NetSquared enables social benefit organizations to leverage the tools of the social web.

Grassroots mobilization/activation

Slave-Free

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

Slave-Free is creatively forcing the elimination of slave labor in the products we buy.

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise

Expansion and upgrades for the slavefree.us and chainstorereaction.com websites are needed.

Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise

While thousands have joined Slave-Free after seeing the Call+Response film (a graphic portrayal the horrors of modern-day slavery), tens of thousands more are needed.  Demand must be loud and pervasive to hold corporate attention. 

Type of expertise needed: 
Management Expertise

Corporate consultants need enough management experience in order to act as liasons and brand ambassadors evangelizing the importance and promoting the market niche for the Slave-Free label. 

Technology Vision: 

While the Slave-Free and Chain Store Reaction web platforms have already been created, serious expansion and upgrades are needed.

Slave-Free

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

Slave-Free creatively displays a new market demand, forcing companies to investigate the use of slave labor in product chains and ultimately adopting the Slave-Free label for their products.

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise

Expansion and upgrades for the slavefree.us and chainstorereaction.com websites are needed.

Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise

While thousands have joined Slave-Free after seeing the Call+Response film (a graphic portrayal the horrors of modern-day slavery), tens of thousands more are needed.  Demand must be loud and pervasive to hold corporate attention. 

Type of expertise needed: 
Management Expertise

Corporate consultants need enough management experience in order to act as liasons and brand ambassadors evangelizing the importance and promoting the market niche for the Slave-Free label. 

Technology Vision: 

While the Slave-Free and Chainstore Reaction web platforms have already been created, serious expansion and upgrades are needed.

Humans Being

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

A vital needs assessment tool that enhances the participatory capacity of individuals through the use of Instant Messaging technology, both computer-based as well as mobile-based.

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise

The project needs IT specialists to work through the logistical and technological aspects of starting up the project anew.

Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise

Buy-in would be needed from NGOs as well as through media to mobilize educational and awareness initiatives.

Type of expertise needed: 
Management Expertise

Fundraising and corporate liaison expertise is needed as the program will be somewhat dependent on sponsorship (especially with cellular service providers) and on the providers of the IM services chosen for the project. 

Technology Vision: 

It is envisioned that the project will continue throughout the IM sphere and then move further towards spheres such as Social Networking and podcasts.

A Citizen Meeting for Justice with Local Faith Communities. R.S.V.P.

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 
Congregation-Based Community Organizations create public meetings to leverage social change. To win hard issues grassroots leaders must engage more people to build larger events.

Stop Family Violence

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

Stop Family Violence will use Web 2.0 technologies to empower local programs, enhance information sharing, help people find the services they need, promote local leadership, and coordinate activism that will keep women and children safe.

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise

NEAR TERM: help us determine open source options vs. custom build. ONGOING: advice on state of the art server, website and user security features since our members are at high risk of cyberstalking.

Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise

NEAR TERM: Develop collateral materials to market our new website. In-kind gifts for printing, mailing. ONGOING: Identify strategies to increase site visibility. Corporate sponsors for advertising to help drive traffic to our site.

Type of expertise needed: 
Other

~ Program evaluation to assess social change
~ Mobilizing from online to community activism
~ Building engaged online community
~ Message development and dealing with backlash
~ Financial support, planning
~ Board members

PulseWire: Connecting women to transform our world.

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 
We envision PulseWire as an electrifying new tool with the power to unleash the transformative potential of women’s and girl’s voices ─ at a time when empowering women is recognized as the most effective way to solve global problems.

Games for Change

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 
Dubbed an early “Sundance of Video Games”, G4C is an exciting new activist movement and supporting non-profit dedicated to using games for positive social change.

Grassroots.org Toolbox

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

The Grassroots.org Toolbox will empower nonprofit organizations by granting free access to a suite of fully configured & hosted online tools, including content management, online event registration software, and CRM.

Type of expertise needed: 
Other

Above all else, we need financial support to help lay the foundation for the Toolbox’s ultimate success.

We know what technology tools our grassroots nonprofit clients need. We know how to configure those tools, we know how to build infrastructure to deploy those tools on a massive scale, and we have partners who can help us host those tools. We even know how to train and support those tools. What we need is the initial support to help us turn this knowledge into action.

Our ultimate goal is to empower 10,000 nonprofit organizations with the $10,000 worth of services through the free technology in the Grassroots.org Toolbox. Your seed funding will help make this is possible. Help us help us others grow.

Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise

We need development assistance specifically for:

  1. The integration of a client intake system with a CRM.
  2. The development of a custom provisioning system to automate Toolbox deployment.
  3. Additional tools and resources. Have a tool that you'd like to make available to nonprofits for free? Think it meets a demonstrated need among grassroots organizations? Work with us to make it happen!
Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise

We currently offer a complete guide to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) available at seo.grassroots.org. Alongside this service, we also offer free telephone consulting, made possible through in-kind donations from an SEO consulting firm.

We'd love to expand the SEO project to cover other aspects of internet marketing for nonprofits (how to use blogs, leverage social networking sites or bookmarking sites, use new media, etc to further a nonprofit organization's mission). Assistance could be in the form of expert articles or guides, telephone or online consulting, or something entirely different. Surprise us.

Technology Vision: 

Many of the tools we are integrating into the Grassroots.org Toolbox are open source, and thus have been freely downloadable for years. However, “Free” though they may be, these tools cost thousands of dollars to install, learn, configure and support. In short, these tools may have no list price, but they are far from free to implement. The result? They're not empowering as many nonprofits as they could be.

    The Toolbox will automatically:
  • provision and install these technology tools,
  • configure them correctly for immediate use,
  • host them permanently,
  • -provide comprehensive training and support resources (both in traditional text and in new media, such as screencasts and training videos)

All for free.

To achieve this, we'll build an integrated user interface to manage Toolbox applications and services, under which we'll develop a flexible and scalable automatic provisioning system. We are assigning multiple staff members to develop exhaustive training and support materials in response to the needs of incoming clients and creating a publicly-available end-user guide for each of the tools we offer. The goal is the technological empowerment of nonprofit organizations everywhere.

100 Innovators - the world's most important story has started to unfold

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 

This decade, the impacts of leading social entrepreneurs will explode. It's the world's most important story, and Innovatorz.org will tell it. We produce and distribute killer online media for award winning social entrepreneurs.

Type of expertise needed: 
Management Expertise
We need a startup guru for advice on project management, fund raising (goal: $200K), business planning. Guidance from people who've been through this process.
Type of expertise needed: 
Technical Expertise
Our platform is built on Wordpress MU. We need the assistance of a PHP coder with expertise in the Wordpress platform and someone with expertise in server administration.
Type of expertise needed: 
Marketing/Media Expertise
We want to create as much visibility as possible for the social innovators we work with and the niche online media properties we create. We have a marketing plan, but we would love the input of an online marketing/buzz creating genius.
Technology Vision: 

We want to make it dead simple for social entrepreneurs to integrate amazing online media into their sites and to find an audience interested in their stories. Our media platform is built on Wordpress MU, SimplePie RSS, and a variety of web services like Amazon S3. We use a process called “assisted podcasting” to enable even the least tech saavy, busiest social innovator to tell their personal story online by recording podcasts with their ordinary telephone.

We are developing a system enabling organizations to not only create their own content for their web sites, but to simultaneously pull in relevant feeds and stories from other organizations and sites.

Innocence Project Learning Center

Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch): 
Our new interactive learning center will raise awareness among young people about wrongful convictions and DNA testing by providing them with a set of web-based tools including Flash animations and videos to create mulitmedia classroom presentations.

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