Tom Watson
11/01/2007
A few weeks ago, my 15-year-old daughter and I started a bank, and now we make loans to businesses all over the world. The mechanism that allowed us to do this is Kiva.org, one of the hottest startup organizations in the fast-growing and bustling public commons that exists between social networks and social causes.
Kiva, Swahili for "unity," is a registered 501(c)(3) in California and a microfinance organization that connects small entrepreneurs in developing countries with a network of connected, online lenders. But Kiva is also something of a social network: Not only do you "meet" storekeepers and business owners in Ghana, Mexico and other places, but you can also read the profiles of your co-lenders. Participation is transparent, and the site encourages some degree of virtual partnership.
Individuals will begin to "wear" their causes as manifestations of their personalities. |
Facebook, the vast social-networking platform that began among college students and alumni and has now spread throughout the wired world, is particularly interesting in terms of philanthropy. Recently, the site opened its platform to outside software developers, who quickly added a multitude of services to entertain and connect members.
Replace "application" with "cause" and you get a sense of what a social network with the power of Facebook and its 24 million users can mean to larger organizations—and why social ventures need to seriously consider building social-networking applications, even while they fund and build world-changing organizations.
Portal Power
Of course, a few groups are already hard at work building these types of applications. PlayPumps International is one good example. The organization will install 4,000 water systems (which operate via children-powered playground equipment) throughout sub-Sahara Africa and bring clean water to 10 million people by 2010. More than 900 PlayPumps systems have already been installed in four countries.
While efforts like this are laudable, building support for the mission is tricky in a media landscape where stories about African poverty are vast. Enter the social network. PlayPumps has built a following of more than 500 Facebook members. The practical goal of supporting small-scale fundraising operations is modest. However, the organization’s overall aim is grander in scope: sustainability through a network of linked supporters. More organizations, particularly those that rely on real-world members, and startups trying to gain a foothold will turn to digital social networks to help solve the sustainability question.
I recently did a quick check on Facebook by running a query on
all the groups that my friends (a very loose descriptor on social networks) belong to. I found that the fastest-growing groups in my network are political
or high-tech, but there were also some small, grassroots causes that could
easily pass for social ventures—and some larger ones that are taking advantage
of the network. For example, I’m Going Green, a group backed by the
environment-cause marketing of Starbucks, which partnered with the nonprofit
Global Green USA, has a Facebook group featuring a Planet Green game that
spreads the message of ecology. Its membership currently totals 9,155.
Social network "mashups," which combine two or more Web information streams, are also coming online. Best-known is the collaboration
between Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to employ the Google Earth
satellite imagery program to portray the destruction in Darfur; the effort has
ties to Amnesty International, Save Darfur and the now-requisite Facebook group.
Just a few more bytes wandering around the networked world in
the cause of improving the planet.
Tom Watson is chief strategist for Changing Our World, a philanthropy consulting firm, and publisher of
onPhilanthropy.com.