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Change.org
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Change.org is a social network for hundreds of social causes and over 1 million organizations.
Supporting organization:
Change.org
URL:
www.change.org
City:
San Francisco
State/Region:
CA
Country:
United States
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Change.org is a social network for hundreds of social causes and over 1 million organizations. We aim to transform social activism by serving as the central platform that connects likeminded people, whatever their interests, and enables them to exchange information, share ideas, and collectively act to address the issues they care about.
Change.org facilitates social activism through two types of overlapping networks: issue-based and organization-centric. Our issue-based networks are completely user-generated and allow any user to type in a change they want to see the world – such as “Stop Global Warming” or “End Poverty” – and create a grassroots network that mobilizes around this change. Within the hundreds of issue-based networks currently on our site users can:
- post ideas and discuss relevant news through a community blog,
- use RSS feeds to stream in relevant content from selected sites,
- embed and discuss videos and documentaries from YouTube or Google Video,
- organize volunteer events or rallies,
- join social fundraising communities, and
- recommend nonprofits that are doing great work to advance each cause.
In addition to these grassroots networks, Change.org has built a social network for each of over 1 million nonprofits and connects these networks to each relevant issue. Within these nonprofit networks users can:
- connect to others in their social network who care about the organization,
- read and write reviews about each nonprofit,
- donate to specific fundraising projects and receive updates on how their money was spent, and
- engage in direct dialogue with the organization’s staff by posting ideas, suggestions and questions on each organization’s community blog.
By making our social networking, organizing, and advocacy tools available to nonprofits and social activists around the world, we hope to allow organizations to better leverage the resources and collective intelligence of their supporters and to empower social activists to transform their passion for social change into powerful collective action.
Sustainability (financial) model:
Change.org has two revenue sources:
- 1% of all donations: Change.org processes donations for each of the over 1 million organizations on our site and takes a 1% transaction fee from all donations.
- Branded networks: Change.org will soon allow nonprofits to create branded networks for special activist campaigns or action alerts, for which we will charge fee to create and promote to our community.
Potential obstacles:
The primary obstacle to the growth of Change.org is the presence of large generalist social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, which already have millions of captive users. Our strategy for addressing this competition for attention is twofold: first, by providing users with tools for social engagement and activism not available on these more generic social networks, and second, by allowing users to take their profile on Change.org and embed it within on their existing profiles on sites such as MySpace – therefore enabling them to promote the causes they care about to their friends on other social networks and helping to distribute content from Change.org across the web.
Resource Needs:
We have received an enormous amount of interest in expanding our service internationally, but do not currently have the resources to provide customized tools for international NGOs. We would use any award to focus on creating these tools to help us achieve our goal of building a truly global platform connecting people across borders and allowing them to exchange ideas and collectively act to address issues with global impact.
Key Milestones:
Early Winter 2007: secured partnerships with over 50 leading nonprofit organizations
Late Winter 2007: soft-launch of Change.org’s early feature set
Spring 2007: beta test for “Change.org 2.0”, our full feature set
Late Spring 2007: public launch of Change.org 2.0
Project Summary:
Change.org is a social network for hundreds of social causes and over 1 million organizations. We aim to transform social activism by serving as the central platform that connects likeminded people across the globe, whatever their interests, and enables them to exchange information, share ideas, and collectively act to address the issues they care about.
Comments
Over 1 Million Organizations?
I'm confused - you claim to work with 1 million organizations but that is clearly impossible (so why do you claim that). All you've done is bought or gotten the rights to a big list of 501(c)3's from Guidestar. Anyone can do that and claim that they work with 1 million organizations. Its at best a liesel.
There is no place on change.org for an organization to consent to let you use their (trademarked) names or logos for fundraising. I've already seen great organizations like Amnesty and Planned Parenthood slammed in your user-provided reviews - Amnesty getting 1 star for "fighting the wrong fight" - what's that about? Why on earth would any organization consent to be part of something that describes them as "The true agenda of groups like Amnesty International is that of a Marxist doctrine, and Sadly they are afraid of taking on the real human rights criminals."
Finally, your site drives supporters of great nonprofits like Amnesty to your site - not to the Amnesty website. They have an incredible site - with causes such as Close Guantanamo, Stop Violence Against Women, and Control Arms right there on the front page. I can't believe that they are happy that you are taking eyeballs from their site (full of great and accurate information) and keeping them on your site.
A few points of clarification
Kerri,
This is Ben, founder of Change.org. Thanks for the spirited response :-)
I’m happy to address your concerns. Here goes:
First, we are careful never to claim that we work with over 1 million organizations, which as you stated would be impossible. We do, however, provide a social networking platform for over 1 million organizations – meaning that we allow anyone to recommend, discuss, post photos and videos about, or donate to over 1 million organizations.
Second, regarding the use of names and logos: nonprofit organizations and their names are part of the public domain, and it is quite common for people to use them online without asking for a nonprofit’s consent. Charity Navigator and Wikipedia are perhaps the most prominent examples, but you can see this anywhere across the blogosphere. The situation is different for logos, the use of which is prohibited without explicit consent. For this reason we do not ourselves place the logo of any nonprofit on our site. The many logos on Change.org, including the Amnesty International logo you may have seen, were posted by the organizations themselves and one of many indications of the tremendous support we have received within the nonprofit sector for our work.
Third, about our user-generated reviews: I think one of the largest needs in the nonprofit sector is for a way for potential donors find out about the quality of an organization, and the need for such a service has been well documented and widely recognized. Donors and potential donors repeatedly report that one of the biggest impediments to giving money is there is no way to find out about the quality of an organization – and because of the unfortunate actions of a few misleading organizations, many people are hesitant to donate anywhere. One of the ways people have tried to overcome this problem in the past was to employ a full-time staff to go investigate each organization. The downside to this approach is that it is very difficult to scale, and the reviews tend to be very generic and fail to get the “inside dope” on organizations; as a result, these efforts have had limited success.
Our approach is a significantly different peer-to-peer approach, based off of the phenomenally successful review models of Amazon and eBay. The benefits of this open approach is that we are able to leverage the experience, knowledge, and insight of the thousands of people who are familiar with each organization and to provide a rich sense of the organization, its background, successes, and limitations. While individual reviews may be negative or even erroneous, the community can rank, comment on, and correct such reviews, and the collective body of information that can be inputted from many different sources heps to provide a much richer sense of an organization than is currently available anywhere else. Since we have only just launched the early version of our service there may be outlying situations where negative reviews have not yet been addressed, but I think you will soon see this situation change - in fact, I encourage you to help be a part of that change :-)
Finally, about your concern that we may be taking eyeballs away from nonprofit websites. I think it’s true that many nonprofit websites have good information and are worthy of a visit, and we encourage this by linking out to every organization on our site. However, nonprofit websites are primarily one-way channels of communication, and as such have had an increasingly difficult time engaging users and keeping them coming back. In contrast, the biggest movement across the web over the past few years is to turn websites into a two-way conversation, and people have clearly voted with their feet by wholeheartedly embracing two-way mediums such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, etc. The nonprofit sector is behind in this regard, and our hope is to provide the sort of two-way participation not available on any nonprofit’s website – that is, the ability for likeminded supporters to connect, discuss the issues the organization works on, and help organize action to address these issues.
Our platform is not intended to replace or compete with any nonprofit’s website, but rather to provide something that users want but which organizations don’t currently offer themselves. I think the excitement that has been generated in the social sector from our early release and the fact that hundreds of the largest organizations in the world are actively supporting our service is a testament to the potential that this approach presents, and to the fact that most organizations see us as contributing to, rather than taking away from, their mission.
Best,
Ben
bravo
Wow, it's not often you see such long and thoughtful responses to criticism. I didn't find anything misleading about your proposal or your site. And I can only imagine a site like yours driving traffic TO my organization's homepage, not away from it. Altogether, it looks very exciting. You have my vote!