And thanks!

One answer is to stop using social media as something to do and start using it as a way to motivate other behaviour.

Don’t move your budget to social media from your offline activities. Use your social media budget to drive more traffic to your offline activities. Do it well.

(Congratulations on being picked up at Brazen Careerist)

I don’t disagree with any of that, and want to make it clear that I don’t believe for a second that social media isn’t useful for social good (my blog talks extensively about the power I believe SM has to promote things and get people to take action). My concern is only that there could be a tendency for online chatter to reduce the likelihood for someone to take real-world action.

I may be unintentionally inflating the danger, but it seems to me to be a legitimate concern and one worth discussing.

So my question continues to be, if people are going to keep chatting in social media, and people are going to continue to want to actually do good, how to we ensure that those who really want to do real, actual good work are helped by social media and not impeded by its low barrier for participation?

Capturing information that allows a charity to build a relationship with the donor is almost always the best investment for long term growth.

Where social networking/media has been used successfully is US politics. Barrack Obama is usually the success story written about, but I think Howard Dean is the originator.

Howard Dean launched e-Philanthropy in the American political context. He was the darling of the blogging set. While he used the Internet, it was really a grassroots movement that sprung up around him using the tool meetup.com. Howard Dean listened and read his supporters. He responded to their criticisms and comments. He removed any campaign impediments to grassroots activities. Gary Wolf’s article in January 2004 “Wired” connected his early success with five popular Internet axioms:
• Make the network stupid.
• Let the ants do the work.
• Leaders are places.
• Links attract links.
• Allow the ends to connect.

Make the network stupid was the campaigns approach to not optimizing supporters for anything in particular. The implications were that the central campaign allowed hundreds of independent groups to function without interference. By focusing on a model where information was pushed out, and results were received, but planning, choices and decisions are at the grass roots level there was nothing to interfere with continuous growth.

Let the ants do the work was the part of the model that allowed those in traditional un-influential states to impact the early campaign. “Because the entire Dean system [was] densely linked, the distant work of all the local groups feeds back into the campaign.” The information that was pushed out from headquarters was enhanced by the mesh of volunteers. Materials were sent among groups. Intensive letter writing campaigns from one part of the country changed the outcome in completely different states.

Leaders are places is an interesting way to describe the welcoming approach of the Dean campaign. In effect, Dean’s run for Presidential-nomination was about providing a way – a place – for others to participate. The ease of participation connected bloggers to other bloggers and influenced outcomes.

Links attract links is a way of describing the value of being online early. It’s hard to play catch-up to someone who has already promoted themselves. Especially hard in a political realm where and early approach wrapped up areas that could have been in play. Add in the Internets tendency to trust sites with more links and a late start can be a recipe for disaster.

Allow the ends to connect is a model of democracy where the community is knit and communicates more with each other than with the leader. The distributed nature of the campaign doesn’t guarantee a volunteer input on policy, but it does open a safe place in which to debate the finer points of the campaign with peers. It turns every supporter into someone who can speak for the candidates, recruit new volunteers and influence the outcome.

Howard Dean’s campaign team pulled together an unprecedented race for an unknown. The Internet was critical to the progress Dean made. But as a long shot, he couldn’t overcome traditional party candidates. What he did was educate an entire group about the potential of the Internet in bringing a candidate to the public’s attention and the Internets potential in generating volunteers.

But there are arguments where social media has been used successful to spark real-world beneficial activity. That’s where the Obama online campaign was incredibly successful.

In summary, you’re right. But only because it’s HARD to get it right.

The concern I express is the potential for people who want to help to be satisfied with just talking. The more charities that ask you to tweet or retweet or Fan a page and give you some reward for it (the satisfaction of being conspicuously compassionate), the more I worry that those who may have actually done something now won’t.

This is not currently an entirely statistically defensible worry, I don’t disagree for a second. That sort of data just doesn’t exist (that I’ve been able to find). But I think it’s a legitimate area for discussion at the very least.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment!

Let me ask you this: would you rather have more money raised and a lower percentage of people donating, or less money raised and a higher percentage of people donating? If we can achieve more/higher, I’m all for it. But if I have to take one over the other, I’d probably take the former. It’s true that charities need to catch up with our social networking media, but I would be surprised if it were not generating more donations overall (even if individuals have a lower rate of participation).

That said, I do agree that we (speaking of Americans and presumably Canadians) have a general social obsession with displays of charity. I think it is often polarizing. There are a lot of vocal people out there who ostensibly believe that every act of kindness should be some sort of Markian messianic secret, not to be shared with the world. I was actually quite surprised when I donated to UNICEF and they gave me the option of posting the donation on my Facebook page. Similarly, I generally don’t tell people that I donate my time as a tutor because there’s a social stigma against doing so. I think this trap leads to “safe” displays of support like joining Facebook groups or retweeting links — because if you’re the one person going out of his or her way to pointedly say what you’ve contributed, many people will see you as being ostentatious.