CauseWired

In December, 2007 the foundation created by America Online founder Steve Case and his wife Jean launched an online program aimed at inspiring everyday people to adopt wired causes, and to motivate nonprofit organizations to begin to take advantage of the burgeoning social Internet. Through the first-ever America’s Giving Challenge and Causes Giving Challenge, the Case Foundation staked $750,000 in a series of fundraising contests that ran from mid-December through the following January. The foundation’s leading partners were Facebook and its Causes application created by Project Agape, and Parade, the glossy Sunday newspaper supplement with its massive circulation of 32 million people weekly.

The rules were pretty simple. More than 2,500 organizations were represented by causes created during the Challenge. The Causes Giving Challenge awarded $50,000 to the cause with the most unique donors, $25,000 to the second and third place causes, and $10,000 to the next ten causes. Throughout the Challenge, Causes on Facebook awarded daily winners $1,000 for having the most unique donations in a single day. Any Facebook user could participate by using the Causes application to promote their cause through direct user-to-user messages, and feature it on their profile. In the end, a total of 32,886 donations accounted for $571,686 in donations supporting 747 different organizations - an average gift of $17.38. The Parade portion, which brought in contributions via the magazine’s website, accounted for another $1.2 million from 48,711 donors - for an average donation of about $24, slightly higher. These online fundraisers used widgets - bits of code users could pass around and put on their blogs to urge donations and involvemenet - and relied on charity donation sites Network for Good and GlobalGiving to process gifts. [An important disclosure is necessary: the Case Foundation is a client of Changing Our World, Inc., the consulting firm where I work, and the company has been involved in some of the online causes work of the foundation, although none of the information in this book comes from that relationship.]

As Jean Case, the foundation’s chief executive, observed: ““Thousands of people embraced new technologies, built new online communities, and proved that simple daily actions and small donations can inspire others and tap into their energy and passion to make a difference.” I’d argue that the manner in which the causes were supported on Facebook and through blog-based widgets and other tools on the Parade side of the ledger may count for more in the end than the money that was raised - because getting those contributions involved creating and activating a social network, a group of people who in the process probably learned a bit more about the causes they were supporting - and a group that may well be more open to real activism in the future than names on an email list. Further, I’d suggest that the online social activism portion of the program best-served one of the key goals of the Case commitment - priming the pump of activism with leadership.

And raising that money online took real leadership indeed.

Let’s take one of the top eight finishers in the Parade.com challenge as an example. Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children, a grassroots project of the Sharing Foundation, garnered 1,650 donations totaling $41,673 - and won a $50,000 grant from the Case Foundation for finishing in the top four among international causes. I know a little more about the foundation’s work in Cambodia, and the Route Out of Poverty program, which teaches Khmer to 100 children of illiterate farmers, and English to over 500 students seeking to move beyond subsistence farming. I know that thousands of Cambodian children grow up illiterate, with very few educational options. I also know that the Sharing Foundation’s Khmer literacy school helps farm children learn their native alphabet and numbers well enough to attend elementary school. I know that its English Language Program offers village students from eight to 18 the opportunity to learn Cambodia’s language of commerce, allowing them to obtain jobs in tourism and word processing. But I don’t know this because of a website, or a Facebook profile, or a cool blog widget, or a well-publicized giving challenge.

I know all of this because of Beth Kanter.

GlobalGiving tracked 1,650 donations to Route Out of Poverty for Cambodian Children - and one of them was mine. And I made the list because of Beth, a Boston-based consultant who is one of the Web’s most ardent champions of online social activism. In addition to her blogging, coaching work and consulting, Beth is passionate about the southeast Asian nation of Cambodia. A few years ago, sheadopted two Khmer children, and is quite passionate about helping them to know about their homeland and celebrate their culture. Beth writes about Khmer culture and technology at Cambodia4kids blog and maintains a web site with the same name that provides information for U.S. teachers and parents. Her Typing To Learn Khmer blog is where she practices her very basic Khmer language skills using Khmer Unicode. She has covered the Cambodian Blogosphere as an author for Global Voices Online, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet and Law at Harvard University.

In addition to her many accomplishments, Beth is something of a noodge - which in the kinder version of the Yiddish translation means “someone who pushes you, sometimes to the point of annoyance.” When I asked Beth for some information related to this book, she very kindly held her hand out, digital palm up. A member of the board of the Sharing Foundation, she was passionately committed to ensuring that its Cambodian cause made the top four finishers in the Case Foundation contest - and an inquiring journalist who is an only an online acquaintance simply didn’t qualify for a free pass. Every time I asked a question, Beth would shoot back some version of: “the deadline’s coming, did you make your gift yet?”

Beth bugged a lot of people, posted to her blog, and urged others to post the widget - a small graphic showing Cambodian children with the current giving levels of the campaign. I finally made a small gift, and posted the widget to my own blog. Other people asked me about and I told them what I knew. And some them went on to make donations. Now we’re all savvy about the small foundation changing the lives of poor Cambodian children. Beth’s leadership brought in needed funds, but it also created real awareness and a network of potential supporters for the future.

And there was a small reward, in addition to Beth’s hearty thanks. In March, two months after the Case challenges ended, Dr. Nancy Hendrie, the president of the Sharing Foundation, sent Beth a video that she posted to her blog and sent around the donors. Only ten seconds long, it nonetheless connected a frenzied online giving contest with real-world recipients. It shows dozens of small children sitting on the porch of the Roteang Orphanage. Prompted by an adult voice off camera, the smiling children shout a few words as loud as their voices would allow them - Thankyou! American! Challenge! Yaaaay!

The Christian Science Monitor notes that “90 percent of college-bound high school seniors have done community service – partly to be attractive to colleges, but partly out of goodwill,” and goes on to take a look how that translates online. The piece focuses on the work of the Case Foundation (disclosure: my firm does work for it) and the $750,000 it has committed to the America’s Giving Challenge and the Causes Giving Challenge on Facebook. And it also notes the growth of philanthropy among the elementary school set in the popular Club Penguin:

Over the holidays, 2.5 million children who play on the popular Club Penguin site (owned by Walt Disney), donated virtual coins earned by their virtual penguins. Club Penguin turned the play donations into a real gift of $1 million, dividing it among three major charities based on the children’s preferences.

The article’s conclusion: “The Internet and young givers are a natural match.”

Say what you will about the results, but you can’t argue the method. Last night’s Iowa caucuses were totally “CauseWired,” if you’ll pardon my attept to turn a book title into geekspeak. From the hordes of young and indepenent voters who migrated from Facebook and MySpace to actual caucus sites in Iowa for Barack Obama to Mike Huckabee’s network of Christian voters and a GOP Twitter network to Ron Paul’s surprising double-digit finish after wildly successful online organizing, social networks put feet on the ground - and fired up a new, younger, better-wired electorate like never before.

Blogger Elaine Young asked the question aloud - the one that some us were asking a lot (in addition to who won and lost) last night:

My question is actually simpler…well…maybe not. What does social media have to do with it? Did the Twittering and Facebooking and MySpacing and Action Centers and blogging make a difference and get more people out to caucus or help spread the word in any way?

I don’t think we know the full answer yet, and the race is far from over. But I do think Obama’s showing was particularly important. All along, he’s been the leader in Facebook and MySpace friends, racking up millions of youthful followers - but many pundits doubted aloud whether that kind of light social networking around a popular candidate would have any real effect on an election. After all, they’d argued, candidates have pinned their hopes on the youth vote and been disappointed since Gene McCarty tramped through the snow in New Hampshire back in ‘68. But it was very clear last night the old formula is changing, especially for Democrats. Chris Bowers, an analyst for the OpenLeft blog, summed it up:

The youth of America isn’t navigating a path between the two parties, they are overwhelmingly siding with one party. What they want is change and youth within the party, not an older generation’s status quo. They want a change in America, and a change in the Democratic Party.

Mike Connery, who blogs about millennial politics at Future Majority, said that younger, wired voters are now at the core of Democratic politics:

Barack Obama may be riding the momentum of a caucus win into New Hampshire, but the real winner in tonight’s Iowa caucus was young voters.

It’s been a long and rocky road for young voters - in the media and in the party - For four years, the media has declared (incorrectly) that young voters were the downfall of Howard Dean, whose over-reliance on an “unreliable demographic” ushered in his defeat in the 2004 caucus. This, despite the fact that youth turnout at the caucus increased that year. For the last year, we’ve heard how Obama’s strategy was foolhardy, and even from the campaign we heard that the youth vote would be “icing on the cake.”

It turns out, it was the cake.

Within the Democratic caucus, more than 46,000 young people participated, and young voters comprised 22% of all caucus-goer - a major increase from four years ago. Connery takes this as a sign:

Young voters are increasingly moving in the direction of Democrats, and tonight, the Obama campaign - thanks to a savvy youth operation that reached out on Facebook and MySpace, at high schools and on college campuses - was able to capitalize on that to attain victory. His win confirms what many have been saying for years now: young people will vote if you pay attention to the, speak to their issues, and reach out. New technologies can certainly help make that initial connection, yet it’s still good old fashioned face to face politicking - peer to peer organizing - that makes the difference. Years ago, when young people began voting Republican during the Reagan Era, Democrats stopped asking young voters to participate. Tonight’s victory shows what individual candidates, and the Democratic Party stand to gain by courting today’s young voters.

Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini, meanwhile, decided to experiment with Twitter, to see if the short-messaging social tool could stay ahead of the results/spin curve during last night’s action.

When I first floated the idea of collecting Iowa Caucus results through the microblogging social network Twitter, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Iowa is a small state, and not particularly known for tech-savviness. Would I find anyone willing to whip out their phone in the middle of a caucus and text in the results?

Result? Affirmative. Ruffini, who organized his Twitter group over at the excellent techPresident blog, found that early on the Twitterstream had a clear message: “Very shortly after 7 p.m. central time, all the reports were pointing in a single direction: a big night for Barack Obama.” That was ahead of the TV networks, who were still vaguely talking about entrance polls.

TechPresident also keeps those running lists of friends at the big networks and they turned out to be pretty damned predictive of the Iowa results: Obama has the most Facebook friends on the Democratic side, while Internet phenom Paul does on the GOP side. Number two for the Republicans? Huckabee. I’ve said (and still believe) that the idea of an “Internet President” is far-fetched, but the numbers do show who does the best of organizing and whose followers do the best judge of recruiting other followers.

Ron Paul presents a contradiction to those who believe a totally-wired, socially-networked population will change politics and how we elect candidates. The libertarian Republican Congressman from Texas has been a true gadfly in the GOP race - contesting the legitimacy of the Iraq war while calling for the virtual end to the large Federal government as we know it. And he’s raised more money online that any candidate in either party, keying huge online efforts around Guy Fawkes Night and the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party to highlight his anti-government theme of rebellion. Paul is one of only two candidates to raise $20 million in the final quarter of 2007 - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were the others.

And yet Paul is decidedly an outsider in the GOP race, hated by the establishment and dropped from the next Fox television Republican dabate, even as his polls numbers creep into double-digits for the first time - and he wins the “MySpace primary” on the GOP side, putting himself on equal footting with young people a Democratic superstar Barack Obama. Indeed, although the Democratic candidates had much stronger online social network and netroots operations over the last year- Hillary Clinton’s was the strongest, but Chris Dodd’s was very good as well - the Republicans’ top tier has no one who can match Paul’s effort.

Yet if you believe the polls, the votes aren’t there. As the 2008 election kicks off tonight in Iowa, I’m thinking about politics from the CauseWired perspective. ComputerWorld’s Heather Havenstein has an excellent article today on the Web 2.0 efforts of this year’s crop of candidates:

But will the number of Facebook “friends” a candidate has amassed or the number of YouTube video views that a campaign tallies really matter in the election? The answer, according to experts watching the first presidential campaign in the Web 2.0 world, is yes and no.

On the social networks, it’s the so-called change or outsider candidates who rule the “friend” wars - Paul and Obama are the big leaders on Facebook and MySpace. Tonight, he start to see if friends also caucus.

Ben Casnocha, the author of My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley has interesting post on his blog about a young Duke University student with a rare disease who has - in part -used Facebook Causes in his battle to fund life-saving research. Ben writes about Josh Sommer, a junior who was diagnosed with chordoma, a rare bone cancer with low survival rates:

He and his mom launched the Chordoma Foundation to promote research of potential cures and galvanize the research community. He works 30 hours a week in Duke labs with professors who have agreed to study the problem. In the meantime, he lobbies congress to implement legislation that would better prevent the accumulation of toxic mold in buildings as toxic mold in his house partly caused his disease.

A few weeks ago, Josh raised $4,200 over three days for his foundation on Facebook “Causes”. By securing the most individual donations within a 24 hour period, he won Facebook’s $1k prize. About 1,300 people (mostly college students - like me) contributed small amounts of money to the cause. Talk about micro-philanthropy!

Micro-philanthropy indeed. I’ve said a bunch of times that the actual funds raised through Causes may be small, but the large numbers of people participating actually sets the table to future involvement and larger fundraising. Here’s a full profile of Josh in the Charlotte News & Observer.

Want proof that social networks are effective tools for social change? Just watch the dictators in action. Facebook, the popular social site often used by political activists to organize members around global causes has been banned in Syria, reportedly over fears of Israeli “infiltration,” reports the Associated Press. Comments the Seattle PI’s Monica Guzman:

The move comes as no surprise to some Web-savvy Syrians whose online reaction has been translated and summarized on Global Voices Online. But as American lives become more and more entrenched in the online world, it can be easy to forget that some governments wield the Internet switch as a political tool, protecting their hegemony by restricting their citizens’ participation in the global network.

Guzman also notes that 1,800 people have joined the Facebook group “Don’t Block FACEBOOK In SYRIA !! …”

I’d missed this great piece in the Washington Post the week before last about the cause of liberal democracy in the Arab Middle East, and how young activists are using social networking tools to plan for a more open, democratic future. Six months ago, Ahmed Samih, the 28-year-old director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies in Cair, founded a Facebook group called “What happens when Hosni Mubarak dies?” writes Jackson Diehl. Now the group has 2,741 members, almost all of them Egyptian. Reports Diehl:

Facebook and YouTube are where the young Egyptian democracy movement lives — mostly out of reach of Mubarak’s secret police. There are more than 60 Facebook groups devoted to liberal Egyptian causes; many of them have thousands of members. On YouTube, one can find hundreds of video clips showing demonstrations for human rights in Egypt, speeches by liberal activists, sermons by reformist Muslim clerics — and torture by Mubarak’s security forces, captured on cellphones.

It’s another example of social networks being used for serious, real-world organizing.

Philanthropy blogger Sean Stannard-Stockton has his list for predictions for the nonprofit sector up, and here’s number 10 - certainly one I’ll be paying close attention to over the coming months as I work on this book:

After Facebook’s Causes application is believed to have played a significant role in the increased voter turnout for the 2008 presidential election among 18- to 24-year-olds, charities recognize the potential of social-media tools and finally get serious about integrated online strategies.

Could very well be. Facebook Causes has had an impressive early run,  with many thousands of people signing on. The money raised is small, but I’m bullish on what the activity means even beyond the fundraising.

Ah, good old 1996 - the first of our “wired” national elections. Bill Clinton versus Bob Dole, with special guest appearances by Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Lamar Alexander. The information superhighway, online debate transcripts, participatory democracy, candidates on email - and all that jazz. We were so smart then.

Fast forward to the 2008 cycle. The campaigns are now super-wired, with vast email lists, major online contributions, multiple blogs, social networks, viral videos - the works. Yet, we’re no closer to choosing the “Internet President” than we were in 1996. TechPresident has done a super job of covering the race from a CauseWired point of view - which candidates have best virtual field operations, best digital media strategies, best penetration on Facebook and MySpace and the like.

But that doesn’t mean that the best-wired candidates are the technology candidates. So I found the efforts at TechCrunch to endorse “The First Tech President” kind of quaint, in a way - and so reminiscent of those mid-90s days:

TechCrunch wants to provide a voice for digital policy and technology issues in the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, and so we’ve decided to hold our own political primaries online.

A noble effort, and it’s a good think for Silicon Valley types to pay more attention to politics beyond their usual knee-jerk libertarian views as a business community. But no convention delegates come that “primary” and it’s very unlikely that the results will spur actual voters.

Besides, it seems to me the candidates, especially on the Democratic side (with due respect to online fundraising phenomenon Ron Paul), have moved way beyond hankering for that label - they’re not just pontificating on the importance of technology to the American economy. They’re some of the savviest consumers of media technology in the world. The campaign of the non-traditional Republican Paul, with his vast army of unpaid but highly-wired campaign supporters, pretty much defines the power of social networks in national politics; but the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and - to a lesser respect - Barack Obama also seem to really understand the tools of the network, and use them to their best advantage.

So with respect to TechCrunch for a decent idea, I think the notion of the first “tech president” in 2008 is antiquated. Don’t look behind any more for the politicians in their adoption and use of interconnected digital networks, look around you - or look farther down the road.

When 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan died on Dec. 20th while awaiting a liver transplant her insurance company refused to pay for until it was too late, her case moved beyond one family’s desperate struggle to save a young life and become a cause for thousands of people who discovered her case on the Internet - on blogs, in Facebook, on YouTube, in their Twitter feeds. I found out about Nataline from Jason Calacanis, an old friend from our Silicon Alley days in the 90s. Jason posted on his blog and into his Twitter stream (I don’t remember which I saw first) and like many others, I was immediately struck by the story.

A leukemia patient, Nataline needed a new liver after her treatment for the blood disorder caused series complications. Her insurer, Cigna, derided the operation as “too experimental.” The family hired a lawyer and organized friends to pressure Cigna to change its mind. Cigna appears to have reversed its decision to deny the transplant after about 150 teenagers and nurses protested outside its Glendale office Thursday, according to ABC News. But it was too late. After the teen’s death, family attorney Mark Geragos said that Cigna “maliciously killed her” and asked for murder or manslaughter charges against Cigna HealthCare.

I’d read nothing of this until this headline showed up in my feeds - CIGNA kills Nataline Sarkisyan. Wow, Jason’s headline certainly got my attention and as it did for thousands of others, the full story pulled at the heartstrings and stoked a sense of anger and outrage. Now, Jason Calacanis is more than your average blogger - the man’s a brilliant promoter and created a series of successful Internet properties during a decade-long career that began when he crossed the river from Brooklyn as a young lad with a certain, shall we say, attitude toward those who might get in his way. “15 Billion dollar market cap… almost 20B in revenue… you can’t afford a transplant?!” he ranted. Then he posted the names and titles of Cigna’s top executives, asking his considerable readership to go after them directly. And as the CEO of the startup Mahalo, a socially-wired search engine with results created by human editors instead of algorithms, he directed the creation of a section dedicated to the case. The page is filled with links to mainstream media stories and blog posts about Nataline, but it leads with a moving video that was created and post on YouTube by Nataline’s brother - after she was denied by Cigna, but before her death.

Nataline Sarkisyan was already a cause before her death became a national headline. An hour or so after I read Jason’s post, I checked in on Facebook to deal with the usual requests to test my movie knowledge, poke somebody back, or rate a new band. And there was an invitation to join a new group - CIGNA is Sicko - with 80 new members. Meanwhile, the YouTube video has been seen more than 15,000 times. The memorial service was yesterday in California, but the cause is still growing. Who’s willing to be the death of Nataline Sarkisyan becomes an issue in the 2008 Presidential campaign? Especially given the importance of the health insurance debate. The progressive group blog DailyKos has already made it a top story. We’ll stay tuned.