A Consultants' Cooperative for Social Actions
Peter Deitz
For the last two weeks, Christine and I have been knocking on the doors
of foundations and companies asking for sponsorship for Social Actions
related to the NetSquared and Stockholm Challenges. So far, no takers.
This experience has reminded me of the urgency for developing a
sustainable model for Social Actions. Below are some ideas I wrote up a
few weeks ago, and intended to post on the list.
Looking forward to your replies,
Peter
=================
Supporting Social Actions through a Consultants' Cooperative
I see a portion of Social Actions evolving into a cooperative of
micro-philanthropy consultants. A number of us in this field do not get
paid to blog and innovate. Most of us do it out of passion. Others see
blogging and innovating as the "marketing budget" for our consulting work.
I would like to form a consultants’ cooperative in which a group of us
bill institutional clients at rates that can also pay for non-billable
work. The revenue stream combined with a modest income from affiliate
programs hosted on Social Actions will permit us to pay the cooperative
members for time spent blogging, attending events, creating new things,
and providing pro-bono work to clients who cannot afford our rates.
I recently came across a cooperative of green energy consultants in
Montreal who are using this model to finance their professional and
volunteer work, as well as their time spent organizing. They have even
used the surplus to income to make grants to local green energy
projects. From what I can tell, they have been successful with this
structure.
The Social Actions mashup and open API will figure prominently in the
kind of consulting contracts that the Social Actions cooperative members
take on. We would approach nonprofits, foundations and traditional
philanthropists with a range of innovative ways to do grant-making and
run nonprofit programs.
Some these options will draw on grant-making and nonprofit programming
built into the social action platforms (coming soon in a few cases).
Others opportunities for grant-making and running nonprofit programs
will be a direct byproduct of the mashup and the open API. More on that
in future emails, if you're curious.
I'm confident that the consultants’ cooperative will be sustainable in
the long run. In fact, I’m pretty convinced that it will be more than
sustainable to the point where we will have resources to reinvest in the
peer-to-peer social change movement.
We will need some financial and professional support in the short term
to develop the cooperative structure, get fiscally sponsored, and
program our way to an open API of peer-to-peer social change campaigns.
For the record, I have no intent to monetize the open API or the mashup.
Those systems need to be completely free and available to the public for
the purpose of spreading opportunities for social engagement to as many
people as possible.
I feel that the moment one tries to limit the flow of data through a
network by monetizing it, the value of the network and the likelihood of
the data spreading are diminished.
A lot of these ideas are in their early stage of formation, so please
bear with me as I hone in on the vision.
Thank you in advance for your feedback.
(Note: I sent these ideas to Erich Broksas of The Case Foundation on
Friday March 28, 2008. He's supportive of the idea but hasn't yet
responded in great detail.)
Philippe Bradley
life experience than for the remuneration. I'm in the UK, which may or
may not mean that I could be helpful as a part time SA 'ambassador'.
Not sure a single, (untested) tool should be the *focus* of the co-
op's consulting though (as seems to be implied by certain parts of
your message). The co-op potentially has more to offer than looking to
shoehorn a tool we happen to 'own' into clients' needs
Peter Deitz
Great points. I'm certain that quite a few members of the consultants
coop will never use the words API or Mashup in their work with clients.
My focus, since it's more tools-based at this point, will lean toward
new applications of the API and the plug-and-play philanthropy solutions
offered by certain social action platforms, including yours when it's
launched.
Hope that clarifies things.
Also, many of the members of this google group will not be actively
involved with the consultants coop. I have put the idea out there to
give you all a sense of how I plan to support myself through this work,
and hopefully, support a few like minded souls who don't have competing
full-time commitments.
I'm glad you're here to help advise and increase our impact.
All the best,
Peter
Beverley
well, having read and re read this outline and coming from a business
perspective more than an IT perspective, this sounds like a
collaboration between all the platforms to cross market. Does this
include a collective collaboration on our services, features or niche
areas in the market?
I am going to play devil's advocate.
As a stand alone company, collaborating with like minded social change
advocates is always welcome. From a business perspective, and from
criticism within the not for profit sector, it is not ideal to have
clients/donors utilize another site to process the same features we
do. Our NGO clients have suggested that as much as they would like
peer to peer programs, they do prefer them to be on their site as
their is value in entrenching donors long term from an NGO
perspective.
The same applies as a business, and whether we like it or not, those
of us who are 'acting' as a business within the third sector do need
to generate a client base within our own niche market from hits on our
page. It would not be ideal to have our clients/donors hopping to
another site.
If the collaboration drove consumerism in the means of donors to our
site, naturally, that would be a sound business decision. Again,
playing devil's advocate, Social Actions, could in essence, replace
all our sites and create one large comprehensive web source for social
change utilizing all the features of our individual sites. This would
alleviate the necessity for us to market our individual solutions.
Where is the business accumen for that decision?
Would I like to outsource some of our niche features to others,
absolutely; and would I like to leverage others solutions within our
own site...absolutely. But do I want to minimalize our web presence
and stance by creating a channel that takes donors away from our
business, absolutely not.
We are here to serve our NGO's best interests. I am not an IT expert
nor in the industry per say. A social entrepreneur who is wanting to
engage the world with the mechanism to 'give'. And create social
change and bottom line sustainability through e-commerce.
Shaking the tree...smiling
Beverley
Julius Huijnk
fully collaborate is one of the main questions I set up in the
'questions' page:
http://groups.google.com/group/social-actions/web/questions?hl=en
Also from a user perspective it can be confusing that content created
on one site ends up on another and content found on one site
originated somewhere else. How would you know you could trust that
content?
"We are here to serve our NGO's best interests."
for Helpalot.org I "don't care" about the NGO's, it's more about the
users finding the best projects. Still, that leaves just about all the
potential problems for Helpalot as for the business-like platforms.
The sooner we find a win-win model, the better. It also would be
easier to get all parties involved that way. Where is the value? Is it
in the owning of the data, or the way you make the data accessible, or
is it the addition of some specific context?
If the sharing is done in a sloppy fashion different branches of the
data might start to grow. Where there is an overlap on data, but
different parts have different updates and it is difficult to 'sync'
them. I think what we'd like is that the owners (and/or the
supporters) of the non-profits are themselves responsible for the main
content of their non-profits. And that it would be best if they could
change there data on one place and 'all platforms' would be updated
immediately with the right data. If we could create that, obviously
you could start asking the quest what the use would be of having
different platforms at all.
If all data is shared with everyone, I guess the only thing you can
'claim' is having the best 'community flavour' or the easiest to use
interface to the data. Different platforms experiment with different
features, flavours and mashing up of different contextual information.
This evolution might bring one 'winner' or it just keeps all the users
confused and stops us from creating that easy please for people to
find good information on non-profits and for non-profits to
communicate to (potential) supporters.
Well, I could write on and on about this, because it is rather
fundamental to how we spend our energy. It is also fundamental to the
future of my Helpalot.org. I guess it would be best if it would be
really clear what the different goals of the different platforms are
so we can be sure that we are not fishing in too much of the same
waters (the goal of Helpalot: making it easier to find charity
projects you trust.). And if some goals overlap too much, we need to
find some form of collaboration that seems fair for all. I'm curious
what different models people can find on how to collaborate in a way
that everyone wins.
Julius
Beverley Pomeroy
Beverley Claire Pomeroy
Pinc Productions Inc.
Ph. 604.683.PINC(7462)
Fax 604.683.7464
Mobile 604.616.6199
Email beve...@pincproductions.ca
Building community family relationships, project by project.
www.pincgiving.com
Peter Deitz
Thank you for this thought-provoking exchange. You are helping me to
think of Social Actions in new ways.
My focus from the start has been on end-users, ie, the individuals and
non-profits that want to engage in peer-to-peer social change
campaigns. For me, it has always been a foregone conclusion that
aggregating content from various social action platforms will help
prospective supporters find their way to interesting campaigns. If more
people end up supporting worthwhile campaigns, then there must also be a
net-gain for the participating social action platforms.
Beverley's points remind me that we also need to find ways to 'sell'
this collaborative initiative to the participating social action
platforms. The fact that the Social Actions open API and derivative
mashups could help to uplift communities through p2p initiatives isn't
enough to ensure the whole hearted participation of multiple-bottom line
social action platforms.
Is the solution to limit the number of platforms, to ensure greater
exposure for the platforms that do join (ie, an airline alliance)?
That's a good question. From my perspective, limiting the number of
participating platforms would defeat the purpose of aggregation. What
if Google said it only wanted to help people search for webpages from
1,500 sources? That would help people find some content, but not
necessarily the most relevant content. Social Actions has to remain
open to any non-fraudulent platform in order to help the end-users of
the API find their way to relevant actionable content.
The value to social action platforms may come in our ability to leverage
all of their needs through the networked model. In the same way that
PincGiving was able to negotiate exceptionally low processing rates from
credit card companies on behalf of all of the NGOs that end up receiving
donations through PincGiving, Social Actions may be able to negotiate
high-value addons for the social action platforms at costs that could
not be achieved through acting alone.
A few examples,
1) what if Social Actions was able to get a GIS company to develop a
simple way for users of social action platforms to specify really
specific information about the areas impacted by a given campaign?
Custom-building that feature for each platform wouldn't be financially
feasible, unless it was a platform's niche area. But sharing the cost
across several platforms could increase the utility of each platform at
reduced costs.
2) what if Social Actions was able to convince Reuters, CNN, and BBC to
list actionable content next to leading news stories? Every so often
each of the platforms participating in Social Actions would get featured
on a major news story, resulting in unprecedented traffic to an
otherwise random peer-to-peer social change campaign. Reuters, CNN, and
BBC probably wouldn't do this for a single platform, but they might if a
recommendation engine existed that was able to pull the most relevant
campaigns for a particular news story from 29+ social action platforms.
3) what if Social Actions were able to secure $5 million in matching
grants for peer-to-peer social change campaigns targeting women's rights
issues. The qualifying campaigns would have to be listed on one of the
social action platforms participating in the open API. NetworkforGood
has proven that matching grants are effective stimuli for converting
prospective donors into actual donors. The $5 million in matching
grants that Social Actions was able to secure would end up benefiting
each of the participating social action platforms. Platforms that chose
not to participate in Social Actions would not see any new donations in
response to this windfall.
For the staff and founders of social action platforms, how do these
scenarios sound to you? I want to ensure that there is value in joining
Social Actions, but I also don't want to create an exclusive club in
which new platforms aren't welcome.
All the best,
Peter
Beverley Pomeroy wrote:
> Here at our organization, we actually did market research on all
> available platforms out there nationally and internationally. We
> compared a series of pre defined criteria in order to leverage what we
> do and how we do it more effectively, efficiently, different all together.
>
> So you are right, every platform has its own business direction; the
> community they serve, how they serve that community, how they earn
> revenue if any, and their target markets. Reminds me of a BNI,
> business networking international; where you have pre defined platform
> requirements. BNI allows X amount of realtors, accountants, lawyers,
> etc etc. Social Actions almost needs to act the same way, where there
> is a set number of platforms, aka members, who are part of the
> collaborative.
>
> The roles of the Social Actions group is for referrals for each of us
> in our niche market; be it peer to peer, e-com, or like pledgealot.org
> <http://pledgealot.org>, giving us viable campaigns our donors can get
> Email beve...@pincproductions.ca <mailto:beve...@pincproductions.ca>
>
> Building community family relationships, project by project.
>
Philippe Bradley
is undergoing a very, very rapid transition into openness, away from
traditional walled garden approaches which you believe are the
superior business strategy. SocialActions, as the name implies, is
concerned with social endeavours, the key to which is getting traction
and critical mass around social objects e.g. philanthropic projects.
By providing your org's social objects to socialactions, you leverage
the platform and multiply your chances of attracting enough users to
reach critical mass for your social action to be a success.
Is there any question whether Twitter would have been such a roaring
success without the API on which close to a hundred clients,
interfaces and mashups have been built? In terms of business acumen,
it was the best possible move for gaining traction as a social (i.e.
autocorrelating/positive feedback-supported) venture. How many
websites have suffered because they published an RSS feed allowing
their data to be mashed up/aggregated by Google Reader, MS Outlook,
Netvibes, etc? What about widgets, Facebook applications, etc?
Remarkably few. The evidence suggests that this transition - which, by
the way, there doesn't seem to be any way to successfully resist - is
going to continue its sweep; even Amazon has stopped selling just its
own products, to the benefit of many small/medium sized businesses
that put their objects into the Amazon Marketplace (effectively, an
aggregator), and to the benefit of Amazon, obviously. There is a
symbiosis here that few closed/walled garden parties can ignore -
ESPECIALLY not if they need social/group formation around their
projects.
The ROI for society (if that is who you're trying to benefit) of you
opening up your data for intelligent, meta-level aggregation, is huge,
as you say; that your participation will enrich the value of the
SocialActions aggregator, no question; but as an internal ROI, this
mashup could be an excellent lead/traction generator for your
organisation. There is added risk from not participating, in that you
may end up getting left by the wayside as the internet-wide trend
towards meta-level aggregation leaves potential donors unable/
unwilling to seek out your standaside site. This is a trend that
started long ago with Google et al and shows zero signs of abating. I
think you stand to lose very little, but stand to gain a great deal,
by opting in, especially given that it would be so easy to opt out if
the experiment fails; just shut down your API.
I'd be delighted to discuss the finer points further, especially if
you have any questions or objections - Kind regards! Phil
Beverley Pomeroy
Beverley Claire Pomeroy
Pinc Productions Inc.
Ph. 604.683.PINC(7462)
Fax 604.683.7464
Mobile 604.616.6199
Email beve...@pincproductions.ca
Peter Deitz
inevitability in some ways, of openness and aggregation in today's web
environment. On the openness front, Social Actions is both advocating
for open systems and opening its own.
I don't see Social Actions as a destination site for finding
opportunities to engage. Whatever we create will be instantly
available to any platform that wants to resyndicate the content, add a
feature, and help people find social change campaigns. Think Digg + the
Social Actions content. Or the DayLife + Social Actions mashup that
Vineet mentioned a few emails ago.
The main reason I don't want to form a business model around the
syndication of the Social Actions open API is that I don't want to have
any incentive to restrict access to it, or force unnecessary
advertisements through it. The aggregated "cloud" of campaigns will sit
on a powerful server somewhere and permit unrestricted queries.
With Tom Munnecke now on this list, we can start to unpack how feedback
may be handled by the open API. It's not necessarily in the interest of
social action platforms to highlight inactivity for a large proportion
of campaigns or flag ineffective campaigns. But a third party system
that draws on the open API and builds a system to aggregate 'after
action reports' from campaigns could be very helpful for the intelligent
filtering described earlier today.
By the way, we are also now joined by Erich Broksas of the Case
Foundation. He oversaw the planning and implementation of the Giving
Challenges earlier this year. Erich, welcome to the Google Group.
All the best,
peter
Peter Deitz
The "Meet the Platforms" portion of Social Actions resembles what you
describe below, ie a gallary of the social action platforms available to
individuals and non-profits that are looking for a technology solution.
The ning site that we have created (people.socialactions.com) will also,
in part, serve as a clearing house for info about social platforms and
how they can be used. I see the consultants cooperative and the open
API evolving in a different direction, with less emphasis on the
platforms than on the campaigns themselves We'll have to flesh out
these differences among the four main components of Social Actions in
the "open business plan" google page that Christine is working on.
I agree with you that Social Actions provides an excellent
sponsorship/partnership opportunity for financial institutions,
foundations, and companies that the staff, founders, and users of social
platforms as composing their target audiences. They can approach us
with partnership ideas or simply sponsorship inquiries.
If you know how to go about recruiting corporate and foundation
sponsorship, please enlighten me. So far, my very limited efforts have
proven unsuccessful. I don't know what to be asking for or on what
conditions?
Thanks for sustaining an interest in Social Actions. We'll end up
somewhere very valuable as long as the big questions get answered soon
and the right people (ie, you and others on this list) stay committed.
I'll be sending out more invites to the staff and founders of social
action platforms in the coming week.
All the best,
peter
> Email beve...@pincproductions.ca <mailto:beve...@pincproductions.ca>
>
> Building community family relationships, project by project.
>