I’ve attended South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) for several years but this year was special since it was my first (last?) as a speaker. My session was intended to be about non-profits using their website to accomplish their mission, but we never seemed to make it there. Since SXSW decided to format it as a discussion, I was relying on content to come from the audience members—who were unfortunately relying on me. The idea of letting people down is not something I’m either terribly familiar or terribly comfortable with, so now I’m sharing what I would’ve said if my session had been just me with a microphone (two turntables optional).

Edge of the Web

Every new medium emerges from the husk of the old, inheriting a number of soon-to-be anachronistic metaphors. The early web brought with it the book’s concept of pages, whose final vestiges as a mode of organizing content have been all but erased by the Web-as-Platform concept. The web as a place where you read is no longer true, if it ever was. The web is where you do.

Should the last point not be self-evident, go now and count how many of your bookmarks are about reading vs buying, selling, searching, inspiring, or communicating. I’ll wait.

One thing we increasingly do on the web is self-organize. On every social network from Facebook to Flickr, we form groups. Most of the time, these groups are purely recreational alliances of common interest. Every once in a while, they are political. Consider some recent examples:

1. The Facebook Bill of Rights & Responsibilities group that achieved greater democracy in the site’s management
2. Concerned citizens flocking to support a designer whose work was stolen by a stock art company
3. Last weekend’s #AmazonFail uprising that investigated why gay, lesbian, and feminist books vanished overnight from best-seller lists

These three particular victories are interesting because they all have two things in common. First, none of their efforts are centered around or guided by an outside organization, non-profit or otherwise. Second, they were all—what’s a nice way of saying this?—wrong.

1. Facebook’s back-pedal traded a vital discussion (Do I “own” my comments on your Wall? Should I have access to them even if you delete your profile?) for Democracy Theatre.
2. The designer, it turns out, may have been plagiarizing others’ work himself.
3. Even Clay Shirky, “Here Comes Everybody” author and post-organizationalist, admits that #AmazonFail was about misguided emotion and not justice.

The lesson that I take from this ad hoc activism is that the general population is neither apathetic nor disorganized. The multitude is brimming with passion about even “niche” issues like intellectual property law or transgender rights (which have received far less media coverage than global warming) and have the means to come together to make demands of top decision-makers. But, given their respective failures, these campaigns also illuminate the need for non-profits to assume a new role in online activism: providing a strategic avenue for collective action.

No more educate-motivate one-two punch? Their most primary roles wrested from them, where does this leave non-profits websites that raise awareness and compel action (two things they no longer need) only to then bill you for it with a donation request?

Your mission, online

It seems appropriate to confess at this point that I feel blessed to work with non-profits on exactly these issues. This post is written not out of frustration with them but a desire to vastly improve their lot.

If a committed and easily mobilized online audience seems like a burden, it’s clearly because we’re looking at the situation incorrectly.

It might be as simple as structure. If your website is handled by Communications, it’s going to be a place to read and not a place to do. If it’s handled by Development, donor conversion is probably your #1 metric. Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, once noted there was a trough of online stagnancy in middle-sized non-profits. The larger have independent web teams, the smaller has a “web team” who also happens to be the Executive Director. At this top level, directly in service to your mission, is precisely where a tool so powerful as “the Internet” belongs.

Is it as simple as looking at your mission and saying, “How can we use the Internet to achieve this?” Almost, but before you go running off to reinvent your whole website, my experience has found two crucial principles that should guide you: sincerity and granularity.

Consider the top 3 actions on WeCanSolveIt.org: sign a petition, tell friends, donate.

Robin Beck, an online organizer and co-worker emeritus of mine (uncharacteristically optimistic here), claims that we’re so used to dodging the Internet’s scams and spams that to really provoke online activism requires a higher order of sincerity. Non-profits are offering big boxes of “make the world a better place” or at least “feel good about yourself”. If we take the lid off and discover instead a “fundraising ploy” or “list-building exercise”, we’re not going to buy another box.

On its most basic level, this means that the action you’re requesting has to directly solve the problem you say it will. Adam Green of MoveOn and Change Congress publicly dropped some science on a recent email action alert he received in a blog post entitled, “Profiles in Bad Online Organizing, Part I”.

I’m not saying the DSCC has no role to play in getting Coleman to step down. I’m just saying they should play an honest and effective role.

But beyond that, it means asking for something that you couldn’t do without your supporters. You have a task that seems impossible, but you’ve figured out how to break down into smaller pieces so—if everyone does their part—it’s a snap. Which brings us to granularity…

A full academic discussion of granularity is available in “Wealth of Networks” if you can wade through it.

The root of granularity is “grain” and sand provides a great metaphor for understanding it. A sand castle is made of very small granular contributions. A single grain or a heaping bucket all contribute to the achievement of building the sand castle. Donations are granular, as supporters can give any amount they choose. Signing a petition is not, as you can only sign it once—lacking the heaping bucket. A video contest is also not, as it takes a high initial investment—lacking the single grain.

Online, this translates into the scope of transactions that your website is capable of handling. Wikis are notoriously successful at granularity. I could write an entire article on “Wookiees” or, if some reason I lacked the time or motivation to do so, I could merely correct someone else’s spelling of “Wookie”. This range of involvement allows for increased participation (and increased accuracy, but that’s a different article).

Enough theory. Let’s see these in action.

A case study

In my final year as Senior Webmaster for Rainforest Action Network, we pulled off an online campaign using exactly these principles. The organization’s mission is:

Rainforest Action Network campaigns for the forests, their inhabitants and the natural systems that sustain life by transforming the global marketplace through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.

The impossible goal was to catalog enough products that contained palm oil or its derivatives to map the supply chain back to the primary forces of deforestation in tropical rainforests. The team consisted of a palm oil campaigner (Brihannala Morgan), an online organizer (Robin Beck, see above), a web designer/developer (me), and three awesome interns.

Step 1 was to ask supporters to go to their local supermarket and find products that contained palm oil, palmitate, etc. For this step, the team created an instructive yet entertaining video on YouTube. We further incentivized the mission by awarding the top “Supermarket Sleuths”.

Step 2 was to ask our online activists to enter the UPC numbers (the form is down now) of products they found. For this we connected to a third-party database to help verify that products were real. Since activists could also mark certain products as not containing palm oil, it was mostly self-regulating.

Step 3 was to ask those same online activists (I use the term “online” loosely here, since they’ve spent most of their time in grocery stores) to return, warning stickers in hand, to mark those products containing palm oil. RAN headquarters followed this up with a letter to companies whose products were getting stickered.

Was it sincere and granular? Cataloging every product that contains palm oil was certainly not something that three staff and three interns, all located in San Francisco, could pull off. It was also sincere in its intention to find the major players in rainforest destruction. The project was granular, too. An individual could find, submit, and/or sticker just one product and still add value or could spend a whole weekend (and we had activists that submitted hundreds). If you just wanted to correct false positives, that was also an option.

Was it successful? Wildly. On the first day of Step 3, the phones were ringing off the hook with companies whose products contained palm oil. A few days and they were disclosing their supply chains. A few weeks and the major producers were calling to schedule meetings.

I don’t want to downplay the amount of energy that the team dedicated to this project but, in absolute terms, it was a small investment. Everything from the online form to the backend database could’ve received a lot more attention—although the stickers were sweet—but they still managed to do the job with only a few weeks of staff time and a few hundred dollars (mostly the stickers). Not bad ROI for getting a meeting with a major player in the palm oil business.

Next steps for your organization

If you’ve read this far and want to shift your website to a mission-driven strategy, here are your next steps:

1. Put together a team. Find folks with a past history of pushing the technology envelope (anyone who secretly signed you up for Twitter or has been caught on Yahoo Pipes will suffice). Balance these with folks who have a handle on the strategic goals of the organization. Bonus points if these are the same folks. Three is ideal.
2. Give the team some space. If they’re successful, these people are about to pull off a task that your organization currently deems impossible. Give them some time to figure out how. Tell them not to come into the office for a week and instead generate 100 ways to accomplish your organization’s mission online. The first few dozen ideas will be boring, but then things will pick up.
3. Ground it in reality. Wow, the team came up with seriously wacky stuff, some of it ignoring current realities. Cut anything that you can’t start small and then slowly build up, along with ideas that aren’t both sincere and granular. From the remaining list, ask the team which idea they’re most excited about and do it first.
4. Provide success indicators and time limits. Measure the impact. At what point will the team get more resources and at what point will you pull the plug or say, “That didn’t work, try something else?” Make the measurements matter to the mission.
5. Start small. Don’t try to do everything out of the gate. Do the most important thing. Then the next. Then the next. All the while, keep an eye on those indicators.
6. Celebrate. It can get lonely on the edge. If you’re really doing something innovative, make sure you take the time to pat yourself on the back. Valuing your team’s motivation, rain or shine, is going to be the key for long-term success. Because…
7. Repeat. The first project may catch or it may not. Even if it does, repeat this process. Figure out how often you can afford to take a chance on something new (every quarter? twice a year? annually?) and re-assemble your team when it’s time.

If this seems exciting but a little bit daunting, then we should talk. Diligent was started with organizations exactly like yours in mind and with a mission “to harness the dynamic and democratic power of the Internet for social change.”

That’s mine, what’s yours?

The basic situation is this: For-profit companies go away if they don’t make money (their stated goal). Non-profit organizations can labor on indefinitely even if they don’t make progress on fulfilling their mission statement (their stated goal).

There are lots of directions to go from here. First, a little clarification. While you’ll frequently see for-profit companies running a loss (i.e. supported by venture capital until they become profitable) those companies do eventually disappear if the market doesn’t support them. Consider Pets.com for an example (described by Wikipedia as “a leading icon of the dot-com bubble”). Contrast this with the (at the time) scathing rebuke of non-profit successes from “Death of Environmentalism“.

Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming. We have strikingly little to show for it.

Fifteen years of not running a profit is relatively unheard of in the for-profit world. After a few quarters, their shareholders are up-in-arms demanding more responsible management. This often means tightening business focus (often accompanied with closing plants and laying off workers), which gets to a fundamental difference between nons and fors. Closing offices and laying off non-profit workers does not help them achieve their mission, in fact it makes it harder. The equivalent in the non-profit world is to “liquidate” their mission, by making it less aggressive and thus easier to achieve. Ta-da, we’re “profitable” again!

The question of “How can non-profits be more like for-profits?” comes up all the time (and the various pros and cons are well-summarized by this article over at N-TEN). Honestly, some afflictions attributed solely to non-profits (like “Founders Syndrome“) can be seen in the for-profit world, as well.

What doesn’t get asked as often is, “How can for-profits be more like non-profits?” Namely, what if the mission of a company shifted from “Make money by producing Product X.” to “Make the best Product X possible.”? I’m not claiming that this isn’t the goal of 90% of the employees of any company, but it’s still not the stated goal. There are obviously financial considerations that make this an unapologetically idealistic and not realistic suggestion, but it’s a worthy thought exercise. How would business practices change?

The specific discussion last night (and I should mention that the representatives for the for-profit-but-not-evil company and non-profit-but-often-frustrating organization tended to agree on a lot) mostly circled around how non-profits keep growing without a way to hold ineffective ones accountable. I would say that, like for-profits, non-profits are providing a product/service/utility that, if the public values, will get funded by donations. It might not be a thing you can hold in your hands (like a Coke can), it may just be a feeling that you’re part of the solution—which many people value even more. This is the beauty behind social entrepreneurship.