Non-Profit Tech Blog

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!