Presentation at the Skoll International Social Investor Research Conference (ISIRC) 2009 - a case study about technology aided real time feedback loops in international philanthropy
9. Iran election word of mouth email twitter gatherings YouTube Facebook mass media
10. Twitter and YouTube replace mass media, augment public protests word of mouth gatherings mass media email twitter Facebook
11. Ted Talk Clip on the great firewall of China: How social media undermines efforts by orgs/govs to hide sub-optimal results in the field. http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_cellphones_twitter_facebook_can_make_history.html (queue video from 10:10 to 11:28)
13. Twitter: power of real-time feedback $14.4M â Fri $8.8M â Sat 39% drop-off (a record!) $21.5M â Fri $26.4M â Sat +23% increase Instant-messaging can make or break a film within 24 hours. Friday is the new âOpening Weekend.â
20. Read the whole story online (20 total project updates, visitor postcards, evaluations, and this paper)
21. Case narrative on feedback loops in Western Kenya 1 | Staff visit to say : âWe are listening.â Project: Support 250 orphans through education and sport GG staffer met org staff and youth. Gave away bumper stickers.
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24. Case narrative Staff visit to say: â We are listening.â 4 | evaluator visits, postcard to donors visitors send virtual postcards direct feedback â Org had overwhelming potential but closed leadership and a lack of financial controlsâ - Evaluator "You canât dare speak, you will be kicked out." â Youth Should GG keep SACRENA? All said yes but asked for more oversight.
25. Case narrative Staff visit to say: â We are listening.â visitors send virtual postcards direct feedback evaluator Professor from Univ of Oregon visited and decided to send 2 volunteers. They ran conflict workshops with staff and beneficiaries, took youth on field trip to TYSA â org with same goals. Found mentors. 5 | conflict resolution volunteers help
26. Case narrative Staff visit to say: â We are listening.â visitors send virtual postcards direct feedback evaluator Leaders emerged from youth and formed a new org with volunteer help. Local school kicked out the old founder, favored working with the new org. Volunteers, mentoring 6 | youth form new org
27. Case narrative Staff visit to say: â We are listening.â visitors send virtual postcards direct feedback evaluator Final SMS/phone survey of beneficiaries â âdo you want GG to remove this org?â Everyone voted âyes.â We removed the org. Donors now understand how & why. Volunteers, mentoring 7 | final SMS and phone feedback survey New leadership
28. Case narrative Staff visit to say: â We are listening.â visitors send virtual postcards direct feedback evaluator Volunteers, mentoring 7 | final SMS and phone feedback survey New leadership Final SMS survey Donors have context and a reason to support the new org now. What if we could do more with SMS? First 6 steps took 6 months; SMS survey took 1 day.
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Editor's Notes
Or ⊠teachology-aided feedback loops
Introducing the parts and explaining why each is important.
You all know the technology that connects people. This is where the conversations are.
Weâre trying to integrate this technology into more traditional forms of program evaluation. Weâre not replacing word of mouth, visitors, and evaluations, but we are adding to them in a meaningful way â to create a technology-aided feedback loop for each of our 700 globalgiving projects.
It is important to borrow from what we know about marketing and social media when building a feedback loop. These are the ways nonprofits promote their ideas and fundraise on GG.
This is the best way to hear the people who might speak up.
After the Iran election, new technology allowed the people to converse and give the government (and the world) feedback it could not ignore. Could show a 30 second clip from clay shirky â why technology-aided matters
âŠeven when the leadership suppressed media and public gatherings, there was no question that the election result was NOT endorsed by the majority of Iranians.
Optional â If you want to cut length of talk â just recommend this Ted Talk and move on. This situation does not apply to MOST organization, but Shirky provides an excellent framework for understanding why technology matters in the particular case of an organization that doesnât want its beneficiaries talking directly with donors and revealing their sub-optimal results. This is the particular case we faced with SACRENA. The four points about formal evaluations, formal media: Produced by professionals Comes mostly from outside world (org HQ in our case) Sparse chunks Comes in relatively slowly
Picking a movie is a perfect analogy for picking a globalgiving project. This is the first year where âreal-timeâ feedback has moved millions of dollars away from a bomb and towards a gem in the movie industry. Imagine how much more effectively we could use aid if that same real-time feedback could move donations from bad organization to good ones within days of finding out problems. ALSO â Opponent to the âyou lieâ guy during Obamaâs speech raised $111,000 in 24 hours! (on 9/9/09) Notes: UP was best Friday to Saturday increase in Summer of 2009. Bruno was biggest Friday to Saturday decrease EVER.
(add diagram of donors â orgs â benes relationship. We donât evaluate and fund; we serve all groups by forwarding messages to each group to facilitate more money going to high-impact projects) ( therefore best possible result is efficient transfer of data without filtering â we are outcomes agnostic, as long as the reports are reliable, donors fund the best. Real-time Technology-aided (direct feedback from benes allows us to eliminate the principal agent problem in aid) What is globalgiving? What we do is provide a platform for orgs to raise money and build a reputation on the Internet. Our goal is not to evaluate projects for us, but to provide useful information to others for crowd-sourcing the funding decision. Encourage conversations.
(add diagram of donors â orgs â benes relationship. We donât evaluate and fund; we serve all groups by forwarding messages to each group to facilitate more money going to high-impact projects) ( therefore best possible result is efficient transfer of data without filtering â we are outcomes agnostic, as long as the reports are reliable, donors fund the best. Real-time Technology-aided (direct feedback from benes allows us to eliminate the principal agent problem in aid) What is globalgiving? What we do is provide a platform for orgs to raise money and build a reputation on the Internet. Our goal is not to evaluate projects for us, but to provide useful information to others for crowd-sourcing the funding decision. Encourage conversations.
We believe that donors who âsee resultsâ through our evaluation tools can make better funding decisions and engage in a conversation that improves project implementation.
Evidence project exists, activities ongoing
Project pages are part of a reputation system, as well as a fundraising vehicle.
Staff visits : GG staffer ran a social media workshop and visited this project while he was in town. He met the youth and handed out bumper stickers, similar to a 1-800-hows-my-driving strategy. Purpose: to plant the idea that they can provide feedback
b) visitors : A few weeks later, a pair of graduate students visited this organization as part of a country-wide tour to test a survey. While there, youths sought them out to tell them privately about conflicts the youths had with the projectâs founder. (e) Visitor postcards raised flags â We were supposed to visit the orphanage but we never got the chance, which surprised me since their main project on GlobalGiving has to do with those orphans. 2) [the founder] asked us for a lot of money throughout the day: to rent an expensive car, to pay for footballs and snacks for the school kids, to buy benches for the schools, to get him a digital camera, to tip the driver, to buy drinks for the football team, and more. By the end of the day, I literally had no money in my pockets, and I left feeling a bit taken advantage of, a feeling I did not have at any of the other organizations we visited.â â Throughout the day, [the founder] repeatedly asked me and my partner to purchase things for the soccer team and the children. It was clear that providing for so many beneficiaries weighs heavily on him⊠Itâs a shame because I do believe that [the organization] is doing good work.â
Say: The visitors were approached in private by some youths who wanted to forward a complaint. She directed them to the website on the bumper sticker. (d) Petition (via email) from 8 unhappy youth: urge GG to audit them Online feedback form: âformerly it was [the organization] sporting organization but currently the co-ordinator is evil minded and corrupt.â Emailed petition text: I would like you to know that I am one of the [organization] youths that have been exploited by [the founder] where by we decided to call it quits because many organizations have been sending a lot of money and goods to [the organization] yet the evil minded man is only benefiting himself and his family. Moreover myself and others that have opened their eyes have decided to alert you to come and audit all the amounts that you have been sending to the organization. Also, the Korean Voluntary organization sent him some of the teamâs items yet he decided to swallow everything by himself. (c) Word of mouth feedback During the surveyorsâ visit one community member met privately and asked the visitor to forward his complaints â because formerly as i was one of the footballers and also official members we were being treated with a lot of respect and also we managed to travel to the neighbouring countries for other tournaments after this things over suddenly changedâŠâ
Important point here is that we asked the youths, not the evaluator if we should keep org. We also ask donors â what do you think we should do? We continue to ask these questions throughout process. We talked to Mwangi a 16 year old orphan who dropped out of school in form four due to lack of school fees. We sought his permission to record this discussion on tape, to which he consented. I quote âmy name is Mwangi, I started playing for [this organization] in 2008, I play full back. I dropped out of school this year due to lack of school fees, I was in form four, I do not have any hope of going back to school since my two elder brothers are unemployed and can not help at all. I come for practice twice a day on a daily basis (morning and evening). This project keeps me busy and also keeps me away from getting myself into a lot troubles like doing drugs and other antisocial things that many young people get into due to desperation. I donât even know if I will ever go back to school, the chances are very minimal.â Mwangi continued: â We donât even go to the office or help out with any work at the office. As much as we have been offered the opportunity to join the team, we also have our own challenges with the club, but we are not given a chance to express ourselves. If you do then you are kicked out of the club. This project can help the youth more, if we can be given some roles to play.â "Does the director listen to you?" I asked. "You canât dare speak, you will be kicked out." However, Mwangi affirms that some of them had traveled to Tanzania for a tournament some time last year. [1] When we asked Mwangi and his fellow petitioners whether the organization should continue receiving donations through GlobalGiving, they replied âyesâ at that time, but asked for more oversight. This postcard was sent as part of a larger formal evaluation. When we asked Mwangi and his fellow petitioners whether the organization should continue receiving donations through GlobalGiving, they replied âyesâ at that time, but asked for more oversight. This postcard was sent as part of a larger formal evaluation
Important point here is that we asked the youths, not the evaluator if we should keep org. We also ask donors â what do you think we should do? We continue to ask these questions throughout process. We talked to Mwangi a 16 year old orphan who dropped out of school in form four due to lack of school fees. We sought his permission to record this discussion on tape, to which he consented. I quote âmy name is Mwangi, I started playing for [this organization] in 2008, I play full back. I dropped out of school this year due to lack of school fees, I was in form four, I do not have any hope of going back to school since my two elder brothers are unemployed and can not help at all. I come for practice twice a day on a daily basis (morning and evening). This project keeps me busy and also keeps me away from getting myself into a lot troubles like doing drugs and other antisocial things that many young people get into due to desperation. I donât even know if I will ever go back to school, the chances are very minimal.â Mwangi continued: â We donât even go to the office or help out with any work at the office. As much as we have been offered the opportunity to join the team, we also have our own challenges with the club, but we are not given a chance to express ourselves. If you do then you are kicked out of the club. This project can help the youth more, if we can be given some roles to play.â "Does the director listen to you?" I asked. "You canât dare speak, you will be kicked out." However, Mwangi affirms that some of them had traveled to Tanzania for a tournament some time last year. [1] When we asked Mwangi and his fellow petitioners whether the organization should continue receiving donations through GlobalGiving, they replied âyesâ at that time, but asked for more oversight. This postcard was sent as part of a larger formal evaluation. When we asked Mwangi and his fellow petitioners whether the organization should continue receiving donations through GlobalGiving, they replied âyesâ at that time, but asked for more oversight. This postcard was sent as part of a larger formal evaluation
When youth had options, they and the community switched to support the alternative overnight. [The founder] says the right things in meetings and then immediately begins to operate on his own terms when he leaves.  We also began meeting with many more community members, some of whom were former members.  We heard many stories about how poorly he has treated his members and many accusations of thievery.  I am not saying I believe all of these stories but it also became clear that the conflict was escalating and that I needed to figure something out⊠After discussions with [several youth] involved with [the organization] the decision was made that we would start a new organization that would successfully address the problems in Minyatta
(40 youth and several community members, 3 volunteers, and KVO â another funder that supported Sacrena wants to help us inform other funders on the ground)
(40 youth and several community members, volunteers, and KVO â another funder that supported Sacrena wants to help us inform other funders on the ground)
environment sustaining dialogues that continuously draw attention to a projectâs environment Community turns on founder: clarity allowed us to take immediate action more participation through more channels generates signals that force others to take action to resolve the underlying problems faster direct feedback circumvents the principal/agent problem a voice prevents problems from escalating Cost effective Allows us to work on problems, rather than just pulling funding Donor involvement: donors are a powerful force for triggering responsive behavior from project leaders. They want to retain donors and attract new ones, and take negative comments seriously. Beneficiaries cannot have a voice if donors remain anonymous to each other and the people they aim to help.
environment sustaining dialogues that continuously draw attention to a projectâs environment Community turns on founder: clarity allowed us to take immediate action more participation through more channels generates signals that force others to take action to resolve the underlying problems faster direct feedback circumvents the principal/agent problem a voice prevents problems from escalating Cost effective Allows us to work on problems, rather than just pulling funding Donor involvement: donors are a powerful force for triggering responsive behavior from project leaders. They want to retain donors and attract new ones, and take negative comments seriously. Beneficiaries cannot have a voice if donors remain anonymous to each other and the people they aim to help.