New York Times, November 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/giving/12FACE.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=cancer%20schmancer&st=cse
 
By BRAD STONE

Published: November 11, 2009
BRAD SUGARS says he believes that cancer can be defeated, one birthday at a time.
On his 38th birthday this year, Mr. Sugars, a skin cancer survivor and chief executive of the professional coaching firm ActionCoach, decided to raise money for the Cancer Schmancer Movement, a nonprofit organization devoted to the detection and early treatment of the disease.
With a few quick clicks on Facebook, Mr. Sugars installed a program called “Causes” on his profile page and asked each of his 3,000 friends on the social network to contribute at least $38. Within a few weeks, more than 50 had given — some generously. By matching each donation, Mr. Sugars raised nearly $8,000 for the charity.
“They make it so easy to do this,” he said. “This is a way to challenge people to go do something good.”
The age of social media has empowered amateur journalists, fledgling presidential candidates and creative corporate marketers. Now, some say, it is time for nonprofit groups to harness the power of 140-character Tweets and Facebook status updates to recruit volunteers, spread awareness and solicit donations.
“Big checks don’t scale,” said Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water, a nonprofit organization devoted to digging fresh water wells in developing countries. “The only way we can truly expand our efforts is through tapping individuals through social media.”
Charity: Water is among the most successful and visible nonprofit groups in its use of social media. In the last two years, the small organization based in New York has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars — and generated waves of headlines — by giving supporters Web pages to run fund-raising drives on their birthdays, and via “Twestivals,” real parties organized on Twitter and held across the world.
Other nonprofit organizations like the Humane Society of the United States and the Case Foundation, which harnesses the competitive energies of bloggers and Twitter users to promote charitable causes in its annual “America’s Giving Challenge,” have also attracted dollars and drawn headlines. The exposure has intensified already strong nonprofit interest in social media.
According to a survey last year by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, about 8 in 10 of the top 200 American charities said they used social networking, up from about a third in 2007. And 9 in 10 said they thought that their use of social networking was successful, up from 7 in 10 in 2007.
Internet companies are also giving charities new opportunities to expand online. Last spring, YouTube, a division of Google, gave nonprofit groups the ability to add “call to action” links to their Web videos that allow viewers to jump right to their Web sites — and their online donation boxes. Last fall, Facebook added philanthropies like the World Wildlife Fund and Project Red to its gift store, allowing users to easily spend a few dollars to give a gift on behalf of a friend on the social network. .
But that does not mean all nonprofit organizations must now automatically pass through social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Far from it; many charities report that cultivating donations on social networks can be time-consuming, labor intensive and sometime fruitless.
“It’s pretty well documented that social media is by no means an easy way to raise money,” said Sean Stannard-Stockton, chief executive of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors, which advises wealthy donors. “But it is a rather fantastic way to build a network of supporters.”
That may be the real opportunity: creating a dialogue with a community of interested individuals, which nonprofit groups could previously foster only with mass mailings and unsolicited e-mail messages.
KaBoom, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that builds playgrounds and skating parks, has raised only a few thousand dollars on social networks. Instead it has opted to cultivate small but devoted followings on Facebook and Twitter and to put their energies to practical use in the field.
“What we care about is deepening the level of connection our followers have with each other and with us,” said Darell Hammond, KaBoom’s founder. “Over time they may become donors. For now, we want people we can move from interest in the cause to action.”
Some social media prognosticators see a more expansive opportunity for nonprofit organizations. They say that social networks, where people broadcast their online activities to their friends, can also be used to exert subtle social pressure on people to get involved.
That is the central thought behind Causes, the Facebook application created two years ago by Sean Parker, a former Facebook executive and Joe Green, a college roommate of the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Anyone can create a cause and link it to an actual registered charity. When Facebook users posts the cause to their pages, announcing a donation or just their support, they automatically convey that action to all their friends on the social network.
The implicit message: their friends should support the cause, too. “People can care about changing the world. But what gets them to act is pressure and social reward,” said Mr. Green, who reports that 90 million people have joined at least one cause on Facebook and have donated a total of $17 million.
STILL, plenty of skeptics ask what it actually means to join a cause on Facebook, and they wonder whether it might be a replacement for a more significant commitment of time and money. There is even a derogatory name for this kind of virtual support: “slacktavism.”
A recent experiment suggests that people may not be engaging all that deeply with charities on social networks. Earlier this year, Anders Colding-Jorgensen, an instructor of psychology at the University of Copenhagen, created a Facebook page that suggested the city’s historic Stork Fountain was to be demolished to make way for an H&M clothing store.
Despite the fact that he divulged on the page that the cause was fake, 27,000 people signed up to protest the move. Mr. Colding-Jorgensen said he believed that a majority of those who enlisted did so because they thought it was true.
Social media backers take that ignominious episode in stride. “We are fighting against no engagement. We are fighting against apathy,” Mr. Parker said.
Randi Zuckerberg, director of market development at Facebook and sister to its famous founder, points out that the use of social media and philanthropy is still new and experimental, and that the value of this kind of activity may not yet be quantifiable.
“In the old-fashioned view, getting involved meant one of two things, giving time or money,” she said. “Now there are a dozen things you can do in between, including giving your reputation. I think when we look back and can quantify it, we’ll see it’s pretty valuable to tell your network you are validating a viewpoint on something.”