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.