Great blog post over at Futuristic Play which details an exchange between Andrew Chen, the blogger at Futuristic Play, and Ben Rattray of change.org. Actually, it’s more of a posting of an e-mail that Ben Rattray sent to Andrew Chen regarding the future of Facebook apps. It’s a good introduction to the problems faced by would-be Facebook developers. You can summarize the problems as:

• Too many apps for limited attention capacity of Facebook users
• Too many invites from other apps lower adoption rates for all apps (including your own) by Facebook users
• Useful apps have a tougher time getting users than social or “fun” apps

I’m not sure the useful vs. fun distinction makes much sense because it doesn’t really explain Causes. It’s very clear the head start that Causes had has been very difficult to erode. As of 5/7/2008, Causes is down to under seven million installations from a peak of ten million. The question is: Is Causes’ user base eroding because of this useful/fun distinction or is it simply eroding because of where we are in relation to the Giving Season? We can’t really say for sure.

I think change.org is an interesting case of a social network trying to use another social network to get more users. In that sense, I’m not sure if Ben’s experiences over at change.org haven’t colored his commentary regarding Facebook apps. There is certainly a lot of truth in what he says but just to get a second angle on what he was talking about I decided to do some quick look ups at Adonomics just to confirm the problem he stated. If it’s true that useful apps such as nonprofits apps will have a hard time getting viral on Facebook, then we should see mostly flat adoption rates for all nonprofit apps on Facebook. And for the most part, he’s right. change.org, Changing the Present and Razoo seem to have hit their plateaus when it comes to user adoption on Facebook.

However, that’s not the whole story. I decide to check out the Firstgiving app in Adonomics. The Firstgiving app was originally created by the US nonprofit Firstgiving which is a subsidiary of Justgiving in the UK. The app is no longer viewable on Adonomics so I decided to check out the Justgiving app. I guess the UK mothership at Justgiving has decided to rebrand the app as its own. That wasn’t the only surprise…

Lo, and behold, Justgiving has been taking on new users at a pretty nice clip since January:

Last August, I had noticed that the Justgiving app had a large amount of user interaction with the Justgiving app. That continues to this day with four percent of their installed base interacting with the app on any one day. What’s their secret? How did they break this trend? Could it be that the British have done what the Americans couldn’t do and loosen the binds that have held back cause-based apps growth in Facebook? I’ll try to follow up on this issue as it is VERY intriguing to me.

Today, I’m taking a look at four online donation aggregators whose monthly visitor count is under 100,000 a month. As you can see in the chart above, I’m talking about change.org, Changing the Present, GlobalGiving and MicroPlace. It looks like some organizations did better during the Giving Season than others. The biggest riser was MicroPlace, which was purchased by eBay in the summer of 2006 but was not actively announced as part of eBay until Spring of 2007.

It’s clear that the eBay acquisition has really improved MicroPlace’s standing in this market. Their traffic shot up like a rocket during the Giving Season and I can only attribute that to front-page links to MicroPlace on eBay itself and the continued difficulties by Kiva in securing a strong inventory of giving opportunities thus ensuring that users move on to other sites such as MicroPlace which are somewhat similar. There’s another thing – MicroPlace will give you a return on investment in real dollars. That’s basically where Kiva cannot go right now. I suspect MicroPlace ’s FINRA/SIPC affiliation was part and parcel of this strategy to actually do what many social entrepreneurs dream of — real financial returns combined with social returns. Basically, MicroPlace can tout securities. That’s a huge win for them and is going to mark them as a serious player in the space and not just due to their eBay affiliation either. UPDATE: There’s more information by the Rails programmer who designed MicroPlace on his blog. Another thing I found out while reading the blog, PayPal is the credit card processor for MicroPlace and thus all transaction fees have been waived.

In an article on Auctionbytes, it’s clear that eBay is also considering the acquisition of Microplace as part of a corporate social responsibility theme to its marketing:

eBay’s Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs was answering a participant’s question about what eBay is doing to help promote saving the planet. He said in part, “A third point to bring up is MicroPlace, which [is] a group that we purchased that is making microfinance loans available to the developing world in particular, and we think – particularly as it relates to PayPal – that we think that’s a great thing to be able to do for the global community.”

Changing the Present also did remarkably well during the same period of time. It’s clear that Robert Tolmach’s strategy of pairing a gifts model with traditional donations is very robust. However, it remains to be seen whether this trend will continue in the first half of 2008. It’s also clear their communications director is doing a great job with public relations. There seems to have been a very directed PR push during the Giving Season. Almost all of the media articles cited in Changing the Present’s media section have published dates in November and December of last year.

I tend to think of Changing the Present as a kind of Personal Social Reponsibility strategy. It’s a way of trumpeting to your circle of friends your particular interests in saving the planet as it were. I think it’s very well connected to the way people actually perceive their own giving.

GlobalGiving also did well on the media front with many articles in its media room discussing GlobalGiving during the Giving Season. Its participation in the Giving Challenge turned out to be huge. Compete.com shows the following graph:

GlobalGiving was growing around two to three thousand visitors per day during the Giving Season. You can also see the traffic jump off at the same time the Giving Challenge started on the 13th of December. For whatever reason, Compete.com did not have enough data on change.org’s velocity at this time and could not report it.

Unfortunately, the most stagnant property here is change.org. change.org did not get significantly more visitor traffic during the Giving Season. They do have a saving grace though. It looks like out of all these four online properties, Change.org has the most devoted users with an appropriate spike during December.

User time spent on change.org is high commensurate with its position as the only social network among the four properties. However, as we have seen with Causes, it’s not clear that it’s easy to convert social networking affiliation into donations.

Again, I’d like to invite speculation as to how and why some properties are doing well and why others aren’t. And if you happen to be a principal of one of these Web sites (and I know some of you are), please feel free to explain how and what you did during the Giving Season to improve your traffic.

Jon Stahl points out that Facebook is no longer measuring apps by raw number of users but by their engagement. There’s more info at the Facebook blog. So how does this play out for charity apps on Facebook?

Well as of 10:38 PM EST on 8/29/2007, here are the stats for charity Facebook Apps:

App Name	% of active users	Active users per day
Firstgiving		14%	34
Causes			6%	203,182
Change.org		4%	288
Razoo Speed Granting	3%	207
Chipin			1%	39

Clearly, there’s room for better user engagement within most of these charity apps. Causes is still the 800 lb. Gorilla of the Facebook charity app world. What’s even more interesting is that Causes is also the biggest political Facebook app by far. And yes, that statistic lumps in political Causes with nonprofit Causes. Let’s say only 10% of those Causes are political. It’s still leading the pack. That’s how huge the Causes user base is. Those of you in the political advocacy world had better start figuring out Causes quick. I hear there’s a very important election in 2008.

I’m very intrigued now by the activity of Firstgiving users. Does anyone have a hypothesis as to why they lead the pack? I certainly don’t. Could it just be a statistical outlier or does Firstgiving have some secret user interactivity sauce?

Oh yeah, if anyone can think of more charity Facebook apps to add to the list, please tell me.

Ben Rattray must have had one heck of a release timeframe since he’s just e-mailed me at 4:55 AM his time to tell me that change.org has just released on Facebook. His hard work has produced one of the slicker integrations I’ve seen out there in the Facebook apps world. Almost everything change.org has is implemented within Facebook. The only thing missing (and soon to be added) is the “Actions” portion of change.org where you can:

• Start email campaigns targeted at your state or national representatives
• Organize volunteer events and rallies
• Make committments with friends to help advance change in your daily lives

One nice thing about change.org on Facebook is that you’re given the option to synchronize your previous change.org work with the Facebook app. It immediately picked up my previous activity on change.org and listed it on the Facebook app. Very nice!

So, the challenge is finally laid down. Will the change.org app have the same virality as the Causes app? Is there a first mover advantage for Project Agape that will make it difficult to dislodge in the Facebook system? For those of you keeping score, the change.org app has 48 users and the Causes app has 1,306,588 users. What will it look like a month from now?

What do you think? Please leave your comments below.

New site just went live today but official launch isn’t until next week. It’s still in alpha but it’s another example of using the Web to fulfill some unmet needs in our sector. I will definitely have more details for you in the next few days. It’s a site founded by Jason Paez and George Reed with technical help from Ryan Ozimek of PICnet. It’s a pretty site — much prettier than its PHP origins would suggest. (Just kidding there, PHP script kiddies!)

Think of this site as an Evite-Meetup-Upcoming for nonprofits. In terms of an ecosystem, I think p4ap (Party 4 A Purpose) could fill in the niche of event scheduling and planning that nonprofits really need. If they can just link this together with existing social networks like Change.org or Project Agape or best of all, Facebook then I think they’ve got an application that has a chance of gaining traction in the space. I talked to Jason briefly today and I think he “gets it” when he says he wants to interoperate with existing social networks and to be entirely mashable.

Personally, I think, at the beginning at least only development staff will be posting the events. It’s not clear that volunteers would be mindful enough to post events but you never know. It IS clear that you’ll now have the ability to go to a nonprofit event almost every night. Is this an unmet need for donors? I think it makes sense only if p4ap does a good job pushing its events all throughout the Web.

They’re in alpha so what’s most important is that you, my dear reader, will leave a comment below. Do you think your development staff will use the site? What are the audiences that you foresee for a site like this? Is it too much like other social networking apps? Do you see any key differentiators here?

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 sticker”) 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 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.

Ben Rattray e-mailed me an hour ago that Change.org has released their 2.0 version that now allows users to build a virtual PAC for candidates. These were the new features he mentioned at the Personal Democracy Forum even though he was slightly stymied by a computer that refused to boot for his presentation. And Techcrunch has additional coverage as well.

Everyone is looking at the big pot of election 2008 gold and thinking of ways they can get a little bit of that. In some respects, this is an expansion of Change.org’s business model and just merely trying to survive past that election cycle. I think it’s clear that he’s looking to be sustainable in the short and mid-term phase. That’s a Good Thing.

And in general, there’s a lot of money spent on advocacy issues as well but Change.org now gives people the ability to bundle their donations into one big pot, thus engineering a larger presence in the mind of a politician about the reason for that donation. It also allows people to vote a position up and down and to decide collectively what path their advocacy group would take.

Will this solve Change.org’s supernode problem? It’s unclear at least for the portion of people that are looking to tie their activism into a specific nonprofit. However, the ability to engineer a moneyed bundle for politicians is basically what some nonprofits do. Change.org’s new strategy will use people’s natural DIY proclivities and allow them to form their own virtual nonprofit advocacy group. The concept is pretty new and will require a LOT of handholding of users over the next few months. This is essentially the Web 2.0 version of what DailyKos does during election season. I THINK it could work and is a bit smarter than playing to existing nonprofits.

Again, there are deeper concerns here. Could sites like Change.org fundamentally shift the landscape for nonprofits when it comes to their advocacy campaigns? Is this more of a negative incentive on nonprofits (”work with Change.org or else?”) rather than a positive one (”Change.org has a lot of people your nonprofit should reach – join us!”)? I think it will do neither for now but I suspect that sites like this will eat away at the less nimble middle-tier nonprofits over time. The very small nonprofit that has a lot of natural agility in adopting new business practices could easily use Change.org in their work practices. The largest nonprofits have amazing people like Greenpeace’s Beka Economopoulos who have effectively demonstrated a comprehensive and creative use of new media tools to make their campaigns move forward. Woe to the nonprofit that doesn’t have new media tools or people like Beka Economopoulos in their advocacy arsenal! As an aside, her session co-hosted with Noel Hidalgo at the Personal Democracy Unconference has showed me how far a small group of dedicated activists can go with Web 2.0 poltical advocacy.

I’m going to try to do a more in-depth look at Change.org from a user perspective and see how viable this is from a user perspective later this week. For now, just ruminate a bit on the meaning of virtual PACs and how your nonprofit could use one. I’d love your comments!

Change.org is now the THIRD Flash-based widget maker for the nonprofit sector. It looks like the sector is really heating up around this technology as people are realizing the ramifications of a revenue stream built on donations to nonprofits. Nothing like getting a small, thin piece of a potentially large pie!

Below is from Ben Rattray’s e-mail to me regarding the widgets:

As compared to Chipin’s widget, I think there are three things that make us different. First, we have access to Guidestar’s database use the nonprofit JustGive to process donations, so we can assure donors that their money will get to the right place (instead of relying on the paypal accounts of fundraisers). Second, our widget is more customizable, allowing users to add their own photo, choose any color, and write their own personal message. Third, our approach is much more than just about processing donations. One of the things we’re trying to get away from are what I call “transactional” donations, where someone will write a check because their friend asks them to and never learns more about the organization or gets connected to its cause. The fallout from this type of transactional giving is huge donor attrition. What we’re trying to do with our widget is not just get one-time donors, but to help start developing long-term supporters by connecting people who click on the widget to others who have donated to the selected nonprofit, allowing them to read reviews of the organization written by supporters, and inviting them to join its community.

Readers, please check out their widget building page and come back here to write your impressions about Change.org’s new capabilities. When I find time today, I’ll head on over there myself.

Courtesy of techcrunch, one of the first true social networks for nonprofit constituents has gone live today. Actually, check out the comments. The commenters have contributed a long list of other nonprofit social networking sites. However, change.org is more of a general social networking site so they’re more unique in that aspect. Change.org doesn’t seem to have penetrated the nonprofit tech blogosphere yet but if you hit techcrunch’s front page I guess that’s good enougn. Rethos.com should be up next in this space…Where you at, Salzman?

The beta was very interesting. I’ll take a look and report back.

Rethos is hiring journalists/writers and change.org is looking for another Rails developer either in DC or San Francisco. Change.org is looking for a developer to help them scale up their application. I’m doing Ruby on Rails for my startup as well and I can tell you it’s not exactly as fast as a rabbit even when it’s just me on the development site. They’ve got some interesting technical challenges ahead as they deploy their code over multiple servers.

As of right now, I think change.org is ahead of the game as it seems they’ve already lined up some large nonprofits for their impending launch. They’ve even got dummy HTML on their front page that should eventually show the logos of their nonprofit supporters once they remove the comment marks. View their HTML source and you’ll see. Change.org is using justgive.org’s processing facilities to handle their future donations. It’s a smart move to outsource and even smarter for them to advocate that all donors, regardless of whether they go through change.org or not, should use online donations over snail mail because of the high cost per donation associated with snail mail. I totally agree with that sentiment. However, web site costs should be considered into the actual cost of every online donation as well although it’s much smaller I can assure you.

Change.org even has a Digg-like interface for assessing the user interest in current or new features in the same way that salesforce.com uses crispynews. I’ve been writing that code myself — it’s remarkably easy to write the code and should be fairly easy to implement on most sites and I’m glad that change.org has decided to implement not because it’s easy but because it implies a willingness to deal with the slings and arrows of our sometimes outrageous user communities. Even care2.com has a social news element to its site.

Good luck to the change.org fellows, it’s going to be an interesting year for social networks in our sector.

UPDATE (1/5/2007): For another take on change.org — see Allison Fine’s post about Change.org. It’s a post that discusses the more problematic ways that the site limits user activities to only interacting with the nonprofit sponsor for that particular subject area. That’s a major issue for all the nonprofit social network wannabes — how to balance the need to monetize and the need for your user to feel comfortable with his or her menu of possible activities within the network. Social networks are not known for their ability to prove their moneymaking prowess (even Myspace isn’t profitable). I’m of the mind to interview these guys so let’s make this issue one of the salients points for discussion.