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sixdegrees.org at Net Tuesday meetup
February 23rd, 2007 by ushaAnother great NetSquared Net Tuesday meetup onâ?¦Tuesday this time. Side story: Too many people, including me, wondered about Net Tuesday being on a Wednesday. After an informal survey, the organizers decided to move it to Tuesday, saving themselves quite a few questions in the process.
Katya Andersen (VP of Marketing at Network for Good & author of Robin Hood Marketing) presented on www.sixdegrees.org, a social networking site with a celebrity twist. The celebrity involved is Kevin Bacon who is somehow or the other connected to this six degrees of separation concept. My ignorance of most of the American pop culture or sports references put me at a disadvantage there, but I am guessing the above sentence makes sense to all of you. 
Kevin Bacon approached Network for Good wanting to do something with the sixdegrees.org URL that he had reserved. They decided to create a site where users can sign up to create web badges or widgets to fundraise for their causes from their social network. sixdegrees.org will also create “celebrity badges” where celebrities can fundraise for their favorite causes.
The original idea was that people will give in droves to their favorite celebrity’s badge. Katya mentioned that the week their site launched, a Cone study came out with a survey result that said that only 15% of those surveyed said they would give because a celebrity asked them to. In contrast, a whopping 76% said that they were influenced by friends and family. This did not bode well for their site, but they are working their way through.
They went live in January 2007. In 4 week about 3,000 people created badges. Of these, only 12% have at least one donation and this smaller sub group had raised a total of $150,000 in that time frame. They are currently having a contest of sorts where Kevin Bacon is going to donate $10,000 dollars each to the cause of five of the largest social networkers (I know, MS Word already told me that there is no such word. But it sounds so appropriate!). This being defined as the badge creators who get the most number of donations before March 31. (The donor with the most number of donations is Ali E with 200 donors giving a total of $6,105. Kevin Bacon’s badge has 10 donors who gave $50,260.)
Lessons Learned:
- A promotion they did with AOL that involved users creating their own AIM pages (similar to MySpace pages) was not very successful. They sent out an email message to 16 million users with almost no noticeable response from them. (Raise your hand if you knew about AIM pages.)
- Their technical execution was not as good as it could have been because of time constraints. The entire site is Flash-based and the widget was hard to create for some users. The badge did not work across all external social networking sites. It still does not work on WordPress or MySpace.
- And finally, this application does not tell the user who gave to their badge. They made this decision because they were concerned about the privacy of the donors. (Aside - I thought this was a really bad decision. I ask my friends to give to my badge and have no way of checking or acknowledging those who responded? Hello??)
They are working on fixing this and a few other technical issues in their next release. Like every other Web 2.0 application world, this is still a “learn as you go” experiment in its early stages. However, Katya seems to understand the new donor-powered world better than anyone. So, expect to hear more about www.sixdegrees.org.
February 24th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Another problem with this: If you donate through sixdegrees, NetworkForGood will take 4.75% of your donation dollars before passing through what’s left to the nonprofit you wanted to support. Ouch!
February 26th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Art,
Thanks for pointing out the transaction costs. One thing to note is that not all of the 4.75% goes directly to Network For Good. A portion is earmarked for costs that online transaction processors (credit card companies, merchant banks, etc) charge, which is generally the case with all online transactions.
The GiveWell blog has an ongoing discussion on Network For Good charges and what they are for. It is very informative with Holden’s questions and Katya’s answers. Check it out.
February 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I actually thought that the people who donated through the badge and through Network for Good were allowed to say who they were, or choose to remain anonymous. That way they can be thanked if they want to be?
February 27th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Hi Heather,
It was great to speak to you at the Net Tuesday meetup.
From what I understood, Network For Good (NFG) asks the users if they want to remain anonymous. And if they opt to show their name, NFG shares their information with the organization they donated to. But this is only at the organizational level.
For privacy reasons, NFG elected to keep the names hidden from the “social networkers” who created the badges. So, at the individual level, this information is not shared. Katya mentioned that they are moving away from this approach. The next version of the widget will make it easier for the badge creators to see who donated to their cause.
February 27th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Usha,
It hardly matters that NetworkForGood doesn’t keep the entire 4.75%. What matters is that 4.75% of your donation dollars don’t go to the nonprofit you want to support.
Instead, you can give directly to the nonprofit or through another donation portal, such as JustGive or ChangingThePresent. Whether you give directly or through one of those other portals, the transaction costs are much lower, and more of your money will get to the nonprofits to do good.