This just in from Beth Kanter’s blog which links to Mashable’s article on LinkedIn for Good. Here’s a bit from LinkedIn site:
With a network of over 10 million professionals spanning the globe, LinkedIn is an immensely powerful platform. A few of us here decided that we should be doing more to leverage the network to promote positive social change, and LinkedIn For Good is our first step in that direction.
You can now learn more about outstanding nonprofit organizations and donate directly from the new nonprofit pages on LinkedIn (see a few examples below).
In addition, you can add a badge (like a “digital bumper stickerâ€) to your profile to show your support and raise awareness for the causes you care about.
When another member of LinkedIn views your profile and clicks on the badge, they’ll be taken to the nonprofit page where they can donate or add the badge to their profile, resulting in a virtuous cycle!
I think LinkedIn’s business plan is…
Phase I: Use our existing social network!
Phase II: ???
Phase III: Profit!!!
They are leveraging what they do have and I think it’s been pretty inevitable that they approach this given that there’s been attempts by LinkedIn members to do an adhoc nonprofit network within LinkedIn already. It makes sense but there’s certainly a bit of social network and badge fatigue out there right now. Again, is there enough incentive for nonprofits to use LinkedIn? From what I can tell, there’s a bit of a reticence on the part of people to join LinkedIn because they’re afraid that people will think they’re job searching (which they normally are). Once non-profits get over that, I think they could see some benefit in using the free employment listings that LinkedIn is now providing for nonprofits.
So who are the winners and losers in this move? The winners are the nonprofits at the left and right hand sides of the bell curve. The nimble as well as large and talented orgs will get this and run with it.
The losers are Change.org and ChipIn for the obvious reasons and oddly enough, Idealist. This could cut into Idealist’s action in the nonprofit employment market. Idealist sits in the space once occupied by OpportunityNOCs.org and the same kind of niche shift could happen again. Alexa head to head rankings between Idealist and LinkedIn don’t bode too well for Idealist.
This is a major problem for Idealist. The new job notification e-mail alert on Idealist has always been late or next to useless and I understand this is a frequent complaint of other Idealist users as in. Rest assured that LinkedIn for Good won’t be making that kind of mistake. Idealist has to really get that job e-mail alert down pat as that is its main “UI” for most users on a daily basis. I’ve had an e-mail alert on Idealist that runs on technology jobs and I’ve never found it usable. I’ve always had to go to the site itself. I always end up looking at Deborah Finn’s job listings on her Information Systems Forum e-mail list instead.
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Just because linked in has badges, does that mean I’m going to promote my charity to LinkedIn users and ignore everyone else?
I admit I haven’t been looking for a job lately, but I don’t think job seekers look in only place for potential employment, particularly when the job listings aren’t necessarily completely duplicative or one source a particular type of job.
Also, right now, I tend to get more job/networking type requests via email versus friend of friend via LinkedIn. That may change.
Finally, I’m not sure doing a head to head comparison of idealist and LinkedIn is useful – what would be more useful is a direct comparison of traffic of nonprofit job seekers for both sites.
Ah, well gotta do my breakfast dishes – want to watch?
Hi there,
Thanks for the thoughts and also for the feedback on Idealist. I think it’s great that LinkedIn is doing this. There are more than enough problems in the world, and the more people who want to get involved, the better. As to Idealist’s email alerts, we are doing our best to make them better all the time, and we’ll be launching a new version of them later this week.
Thanks!
Ami
LinkedIn for Good is fairly different from ChipIn. LinkedIn for Good starts with a social network and then tries to attract these users to a given cause, while ChipIn (and others) start with the nonprofit and then gives them the tools they need to raise funds from their supporters, and their supporter’s social networks in turn. They both “compete” for donations, but take quite different approaches.
And as Ami says, the more options nonprofits have, the better.
I’m pleased that Idealist enabled RSS feeds for job searches. I have quit the email notices since the feeds were started. Now if they would only make the headline a real link and label the job listing pages with a real title they would be somewhere.
Thanks Rob! That’s on the list
Ami
Geez, sorry for the late reply. I didn’t realize there were comments here since I was so mesmerized by the Meebo chat room then left to hang out in Ft. Greene in Brooklyn so my apologies.
Sure, I agree with you Beth, that LinkedIn for Good right now probably doesn’t have nearly as many job listings as Idealist did but again, I’m sure the folks at OpportunityNOCs were surprised by the quick adoption of Idealist, too. It’s just too enticing for LinkedIn to enter the nonprofit employment market. I would suspect that private sector people looking to transition to the nonprofit sector would at least give LinkedIn a spin around the block and LinkedIn for Good’s free pricing for nonprofit job postings is sure to attract attention from nonprofit HR directors with nonexistent hiring budgets. Don’t get me wrong, I think free pricing can be beaten on the basis of perceived value. However, free pricing with a well-known brand is a difficult proposition to counter.
Ami, besides the enhanced RSS feeds, I would suggest that Idealist make it easier to find a job from the first page of Idealist.org. It’s not actually that easy to find a job on Idealist despite the fact that job search is the Idealist “brand” for most people. The link to find jobs on Idealist is mystifyingly represented as:
http://www.idealist.org/if/as/Find?sid=92898443-192-OaG
I think it should just be http://www.idealist.org/jobs or http://jobs.idealist.org (both would be ideal). Also, there should be a large FIND JOBS button and not just a text link in the right hand sidebar. In fact, many of the URLs on idealist.org are not human-readable which I believe is simply a UI no-no when building large enterprise sites. It’s not clear whether or not these URLs are permalinks either.
It’s been my experience that I go to Idealist for jobs and THEN I look at the rest of the site. If there was a way for people to take an Idealist.org job search “widget” and embed it into their Google homepage that would be great. It would allow for more searches to be done from the comfort of people’s own daily homepage.
Also, I believe that Idealist needs to geocode its data especially those regarding meeting and job locations and perhaps even feed that data into other meeting sites such as upcoming.yahoo.com and eventful.com. A geo-aware Idealist would attract a lot of press but also give new users a chance to understand the breadth and scope of Idealist’s real-world offerings. I would love to see Idealist jobs and meetings on a Google Maps mashup so that I could find ONLY the jobs or meetings I’d be willing to sign up for based on their location. See housingmaps.com for an example. I’d love to see an Idealistvision just like the one over at Twittervision.com.
Looking forward to your comments…
Todd, there’s competition here but I don’t think LinkedIn for Good knocks out either change.org or chipin.com out of the running, not by any means. However, there’s only so much room for nonprofit widgets. Starting from one widget to several widgets and even more in the future, it’s hard for prospective microfundraisers to choose from the cornucopia of different widgets out there. In the end, LinkedIn for Good gets instant credibility since LinkedIn is a well-known brand. Will that crowd out other widgets? Sure, in this case, I’m pretty sure ChipIn won’t want to be pushed out to the right-hand side of a Long Tail of widget wannabes with LinkedIn sitting in the alpha widget position.