Non-Profit Tech Blog

Beth Kanter just made a tiny post about change.org, another contender in the nonprofit social networking space. As far as I know it looks like a rethos vs change.org slugfest is brewing in this sector. It also happens to be a Princeton alumni (Rethos) vs. Stanford alumni (change.org) matchup. Us UC Berkeley types just like to chime in from the peanut gallery (go bears). Even better, it’s a PHP (Rethos) vs. Ruby on Rails (change.org) matchup.

Both sites are currently hiring:

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.