the Exchange designed in collaboration with evaluation firms, ratings firms and other social sector leaders and experts. Along with access to individual evaluation studies, the S&I 100 also allows donors to view each organization’s plans for future growth, current and prior year budget and actuals, current locations, and major funders that are supporting them. When donors visit the site, they can search for organizations by issue area and by state, and they also have the option to give directly to the organization via its “donate now” button that links to the organization’s donation page.

Over time, we will expand the S&I 100 as we identify additional nonprofits that meet the criteria, and we will continue to collaborate with experts across the field to accommodate additional scaling initiatives and to help make the Index more accessible to donors. Ultimately, our hope is that by making it easier for donors to identify and give to high-impact organizations that are growing, we can begin to create the conditions for philanthropic giving to achieve major positive change. In building a marketplace that efficiently delivers capital to the most effective nonprofits, organizations can focus on doing the work they do best, and continue to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the country.

The post Social Impact 100: Who’s really effecting change? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Allyson Kapin
Partner, Rad Campaign

The tools for taking action and effecting social change are getting more robust all the time. Here are five of my current favorites:

Frogloop

1I think Care2’s Frogloop is one of the most trusted sources among nonprofit campaigners for having the latest resources and best practices to engage activists and donors using multiple channels including email, texting and social media. Full disclosure: I’m the Blogger-In-Chief but I don’t think that clouds my judgment. :~)

OpenStreetMap

2OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the nation and the world created by regular people, Wikipedia-style. It’s a fantastic tool that nonprofits should be using more. It contains a lot more open data than Google Maps.

Threadsy

3If you’re the type of nonprofit campaigner who thrives off of multitasking, Threadsy could be a life saver. In a nutshell, it’s a dashboard that allows you to manage email, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging – all in one place! It was in beta but now it has just been released to the public.

Idealware

4Idealware provides some of the best research and data to help nonprofits make smart software decisions – anything from choosing open source content management systems and the differences between them to low-cost data visualization tools.

The Petition Site

5Care2’s The Petition Site enables anyone — not just nonprofits — to start a petition around social action issues, from stopping the Sable Island seal slaughter to protecting against new drilling.

In this series

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools

• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change

• 12 open source tools you should be using

• 6 productivity tools for social change

• A developer’s 5 favorite social tools

• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist

• Top cause organizations

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Our colleague Beth Kanter, author of Beth’s Blog, turns 53 years young today. The past year has been a momentous one for Beth, who pulled up roots and moved with her family from Boston to the Bay Area, rented a house, co-authored a book, became a visiting scholar at the Packard Foundation — I don’t know, probably won a Nobel Prize when I wasn’t looking.

Beth is Exhibit A for those who believe that individuals can make a real difference. As perhaps the best-known name in nonprofit technology, Beth has been pioneering the use of social media for social good long before many people even knew what social media was.

Today, Stacey Monk, Amy Sample Ward, Christine Egger and several others have organized an online surprise birthday party for Beth — a fun and spot-on idea. Writes Amy:

In her birthday wish post, Beth announces that she’s trying to send 53 Cambodian children to school by raising $530.  Last week, Stacy Monk and I were chatting and thought that our community could help smash that goal by raising much more funds as well as awareness for the work the Sharing Foundation does in Cambodia.

I’ve already contributed to the cause (as I have the past two years). Not only has the effort blown past $530, at this hour it’s up to $2,019, which means 201 Cambodian children will benefit. (Beth’s two children, Harry and Sara, were adopted from Cambodia and are now happily ensconced in Silicon Valley.)

Please contribute at Beth’s Birthday Wish Page on Causes. (If you’d like to join the birthday brigade, sign up on this Google doc.)

Or, just stay informed by reading her blog and her dispatches here. Beth was one of the main inspirations for Socialbrite.org — I always pick up a trick or two by following her writings or seeing her in person — and she continues to amaze with her frenetic pace and deeply felt zeal.

The world’s a much better place as a result.

The post How individuals make a real difference appeared first on Socialbrite.

Welcome to all the visitors from Mashable! We were thrilled to be featured in Melissa Rowley‘s article, 4 Social Good Trends of 2009.

For first-timers, we thought now would be a good time to highlight some of our favorite posts on Socialbrite since our launch earlier this year:

Some of our favorite causes

• Tweet for a cure to end SMA

• Global Voices: Lifting up the powerless & voiceless

• An inventive cause campaign to fight malaria

• Tim Ferriss’ method of supporting causes

• Boxee and the promise of open media

• All for Good: A Craigslist for service

• California’s Secretary of State: Come and collaborate!

• How the National Wildlife Federation uses social media

• Socialbrite’s night at NetTuesday

• UniversalGiving: Tailoring an impact just for you

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing

• YouthNoise: Helping young people network a cause

• Kiva: micro-loans to entrepreneurs abroad

• Giving Challenge: Tap your networks to support a cause

Some favorite tools and tactics

• How to make your website more accessible and 7 tips for communicating with people with disabilities

• 20 tips for mobile advocacy

• A user’s guide to mobile activism

• How mobile is empowering consumers

• SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site — Search Engine Optimization isn’t black magic, so get your site to shape up

• 8 tips for raising funds online

• The Extraordinaries: Building the ‘micro-volunteering’ movement

• Twitter as a tool for activism

• How to build a Facebook community — 14 levers you need to be pulling

• How to add a Facebook Page Fanbox to your site

• How to use Seesmic Desktop

• Carbon footprints, nation by nation

• Foundation Center: a deep resource for philanthropy

• Guide to shooting photos in public

• How to capture great photos on the road

• Fair use in the digital age

• Seven blogging tools reviewed

• Socialbrite releases Creative Commons plug-in

Thanks to everyone for your support this year! (Don’t forget to follow @Socialbrite on Twitter!) We’re now working with a number of nonprofits and educational outfits — TechSoup Global and Scholastic, to name two — and looking forward to helping others with their social media needs in the months ahead.

The post Mashable & our favorite posts of the year appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why even small, resource-constrained nonprofits should be using social media

Guest post by Jordan Viator
Nonprofit Live TV

What are some of the ways in which social media can be used to advance the social good? Nonprofit Live TV put the question to Matt Mahan, Nonprofit and Business Development Director of Causes and Carie Lewis, Director of Emerging Media of the Humane Society of the United States.

The 7-minute interview, conducted at the 2009 Convio Summit conference for nonprofits in Austin, Texas, last month, addresses how smaller, resource-constrained nonprofits can be using social media.

Mahan and Lewis give examples of how outreach on Twitter or Facebook can engage support for a cause or organization. When someone’s birthday rolls around, Mahan says, instead of giving them a Starbucks gift certificate or the like, It’s much more meaningful to receive a gift in the name of someone who’s truly deserving. The Causes site has also recently upgraded its partner center to enable nonprofits to interact more actively with their supporters on Facebook.

See other interviews from the summit’s showroom floor at the Nonprofit Live TV site.

The post Social media for social good appeared first on Socialbrite.

Causes, of course, is the application that lets individuals, groups and organizations support and raise funds for a particular cause.

Now, I blogged earlier this year about research that indicates very strongly we mirror our offline social barriers and segmentation in our online social networking platforms.  (Visit danah boyd’s website for more information and research on this topic.) Different communities have aligned and adopted different social networks, social media tools, communications platforms, etc. The tools we use often reflect the communities we are in, whether those communities are geographic, ethnic, or otherwise.

I consistently advocate that organizations go where their community is — because that community is already connected and people are already talking about you, your services or your sector.  Why? Because individuals network together online and the biggest influencers are our closest friends in our network.  When a friend starts a campaign, supports or fund-raises for an organization or cause publicly on a social networking platform, they broadcast that action and encourage their friends to do the same.

Causes leaving MySpace means that no users there (though, there certainly seem to be A LOT of users) will be able to continue promoting the causes, organizations or sectors that they care about via a process that’s already been established, adopted and networked.  I’ve talked before about how I believe millennials are using alignment and promotion of social impact areas (whether it’s a sector, like human rights, or a nonprofit, like Planned Parenthood, etc.) as a form of self-expression and identification. Applications like Causes also enable individuals to give voices to your work that you don’t have to control or manage — campaigns that benefit you because your supporters believe and appreciate the work you are doing.  (Check out a great post from Ivan Boothe of Rootwork on this topic.)

In a big way, removing the Causes application from MySpace will mean many people don’t have the “space” to bare their badges of support, to leverage a networked dashboard of lapel pins that align them and define them.

What it means to communities

Causes’ About statement says, “The goal of all this is what we call ‘equal opportunity activism.’ We’re trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.”

The debate around social media and the Internet in general as a leveling force is still heated from all sides.  Yes, you can claim that anyone has the power to blog, but that’s really only the people who have access to the tools and the time and the empowerment. The access debate aside, the removal of Causes from MySpace — where there are active communities of supporters — means “equal opportunity activism” is defined by only certain communities (as we know that social networking platforms have very different demographic user groups).

It also skews the idea that organizations can focus energy where their communities already are. Although, with MySpace, organizations have different opportunities for creating profiles and interacting with supporters than on Facebook.

Looking ahead

Causes has yet to post anything about this on its blog and the MySpace option is still prominently displayed next to Facebook at the top of the site. Obviously, there are many questions users, administrators and communities would like answered. What will happen to the content, the communications, the information?  Will organizations or administrators still be able to connect with or communicate with their list of supporters? And so on.

But there are many other, larger, questions this raises:

• Is this an indication that communities will have to take the lead of technologies (and the people behind them)?
• How can communities communicate and demand technologies take the lead from them?
• How are organizations building community online in a way that safe guards them from third parties (maintaining the connections to supporters on MySpace that were gained via Causes by inviting users to register directly with the organization as well, etc.)?
• What will be the requirement in an open data or open web for applications serving communities?
• How do we, as public thinkers about this stuff, help guide organizations in navigating these questions and others?

What do you think?

I can’t wait to hear what you think! Are you using Causes on MySpace, are you using it on Facebook? Do you have ideas or feelings about the questions above? What other questions do you want answered?

Share your thoughts in a blog post of your own, in the comments below, or on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog.

It definitely needs to be noted that Ivan Boothe and Joe Solomon were integral collaborators on this breaking news, conversation starter, idea sparking post. Thank you both!

To see the original entry, go to Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.

The post MySpace abandons Causes — what does it mean? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Like millions of Americans, I’ve been looking for ways in which to get more involved in worthy community efforts. The traditional ways in which you can volunteer and gave back at the community — say, working in a soup kitchen or signing up for AmeriCorps — just expanded exponentially with the recent rollout of the United We Serve initiaitive at Serve.gov. Above is a video of some recent United We Serve activities, including a visit by players from the WNBA’s Detroit Shock to the White House.

Monday I was one of 75 people to join a United We Serve conference call featuring Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement (who reports to Valerie Jarrett, Senior Adviser to the President, and Christina M. Tchen, Director of the Office of Public Liaison); Yosi Sergant (@a35mmlife on Twitter), Director of Office of Communications, National Endowment for the Arts; Michael Skolnik (@michaelskolnik on Twitter), Political Director to Russell Simmons and Editor for the politics section of GlobalGrind; Nellie Abernathy, director of the outreach program for United We Serve; and Thomas Bates from Rock the Vote, among others.

The call’s goal was to enlist grassroots organizers to spread the word about United We Serve and highlight the role that the arts community plays in documentnig stories of how arts service can be fun, engaging and youthful.

United We Serve: What it is

As Yosi Sergant put it on the call: “What the hell is national service, and how do i get kids with fancy clothes and haircuts to pay attention to it?”

The first thing to know about United We Serve is that it’s an initiative in which people in nonprofits, community organizations and government agencies — at the local, state and federal level — join together to enable and facilitate greater community service. People can get involved in two ways: By posting a service project to the Serve.gov site and engaging others who may be interested in the same issue, or by signing up for a project. Your commitment level is up you, and it’s easier than ever to find a project that matches your interests through the easy-to-use tools on Serve.gov.

We’ve already written about All for Good (a “Craigslist for service”), which lets you easily volunteer for community efforts. (See the widget in the sidebar at the right — enter your zip code to find matching volunteer opportunities in your area.)

United We Serve initially runs from June 22 through September 11, culminating in a National Day of Service and Remembrance on 9/11, but it will grow into a sustained, collaborative and focused effort to promote service as a way of life for all Americans.

Wicks said the idea is to persuade people that “I can be an agent of change in my community,” and to tap into existing civic engagement efforts by cities, nonprofits, community groups and federal agencies to “create sustained relationships we can all build on.”

Key areas of focus

The United We Serve team helped bring some focus to the countless volunteer opportunities by keying in on four main areas:

• health care (in fact, this is health week)
• energy and the environment (eg, weatherizing homes or League of Conservation Voters or the Sierra Club)
• education (educators are concerned with “summer reading loss,” — the dramatically decreased reading ability of students when they return to school in a few weeks)
• community renewal

Some impressions

• Mid-August is probably the toughest time of the year to ramp up an effort like this, but the administration should be cut some slack given the time it takes to get a national effort underway. The goal, as Wicks said, is to create “an onramp to long-term service.”

• United We Serve should be doing more with its social media efforts — by now they should have tens of thousands of followers on both Twitter and Facebook.

• ServeDotGov has 353 followers and is following 19 on Twitter. For an effort such as this, I recommend that ServeDotGov follow everyone back. There are now easy-to-use tools to track the tweets of a subset of Twitter users.

• The United We Serve group on Facebook (only 32 members); United We Serve Causecast group on Facebook (95 members)

• United We Serve shouldn’t be shy about piggybacking on and spotlighting existing hashtags for social causes. In fact, a directory of social cause hashtags would be a great idea. Who wants to create it?

• Great idea: MyImpact. “Tell the stories of the projects that you find on @ServeDotGov on the United We Serve online community.”

• More goodness: The United We Serve toolkit for education, health, community renewal, energy & environment, safety & security and do-it-yourself toolkits.

• Other urls and Twitter members worth following: United We Serve Military Retreats for free retreats for U.S. military personnel and their families. United We Serve fact sheet (PDF). @nationalservice is the Twitter presence of the Corporation for National and Community Service. ReadingIsFundamental (RIF website and @RIFWEB on Twitter) and its Readforchange program (#readwithkids hashtag) highlighting RIF’s United We Serve White initiative. Right To Play is the leading international humanitarian and development organization using sport and play as tools to effect behavior and social change. And don’t be shy about using the #unitedweserve hashtag.

Finally, here is Michelle Obama introducing the United We Serve initiative a few weeks ago: “With the knowledge that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things when given the proper tools, this initiative aims to expand the impact of exisitng organizations and encourage people like you and me to develop our own do-it-yourself service projects.”

The post United We Serve: Become an agent of change appeared first on Socialbrite.

Aden Van Noppen of Brown University discusses a youth initiative and campus engagement strategy, supported by the Acumen Fund, to involve college students in social causes. The initiative is focused on how finance and business can be used as a tool for social impact in fighting poverty and advancing other social causes — and making students aware of it.

We chatted for a few minutes at the first Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco in October 2008. The next SoCap is scheduled for Sept. 1-3 in San Francisco. Information here.

Watch video in Flash on Viddler (embedded above)
Watch video on Ourmedia

Cross-posted to Socialmedia.biz.

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