Mr Splashy Pants / Greenpeace.org

Mister Splashy Pants, a whale named after Greenpeace held a naming competition in 2007 doesn’t seem to be news, but Alexis Ohanian, who is a founder of Reddit tells a great story at TED (in 3 minutes no less!) of how social media created a meme, took Greenpeace by surprise, won the competition, Greenpeace ceded control and in the end saved whales, literally.

The example shows one way for establish organizations to work with social media: Loosen up and go with the flow. Make the most of the situation and the attention. You need to give something up to gain people’s trust and participation. This is something that corporations and non-profits alike are mortally afraid to do.

Organizations are afraid of losing control over their message. But what is brand identity anyway? Isn’t it something that forms in the minds of the customers and participants? And it’s hard to control what people think of you. Individuals are constantly making adjustments to accommodate, influence or reject the way they are perceived by others. But it’s an ongoing relationship, not one-way. The more social we get in the use of internet technologies, the more relationship-oriented things will be.

So it’s not ok to find new ways to do old things, like one-way communication. Embrace participation. Lose some control. It’s ok. If a serious organization like Greenpeace can have some fun, other can too.

—

See also: Wikipedia entry

Twitter

In his presentation at TED, the founder of Twitter, even Evan Williams acknowledges that he didn’t anticipate the many of the creative uses this simple tool would be used for:

What we didn’t anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. When the wildfires broke out in San Diego, in October of 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them.

Twitter (despite my initial skepticism), is obviously here to stay.

For those new to Twitter, Twitter allows you to express your thought, one 160 character or less statement at a time. Members can follow each others “tweets”. That’s it. The value of twitter is in is simplicity.

Like simple Lego blocks, it can scale up into more purposeful things that just vanity broadcasting. And many people are finding ways it can serve social causes. Here’s a couple I’ve come across lately:

Five Ways Nonprofit Organizations Can Really Connect on Twitter

Twittering for a cause: Web 2.0 and its philanthropic impact

TwitCause and TechCrunch’s write-up

Twitter for Social Entrepreneurship: The Top 100 Tweeps to Follow

Twitter 101 for Nonprofits

Givology.org

I have more than a passing interest in how internet technologies affect they way that social innovations are made and even more so when it comes to the support of education for the less privileged. So I was very happy to be given the opportunity to talk to the founder of Givology that recently launched a site whose purpose is to raise money for scholarships and education projects in the developing world.

According to its site,

Givology is an Internet online giving marketplace that empowers individual donors to connect with students and communities in need of education support. By leveraging the internet to support education grants and projects, Givology creates a global community of people connected through their belief in the power of education.

Givology works a lot like DonorsChoose.org, where donors provide small donations through the site to fund students or educational projects that are listed on the site. Whereas DonorsChoose.org focuses on projects in the US, Givology currently funds partners in China, Uganda, Rwanda, India, Kenya and Ecuador. Like DonorsChoose.org, the main challenge is vetting the partners who work with the students, maintaining transparency of the process and regular feedback informing the donors how their donations were spent. It seems Givology fellows also regularly travel to sites to check on progress and provide support, blogging about their activities to the site.

What does seem like a small donation to donors in developed countries do go a long way in developing countries, and providing someone around the world a better way of life through internet-empowered sites like Givology would have been something hard to imagine just 10 years ago.

I remember watching on BBC News in the mid-80’s images of children dying in Africa which produced a huge public outcry which resulted in such huge fund-raising events as Band Aid, USA for Africa (who can forget “We are the world”) and LiveAID. That seems befitting for the MTV age. What many were left wondering however is after all the hype, what happened? Back then, big organizations did big fund-raising for big impact, but unfortunately these efforts were not entirely sustainable.

Sites like Givology, DonorsChoose.org, or Kiva.org are tiny in comparison, but no less ambitious. They value personal connections and take small donations, but it is these small drops that make the ocean, and the force for sustained and effective change.

—

Posted here are the responses to an email interview I conducted with Joyce Meng, Founder/CEO of Givology.org. Many thanks to Catherine Gao (@Catherine_Gao) for making the interview possible.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Joyce Meng, and I am the CEO and co-founder of Givology. In 2008, I graduated from the Huntsman Program of International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and international studies and minoring in mathematics and Spanish.

Currently, I am a graduate student at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Last year, I finished a Masters Degree in Economics for Development and this year, I”ll be joining the Financial Economics program. More information about my background can be found on my site: www.joycemeng.com.

How old is your organization (givology.org), and how did you get started?

We launched the first version of our site in September 2008, but the concept was in development since March 2008. We worked really hard to develop the technology features in-house and to form grassroots partnerships with some great community organizations.

As for the story of how the idea came to be, it all started with an idea of making education philanthropy as easy, transparent, and accessible as possible, and a belief that education was dominated too much by traditional forms of donations. We really wanted to build a community and a social network around giving that was really engaging and active, not just a passive “write your check” and receive an annual update.

Our purpose was to engage donors to support talented students from across the world. Givology also came from a commitment to promote grassroots education causes and to enable the dreams and aspirations of students worldwide. For a good primer on our strategy and our philosophy, please do check out the following critical analysis paper that I wrote: https://www.givology.org/static/microphilanthropy_education.pdf

How does the site/program work?

Our aim is to make our site as intuitive as possible. Below is a general outline of the mine steps to begin donating and participating in the online Givology community:

1. Create an account
2. Browse student and project profiles
3. Add money through Googlecheckout to your “wallet”
4. Allocate money from your wallet to the students and projects you want to support
5. Receive automatic updates and notifications about postings of the child or project’s progress and impact! Also, each user has the ability to message students and projects. We collect and deliver to the student or the project your updates, so your words of encouragement really makes a tremendous difference, as you can read from the student letters that we receive. All donors have the opportunity to blog and post their own thoughts to their Givology journal

We welcome people to update their profiles, read our notes from the field, where our fellows post their research insights as they travel and do volunteer work abroad, as well as join different giving team groups on the site

What successes have you had so far?

Every bit of progress is a milestone, especially as we are reaching our first year.

• Helping hundreds of kids through student and projects and knowing we change their lives, reading about how our small contribution makes a difference – really helping change the nature of education philanthropy and supporting great grassroots work
• Raising $10,000+, forming 18+ grassroots partnerships in 7+ countries, sending fellows to 4+ countries in the world to research and conduct due diligence on education issues, building an innovative technology platform, running a successful internship and volunteer program, starting chapters in 3+ universities and 2+ high schools in 2009 and hoping to expand
• Getting selected as one of the top 100 student-run enterprises by the Kairos Summit
• Winning first place at the Education Without Borders “Technology” theme
• Featured in Knowledge@Wharton, Nicholas Kristof’s NYT blog post, Philly Inquirer, Penn Gazette, Seattle Times…
• Raising ~$10,000 and on track to $20,000

What has been your biggest challenge?

One big challenge is encouraging repeat donations and getting the word out. People generally get very excited about Givology and our concept, but then they sometimes forget to visit the site again, message the students they have helped, or continue to be part of the community.

We’re a 100% volunteer network so we depend on the time and skill contributions that each individual can make. Sometimes coordinating our network of 15+ team members and 50+ volunteers can be very difficult, but we’ve adopted the processes to get people engaged to work together on different projects.

Our organization is very young and still growing tremendously. The benefit of being a purely volunteer-based network is that all the donations raised online go directly to our partners.

In terms of efficiency and low administrative costs, we’re definitely top rated! We’re really committed to being lean and making the biggest impact – no admin or overhead cost so that we can make greatest impact. In light of the financial crisis, we know it’ll be a challenge to meet our target of $40,000 by next year, but we believe that with effort, we can do it!

How do you work to promote trust between the user and Givology?

Transparency is one of our core principles. To promote greater disclosure and information sharing, we have quarterly student updates of scanned letters, photos, videos, transcripts. For an example, you can visit our student updates section: https://www.givology.org/studentupdates/, or click under each student’s profile “View my Updates”.

We also have messaging so the donor can pass on a short letter of support and see the student’s response and a fellowship program in which our fellows visit our partner sites, make sure everything is going correctly, and then post blog posts online, acting as the “eyes and ears” of our organization.

We have a rigorous due diligence process to select grassroots partners – for more details about the selection process, you can visit the partner application page on our site.

Most importantly, we’re constantly monitoring, and are not afraid to admit when things go wrong. For example, a few of our sponsored students dropped out of school due to financial pressure at home. We refunded the money to all the donors and sent them a message informing them of the unfortunate event. Even though we do our best to encourage students to stay in school, we understand that the harsh reality may force them to choose otherwise.

We believe in transparency and are not afraid of sharing the difficult challenges that arise with our donors. This new era of social networking has given us so many tools to reach out and connect to our community – we have twitter, facebook, notes from the field, givology news to keep people updated and engaged. It’s not just about donating, but building a community around giving and creating dialogue to promote trust and greater development.

What is the future for Givology?

Future? For us, we have so many ambitions! The great thing about our technology platform and our organizational strategy is that it is fully scalable. We intend to expand to many new geographies and partners, start more chapters at schools and regions throughout the world, build out our volunteer and supporter network, increase traffic to our site, improve our technology platform, among many other goals.

We have lofty dreams, but we strongly believe that internet microphilanthropy and building a community around giving can make a tremendous difference. Concretely, we’re targeting $20,000 for 2009, $40,000 for 2010 and $70,000 for 2011 and beyond, with more than 5,000 registered users by the end of 2010. But most importantly, we want to make sure that we’re innovating and listening to what people are saying so that we can adapt in connecting and supporting meaningful education projects throughout the world in areas of great need.

We want Givology help thousands of talented students realize their dreams, as well as empower communities across the globe to harness the talent of their young.

—

Further Reading

• Givology entry in Wikipedia
• Givology: Using Social Networks to Connect Education with the Developing World, Feb 2009 interview with Catherine Gao, chief development officer for Givology in Knowledge@Wharton
• Givology – democratizing giving to benefit students, Oct 2008 article in Asian American Giving

iTunes U

Recently I’ve participated in brainstorming session for a premier university in Korea on how to make its lectures available online.

Ever since MIT started offering its lectures through its OpenCourseWare (website) initiative in late 2002, many higher education institutions have been offering lectures online through various channels: YouTube and iTunes just to name the obvious.

The YouTube Effect

The explosive popularity of sharing sites such as YouTube seems to have radically changes the way we consume media.

Part of the popularity of YouTube lies in the ease in which you can “take” video, hosted on YouTube, and embed it on your site. This is no trivial change. Previously content was a guarded commodity. Some readers my remember that in the early days of the internet, “deep linking” (linking to a page other than the homepage) was a controversial issue, which seems almost comical in today’s internet environment. Others devised ways of keeping users on their website as long as possible, and only allowed consumption of their content on the site.

With the rise of user-generated content, and the legal framework that Creative Commons affords in terms of copyright protection, the line between between the ownership/authorship of content hosted on such content sharing sites as Youtube, Flickr, SlideShare and to some degree digg are being blurred.

YouTube really doesn’t distinguish between the content being on their site or your site. This is important in that it recognizes that is is impossible to neatly categorize the content and it is transferring that burden of organization, categorization and contextualization of the content to users themselves. YouTube has so much content that it cannot (and does not) predict how users will use the content on its site. They leave it up to the users to contextualize it by embedding in their sites. A funny video of a cat may be just cute entertainment on someone’s personal site, whereas it could be a serious example of feline behavior on an academic site. YouTube is saying, we provide you easy access to the content, you provide the context.

David Weinberger writes a whole book on this issue. In Everything is Miscellaneous he writes:

We are building an ever-growing pile of smart leaves that we can organize as we need to at any one moment. Some ways of organizing it – of finding meaning in it – will be grassroots; some will be official. Some will apply to small groups; some will engender large groups; some will subvert established groups. Some will be funny; some will be tragic. But it will be the users who decide what the leaves mean.

Allowing users to take the content is supremely smart for YouTube in that it significantly increases distribution and now that they have figured out a way to advertise within the video frame, a greater source of advertising income.

TED is using this exact model for spreading its ideas.

Shifting role of universities

Back to universities. For universities this climate of content sharing sets up a dilemma.

Universities as an institution have long been in the business of guarding its knowledge and the authors of its knowledge. Whenever you partner with a university the intellectual property contracts their legal department send you is a strong indication of how serious they are about their knowledge. It’s apparent that some knowledge needs to be protected, such as patents, processes and original works. But in this current age, being too strict about protecting knowledge has the negative effects. Universities are not measured in terms of how many books their libraries house but how effective they are in encouraging, facilitating and protecting open discourse, thought leadership and, more so than ever, social responsibility.

Liz Coleman, the president of Bennington College in her inspiring presentation at TED (Feb 2009), A call to reinvent liberal arts education, expresses the urgency of our higher education institutions to be more open, interconnected and socially responsible:

The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus. Learning more and more about less and less. This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. Lest you think I exaggerate, Here are the beginnings of the A-B-Cs of anthropology. As one moves up the ladder, values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. Questions such as “What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making?” are treated with more and more skepticism and move off the table.

To share or not to share?

When one thinks about how to describe the premier universities in Korea, words such as exclusivity, high-walled, academic, authoritative and conservative come to mind. This is clash with the values of the internet that shout social, communal, accessible and collaborative.

The motivation behind a premier university in Korea sharing its lectures online seems may seem to be a little more self-serving than socially inspiring: To reinforce it branding and positioning; to create a business model for paid exclusive content; and to provide some public service.

Whatever the motivation, I believe that once the door to access is opened up, it may unintentionally trigger a change that may be irreversible.

Ever since Facebook launched, schools and social media have enjoyed a strong connection. One of the first Web 2.0 site to really take off in Korea before Cyworld hit it big was a site called I Love School, which connected users looking for old school buddies.

Alumni have been a great source for fundraising for universities and it seems only natural that universities should do a better job of connecting with alumni and connection alumni to each other, increasing the value of the school and of the alumni body.

Mashable.com recently had an article 10 Ways Universities Are Engaging Alumni Using Social Media which outlines how universities can do a better job of connecting with its alumni. The list is not just for universities – these are good pointers for any organizating wanting to increase value and influence through members who are have passed through its organization.

Here is Mashable’s list of how universities are interfacing with alumni online:

• Helping alumni find jobs
• Collaboration and connecting with students
• Fundraising: From e-mails to tweets
• Training alumni to use social media
• Meeting alumni where they’re at
• Providing tools to spread information
• Alumni-generated content
• Promoting alumni networks
• Mobile reunions
• Connecting the dots: Google maps

I think openness is key here. Clay Shirky in his recent book, Here Comes Everybody show how the Catholic church in the face of its highly publicized priests’ child abuse scandals tried to impose limit the conversation the lay were having with each other. This may have been possible before the internet, but the effort in which you can disseminate information and organize groups is so low that it is simply impossible to contain conversation.

Like the church, universities have also classically enjoyed being the authority on knowledge and discourse, and being so, it would want to impose antiquated forms of limitation on what is talk within and about the institution. If you don’t embrace conversation and openness, members will find other ways of connecting with each other and you lose the opportunity to create value and take advantage of the group interaction.

Obama on his ground-breaking election bid website MyBO did exactly that, when the site did not shut down or delete the members’ open and vocal opposition to his stand on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

This is the way things are now. Organizations and institutions which do not embrace this new climate will be talked about, not talked with.

ty8bhcvpkd

Clay Shirky gave an amazing presentation at TED@State last month about how users are becoming empowered by the ability not only to talk back but to self organize to communication with each other.

Almost as a follow-up to Clay’s presentation, McKinsey Quarterly has an article on how companies should deal with this changed environment, which may be a little scary for companies that are more used to traditional one-way communications: Managing beyond Web 2.0

Executives can use a model we at the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing have developed called LEAD (listen, experiment, apply, develop) to create a road map that will help companies thrive in the online world’s environment of constant change.

Listen is usually the hardest thing to do.

Causes, the facebook app that allows it users to share “causes” with their social network and give and receive charity gift, has raised $10 Million in its 2 years of existence.

Today [July 10], Causes broke $10,000,000 raised through the application in just over two years. Half of this, $5,000,000, was donated in just the past 6 months. It is through the hard work of activists and nonprofits on Causes that we have been able to reach this milestone. We are constantly awestruck by the drive, commitment and passion poured into a cause, petition or birthday wish.

[via TechCrunch]

Clay Shirky, TED@State, June 2009

I’ve recently been reading Clay Shirky’s 2008 book Here Comes Everybody and found he gave a talk at TED@State last month, hosted at the State Department in Washington DC .

He talks about how rules have change in the games of communication. Where before the internet, organizations would send the same message to everyone they are trying to reach. But all that has changed. Not only are they talking about but they are talking to each other about you:

We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global. social, ubiquitous and cheap. Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. The audience can talk back. And that’s a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do.

But that’s not the really crazy change that we’re living in the middle of. The really crazy change is here. It’s the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other. The fact that former consumers are now producers.

There is an additional Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran (June 16, 2009):

I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media.

Here’s Clay talking at TED2005 on Institutions vs. Collaboration, which interestingly is before the rise of Twitter as the communication tool of choice.