Amy Sample Ward NetSquared
	Beth Kanter Beth's Blog
	David J Neff Lights.Camera.Help.
	Holly Ross NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network
	Kari Saratovsky The Case Foundation

Short stories about crowd sourcing

Beth
Beth started a blog called spider school. She was writing about how nonprofits can use the web. She would get emails from people she didn’t know pointing out grammar errors and typos. She decided to start a feature called spider school police and give a digital badge to anyone who found typos or errors.

Amy
NetSquared facilitates offline events all around the world. Amy organizes a group in her city, and she tries to ask people to speak, but people don’t self-select to speak. One month we didn’t have any speakers, so we asked people for recommendations. They came through with programming for a whole year.

Holly
It’s been imperative for NTEN to utilize the community to keep up with technology trends.

Kari
Case Foundation opened up to the public and encouraged them to get involved in the grant solicitation. People provided feedback on applications, and they finally did a crowdsourced vote of who should get grants.

David
David has recruited volunteers. He has also built a website to allow people to tell their cancer stories including stories, video, and artwork.

About the panel
All the content for this session has been crowdsourced, including the powerpoint presentation. They launched a social media for social good case studies. It had a submission form which they opened in January. They had a ranking system so that people could rate the case studies. We selected case studies based on that ranking and the focus of the panel. They didn’t have funding for the panel, and it actually took very little effort to demonstrate to nonprofits how easy it is.

The Hybrid Model
The hybrid model has been a popular method of crowdsourcing. There is some good and some bad that comes in when you start crowdsourcing. The hybrid model has some responsibility with “experts” and some responsibility with the crowd.

Freerange Studios
Freerange Studios did a project called utopia where they did $30K worth of free work. Anyone could enter, the audience narrowed it down to the top twenty, and then they made the final decision for which project they wanted to work on.

Seattle Free School
The Seattle Free School uses social media as the entire operation mechanism. The idea is that it’s free to teach and learn within the community. It’s how they operate and how they grow. They use social media to distribute the roles of the members, so there’s no mail or fliers. It was even created through social media.

Invisible People
Invisible people is very good at story telling, helping people understand that homeless people aren’t different or scary. They crowdsourced who they should interview. The most amazing thing about the project is that he is unafraid to look away from an issue that almost everyone else looks away from.

Open Green Map
Open Green Map helps communities map themselves. Community members can enter any locations they consider to be green, like bike racks, eco-friendly restaurants, etc. The whole project is open source, so you can take the code and use it for any mapping project. They are actually creating change in their community.

Trends in submitted projects
The organizations who participated were not household names. Most of them mentioned that they had no marketing budget, and they relied on the power of social media and their communities.

Open Street Map
Open Street Map allowed people to add streets to a map. It is the main application being used by relief organizations to share which roads are accessible and blocked.

The Uptake
The Uptake covers Minnesota politics, and they livestream and let people comment in real time. Using the time stamp on the comments, the editors could easily find the video highlights and put them together.

When does crowdsourcing suck?
Anytime the legal department is involved. Any time you are writing by-laws or mission statements – things that need to be carefully worded and come from within the organization.

How can we use crowdsourcing to add value to the target population?
Crowdsourcing is one of the values that we have as social change organizations. We have to live by our values, and not just voting online, but actual online collaboration. The community will tell you what sort of research they want to accomplish together.

How do you prevent crowdsourcing from being a resource suck?
Crowdsourcing within a community is already part of the way a community operates. If you’re crowdsourcing to the crowd, you’re probably doing something simple like an online vote.

Netflix prize
Netflix has offered a prize to individuals who can improve their recommendation algorithms.

How do you convince your senior management that some of the best ideas come from outside your organization?
There are huge benefits to build community. You are bringing great people into the process. If your management doesn’t get it, then quit and bring your resources to an organization that gets it.

How do the panelists define crowdsourcing?

Amy
I’m not the best at everything, and I have to trust people outside my brain and empower them. An expert is someone who has a really good network.

Holly
Some problems should be solved by experts, but sometimes experts lack diversity that only large crowds can provide.

Kari
It’s a recognition that you can tap a wider audience than might exist in your own organization.

Jeff
There are smart people outside your organization. You should tap that potential.

How do you get people to work for free?
It provides value to them. They get to work with a community, which makes everyone more effective and efficient. But you shouldn’t ask for people to provide professional services for free. That’s disrespectful.

Generation Y and the Future of Nonprofit Communications

Recruiting and Retaining Generation Y: Cheap But Not Easy

Lest you doubt the need to communicate with generation y, and bring them into leadership positions in your organization, I’ve collected some of our brightest minds and saddled them with some of the most difficult questions of our time. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting their answers. I’d like this to be an exercise for those of you who are not digital natives. Could anyone on your leadership team answer these questions? What will happen if your organization doesn’t engage on these issues?

If you’d like to learn more about engaging Gen Y, please vote for the panels. You need not attend sxsw to vote.

Here are your internet experts, and oh yeah, none of them graduated high school before the year 2000.

	Willow Brugh is a community organizer, a scholar on the subject of transhumanism, and is a currently developing a multi-discipline maker space in Seattle called Jigsaw Renaissance .
	Tim Hwang founded ROFLCon, Titans of Small Town, Information Superhighway, and XORCon. He is currently a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society with Yochai Benkler.
	Riana Pfefferkorn just graduated from University of Washington School of Law in Seattle, where she founded the local chapter of the CopyNight monthly copyright discussion group. Prior to law school, Riana spent three years in the search engine industry, working for Google and CNET as well as freelancing.

Some of the resources mentioned on the panel:

Ways to post to multiple sites at once: Ping.fm and Hellotxt.com
Short explanatory videos about technology and social media: Common Craft
Demographic information about social networks: danah boyd
Alternative copyright licensing options: Creative Commons

In short:

Twitter at http://twitter.com/sarahdavies

Blog at http://sarahdavies.cc

Liveblog at http://nten.org/ntc-sarahdavies (doesn’t go live until Sunday)

I’m MCing the ignite talks in the Grand Ballroom on Monday and Tuesday which will be off the hook. I’ll be liveblogging about the ignite practice sessions tomorrow, so be sure to tune in!

And the slides:

And here are links to some of the resources mentioned in the talk:

Creative Commons
Creative Commons “Wanna Work Together?” video
Twitter in Plain English video
Human Rights Campaign Facebook Cause
RSS in Plain English video
Cory Doctorow on how to be an uber blogger video
Flip video camera
Books: Getting Things Done and Four Hour Work Week
LinkedIn
Ignite Seattle
Ignite Portland
BarCamp Seattle
BarCamp Portland
Audience suggestion: Pecha Kucha Seattle and Pecha Kucha Portland
Saturday House

I could talk about this stuff all day long. I’ll be at the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference, so feel free to connect with me there or ping me on Twitter.

2. Give your evangelist time
Find someone else who can do what they do for five hours a week. Really. Offer to scrub the kitchen floor for them. Have them go around your office and ask everyone what they are doing. “What’s the most interesting thing you did this week?” “what’s coming down the pipe?” “what are you thinking about doing in the future?” Have them make a list of 10 interesting stories per week. Per week! They can do it. Have them record or write down direct quotes from your employees. Your organization has a lot more news than you think it does. It just takes a passionate person to go around and collect it.

3. Find your writer
You need a great writer. I can’t emphasize this enough. You need to hire a freelance writer who is looking for a little extra income while they finish their next novel. He or she needs to be funny. He or she needs to be charming. He or she needs to be a digital native so they know how to write for the web. If your organization is comfortable with it, I’d say find someone who is a little incendiary. Give them the by-line so they get professional cred for their work.

4. Pay your writer
Pay them $5 to write a sample blog post for you. If you like it, negotiate a rate that’s manageable for you. The very best professional bloggers make about $12 per post. Hire them to write 10 posts per week. (OMG! That’s expensive! Yes! How much do you spend on publishing and mailing the newsletter that no one reads? More than $480 a month? Hire a blogger.) Have them pick five of the evangelist’s ten weekly stories and write them up. (Yes, you are throwing away five stories! Chaff/wheat. Think about it.) Post one every weekday. Also have them find one news story or post from another blog every weekday that has to do with your organization, and post an excerpt from it and a linkback to it. Pay them the same rate to do this, even though it’s less writing. It’s important to have continuity of authorship, and other blogs will notice you faster if you link back to them. So, that makes two posts every weekday.

And that’s it. The technical aspects of setting up a blog are easy. If you don’t have a tech team who can install blogging software for you, just go to wordpress.com, buy the premium account ($15/year) so you can use your own domain name, and pick a theme. It’s that easy.

[Edited to add: Disclosure is hugely important to regular blog readers. A disclosure page, like this one or this one helps build trust with your readers. Tell them outright that your blogger is a paid contractor, not a volunteer supporter. Always make a note in your post if the author or the organization has personal or financial connections to the subject of the blog post. Hat tip to Jesse's comment below for the suggestion.]

My panel is called Start to Finish Drupal Redesign, and you can vote for it now!

Bug fighting Drupal drop by Senpai

ACLU of Washington is currently in the thick of a Drupal redesign, made all the more complicated by the fact that we’re nuts about privacy and accessibility, so we’re going to have to modify Drupal quite a bit to account for those things. We’ve put resources into creating a very technical detailed case study of how this project was (will have been?) accomplished, so that others may learn from our vast wisdom (many more others if you go vote for the panel. See those stars at the top? Click on the fifth one. Tell your friends!).

[Edited to add: Also give some love to my friend Tim Hwang of ROFLCon fame, and the fabulous nonprofit tech folks!]

This morning I got a little package from the fantastic Holly Ross. It’s a crappy picture, but the package had a super nice card, a bunch of NTEN swag, and chocolate (breakfast of champions). Thanks NTEN!!

Here are the notes from Nonprofit 911:
introduction
slides
notes

Here are my notes:
Basics for Nonprofits

Any user can start a cause. Only nonprofits can make an official nonprofit profile. Both are free of charge. To make an official nonprofit profile, go to http://www.causes.com/partners/new. You will need your EIN number. Your profile will be approved within 24-48 hours. Facebook will verify you as a 501(c)3. Your profile page will include your total donations, total number of donors, total number of supporters, and total number of causes. You can also add your own information, such as mission and history.

Once you have a profile, you can access donor information including name, address and amount donated.

Causes should be seen as a specific campaign or initiative, not an organization. The profile represents the organization. One organization can (and should) have many causes. The photo on each cause should relate to the cause. It should not be your organization’s logo.

When a user creates a cause, they browse the database of nonprofit profiles and pick one to be a beneficiary.

There is a 4.75% fee taken from each donation made through causes.

Questions

Q: What if we already made a cause for our organization? How do we change it into a nonprofit profile?
A: First, sign up for a nonprofit profile, then change the cause into a specific campaign. Upload pictures or video that indicate to people that the cause you created has changed to a specific campaign.

Q: What’s the difference between a group and a cause?
A: A cause has a nonprofit profile associated with it. One nonprofit profile can manage a cause for each of it’s chapters, or each of the bills that it’s concerned with. Groups don’t have that hierarchical structure.

Q: How do donations made through causes get to us?
A: Checks are sent out on the 15th of every month.

Q: What’s your business model?
A: We are a separate company from Facebook, but we have the same venture capital funders as Facebook. We want to branch out into new territory and engage youth. We currently make no profit. If we monetize in the future, it will be through advertising. We will never monetize nonprofits, including selling donor information.

Growing Your Cause

One person can only invite 12 people per day. So you need to be diligent about inviting new people every day, and encouraging them to invite more people.

Add links to online blog posts, articles, or video about your organization through the media board. People like to know that your organization is doing ongoing work. Every time you change a link, it goes to your members’ news feeds.

Start debates and discussions on your wall. Encourage your members to engage and talk to each other.

Offer rewards to the people who recruit the most members or raise the most money.

Questions

Q: Do you have examples of organizations that have had a large return on their time investment?
A: Love without Boundaries recently won our causes giving challenge. We awarded $25,000 to the cause who attracted the most donors. You would think that large causes would typically win, but it was actually the small nonprofits who diligently ran campaigns to get people to invite their friends to donate, who won. Love without Boundaries’ cause page was just a personal story about why the founder started the cause. Then she emailed all her friends who weren’t even on Facebook yet, and they invited their friends, and the cause spread virally.

Q: How do you prevent fraud?
A: You can disassociate any cause that you do not want to benefit your organization. But if someone starts a cause for you, but doesn’t quite get your mission right, you should reach out to them and give them more information. UNICEF didn’t want to join Facebook because they were afraid of losing control over campaigns that represented them, but one of their supporters started a cause for them and raised $10,000. Then they saw the power of exponential organic growth.

Q: In what creative ways have people used causes?
A: One organization gave presentations in classrooms at their University, and offered a pizza party to people who learned more about the cause. The League of Education Voters posted videos of themselves being excited about their own cause and what they would do when they reached their goals.

Q: How much do causes raise typically and how many causes does each nonprofit typically have?
A: Randall has seen fewer than 10,000 people raise over $100,000. Some causes choose not to have a beneficiary and only exist to distribute information.

We already have physical social networks. Many people in a movement amplify each other’s voices. Online, people self-organize networks for their own purposes, they don’t need or want marching orders from nonprofits.
Five aspects of effective networks:

• Strong social ties
• Common story
• Dense communication grid
• Sharing culture
• Network awareness

Different network structures facilitate different communication styles. Is your organization hierarchical? Do you all have one contact point? A few main contact points? Do you work without a leader? Does everyone talk to everyone else?

Your network structure affects what happens when people leave your organization or when your communication strategy changes.

Example

Fellowship of Reconciliation uses Flickr, Change.org, Change.org on Facebook, Causes on Facebook, Facebook “page”.