There’s been an awful lot of conjecture mixed with hope over MacArthur Foundation’s new space in Second Life. I’m having a REALLY tough time endorsing nonprofit ventures in Second Life simply because of one metric which is often overlooked: marginal cost of participation in a virtual world doesn’t decrease quickly enough. One of the fundamental things we’ve learned about the largest Internet properties is that the cost of participation is surprisingly low after the initial set-up of a presence. In Wikipedia, Myspace, FaceBook, etc. there’s a quick learning curve as you set up your initial presence but you’re not going to have to go in there every day trying to interact with people. It’s an asynchronous communication tool. Basically, you can have a web site or your profile up there running 24 hours a day whether or not you’re awake, on vacation or just hanging out with your friends. This is the early promise of the Web as it was fulfilled so long ago and this is why an e-mail address was the early killer app. It was about the breaking of time and space boundaries, thus reducing the marginal costs of keeping up on your hobbies, keeping up with your friends and relatives and learning about the world around you.
However, Second Life and other virtual worlds, want to re-introduce those old barriers of time and space by subjecting you to a 3D experience. Sure, you can teleport and use SLURLs, but the server limitations on Second Life reimpose a kind of time/space barrier (more like a calculation barrier) as to how many people can congregate in one space. I keep asking myself, why would I want that? Why reimpose what us sci-fi nerds call meatspace back into cyberspace? Sure, as a learning tool and as a simulation, it’s incredibly useful, but simulations and learning tools demand more attention from a user base that is still primarily preoccupied with you guessed it, Myspace and Facebook. Worse yet, in order to really make your presence interactive, you have to be at the keyboard meeting and greeting your visitors. That puts you right back into the pre-Internet labor proposition for a real storefront. Why would notoriously non-entrepreneurial nonprofits want to do this?
And this will ALWAYS be the case for every virtual world until a virtual world becomes successful at incorporating current Web 2.0 properties. Virtual worlds are attention-grabbers but for all the wrong reasons, they take up your entire user interface, they grab keyboard interrupts, and they require client-side downloads. There needs to be a way to merge a social networking experience into Second Life and that hasn’t been done yet. Until then, Second Life is a very intriguing but disappointing sideshow.
Which leads me to the fundamental and perhaps most difficult problems for nonprofits in Second Life: marketing and fundraising. Marketing is primarily a numbers game, the harnessing of statistical data towards the achievement of one goal: making money. It’s strictly an issue of finding where the most people are who like your message, coming up with a campaign, and then executing that campaign well. In that manner, I would be much more likely to endorse Facebook’s Causes application over Second Life simply on the numbers alone. Second Life’s 20,000 concurrent users is impressive but is dwarfed in comparison by existing social networks. Project Agape’s Causes has one million users on it and they all opted-in. And they raised $100k without even doing a virtual walk-a-thon. My guess is that Causes will ramp up much faster than Second Life will and within the first year of operation will easily outstrip same year donations for nonprofits in Second Life.
Just for fun — here’s a video of Second Life in the real world…
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That video is HILARIOUS. It’s exactly why I stopped going into Second Life. Too frustrating!
That’s a tough-but-fair analysis. I think Second Life is nearing the end of its hype cycle (but hey, at least it outlasted Twitter!)
Thanks Jon, every time I read the hype I keep thinking maybe I’m completely wrong or I’ve lost my mind. It’s hard for me to understand the appeal virtual worlds will have for an increasingly distracted Web user whose reservoir of attention is very finite. I think virtual worlds make sense IF you have Web 2.0 properties adhering to them. I don’t really feel the Web 2.0 love in Second Life — it’s completely the opposite. I can’t simply pack up my Web 2.0 properties and still have them ticking away in the SL interface. How nice would it be if I could uh… Twitter in Second Life or get updates to Facebook profiles of my friends? Or even to have an avatar that kinda acts like me introducing people to my profile goodness? I can’t do that right now but I suspect people will want that when the one, true virtual world comes along.
While I agree about the marginal costs of Second Life, there are real costs associated with Project Agape Causes that are being ignored.
The reports sent with checks to non-profits from Project Agrape have no data on what Cause led to the contribution and non-profits have no control over what causes can be associated with their non-profit. The costs are both the admin time to figure out how to allocate these small donations and the managaement and potential legal costs associated with dealing with Causes promising fund allocations that are either tied to projects that the organization does not work on or are outright illegal (search causes for “president” to see Causes that have been created for donations to 501c3′s to engage in elections).
Great points there, Ken. I’ll follow up with Project Agape and try to see how they will handle your points. You’re right, what does Project Agape do with illegal causes and how do they handle paper trails for their checks?
I suspect that they’ll figure this all out eventually but let’s see how they answer…
Also, tell us more about your site: http://www.directchange.org
Hopefully, Project Agape will improve reporting with time, but the challenge of their approach is that they turn all the power over to the people creating the Cause without limitations from the organization that is getting the funds. While I am strong supporter of user-generated causes, charities have legal limitations, which therefore put limitations on how much control donors can have.
In regard to your question about http://www.directchange.org, we are a new charity that was created to leverage web2.0 technologies/approaches to raise funds for African development projects run by Africans. Specifically, we provide both online tools and support for offline events for individuals and groups that want to raise money for specific projects. We started in December 2006 and have raised over $300,000 for our African partners since then.
Several of our volunteer fundraisers have created their own Facebook groups that link to their fundraising pages on our system and others have started to create Facebook Causes.
While we empower our supporters to start and control their own fundraising campaigns since most of the projects we support are run by African NGO’s that do not have US 501c3 status we need to limit supporters to raise funds for projects that we pre-approve (to comply with both IRS and Homeland Security regulations).
Therefore, we are concerned that someone could start a Cause to support an African project that we have not reviewed and connect it to Direct Change. We then would have to go back to the people who joined and/or donated to that Cause (who Agape does not even give an option to opt-in for information from the group) to explain we cannot fund that project.
I doubt such debate is going on in larger non-profits who are most likely just getting the checks without any project designation and just putting the money in their unrestricted accounts.
There are lots of things you can do in Second Life that you can’t do anywhere else (including real life). This makes it a powerful tool, but it doesn’t make it the right tool for every task.
Why discount it just because it doesn’t meet your specific needs right now? So what’s your name in Second Life, Allen? Have you visited the Nonprofit Commons, Better World Island, or Camp Darfur?
It’s Allan Beliveau. I’ve visited all those sites. As an aside, those sites pale in comparison to richer environments I’ve seen on gaming titles such as Counter-Strike or Battlefield 2. They don’t really do a good job of building narrative elements into their story. That’s something that the super popular virtual worlds are good at. I’m still disappointed that SL doesn’t follow first-person shooter conventions for interacting with the environment. My intuition tells me that SL is lacking in the graphical and narrative elements that make other virtual worlds more compelling. It IS a powerful tool but even if you discuss SL purely on its own terms, as a virtual world, it’s clearly not the leader in its own class.
Again, I want to make it clear that SL is not a particularly good fundraising/marketing tool when compared to something like Project Agape’s Causes app. It’s not as viral, scalable, sticky or as open to data mining as Causes is. And in a world of finite resources, I think development directors will have to make a clear choice between a subset of 20,000 concurrent users at Second Life versus a subset of 1.1 million users and growing at Causes. The choice seems very clear as to what to do from that vantage point.
But Allan, that’s like saying that telephones aren’t as good as televisions for conveying videos. It’s apples and oranges. Why do we have to choose?
NGOs need to do a lot more than raise money to succeed, why limit ourselves to only one tool or platform? (Also, I think Causes itself pales in comparison to Change.org.)
Causes now has 1,159,807 users. The momentum has slowed down a bit from 37,000 new users to 27,000 new users PER DAY. This raises the opportunity cost of NOT participating in Causes to a very high level. And that is where the comparisons between Causes and Second Life really succeed — opportunity cost.
There’s only a finite amount of time for each development director. I think it’s clear that this is the time for everyone to look at Causes. The numbers are astronomical and the future is extremely bright for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Sure, the Causes toolset is minimal compared to change.org’s richer toolset but what we’ve seen so far is in effect a beta release. Wait for their full release on July 1st.
I would even suggest that the Causes app has the most momentum behind it of any other fundraising app on the Web. It’s a game changer.
And this is why I find Second Life hype so perplexing to me. The numbers aren’t there, it’s not even best of breed and it’s not even open-platform, let alone open-source. It violates a lot of design rules that IT directors have in their heads when they’re choosing new enterprise technologies.
Totally agree, Allan. Nonprofits, you want to “interact” with potential contributors? Well, then set up a booth at a freakin’ mall! Seriously, that would be much more effective and efficient than dealing with Second Life.
Thanks for dropping by GoodWordEditing.com. What a great blog concept! I’m always looking for ways to learn more about nonprofit entrepreneurism.
You do a great job here of explaining why certain web apps work better than others. Blogging is somewhere between email and Second Life. Not quite hands free, but also not quite real time.
Very helpful insights. We are just getting started in Second Life and the learning curve is definitely a drag. We factor that in to our exploration of new technologies, but we also look to engage volunteers who have particular interests and skills – to flatten our learning curve. Managing this brings its own “costs” and risks. We don’t know what we don’t know. Our focus on innovation and looking for ways to leverage new social networking and technology tools to drive down costs and the opportunity to find hidden value in untapped veins drives our progress forward. If the spaghetti sticks on the wall, we go deeper… if it slides off, we clean up the mess and cook another pot. In our free social market, we can find and engage untapped volunteer resources – individuals and businesses who have not yet been called on or motivated to act, without necessarily diverting them away from other important social priorities or our other work – not because they are uninterested, but for lack of common interest. We are often asked what relevance this magazine or that magazine will have in meeting child and family literacy needs. Some, like Highlights, or Ranger Rick, or Scientific American are obvious resources. But, how could a bowling magazine be of value or the trade magazine of the “American Pot Stickers Association?” It might just be that bowling magazine or that trade journal that can uniquely inspire the bond around a common interest between a mentor and a child learning to read. So diminishing returns aside, some previously untapped value trumps ignoring the possibilities.