A chat with Susan Gordon, Non-Profit Coordinator for Causes. She tells us a thing or two about how Causes works, how a medical student used Causes to create a 3.3 million+ strong campaign to fight cancer, and how to get your fumigator to join your Cause.

Can you tell me about Causes and can you tell me about Project Agape?

Project Agape was a name of our company before we launched Causes. Things on Causes and on Facebook have taken off so much that we're just calling ourselves Causes now because that's the product we're really focusing on. But, what's behind is it called Project Agape, but that was really just a functional name.

Just to tell you a little bit about Causes and what it does, Causes is an application on Facebook and on MySpace that empowers individuals, any Facebook user, any MySpace user to create a cause about an issue that they feel passionately about. They can create this issue, upload a picture of it, describe it, why it matters to them. And then, they can connect with any 501(c)(3) non-profit in the country. We have every registered 501(c)(3) in our database, using GuideStar. It really creates tools for empowerment of users, to be able to use their own social networks as activist tools.

It's really being able to empower users to realize the fact that their social network is really powerful, in terms of making a difference in the world, and that they have the tools at their fingertips, in order to spread awareness about issues, to raise money for issues or non-profits that they think are doing great work, and really giving them the tools and empowering them to do that.

OK, and do you mind if I ask what your role is there, what your title is and what you do?

Yes, absolutely. I'm a Non-Profit Coordinator. On one hand, I work with the non-profits, in order to help them along the process of creating a cause, of becoming an official non-profit partner, getting them thinking about how they can use this as a great organizing awareness, fundraising tool, really working with them to figure out what are their goals as an organization, what do they do, and then, how can Causes fit into that? And on the other half of that, I work with the individual activists on the site, as well. There are people on there who might be unaffiliated with a non-profit, but are really excited about using Causes to make a change in the world.

OK, so when you say you have all the non-profits registered . . .

501(c)(3) non-profits, yeah.

So, just because they're on there, are they ready to receive payment through you?

Yes.

Do you receive payments and cut them a check and send it off?

Exactly, so we work with Network For Good, who's a leader in the field of being able to process donations and get it to non-profits in a very safe and secure way. We process donations through them. But there are two levels of involvement. One is if you're a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, you can use Causes, and people can create causes that benefit you.

And then, on the other hand, there's another distinction, which is you can become a non-profit partner; And that gives you a whole suite of tools to track different causes, to download donor contact information of anyone who donates to you, things like that.

Well, that's fantastic, I had no idea that it was so easy.

Part of the benefit of using Causes is just the deep integration with Facebook. And we're learning the lessons of MySpace, too. It's all about the network for Causes. We've got over 11,000,000 users using Causes right now, almost 12,000,000. And that network, on Facebook, is really where the magic happens, I guess.

What are your plans for other social networks? I imagine you're already pretty dialed into OpenSocial. Do you have any other social networks under your radar that you want to integrate with?

Yeah, I mean, right now, we're really focusing on Facebook and MySpace. We got it up and running, but the plan of Causes the first year was about really building that network and about tapping into this network, getting people excited, engaged, joining Causes, creating causes and growing them. We just have some incredible stories about the past year. Our largest cause is now over 3.3 million members in this community. It was really about those numbers and getting people excited and tuned in.

Now, we're really focusing on empowerment and engagement of those users. You're going to see us launching with different features that really let you do more with your cause, engage your users, and really empower people to get more involved and be able to do more with them. We're really focused on being able to do what we're doing on those sites well before we start expanding into all new areas and zones.

Right, which makes sense because you've got such a large audience just between those two.

Exactly.

So now, can you tell me about some of the success stories you're talking about? Which is this cause that has over 3.3 million members?

It's a cause called Support The Campaign For Cancer Prevention. It was originally called, Support The Campaign For Breast Cancer Research. And it was started by a med student, named Eric Ding, who was doing some work at a hospital outside of Boston, called Brigham and Women's Hospital . And he saw the hands-on studies and research that they were doing with breast cancer, the Nurse's Health Study, it's called, and thought, "Gosh, these people are really doing the groundwork, doing the really good research that needs to happen to cure breast cancer. I would love to be able to raise money for them and spread awareness about the fact that these are the people that are really doing a great job."

He started this cause and got his friends involved, started spreading the word, told his med school class, things like that, just started recruiting people. And really, it spread, it spread wildly. People were really excited about being able to find something where they could connect to breast cancer and do something about it.

It's been an amazing cause. If you go on the Cause, the wall, in fact, has turned into this incredible place of support and encouragement for people going through breast cancer. People saying things like "My mom was just diagnosed, my sister just had this happen, can anyone give me advice about blank?" It's just been really incredible, so now, it's got over 3.3 million members, and they've raised over $70,000, already.

That's fantastic. It's an issue that is, unfortunately, very close to me, so that's really great to hear. Now, so you're talking about people reaching out to each other on the wall. Is that where you're seeing most of the activity? Is it happening in the discussion groups, is it happening on the wall? And how do you track that activity?

Great question, so we're seeing activity in really different ways, depending on the causes. Because anyone can create a cause about anything, we've got some causes for artists and some causes for the environment, some causes for very specific local community development organizations. In that, the cause takes on its own shape, depending on who's in it and what they're doing.

For some causes, the discussion board has been really central. Some places, the wall. Other places, it's been the administrator really taking the lead on things, posting announcements, e-mailing their members, things like that. It depends on the cause. And then, tracking it, the team of engineers that we have working here are really some of the most talented people I've ever met. And they have done an incredible job of just tracking everything. So, if we want to know which group is more active, this group or that group, we've been running statistics and keeping track of everything. That's definitely something that we're looking to utilize more, so people can have more access and be able to make better decisions about their causes when we give them some numbers to work with, too.

Yeah, and I guess that's the benefit of having your own app, but is there any way for you to track the things that are happening on Facebook, like out in the wild on Facebook?

Yeah, I mean, part of the benefit, well actually, at the most recent Facebook F8, Causes was announced as a Great App. That means that Causes fits many of the specifications that Facebook wants to promote. They are in line with the mission, we don't spam people, we don't sell your information. It's a very clean, nice looking application. We are in line with what they want to be doing. That gives us greater ability to work within Facebook.

Obviously, it's a separate deal, and Facebook doesn't want to give away all their secrets, of course. But yeah, we work very closely with them, and we've had a very positive relationship. We don't track statistics that they don't release to us, but we do what we can.

OK, that makes sense. I was going to say when you mentioned your engineers, Brad Fults introduced me to you.

I'm a big fan.

Yeah, all of our developers are fantastic. I've been very impressed. I come from definitely a more non-profit background, and it's really great to see this team of engineers and just how they work together, how they brainstorm things. It's great for me to see people in a more technical background working, tackling these non-profit issues in a whole new mindset. It's been really exciting for me to be able to work with them.

Sometimes, I say, "Guys, this is probably really, really hard to do, but do you think in a million years, we might be able to do blank?" And they say, "Yeah, Susan, that'd be totally easy, we could do that right away." Sometimes, I say, "This is probably really easy, you could do it in two seconds, but you should really do blank," and they say, "Well, Susan, that's a little more complicated than you think. It's been really great to work together with them.

I'm always making the same mistake and it's funny because I sort of pride myself on being half geek, so I understand a thing or two about programming. But whenever I talk to engineers, it's always the same experience: if I think it's really complicated, they're like, "No, it's easy." And if I think it's really easy, they're like, "You obviously have no idea what you're talking about."

Exactly. Exactly, so I've been learning, but they've been incredible about teaching me all sorts of things like "this is a computer." I think it's really useful in our tools, too, because our non-profit team is three people. We work closely with non-profits, we work closely with activists, and it's a big value in our company to be able to work with the engineers and bounce ideas off and see what's possible. I think it's really strengthened our company that the non-profit team and engineering teamwork is so closely together because I think it makes the product a lot stronger.

I would like to know a little more about maybe other success stories. The one for cancer, it's great because it was a student that started it, sort of came out of left field. Do you have any instances of like really small non-profits that sort of came out of nowhere or maybe this has been their first foray online and they've had a lot of success?

Absolutely. We held a giving challenge with the Case Foundation last December, where the Case Foundation put up $250,000 to really encourage people to use Causes to kind of go into this online philanthropy space. They set up this challenge, where there was 50 days, and the cause that had the most individual donors in 50 days won $50,000. And second place was $25,000, and 10 $10,000 prizes awarded. And then, every single day, the cause that had the most donors in a 24-hour period won $1,000. This served to enter into a whole lot of fantastic dynamics, which was here's this incredible activation of grassroots networks and people around different causes to win the $1,000 prize everyday.

The great thing was that every cause had to be started at the same time or after a certain point. It was really anybody had a chance to win. It was all about what you were doing with your cause and how you were activating your network, what you were doing online. It was really great because we had this hypothesis that gosh, maybe huge non-profits would just be able to send out one e-mail and then, bam, a million people would sign up. That wasn't the goal. The goal was it's really about individuals being able to use this tool, in order to promote what they believe in. We had this hypothesis that maybe big non-profits or small non-profits could be able to use this in an equally productive way.

What was great was that the winner of the challenge ended up being this non-profit, called, Love Without Boundaries Foundation. Love Without Boundaries is out of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. They're an all-volunteer staff that basically provides medical care for Chinese orphans, so that they can be adopted. They do great work and have less than three percent overhead. They've got an incredibly dedicated and fantastic staff. Their Executive Director had joined Facebook about four months before the challenge. She's 45. She didn't have a huge network on Facebook at all. And she was like, "Heck, let's do it!" So, she started sending out e-mails and started activating and using offline tools really well, in order to bring people onto the cause and donate.

There're some great stories from there. An exterminator came to her house to fumigate, and she was telling him about the cause and what they're doing with the challenge. By the end of the fumigation, the exterminator signed on, signed up for the cause and donated. It was fantastic, and they ended up winning the $50,000 prize, which went straight to 10 different heart surgeries for 10 very specific babies in China. It was really amazing to see.

People just really did all sorts of things. Students For A Free Tibet were holding large events and having computers there, so that people could get on their cause. They were doing a great job of using the announcements feature in the cause and e-mailing people about what kinds of things they were doing, keeping the cause interesting to come back to and motivating to keep recruiting for.

It's amazing. And I love stories like that because it sounds so low-fi. You get a bunch of people in a room and have them gather around the computer, it's a very low-fi way of social networking. Nonetheless, the application is bringing people together. They're just not on different computers.

We find people can use this really well when they think about their offline and their online tools and capabilities and think about them together, how can we make this work kind of from all angles? I think that's a great model because it uses strengths of non-profits and of grassroots networking. The technology helps that and that helps the technology be better. It was really great to see.

Exactly. A personal experience of mine was I did an internship with a group in Brazil that sets up computer schools in favelas (shanty towns) down there. The biggest takeaway from that for me was how enthusiastically kids would go to the schools to use Microsoft Paint or Text Editor. They didn't have the Internet. The computer was still so compelling to people that it was a focal point for the community. People would come to these schools and it was exciting and entertaining for them.

Exactly.

This isn't like 10 years ago. This was like three years ago. The Internet was already pretty widespread. They could have had it in those neighborhoods, but that wasn't the point. The point was that this tool is really compelling to people and it will bring people together. But, obviously, it's even better when you have an application like Causes. It takes that compellingness, if that's a word (ed. it's not ), and moves it up about 20 notches because not only are you interacting with people, but you're talking about things that directly affect you or you're really passionate about.

Exactly.

I think I'm making your pitch for you.

I love it!

Is there anything else you want our readers to know about?

I guess the real takeaway that one can have from Causes is your readers are tech-savvy people, who care about doing good things for the world. The exciting thing is there's a lot of great people doing great things in the world, and non-profits that are doing incredible work on the ground. I think a real exciting thing about social media, in general, is the fact that we all have this power to make a difference.

That might sound cliché, but the fact is that what a lot of these projects and non-profits want is more people to know about them. You never know when you're going to strike a chord. And that's been the exciting thing about causes, is that I might join a cause. The cool thing is on Facebook, my friend of my friend sees that I've joined that cause. You never know what kind of heartstring you're going to strike or what kind of response you're going to get from people.

I think the takeaway is that each person in their social network has just a lot of power to make a difference, and that old grassroots organizing models are all based on that. You ask your 10 friends to ask their 10 friends to get involved, and maybe two people do, and then, they ask more of their friends. That model is perfect for social networking and social media. It's all on there. We just need to get together and start using it in creative ways and just dreaming big with it and saying, "Gosh, we've got all this here, what can we do with it?" And so, I guess the takeaway is just that we've got it all there, we just need to be creative and go get it.

 If you are interested in working with Causes, Susan can be reached at susan@causes.com