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Since I last blogged about Facebook Causes, they’ve continued their meteoric rise as one of the most popular Facebook applications available. Causes currently boasts 1.7 million users, making it the 18^th most popular application available (though sadly still lagging behind the ubiquitous albeit less socially conscious Fortune Cookie application). That’s more than 154% of the user count at the time of my last blog post a few weeks ago, and eight and a half times as many people as used Causes when I first blogged about it. This growth is partially attributable to the growth Facebook continues to experience and partially due to Facebook’s uber-viral effect that make the best applications grow the fastest (By the way, as a side note, all app statistics in this post come from the handy appaholic.com, which measures user counts on all Facebook apps and lets you compare them against each other).

But two new players have recently entered into the Facebook App for non-profits space, both of which are connected to larger mothership sites and make use of those sites capacities to offer additional features. More on them after the jump…

The first new player is Change.org’s application (called, cleverly enough, Change.org). Change.org is centered around the question, “What Do You Want to Change in the World?” Pick your cause de jour and you see a few options for how you can effect change: join, donate or take action. While the last is still forthcoming in the Facebook version of Change.org, “Join” lets you add your name to the supporter rolls and “Donate” takes you to list of NPOs that are working on that goal. Don’t see your non-profit? You can recommend it, but be warned: if people don’t think it fits they can rate it down until it falls off the list (so you won’t see the NRA on a list of groups for the change Stop Gun Violence). This self-moderating allows the organizations that are perceived as doing the most good to rise to the top and be the most likely to receive contributions.

When you make your selection, you can donate through Change.org’s donation form, which lets you give to the unrestricted fund or whichever restricted funds they have set up, each of which have their own goals. Change.org’s donation form also lets you choose how much info to pass along to the organization you’re donating to: your name, your mailing address, and your email. Obviously, you’d prefer if donors chose all of these, but some won’t and this choice balances Facebook’s privacy guidelines with the desires of NPOs to get donor info to thank them and solicit them again later.

Change.org, which is installed by approximately 2,600 users at the time of this writing, has some cool features, but it stresses the larger underlying mission of organizations more than the organizations themselves. This means that those groups with star power have less ability to make use of it, but, conversely, you’re completing with other organizations similar in mission to your own at the donate screen. Each organization has a small blurb to pitch why you should donate to them, but you and your competitors in the space are still side by side, so promoting a change can be a risk since you’ll likely only be raising a portion of the donations. On the other hand, it provides an incentive for similar groups to form a coalition and make a collective push for a given change, knowing that they’ll split the donations.

For more on Change.org, check out Mike Connery’s post at MyDD. He does a good job of laying out the case for creating a community using Facebook rather than trying to build an independent social network:

It’s too early to make any real judgments, but the strategy seems to be at least a jump in the right direction. People stop by FaceBook everyday - for long periods - because they can find information useful and relevant to their daily lives (mostly about their friends). If you want to create awareness or build a constituency for a cause or for a politician, doesn’t it make sense to integrate that advocacy and awareness as much as possible into the daily lives of your potential constituents? Isn’t that part of the philosophy behind a group like Drinking Liberally? FaceBook is where millions of Americans hang out online. If you want to engage them in online activism, it makes sense to do it through these highly trafficked, existing communities rather than attempt to create new communities whole-cloth.

The other newcomer to the Facebook space is Care2’s Petitions App. Petitions, which currently is installed on around 800 profiles, builds off of Care2’s venerable paid list-building space, The Petition Site. Petitions allows you to sign petitions posted at Care2’s main site, as well as creating your own petition. The app is largely an extension of Care2’s existing site, and signing a petition takes you to the signature page on The Petition Site, where you have to enter your email address and other contact info, though can choose to make it anonymous on the public petition.

What the application does well is expand their existing property into the social networking space, and make use of Facebook’s friend inviting capacities. What it could do better is to leverage the rest of Facebook. The application requires you to leave Facebook to take action, and requires you to provide an email address. While many organizations would prefer to just build large email lists, and email remains the bread and butter of online fundraising and advocacy, it makes more and more sense to start establishing alternate streams of communication for users who choose alternate ways of engagement. For a user who became interested in your cause via Facebook, message them via Facebook. It’s among the stickiest sites on the web, and is naturally much more viral than email. Imagine a holiday campaign where users saw their feed full of donations their friends were making to NPO’s - it’s much more visible than an email gift, and gives you passalong value without even requiring them to enter friends’ email addresses.

It begs a question of whether Care2 should segment out their paid co-registration biz into Facebook and not-Facebook - is there more value in a name bought through Facebook more valuable because of viral potential? Is there a value adjustment because of the demographics? Should organizations be able to pay for Care2 only, Facebook only, or a combination of names, at their choice, or is this a way for Care2 to fulfill contracts faster, which wouldn’t work if they let people pick their audience? While the petitions module isn’t big enough to necessitate these questions now, if it grows larger we might see them come up.

Joshua Levy at Personal Democracy Forum had interesting insights on Petitions as well:

Even though itâ??s only porting a fraction of the original site into Facebook, the Care2 app reminds me a lot of Change.org and the Causes app in how easy it is to support an issue. Just click on a couple of links and, if you like, invite your friends, and thatâ??s it. The exception with Petitions, of course, is that you arenâ??t being asked to donate any money. Instead, youâ??re lending your name to petitions against harming housepets, blowing up children, jailing corporate criminals, and so on. Thereâ??s no commitment beyond your signature. Thatâ??s also big difference from Change.org or Causes apps, which I suspect have the unique ability to instill guilt in their users unless they pony up some cash.

Will Change.org or Petitions challenge Causes for the title of King of the Socially Conscious Facebook Apps? They certainly have an uphill climb - Causes has the inertia caused by being the first in the space, and they’re looking at a major rollout soon with more features (read the Causes reviews page and message board for more), and they’ve already raised a significant amount of money (there are no total numbers, but they’ve brought in almost $25,000 for “Save Darfur” alone) and build some big lists (again, no net numbers, but there are 580,000 people following “Support Breast Cancer Research.”). That said, Care2 and Change.org have existing communities that they can encourage to port over, depending on how confidant they are that they’ll succeed in Facebook. Is there room for only one NPO App? Only time will tell.

Take a test drive of the three apps: Causes, Change.org and Petitions. Leave your thoughts in the comments. If there’s another NPO App to consider, mention that as well and I’ll add that to my watch list for the next post on this growing trend.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Marketing, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.