Chart of APA for Progress site traffic

What we have above is a chart detailing the last six months of traffic for APA for Progress. In return for my volunteer work with them, I asked that I be able to blog freely about the site’s growth and how I did it on basically a very, very tiny budget.

Be aware that the time period in the chart above begins the day before Obama’s inauguration so there is no bump from the political campaigning of last year. Also, the group had a very low number of new blog entries on it and was unable to get a bump from the campaign. Site traffic has grown from 91 visits a week to an all-time high of 2,356 about two weeks ago. The site is probably going to undergo a summer slump as many students will be on vacation but I expect the traffic to grow again during the fall. At the time I found them, APAP had suffered the loss of a previous Drupal site and was temporarily on a WordPress site as a stopgap measure. In other words, they were simply like many other tiny nonprofits in terms of the transitory nature of their IT assets.

First, let’s list APA for Progress’s online and offline assets:

• Email list of around 3000 people
• Facebook group of 1000 people
• APAP’s Volunteer Executive Director does offline organizing with college campuses showing a film about Vincent Chin
• Extensive contacts with Asian American political figures and the Democratic party
• Overcrowded WordPress blog (way way too many widgets)

With little money and no traffic, APAP had to figure out how to maximize their current assets. I ran into them as a way to work off my Obama addiction. I decided that they would make a great lab for many ideas swirling around in my head as to how nonprofits should carry out their advocacy campaigns on the Web.

Over time, I’ve had to seriously rethink the role that nonprofits can play on the Web. Most of the time, nonprofits like to use Web sites to promote their mission and monetize their traffic. It’s basically a 20th century industrial model akin to radio and TV. The nonprofit broadcasts and the donor listens. The problem with this model is that it’s a guaranteed way of falling straight into the black hole of mediocre web design and low site traffic. There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years given to email marketing and social media but primarily email and social media end up being used in the same way: to broadcast a nonprofit’s news and events. Just because your site has some moderate interactivity given you by an email vendor or your CRM, it’s not going to fundamentally change the nature of your site.

And unfortunately, much is made of social media’s ability to break up this model to the detriment of what I believe should be the cornerstone of a nonprofit’s online strategy: the Web site.  Social media (in this case, Facebook and Twitter) simply cannot carry the burden of the work. It cannot generate traffic on a consistent basis and relies all too often on the most mercurial of personal relationships. If your nonprofit has little penetration with the right digital media rockstars, it’s difficult to get your message out there. This is not to say that your nonprofit should NOT have a social media inititative. If your constitutencies include young people, you should definitely have a Facebook fan page or Facebook group for your organization. You CAN use Facebook to drive traffic to your site but mostly for increasing traffic to your already popular blog entries.

What APAP needed was a surefire way of generating site traffic without hoping on hitting a social media jackpot and absent a compelling event that would organically drive interest in a nonprofit like APAP that dealt primarily with Asian American politics. It’s difficult to raise interest in politics regardless of your ethnicity if you’re not in an election cycle.

Because of this, I had to think about the assets that tiny nonprofits have. All small nonprofits are mostly made up of a collection of people interested in working on a particular issue. Their main assets are their fundraising and community relationships. This means that you have to grow and nurture those relationships into an online design. I’ve got a couple of “theorems” about nonprofits as a result:

1. Nonprofits best serve as news aggregators due to their in-depth domain knowledge and consistent advocacy of particular public policy positions
2. They don’t have the ability to produce news content on their own easily and should use volunteers to help them out

These two observations have a strong impact on the way I believe nonprofits should create their sites in the future.  It suggests that nonprofits can use their staff to create a strong editorial “filter” on news items happening in their geographic catchbasin. It also suggests that they should use their existing community of volunteers to build out content that more closely matches their advocacy positions.

These observations simply hung in the air until I started thinking further about taking these observations and turning them into an operational plan that could be implemented into APAP’s website. After working on this blog for two years, I had learned a lot about SEO and was intrigued by the success of sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. I thought to myself: what can be gleaned from those sites and be applied to nonprofits? Here are my simple recommendations that I think nonprofit websites should adopt from news sites.

1. Big headlines get clicks
   There’s no doubt that Huffington Post does an amazing job of organizing the front page of its site to cue readers as to the most important thing that they should click on.  This type of headline design originated from  drudgereport.com. In fact, I consider this to be Matt Drudge’s singular insight on website information architecture.
2. Pictures next to headlines get more clicks
   You’d think this was pretty obvious but it’s not. However, most commercial news site have adopted this as a standard. Great examples are Yahoo! News and MSNBC.
3. Big pictures next to big headlines get even more clicks
   If you need more data on this, I can give it to you but this is pretty much common sense if you accept the first two ideas.
4. Give people an anchor to look at — i.e. headlines with pictures
   This means putting all the big headlines and pictures into one area in a prominent portion of your Web site – just like the Huffington Post. You’re making it SUPER easy for the user to understand what he or she needs to click on. No more random clicking from users looking for the good stuff.
5. Aggregate the news for your nonprofit vertical
   Use the strong editorial filter function that is inherent in your nonprofit to rearrange the day’s news in terms of how it affects your constituency or policy goal. Act like your nonprofit cares about the world’s current events.
6. The order of presentation for your news is YOUR value added
   What makes your editorial filter stronger is the sense imparted to the reader that you are making it easy for them to imbibe your view of the world. This means you really mean it when your biggest 30 pixel high headline is really important.
7. Tag, tag, tag, and tag again
   Tags are one of the ways Google tries to understand your blog entries and pages on your site. Don’t forget this part. SEO is everything.
8. Magazine-style layout is the future of nonprofit web sites
   And ultimately, what you’re doing is creating a news magazine akin to Huffington Post. This is not the same as creating a newsletter. Newsletters aren’t done on an ad hoc basis like the front page of your website. They also don’t tend to aggregate news sources and are more about the internal operations of your nonprofit.
9. Timeliness is everything
   Like all news magazines, your website has to thrive on timeliness both for more referrals from Google search and for establishing a reputation as a competent and driven nonprofit directly immersed in the issues of the day.
10. Allow your users to blog on your site
    Yes, I know established nonprofits would fear this user-generated content the most. However, small nonprofits have very little access to paid staff and should consider this to be their secret weapon to establishing mindshare within their constituencies.  That is, when you’re broke, you should adopt user-generated content.

So ultimately, my earlier two theorems and these ten tips combined together into the current site design for APA for Progress. I understand that these strategies would create a fairly radical shift in the way nonprofits organize and distribute their communications. It’s a user-centered model built on serving users with content that doesn’t necessarily originate from the nonprofit. Indeed, most of the people creating the content are not staff.

This has tremendous ramifications for the way a nonprofit will organize itself on the web. With the informal and highly opinionated nature of most user-generated content, it’s probably a good idea to include a disclaimer saying that your organization doesn’t necessarily share the opinions of its bloggers. It also means the traditional role of a communications director moves less from creating press releases to more of a “business development” role asking other blogs and nonprofits in the same policy space to syndicate content from the site by either linking to it or republishing. It also means using your contacts to generate good “gets” — getting good guest bloggers or having important individuals participate in conference calls to your membership or in live video conferences. There are many different ways to use traditional PR means to get more traffic for your site.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a remarkably labor-intensive endeavor. Writing content and/or getting people to write for your site is time consuming. However, it IS free. And when you’ve got more time than money, this is a fairly clear way of getting your nonprofit out there. Oh, and how much did this project cost? Less than $600 for the Drupal redesign.

Well, I knew it would happen sooner or later but Blackbaud has finally done it. They’re starting to do what was once possible only by hiring a team of developers and spending a large sum of money with version 5.5 of Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC). What is it I’m talking about? The wholesale merging of social networking with your fundraising tool. BBNC developer Tim Wolf gave me a tour of BBNC last week.

It’s a difficult topic to wrap your head around if you’re not used to looking at analytics tools and you don’t understand the basics of data aggregation and its eventual power as a fundraising tool. However, imagine merging social networking analytics tools like the kind you find when you run a Facebook Fan Page with the data from Raiser’s Edge. This allows for the dream of Total Information Awareness that the US Government proposed in its war on terror now applied to your organization’s fundraising efforts. Sound scary? Not really. This is an opt-in approach to learning all about your online constituents. Here are the basics:

• You can now create a social network on your BBNC site. The functionality is modeled more on Facebook than it is on Myspace. It’s dedicated to the creation of a walled garden of data for your nonprofit’s use. This means that your org will have total and complete control of constituent data on your site.
• The integration tools are more directed at Facebook users at this moment in that it can integrate with your Facebook friends list and drive invites to join your network to them in an attempt at a viral spread of the network through existing Facebook networks.
• Most importantly, that social network can engage in a two-way data transfer between itself and Raiser’s Edge.

Things that still need to be built out include the business intelligence reporting tools that would allow you to do deep data mining of your users once the social network has run for some time. I suspect that Blackbaud will probably have these tools up once you have the requisite data to do so.

Social media activist Beth Kanter raised this issue quite a bit. Those of you who remember her campaign last year on Causes’ contest run in December may have remembered her frenzied Twittering which not only exhorted us to action but also bemoaned the lack of reporting tools for Causes and the lack of reasonable fundraising logic.

BBNC proposes to solve all of that by including fundraising business logic already baked into Raiser’s Edge and merging it with the BBNC social networking application. Because of the opt-in nature of a social networking application, you can gather more data about a constituent’s demographic profile but also build a profile based on resulting user activity. You would have a sense of the social graph of your constituents but more importantly you will eventually be able to find the supernodes in your social network and more rapidly incorporate those supernodes into your social media campaigns.

One side effect of BBNC is that it will retard adoption of third-party social networks by hundreds of nonprofits. At the same time, this should hopefully force developers at Change.org, zazengo, ammado, justmeans, Razoo, Bring Light and a host of other networks to reconsider the kind of tools that they will make available to their users. Many of these networks tend to see their value proposition in terms of the badge-like nature of their network in a user’s profile. This just results in a rather simplistic me-too effect as users join the cause du jour. Simply saying that you’re part of a nonprofit’s constituent base has very little bottom line effect for a nonprofit. When advocates for nonprofit participation in social media ask nonprofits to join in on Causes, they are in effect asking a nonprofit to make an entrepreneurial move into a space where they may have little expertise on staff and with little expectation of a monetary return. Worse, with existing nonprofit social networks (or Facebook), you will not have enough tools to help you understand if there is ANY monetary return at all. This explains the relatively tepid responses of nonprofits to most nonprofit social networking applications. BBNC does a lot to restore the balance by asking nonprofits to instead build on their constituents already in their Raiser’s Edge database and by using the already existing skill sets many nonprofit staff members have in Raiser’s Edge.

Of course, there are several questions. For those nonprofits using BBNC and hoping to use the social networking features, this is also an entrepreneurial move. BBNC currently allows for a fairly complete customization and redesign of its tools to more closely match your existing website’s look and feel. A rollout of a BBNC social network will have redesign and marketing costs associated with it. This can be substantial.

Will the users show up? And if so, can your organization provide enough content to allow the users to more adequately participate in your mission? If users can’t show a badge illustrating their relationship to your organization on a third-party social network like Facebook, will that be an inherent limitation to their activity on your network? Is this better suited to organizations with a strong advocacy appeal so that non-monetary asks can be accumulated in some form of soft credit? Tons of questions here, I’m sure you can make up your own. Then again, these are more interesting questions to ask and have answered than the ones nonprofits have been faced with for the last couple of years in regards to their social networking strategy.

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.

I sent e-mails to Joe Green and Susan Gordon at Project Agape asking for their December numbers. I haven’t received any word from them and it’s been more than a week. I can only conclude I’ve lost the bet. Bill Templeton — wherever you are — please e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org for the official eating of crow etc. I also have a $50 donation to make to the donation of your choice as well as a Google glow-in-the-dark sippy cup to give away.

What’s fascinating is that Causes has failed to push users towards donations and only towards affiliations. Despite an installed base of over ten million users, Causes seems unable to generate the volume that would be commensurate with such a vast installed base. You can see the interest in Causes waning in the chart by Adonomics below.

It’s evident that there was a drop in activity that coincided roughly with the giving season between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve. Why? The question here is whether it’s a local problem that’s unique to Causes or something larger that can be blamed on trends that are part of Facebook or the demographic on Facebook?It’s been suggested Causes has numerous problems in its business logic that seems to stem from a lack of understanding of the giving process. For one thing, it’s very difficult for nonprofits who are actually interested in engaging Causes users to engage that group. Causes doesn’t have a specific backend interface for would-be nonprofit administrators to deal with a Causes members list. Also, the inability to mesh Causes data with a CRM such as Blackbaud’s NetCommunity, Kintera Sphere, Convio or even Salesforce.com doesn’t seem to bode well for Causes if it wishes to become an integral player for nonprofits. There are also silly things such as having users being bumped from the Hall of Fame for a particular cause. Generally speaking, it’s not a good idea to tell donors that they’ve LOST recognition from a nonprofit. It certainly suggests that the Project Agape team are not well-versed in traditional philanthropy.Or is it a general problem related to the drop in traffic that Facebook has when students go on winter break and are studying for exams, etc. Or is it another structural problem? That millennials simply don’t have the money to give away. Only time will tell. One thing is for sure: with over ten million users, Causes is going to still be a factor for a long time but by how much we may not know. For now, Project Agape has network effects working for them quite well but they seem unable to convert their users into actual donors.It’s a bit of a puzzle to me why they haven’t hired people more well-versed in traditional giving to work with them and change their existing business logic. They remain an untapped resource and it’s quite frustrating to watch and even more frustrating that Project Agape has seemingly clammed up.

I definitely would like your comments on this issue? What are your theories on why Causes failed to raise not just a quarter per user but worse, EIGHT cents per user from their installed base?

UPDATE (1/29/2008): At the time of close on 12/31/2007, the prediction market for this bet was running at a 40.8% probability that Causes would not make the $825k mark. Score one for prediction markets!

So here we go again! Another major step in the development of a new social networking platform is set to release tomorrow. Google and a panoply of other social networks have decided to one-up Facebook and create a super-platform whereby developers can create one application that can be served over Orkut (Google’s social network), LinkedIn, Hi5, Ning, Plaxo, and Friendster. Oddly enough, salesforce.com is in this mix too but it’s hard to understand how they can be a part of this unless your app can be added through AppExchange.

However it may be, your average nonprofit will not be able to take advantage of this development in a meaningful way. There’s no doubt that a few will be able to do so but that’s because they’ve already adopted the infrastructure and skill sets that would allow for rapid adoption for new technology. As I outlined in a couple of earlier posts, if you’re not even state-of-2005 in your application development practices, don’t bother with OpenSocial. Basically, your IT architecture needs to handle hundreds and then eventually thousands of requests per minute and you need to do some seriously rapid application development. If you’re not using EC2 or a web framework like Django or Ruby on Rails or even an agile methodology, forget about it. You’re toast. However, I suspect only ventures that are VC-backed will be quick enough to do this.

It’s an interesting race because one could say that Project Agape’s Causes has had an unfair competitive advantage due to Joe Green’s connections to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg. As a result, Causes was the ONLY charity app on Facebook for several weeks and had a huge head start during a period when you could invite an unlimited number of your friends to the app. To this date, competing charity apps are having a tough time breaking 20,000 users while Causes is probably going to have its seven millionth user before mid-November. If Causes is the 800 lb. gorilla of Facebook charity apps, it has little or no recognition outside of it. It’s about as pure a play on Facebook as you can get it as Project Agape doesn’t even have an extensive Web presence.

Google OpenSocial hits a reset button for all the players involved – we can now see whether or not the new microphilanthropies (including the one I’m a part of — socialmarkets.org) will be able to change course and adopt this new API. Ironically, this makes the Facebook portion of Convio’s new open platform even more inadequate than it already is for dealing with this new open world of social networking. Facebook apps are not compatible with Google OpenSocial because Facebook’s markup language is only useful for Facebook. This is ultimately Google’s flanking maneuver against Facebook and probably something that may not have been released had Google won the bid to own a portion of Facebook. The incompatibility of the two APIs will certainly cause developers to look at the prospective user audiences involved. After all, at least for nonprofit technologists, LinkedIn has always represented a more “premium” audience for charity asks than Facebook ever did. The addition of the other social networks is nice and can round out your worldwide reach. For instance, Orkut is strong in India and Friendster in East and SE Asia. So imagine being a charity app developer, you can get fifty million young Anglophones (Facebook) or 100 million users worldwide (Google OpenSocial), which would you pick?

And yes, this means the Gold Rush begins TOMORROW. The chances for your app to explode in a viral fashion diminish quickly by every day you’re not out there. Sigh. It’s like the 1990s all over again.

Every so often I read in the nptech blogosphere articles that I consider to be problematic. I just read one today that stated that the Convio Facebook App is better than the Causes App on Facebook. Apparently, the major claim to fame is that people within a Convio Facebook App can now directly sign-in to an organization’s CRM. Another added bonus is that content from a Convio-powered Web site can be integrated with a Facebook App. Unfortunately, you can only run one Facebook app at a time using the Convio tool.

There are multiple problems associated with the statement and here’s the list:

1. Convio doesn’t have an industry-standard SLA. This may not be such a huge problem for those nonprofits that are combining an existing web site with Convio content but this is a huge problem when it comes to handling a Facebook App. Previous blog entries on this site detailing the infrastructure for Causes show that most nonprofits (even the larger ones) will not have a big enough IT staff to handle their own Facebook App if it takes off. Do we know whether or not Convio could handle the server load if multiple Convio Facebook applications take off?

2. Where’s the fun stuff? Are you seriously giving Facebook users the wonderful opportunity to sign into your registration system? What happens after that? There are no set-asides for other interactive widgets such as forums, etc. Oh wait, most people don’t have that on their regular Web site. So the problem here is that you will end up with an app that’s basically the equivalent of Web 1.0 brochureware.

3. The best Facebook Apps increase interactivity between and among users themselves. Most nonprofits are not set up for this kind of interactive strategy. They’re still in broadcast-only mode. This isn’t just a tactical issue but a strategic one. I can think of all sorts of great Facebook activities that would be fun to do for supporters of a nonprofit but I can picture a lot of cringing too on the part of nonprofit management staff. Are you strategically ready to live with the idea that your users will talk about you? In light of the controversy surrounding even Web site stat transparency around here, I seriously doubt a lot of nonprofits will be comfortable with this strategy. If you’re the kind of person that likes to filter information about your organization to the public, this strategy is dead in the water for you.
4. Convio’s API is ultimately your limiting factor. The lack of multiple user retrieval and the lack of pass-through SQL will pretty much condemn your app to interacting with only one user at a time. Even if you did an end-around on the Convio SLA issue by putting your App on Amazon’s EC2 and outsourcing your programmers, you’ll still have to run one data call for every user. Imagine doing a hall of fame with your App or some other function like the total amount of dollars raised! That’s pretty much a death knell for an application that needs to scale over thousands of users.

Wait for Convio to get its act together. I understand that Convio will be making changes to its API soon in response to my earlier post. It may be that they’ll implement some of my recommendations and maybe even create a rider that discusses a special SLA for a Convio Facebook App.

With some amazement on my part, it looks like the Razoo Speed Granting application has definitively overtaken Change.org’s Facebook app and is now the second most active Facebook charity app. Of course, both Razoo and Change.org are far behind Causes which is nearing the five million mark and probably pass it by next week.

As the chart shows, Razoo Speed Granting will soon be at around 500 active users a day. Razoo launched in late June 2007 and quickly rose in the last few months to grow to greater usage. What’s their secret? I don’t know. I’ll ask for an interview and hopefully we can get some answers.

Entering the fray in the last few days was changingthepresent.org’s Facebook app, called appropriately enough Changing the Present. Those of you who are Facebook users are well aware of the digital gifts that can be purchased and sent to your friends. I’ve never purchased these “gifts” but apparently they’re one of Facebook’s cash cows. Changing the Present is placing their vast inventory of gifts into the Facebook stream with the launch of their new App. In this case, the gifts are really for services like providing job training or buying clay so that artisans can make crafts to sell. I happen to think it may work as a good Facebook App. You can either send the “gift” in $1 increments to your friends or pay for the whole thing. The interface is a bit busy for a Facebook App and I hope they fix it but then again so is Razoo’s.

Well, it looks like we have two takers, myself and Bill Templeton. We’ve been beating each other up on a comments stream about whether or not Project Agape is a runaway success and now is the time to place the bet we discussed in the comments.

My Google glow-in-the dark cup (a virgin cup at that in the sense that the glow-in-the-dark components have to be snapped in order for it to glow)

versus

Bill Templeton’s eBay RASCI the Decision Making Mongoose

And just to make this more charity-oriented, Bill and I will donate $50 to the charity of the winner’s choice. Project Agape, the maker of the Facebook Causes App has agreed to submit the numbers for December 2007 to make this bet happen.

I’ve held back on this post because I was looking for a decent platform where all the other readers of this blog could participate in the bet. I found it at inklingmarkets.com. Inklingmarkets is a decision market where you can buy stock in a market that answers a question. It won’t cost you anything but your time. No money is exchanged. Inklingmarkets will give you $5,000 in virtual currency to play with. And you can use that virtual currency to participate in the new market I just created which is supposed to harness the wisdom of this blog’s readers in answering the question: Will the Facebook Causes app raise more than $825,000 in December 2007?

Basically, if you short the stock, you’re betting against that outcome happening but if you go long on it, you’re betting on it to happen. Unfortunately, as the market maker, I’m not allowed to “invest” in the outcome but you can. Go over to inklingmarkets and check it out.

If you’re interested in placing the following charts on your blog or web site, inklingmarkets has the appropriate instructions for installing the widgets.

I really hope that you all participate in this market. It’s a great way to get a whole bunch of people involved in discussing Facebook Causes, the future of nonprofit marketing and being involved in probably your very first decision market!

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.