During the 1990’s, the Internet was primarily focused on providing information and services in a top-bottom fashion. That means many of the sites were taking printed data and making it available for the general public by digitizing that information. It was revolutionary, but as we approached the new millennium, the focus shifted slowly from the institutions to the end user. The Internet went through a process of reinventing itself. It is then that the terms Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 came into use. Web 1.0 refers to the classic web while Web 2.0 is all about the era of social networking. Looking back at this decade, it is clear that its biggest impact was the ability of people to connect and network directly, thereby bypassing the big institutions.

In many ways online fundraising, also known as e-philanthropy, was born just around the same time as Web 2.0. Since its earliest days, philanthropy was about the human touch. People were asking other people for help and so the appeal had to be personal and emotional. At a first glance, fundraising via the Internet is in stark contrast to that axiom. The human touch, a crucial part of the process, is lost. Still, e-philanthropy is thriving. It has grown over the last decade by over 7000% and while overall philanthropy has decreased during the economic crisis in 2008, e-philanthropy has grown by 44%.

There are many reasons for this phenomenon, many having to do with the power of the long tail and micro-philanthropy. But what is true for buying books on Amazon is not necessarily true for donating money. The answer, in part, is the combined use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook and the equally important use of central portals such as Justgiving and JGooders. All of these sites provide a partial solution for the loss of human touch. People are now able to open individual web pages and make a personal appeal to others and try to raise support for not-for-profit organizations.

But while this new way of philanthropy is rapidly growing, one must not forget that people are still social creatures who need a sense of belonging and expect the one-on-one interaction even if they decide to donate as little as $5 through an online request. This is why we at JGooders preach to our clients about the need for thank you letters and the importance of cultivating online donors. We must remember that portals and social networks are only tools, however necessary, that help us extend our reach to a larger group of potential donors and other partners for our not-for-profit activity. If we neglect their continuous need for the human interaction, they will seek it elsewhere and we will end up losing them forever.

No one can really predict what lies ahead in the upcoming decade and how online philanthropy will continue to grow or what impact the introduction of Web 3.0 also called the “Semantic Web”, will have on e-philanthropy. But it is a fair assessment to say that the more we spend our time surfing the web, the more likely it is that our giving will shift towards the online. This is good. It is even great. As long as we all remember that at the end of the day, it still all about people that are giving a helping hand to other people.

Happy new decade.

Have you registered for JGooders Online Fundraising Seminar?

Fundraising has undergone a tremendous revolution over the last five years – is your nonprofit keeping up with the times?  Following the success of a one-day online fundraising training seminar earlier this year, JGooders is proud to announce a series of training seminars geared towards helping Nonprofit professionals develop, manage and succeed in online fundraising for their organization.

Over these two days, we will explore the theories underlying the transition from off to online fundraising and provide you with practical, hands-on experience to better the leverage the tools available to you. Sessions will include: Web 2.0/3.0 – What Does it All Mean? The Psychology of the Online Donor, Fundraising in a Modern Marketplace, Writing for the Internet, and more.  This is a unique opportunity to network with your peers, learn from experts, and gain critical fundraising skills.

For JGooders Nonprofit members outside of Israel, we will make seminar materials available early next month.

Date: Monday-Tuesday, November 16-17, 2009

Time: 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Place: College for Academic Studies, Or Yehuda (transportation from Tel Aviv will be provided)

The seminar is open to all, but space is limited. A reduced rate is available for JGooders members and organizations sending more than one representative.

Click here for more information. To register – contact us at nposupport@jgooders.com or at 072-250-4551. The seminar will be conducted in Hebrew.

Ronit Dolev of JGooders speaks at Israeli Presidential Conference 2009

The recent Israeli Presidential Conference brought together world leaders in security, economy, hi-tech, arts and culture to focus on our mutual tomorrow by investigating trends that are shaping the future and exploring actions that could be undertaken towards the betterment of generations to come for all the world’s citizens.

JGooders Co-founder and Chair of the Board, Ronit Dolev, joined other conference speakers including the innovators behind Skype, Wikipedia, Paypal and other hi-tech entrepreneurs.  Her presentation in a panel called “Joogle- Judaism in the Internet Age”, gave the audience an introduction to online giving.

Joogle panel at the Israeli Presidential Conference

The other Joogle panelists were:

Lior Shilat, Co-Founder and CEO of “Galilaea”; Yair Harel, a musician and Director and Chief Editor of piyut.org.il;  Rony Kalinsky, Director of “Kadima Mada – Science Journey Educating for Life”, which gave a fascinating live demonstration of SMART Board teaching  in schools in Israel and the Former Soviet Union; Moshe Vigdor, Director General of the Jewish Agency for Israel; Michael Weiss, Co-Founder and CEO of Jerusalem.com.

There are so many great organizations listed on the JGooders donation platform! Some you may know personally, and others seem appealing from their description. Though each nonprofit has been vetted and interviewed by JGooders, you may want more information before donating. It’s easy to research nonprofits you are interested in supporting using social media.

One of the best things about social media is its transparency. It’s hard to “get away” with untruths nowadays because everything an organization writes, uploads, and talks about online is available for scrutiny. Researching an organization using social media means looking at both the organization’s “official” social media presences, and what other people are posting online about the organization. The great part for you, as a donor, is that you can use all of this information to inform your decisions.

Where does one start researching? Look up the name of the nonprofit at http://namechk.com/. This site checks most social media sites for user name availability. If a nonprofit has registered its name with any social media site, then this search will tell you where to find their official online presences. One important exception: nonprofits often register their names on social sites that they don’t actively use – either to reserve the name or to use at a later date. Here is a screen shot of the site after I searched for the user name profile “Shatil,” a relatively prominent Israeli nonprofit organization.

Check out the sites on which Shatil has a registered username

Find the nonprofit’s officially registered social media profiles and spend some time on them. Do you like what the organization has to say and how the organization says it?  How engaging, or un-engaging, is the nonprofit online? Does it respond to comments? Ask questions? Is it transparent about its challenges? What does this tell you about the organization?

Next, listen to the conversations the nonprofit is not controlling.  I recommend limiting your search efforts to Twitter, Google blog search, Facebook, and of course…looking at what Google has indexed about a particular organization.

Twitter is wonderful because you can search Twitter conversations both in real-time and historically. I prefer the search engine Twazzup http://twazzup.com when searching Twitter because it gives great information about who is tweeting the most about the organization. Plus, you can save each search.

If you don’t want to register for Twazzup, you can easily use the default Twitter search engine without registering. Here is a screen shot of what people are saying about Hebrew University on Twitter using the default Twitter search http://search.twitter.com/.

Hebrew University Twitter Search Results

It is relatively easy to judge from the Twitter search whether or not people are speaking positively about the nonprofit that you want to support. You can also find people who are tweeting about it and send them your questions.

I also recommend a Facebook search in order to find the “unofficial” Facebook groups – groups started by either fans or critics of a nonprofit. Young Judaea has almost a hundred different Facebook Groups – many of them alumni groups. That says a lot about an organization if so many alumni want to reconnect over time.  There may also be Facebook Groups formed just to oppose the efforts of an organization. It is up to you do decide what information may or may not influence your decision to donate.

If you want to dig deeper, type use Google Blog search.  http://blogsearch.google.com/. A search under Google Blogs for “El HaLev,” a women’s self-defense and empowerment organization in Jerusalem, revealed this:  It’s a great way to gain an insight into the way that others are thinking about an organization.

El Halev - Search Google Blogs to see what people say about them

Lastly, if you are thinking about donating to a nonprofit organization in the US, don’t forget to look for it on Charity Navigator!  Charity Navigator http://www.charitynavigator.org/ is an independent evaluator of the financial health largest 5,400 US charities.

The social media conversation is unstoppable, and social media conversation is generally uncontrollable. This means that there is a lot of information out there that can and should inform your decision to donate to a charity. How do you research organizations?

Debra Askanase

Debra Askanase has 20 years of experience working in nonprofit organizations, from Community Organizer to Executive Director. She is the founder and lead consultant at Community Organizer 2.0, a social media strategy firm that works with non-profit organizations and businesses to develop social media strategies, activities and campaigns. She blogs about the intersection of social media, nonprofits, and technology at communityorganizer20.com.

Shana Tova to the JGooders community

In honor of Rosh Hashanah, this post focuses on four social networking ideas for the Jewish community.

Send Holiday Greetings:

When I was a kid, we always saved a space in our Sukkah to stick up the colorful and heavily-glittered Shana Tova cards that my parents received each year from friends and family.  Today, most of these sentimental missives have been replaced by eCards, tweets and Facebook gifts.  My mom and in-laws still mail a few cards, but on the whole, what we send and receive today is virtual (unless you print it out on a piece of paper).

One good reason to send a JGooders Gifting Card is that the virtual greeting (or print – if you choose to have it mailed) actually has a real impact on making the world a better place, because the recipient can choose from hundreds of worthwhile projects to donate the gift amount to on JGooders.com.

Learn from Social Networking:

Writing in the Cleveland Jewish News last month, Lev Gonick presented an eloquent challenge to the Jewish community, “In the next 25 years, tikkun olam needs to translate into repairing our world, right here, as an integrated and intentional effort in making Cleveland and the Jewish community in Cleveland the most innovative, connected, and Internet-aware community we can. If we are to realize the noble goal of repairing the world around us, we need to be able to balance our instincts to improve the lot of others with the more difficult challenge of realizing the deep and profound challenges we face in improving our own communities.”

Lev’s vision includes, “A networked improvement community…an intentional community working to re-imagine, reinvent, and re-invigorate its members. Not exactly a Super Sunday event or joining a synagogue committee for a year, building a networked improvement community is a journey to a promised land filled with giants. It starts with embracing new language, new ideas, new tools, and being prepared to at least consider questioning some of the received wisdom, language, and ideas that have long represented our own sacred cows.”

Tweet:

Fresh on the heels of the Tweet4Shalit campaign, the JIDF has created the #ShanaTova Twitter campaign encouraging people to tweet the hashtag for the Jewish New Year TODAY, September 16^th, to raise awareness for the children’s cancer charity Chai Lifeline.  They write, “‘Tweet #ShanaTova’ is a 24-hour Twitter event where thousands will use the ‘#ShanaTova’ hashtag to accompany all their Tweets, with the goal of making it a top ten Twitter ‘Trending Topic’ two days before Rosh Hashanah…to remind people to think about those less fortunate than themselves, particularly children suffering from life-threatening diseases such as cancer and other debilitating chronic and genetic conditions.”

Share YouTubes:

YouTube is a great outreach tool for introducing the livelier side of Jewish life. Birthright Israel has taken advantage of this by producing three viral videos just in time for Rosh Hashana.  Their amusing High Resolutions series looks at our addiction to social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter, and  encourages young Jews to get a life and …guess what…visit Israel for free.

To finish, we couldn’t resist sharing with you this cute and quirky short clip that is this year’s hit for Rosh Hashanah YouTubes.  Wishing all of our readers a Shana Tova U’Metuka and great year of goodness, action, involvement and fun!

Tova Serkin and fellow panelists at the Jewish Bloggers Conference (photo: Jacob Richman)

The day after the 2^nd International Jewish Bloggers Conference, the buzz is still there.   Like most social media events, the workshops, panels and conversation encompassed not only blogs, but also Twitter, Facebook, Video-streaming, social networks and other forms of social media, both existing and in development.  Discussions ranged from Tikkun Olam to the MASA “Lost” Ad to the Iranian elections and LA singles life.

David Horovitz, Editor- in-Chief of  The Jerusalem Post, explained how rather than a threat to this veteran Israeli newspaper, the growth of electronic media has been tremendously significant, “It took us from being a small foreign-language print publication in Israel, to the largest Jewish website in the world.  We had 45 million page views in 30 days during the 2^nd Lebanon War.”

David Kelsey of Jewcy, spoke about how blogging has created democratization in the media, breaking down socio-economic barriers and making it accessible for everyone to report important events to the public that the mainstream media outlets may not spot or prefer to pass by.

One such event with major impact was referred to by Ron Dermer, Director of Policy Planning in the Prime Minister’s Office, when he recalled blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs who discovered that Reuters had published a doctored photograph during the 2^nd Lebanon War.  This created such a public outcry that Reuters was forced to apologize.

The Jerusalem Post quoted Tova Serkin, JGooders Chief Business Officer, in her caution during her presentation on social media and nonprofits, that that social media is not the magic bullet, but rather a tool that needs to be harnessed.

Here is Tova’s full presentation:

Other JGooders staffers in the media spotlight were COO Eli Shua and Content Manager (and Blog Editor) Tamar Wisemon, who were interviewed by Arutz 7 Hebrew Online TV.

Blogger Yehuda Berlinger provides an excellent, if subjective, account of the entire convention on his blog, Yehuda, although he neglected to mention the exclusive Bloggers Travel Kit, courtesy of the JGooders blog.

And here’s some video coverage from WeJew

If you missed out, make sure to attend next year!

Zack Miller's presentation at the International Jewish Bloggers Conference (photo: Jacob Richman)

Two of the bloggers who presented at the 2nd International Jewish Bloggers Convention spoke about the importance of building trust. What was interesting is that their blogs are so different – Zack Miller writes the “New Rules of Investing” financial blog, while David Bognor is the man behind Treppenwitz, a very personal diary about his life, family and current events in Israel.

A participant asked Zack Miller, “How can you take a non-commercial blog and monetize it without selling your soul?” Zack, an investment advisor who presented on “The Business of Blogging”, responded that everything is built on trust, “Once you have built trust with your readership, you can introduce a useful service that they will clamor for.”

Zack stressed that creating a successful blog is all about content, “Produce the kind of content that people are looking for.” Some of his examples:

a) He spends some time in researching what terms people search for on Google, to check that he is writing on topics that do interest people.

b) If there is fresh news on topics he wrote about previously, he goes back and updates those posts with links to the new information.

c) He regularly goes through his list of followers, particularly on Twitter, to block spam accounts.

d) He uses Linkedin, a business social network, to develop business dealings, particularly through their InMail service, “I have found people to be twice more likely to respond to an InMail message than to a regular email.” Zack adds that Twitter has a similar effect, and has proven to create a more personal relationship with high level business executives who do not use Facebook, but direct emails can only be sent to people who already follow you, which is a little trickier.

Zack admits to being a twitter addict, using it for marketing purposes. He tweets 3-5 times a day about topics in the market that his readers would be interested in, in addition to maintaining his blog, publishing a book and more.  To learn effective online marketing techniques, he recommends CopyBlogger as an excellent resource.

In explaining how to build a relationship and sense of trust on the part of his readers around the world, David Bognor focused on the comments section of a blog, where readers can respond publicly with their reactions to each posting. David encourages comments and recommends anti-spam software to avoid having to heavily moderate comments. A proponent of allowing unrestricted posting of comments, he was asked how to respond to anti-Semitic or anti-Israel comments. He responded that while he prefers all non-spam comments to be posted, when necessary, he has used comment-software that can remove all the vowels in a post, or make it invisible to everyone but the poster. If someone addresses an opinion that others may silently hold too, “then I take the opportunity to respond and explain the error of somebody’s ways.”

David Abitbol of Jewlicious at the Bloggers Convention (Photo: Jacob Richman)

JGooders will be blogging and twittering live from the 2nd International Jewish Bloggers Convention. So these posts may be a little unpolished (we’ll go back and touch them up tomorrow).

First workshop we attended was by David Abitbol, the founder of Jewlicious, one of the most successful Jewish blogs anywhere today, spoke on “Networking for Money: Your Social Network has Value. “Give and Ye Shall Receive.”

David started by saying that the the geeks of yesterday grew up and now run much of the internet infrastructure, such as through Google. He stressed that “Geeks reward geek-like behaviour”, such as sharing, giving and being a good member of the online community.

Jewlicious has English, Russian and soon-to-be-Spanish websites with around 8,000-10,000 visitors daily.  It also have 10,000 twitter followers

David brought up the UJC’s current Jewish Community Heroes campaign. Of the 150,000 votes so far, 40,000 of them are for Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, director of the Jewlicious festivals.  Said David, “When we ask our followers to do something, they do it en masse…When you give them what they want, they will pay you back.”

He added that all these thousands of votes came from people who wanted to show Rabbi Bookstein their public appreciation for the wonderful work that he does.

JGooders asked David if these loyal followers were prepared to give money or just support. He responded that Jewlicious has also succeeded in rallying its readers and followers  to raise money for good causes such as $1,750 for needy Jerusalamites before Pesach, and $3,000 for the Coalition against Human Trafficking.

Clearly Jewlicious is doing good in more ways than one.

Online and offline social action will interact on Web 3.0

From the fourth sector comes Web 3.0.  During the Social Capital Markets‘ conference, SOCAP 09, which took place last week in San Francisco, a panel on “The Future of Social Innovation on the Web” discussed how the web will continue to develop social added value in the next few years.

Beth Kantor quotes Dennis Whittle of Global Giving as defining the future of internet, social action and interaction, “If Web 1.0 is about one-way communication, and web 2.0 is about two-way communication. Web 3.0 is about building a bridge between two-way online communication and offline actions and impact.”

Since there is not complete agreement on exactly what Web 2.0 is, this is just one possible idea of how Web 3.0 will evolve.  But from a social action perspective it is certainly both plausible and desirable.

JGooders and other fourth sector companies would be delighted if Web 3.0 technology works towards actualizing the online experience.  We already serve as a catalyst for people to connect to nonprofit projects and causes that are involved in social action on a daily basis, with the purpose of creating real change in the world and welcome the technological advances that will help us further our vision.