More than 1.6 million Americans have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As of August 1, 2007, 67,000 of them had been killed or wounded. In addition, more than 250,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans had been treated at Veterans Administrations hospitals since their return home from combat.

KPFA launched this website in an effort to put a human face on the conflict. Only by truly listening to the stories of soldiers who've come home, can we appreciate the realities of war and what we can do to help.

If you're building a social network, mailing list, or other social tool, how do you break through a crowded market? With MySpace, Facebook, and a host of new niche social sites popping up, how can you beat the competition?

 

Simple- you don't. You work with them to go places you never could before.

Cauzoo.com had a problem that most new sites had- gaining traction in a crowded field. For us, the challenge is making clear that we don't want to supplant MySpace or Facebook, but supplement the social experience by adding a new angle. Undoubtedly, most of your non-profit sites are the same. You aren't asking for all a person's time, just a bit of their attention. But how can you do this without scaring them away? In addition, how can you make a better site from it?

Our answer was simple- instead of fighting the competition, we promoted it.

 

 

 

 

If you look at the bottom left corner of a sample profile page, you can see "Social Me", an exciting example of our tool. We know that people have countless different social identities- so why not use them? It helps our users recognize that Cauzoo is a place to show part of yourself, not all of yourself. That lowers the barrier to entry and clarifies our concept. Secondly, it simply makes for a better site. Our pages have more utility if users know more places where they can reach their friends.

The great thing about "Social Me" is that it's not our idea- we used code from the Open Source site here- http://dbachrach.com/showyourself/. It wouldn't be tough to figure out anyway, but this is a good reference point for some of the social networks out there that your users might have. Naturally, we're not sure how many sites/non-profits this will help, but we'd love to definitely take a step to say one thing: you are on Social Networks for a reason- promoting them!

 

 

Palo Alto Partners in Education (PAPIE) is a primarily board-driven organization with only 2 staff and a budget around $2+ million. We raise private funds to supplement public funds for all the public schools in our school district.

Challenge:

We needed a tool to ensure communication and collaboration amongst the board members, staff and volunteers. We also wanted to keep a history of documents, activities, decisions, etc. to ensure continuity due to volunteer turnover year-to-year. The tool had to be easy to use and very accessible. It had to be flexibly private, meaning that it needed to allow proper permissions for each person - ensuring that only the proper person(s) could see or do what was appropriate. It needed to combine a website and email communications to reduce duplication of effort.

Solution:

www.nexo.com

Nexo allows us to create a free group for PAPIE. We have a highly customized, private website that any authorized person can add to, change, or read. We also get an email group integrated with the website so that updates, alerts, news, etc. are easy to distribute (even automatic if desired) to the group. We also can have live chats on the site if desired. We have multiple pages and multiple sub-groups (board, marketing committee, development committee, etc). The site essentially defines our own social network.

The website allows us to share blogs, files, pictures, videos, calendars, events, to do lists, budgets, plans, press releases, contact information, RSS feeds, etc.

Impact:

Not only has nexo improved communication, collaboration and participation, but a by-product is that we have a back-up for our most important files such as board minutes, budgets, etc. These used to just be stored on one computer which is scary for many reasons. The site also makes is much easier to transfer knowledge from year to year since new  leaders/volunteers have the roadmap from the year before.

www.nabuur.com is a new concept in people-to-people global citizenship. The world is a global village and Nabuur facilitates contact among the neighbours.Nabuur builds virtual neighbourhoods around local communities in developing countries, to assist the latter to deal with their problems in their own terms. It links people in third world communities with their Neighbours on the internet. The locals say what they need, the virtual village helps them to find their future.

The characteristic features of NABUUR.COM are:

• Person to person contact, no bureaucracy between the local community and persons who assist
• The local community is in the lead. It is not thematic; they determine what needs to be done.
• It is not about giving money but about jointly working towards solutions
• It is transparent; the progress is visible to all
• Everyone can contribute, not just experts. What is needed is time, contacts, know-how, tools, manpower

After careful preparation NABUUR.COM is ready to expand. The basic tools, procedures and systems are in place. 75 local communities now take part. 200 local communities will be served by the end of 2006, 1000 by the end of 2007, many more after that.

Background.

There is no shortage of resources to assist Local Communities in their daily struggle. But, as William J. Clinton says, we do not have the systems to respond in a comprehensive way. Ngo’s, corporations and governments are all hierarchies and can therefore only deal with a limited number of projects. What is needed is something complementary, that can tap into the huge reservoir of resources in a self organizing way.

NABUUR.COM tries to create part of that structure, by combining the self organizing and time tested principle of neighbourship with the factor that makes the resources worldwide accessible, the Internet.

NABUUR.COM is a lab for democratized development assistance. It mobilizes world citizens. Not an amorphous anonymous mass, but as a collective of capable committed individuals ready for concrete individual tasks and responsibilities.

Nabuur is an old Dutch word for neighbour. Neighbours usually are not experts, funders or friends. But they do help each other in times of need by tapping into the resources out there. They organize themselves until the problem has been dealt with. That’s how it had worked for ages in a real communities, that’s how it can now work via the Internet. Today world citizens ARE neighbours in the Global Village .