Yesterday, we gave a talk at the NetSquared Mashup Challenge Conference, highlighting how non-profits could use online tools to create and engage their community. We outlined how to create the community, and how to get that community to ‘work’ for the organization’s cause.
Part of talk highlighted how non-profits should share their data whenever possible. Everything from using services like slideshare.net and docstoc.com, to posting stats and knowledge on their blog. Of course we drink our own medicine, so here is a copy of our slides:
In the second half, we list different tools and services that many startups use to engage their community, it’s worth checking out and bookmarking some of the sites.
Another interesting service for sharing data is freebase.com – it’s like wikipedia for data. It accepts data in an open format, so that anybody can chop it up, modify it, work with it, etc.
In the tech industry it’s clear who you’re users are – the people who have signed up to check out your product. Whether they’re activly engaged or not, this is a different question, but broadly speaking you have a clear idea of a ‘user.’
Non-profits – my first true love – have a more difficult time defining users. A user can be any number of stakeholders from the board members who donate their time, individual donors who send in $25 every paycheck, corporations using your brand as part of their CSR, volunteers, and on….
The first thing I learned moving from non profit to high tech is that your users– in all various incarnations – are there for a reason and they want to stick around. “Using your users” means understanding who they are, why they’re there and how you can help them stick around.
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! The top three problems are actually:
Understanding who their donors are and helping them spread the word
Managing insane board members
Understanding who their donors are and helping them spread the word
Solve the real problem! Find out who the people who support your organization really are and go from there. But you have to start soon, because your uesrs aren’t going to wait forever.
Check out this great Q&A session with Seth Godin at the Chronicle of Philanthropy – the topic is ‘Marketing Non Profit Causes’ and he has some great advice.
Is that really the question you want to be asking if you’re behind a web startup?
Yes.
The idea came to mind when a friend/co-founder, Paul, pointed me to this Laughing Squid post about the SF Ignite talks. A fun idea, 5 min to teach/preach an interesting topic.
What have I learned that could make for an interesting talk?
Earlier that morning, I traded emails with a Brazilian who ran a soccer forum on our forum hosting service, about translating his site into Portuguese. The previous week he offered to help with translations. His offer eventually turned into him personally translating about 1,200 phrases!
However, the Brazilian admin was also excited to be providing a service that Portuguese speakers everywhere could benefit from. He loved our forum product and thought it would be a useful product to other Portuguese speakers. Not only would his forum benefit, but future Portuguese forums would reap the benefits as well.
Now this concept is nothing novel, in the tech world, we’ve seen it happen with Open Source software and taken to another level with things like the Creative Commons and wikipedia. Non-profits, political campaigns, and countless other efforts all employ these same methodologies – but this was my first time articulating it as way to grow a small-shop web startup.
So when I had to fill out the brief little form for the SF Ignite talk with just a title and description, it all clicked. I submitted the title knowing that it would have that ‘tongue in check’ feel to get noticed. I guess I was right, they invited me up, and here is a recording of that talk:
After chatting with my fiancée Kristine (a community evangelist at a startup) about this idea, we realized that we held different viewpoints to the approach, but shared an understanding on the overall benefits – a sort of ying and yang to the modus operandi. So we hope to share and contrast our styles right here for you.
