Originally published on the TechSoup Blog.

There's been a lot of discussion over the past week about Causes leaving MySpace and becoming a Facebook-only application. In a sense, the news isn't that surprising (being a for-profit company, Causes must focus on platforms generating the most commercial interest), but it's raised a lot of questions about how closely the nonprofit community aligns itself with commercial tools.

My colleague Amy wrote in a Stanford Social Innovation Review column, "The debate around social media and the Internet in general as a leveling force is still heated from all sides. Yes you can claim that anyone has the power to blog, but that's really only the people who have access to the tools and the time and the empowerment. The access debate aside, the removal of Causes from MySpace where there are active communities of supporters means 'equal opportunity activism' is defined by only certain communities." If nonprofits have the goal of making more resources available to more people, what happens when the tools we're using seem to undermine those goals? Amy points out danah boyd's much-discussed research on the socioeconomic and racial differences between MySpace and Facebook users. Justin Massa goes so far as to call the move redlining: "Causes' justification sounds an awful lot like what financial institutions and the real estate industry used to say about poor and minority neighborhoods."

Marshall at ReadWriteWeb snaps:

Causes co-founder Sean Parker poses sitting with crossed legs in his photo on the company profile page; his mission statement begins with the words "According to the historical Buddha..." It's hard to imagine a beneficent religious figure that would ditch MySpace for Facebook, isn't it? Perhaps "the historical Buddha" would choose to pull up stakes from the 11th most popular website in the world if the people were too shallow and go to the hip social network where the money-raising action is.

Later in his post, Marshall asks, "By pulling out of MySpace, is Causes abandoning some of the people who need it most? Or is MySpace a bad place to do political organizing anyway? Or, is Causes just not a great way to organize and fundraise?" Good question, particularly in the midst of serious questions about social media's ROI for nonprofits. Just this morning, Robert posted the latest study on fundraising through social media. Many people would agree that social networking can be an important part of a nonprofit's communications and marketing strategy, but it's likely to disappoint if approached solely as fundraising.

Joe Solomon used the NetSquared network to organize a simple online protest of Causes' move, but he's more interested in moving forward than in focusing on Causes. "We're taking this as a moment of deep reflection and thinking-shifting about how communities may have to take the lead on technologies, how we prioritize & encourage open source and open data, and how we can reach out to and engage supporters on social networks."

Michelle Murrain, ever the advocate for independence from commercial software, strikes a more cynical tone:

If we keep building our nonprofit toolsets on proprietary software and for-profit web services, even if they are free (for now) we are going to be bit by this over and over again. The only way we're going to get out of this cycle is to channel this energy and resources into open software (including "open" source apps for proprietary web services), open standards, and open networks things no one can take away.

I love to write blog entries about successful open source efforts like CiviCRM, or the amazing stuff people are doing in the mobile space. Writing blog entries about for-profit web vendors that make economic decisions that hurt nonprofits because we depend on them too much is just not fun.

And for what little it's worth, I agree. I wouldn't work for TechSoup if I didn't believe that partnerships with the private sector are necessary and beneficial, but we must be sure that we're making decisions based on what impacts our missions most deeply, not on what technologies are lucrative or buzzworthy. Projects like Ushahidi and Social Actions are exciting because organizations can build on them, change them, clone them, and restructure them. These tools will stay effective long after they stop being cool.

Be sure to read what others have had to say about these issues over the past week:

• Ivan Boothe
• Beth Kanter
• Allyson Kapin
• Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Justin Massa
• Michelle Murrain
• Joe Solomon
• Amy Sample Ward

Photo: Matthew High, CC license