September 2007 Archives
What do you think?
Below: a few cause-related vids that use humor to make their point.
Here's the viral "Teenage Affluenza" video from World Vision:The next one features celebrities and lots of surprises in a wry parody of, well, the sort of ads usually produced produced by groups like World Vision:And click here for a video from the creators of Obama Girl in support of an Iraq and Afghanistan war vets charity.
Here's a story from the other side: a university that has endorsed a student group's downloadable hiphop mixtape to attract prospective students. For a cutting-edge example of nonprofit web marketing 2.0, check out ProHipHop.com and the Hip Hop Congress mix.
My favorite quote is from one of the student performers, capturing how much better students understand the emerging marketplace than many so-called experts:
"It's more unique than a T-shirt or a coozie."
Over the weekend the New York Times featured an article on what some see as a growing problem in the charitable trust world: banks managing the property for charitable purposes that differ from the specific causes supported by the trust's original creators.
The scenario the article describes goes something like this:
- Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy-Couple in Omaha want to help their favorite local causes.
- Mr. and Mrs. Wealthy-Couple create a charitable trust managed by Local Bank.
- Local Bank gives money to a cowboy museum and other local causes favored by Mr. & Mrs. Wealthy-Couple, who express their wishes to Local Bank officials.
- Mr. & Mrs. Wealthy-Couple die.
- Local Bank gets sold to Huge National Bank.
- Huge National Bank gives the trust money to the East Village Vegans against the War.
We'll talk about the tension between donor control and charitable mission throughout the semester. For now, here's a blast from the recent past in New York City:
A Matter of Trust: Two Titans of Charity Battle over Millions
This morning I went to a focus group run by a nonprofit organization. The ostensible purpose: to discuss what we thought about the design of its online database.
Blah. And I don't just mean blah blah blah, but blah, what a waste of time. The session was run by the consultant who not only designed the organization's current online product but the CD-ROM that preceded it. Talk about a vested interest! He maintained a tight control over the whole affair, channeling the discussion to get people to say that they wanted certain things he'd already prepared and then--ta da!--showing us he'd already prepared them.
It was marketing manipulation 101, and badly done to boot. Of course people in the focus group (well, except for yours truly) complimented the guy on what he showed us--any marketing psychologist will tell you that Americans tend to be polite when asked to criticize a creator face-to-face, which is why focus groups that actually want to get information that will help in product development leave the creators--e.g., the writer, designer, director, producer--out of the room.
The nonprofit folks were nice, and it seems they really were interested in getting useful feedback. What they actually paid for, however, was a consultant trying to build a case for his own work. And so we sat for almost two hours while he fished for approval.
But despite the nods to customizable collaboration and Web 2.0, here's what we got. Three-dimensional click-button bar graphs. Rudimentary integration of Census data in a thinly populated proprietary map. An interface that maintains strict centralized control over searchable categories. Are people really asking for this stuff?
What I saw this morning was a phenomenon all too common in nonprofit and web design circles. Someone feels behind the current market, moves the furniture around a little and tell themselves they've adapted to change. Except they haven't, and the result only underscores how little they understand the phenomena they are trying to emulate. If this morning's pitch was going to show us how the nonprofit was taking the next step from CD-ROM to dot-com to Web 2.0, the first step would have been to open up discussion beyond the talking points.
Yesterday's news brought us an article from a group of anarchists about incorporation, and you may have noticed a bit of reluctance toward getting any more entangled with the government than is absolutely necessary. Not surprising, that--that's part of the anarchist value system.
But you don't have to be an anarchist to want to avoid dealing with the government when starting up a social enterprise. Doing good can be challenging, but it has other words; paperwork can be messy, hard, expensive and--when you add the possibility of tax audits and attorney general investigations that come with getting on the radar screen--risky.
So why bother?
Here are a few key advantages of incorporating. Later next week we'll add some details regarding a few other options, such as forming a trust ("property with a purpose") or an unincorporated association.
- Limited liability: Forming a corporation means that insiders are not personally liable for the group's obligations. In other words, your house is not on the line when the group gets sued for not honoring a contract or accidentally hurting someone.
- Contracting: If you want the organization to open a bank account, to acquire property or to enter into other agreements, incorporation helps clarify the legal relationships and may even be required.
- Decision-making rules: Corporate law is not just a bunch of requirements. It also provides a set of standard decision-making rules. You can change many of them in your bylaws to suit your organization's particular needs, but when disagreements arise it can be useful to have a set of procedures for resolving them ready-made out of the box.
- Funding: Grantmakers & other venture funders are often more comfortable giving money to corporations--which are legally distinct from their members, directors and officers--than to individuals in an unincorporated association.
The Pirate Bay also has expressed support for populist change in the political realm, as evident from the "Free Burma" linked graphic on the upper left corner of its homepage today:
You may have seen little graphics like that for other charities on other sites, and perhaps you've wondered how it's done. Well, here's the code--read it closely and see if you can figure out how it works!
<body>
<a href="http://www.freeburma.org" target="_new"
style="text-decoration:none;border:0;">
<img src=http://static.thepiratebay.org/img/freeburma.png
style="position:absolute;left:0;top:0;border:0;"/></a>
Is nonprofit law obsolete?
Do some due diligence on the background and qualifications of your leading candidates. For example, if you're a nonprofit representing survivors of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, you might want to check into whether a woman's heartwrenching tale of her struggle to safety isn't actually an attention-grabbing con before you make her president.
The infoshop movement is an anarchist news distribution network. Yesterday the movement's online hub--infoshop.org--featured an interesting article forming a local infoshop center, with a particular reference to obtaining 501(c)(3) status in the U.S. There's some imprecision in the article's legal language and I don't endorse all the advice, but the article has a lot of good stuff. Below, some key points from the piece worth highlighting for all nonprofit organizations:
- The terms "nonprofit" and "501(c)(3)" are not synonymous. "Nonprofit" refers to a category of legal status under state law (for example, a nonprofit as a opposed to a for-profit corporation), while 501(c)(3) refers to an organization's status under federal law as a charity exempt from federal income tax.
- Not all nonprofits are charities. Not all tax-exempt organizations are charities. More on this soon!
- It's all too easy to get distracted by complex legal issues at start-up, to the point of not getting anything done.
- However, incorporation is typically advisable, even necessary, if your organization needs to get a bank account or sign any other contracts. Filing basic articles of incorporation can be done quickly with the assistance of a competent lawyer or incorporation service.
- The details of your organization's structure will be spelled out in its bylaws. Tony Mancuso's Nolo book on forming a nonprofit organization has a decent set of model bylaws.
- Obtaining recognition as a 501(c)(3) organization requires a fair bit of time and effort as well as specialized knowledge about the language of tax law.
- Your organization might be able to find an existing recognized 501(c)(3) that will serve as a "umbrella" or "fiscal sponsor" for purposes of federal tax-exemption and deductible gifts. For an example of such an umbrella program in New York, check out Fractured Atlas or the Tides Center.
- An effective organization "is one that is built on healthy human relationships between the participants, not on some perfect organizational plan committed to paper." Amen!
In today's web design class I happened to mention the release of the Microsoft XBox Halo, which is a Big Deal in the gaming world. Is Halo a social enterprise? Let's take a quick peak into the future . . .
The following are few popular web-site design services and content management systems (CMS) used not just by individual bloggers, but all sorts of enterprises:
The links above go to examples of live sites--students in my web design class, your task for next week is to kick the tires of one of the four services above that is not Non-Profit Soapbox. Is it easy to use? Customizable? Cheap? Are there limits that make it advisable to upgrade from a free version to a paid subscription? Is the same system available elsewhere with even more features at less cost? We'll discuss your experience in class--but please send me a link to your test site before class time next Wednesday so I can get a sense of what you did.
In school you learn not to copy. Then you go to the real world of law and web design, where you copy all the time--at least to create a basis for your own original work. Here are some examples of nonprofit and social enterprise web sites that you might--or might not--want to copy:
- Unforgiveable
- About that domain name . . .
- Focus, people, focus!
- So much useful info, so little on the web
- Front page focus: Emergency 9/11 blood donation. Deep-linked advisory: Emergency blood donations unnecessary.
- The design says "Help Now!" for 9/11 relief but the money actually went to infrastructure
- Slight of hand--Donate so $100 million can go to victims' families . . . if needed to cover expenses for the indigent. And exactly how many people who worked in upper floor trading firms in the WTC were dirt poor?
- The rich get richer--a grant databased turns out to be priced out of reach of the organizations who most need it
- Robin Hood
- Behind the music
Hat tip: Web Pages that Suck
What is social enterprise? Let's see . . .
Tonight I attended a wonderful gathering of social entrepreneurs organized by JustMeans. We got to talking about social enterprise technology, and one of the attendees told me the following story. A few years ago her grandmother, new to computers, was using a program when everything froze and the following error message popped up:
So she did the only thing a decent person should do in that situation--she called the police!
This is one of those stories that should be true even if turns out to have been just a cute joke. It captures the importance of language in context--the same word can trigger different responses in different environments.
Remember this as we move forward with various kinds of code, from graphic design and web development to corporate and tax law. Words that inspire the supporters of your social enterprise could lead the Attorney General to investigate and the IRS to revoke your tax exemption--what seems charitable to you could seem criminal to them!
One of things that my classes this semester share is the word "nonprofit" in the title. While "Web Design for Nonprofits" and "Law for Nonprofit Managers" both have the advantage of serving an identifiable constituency, they nonetheless don't reflect the reality of today's professional do-gooder. Sure, people still work for nonprofits, but the more conspicuous trend is to integrate for-profit and nonprofit characteristics in what many people call a "social enterprise."
There are about as many definitions of social enterprise as there are, well, social enterprises, but you can boil 'em all down to a single word: hybrid. Just like hybrid cars blend traditional internal combustion mechanics with engineering that is more environmentally friendly, social enterprise represents a fusion of for-profit and nonprofit organizational cultures. Some social enterprises are nonprofit; some are for-profit; some are a mixture of the two, such as nonprofit businesses, networks combining nonprofit and for-profit organizations, or even for-profit corporations committed to corporate social responsibility and environmentally friendly business practices.
My own take on this movement? I'll say more on that front as we go on. For now, over the next few posts, let's take a brief look at a few social enterprises and what we can learn from their design.
It's funny 'cuz it's true::
The screenshot below offers a sneak preview of what we'll be covering in tomorrow's web design class and in the nonprofit law class a few weeks from now. Click through to the pic's Flickr page for more.
How did I get this old screenshot? Click here
.
Pictured above: The Movable Type template editor for this website
Students reading this site no doubt have already noticed that it includes posts from both my classes. This is not an accident. A social entrepreneur wrestling with issues in nonprofit law does not do so in a vacuum. As we shall see, law intersects with all aspects of organizational life, including web design--rest assured that if you don't see the connection, the IRS and your donors will.
The same goes for someone doing web design for any type of corporate enterprise. Your job is not just to throw any old words and pictures on a screen. You are creating a group identity, which if done well will accurately reflect--or at least not contradict--the rules that shape its organizational life.
In fact, the connection between legal and web design go even deeper. In last Wednesday's nonprofit law class I likened articles of incorporation and bylaws to DNA. I could have expressed the same point by likening them to the code that gives life to this very site. Organizational documents, like a computer program, contain a series of coded instructions. Get the code wrong one way and the object in question won't exist--just like when something I botched Saturday night wiped out this entire site! Similarly, it's possible to completely change the appearance of the resulting form with relatively minor changes in the underlying the code, from the color of a link or the position of the page title to legal status as a for-profit or nonprofit organization.
Pictured below: the home page of New York's Robin Hood Foundation. Notice anything interesting about the site? What is the purpose of this design?
Pageants have long tried to foster an image of being concerned with more than beauty. One key design strategy: scholarships as prizes.
Except all is not as it seems. Check out this article from the New York Times, which explains how pageants use arcane rules to keep winners from actually receiving promised scholarship payments.
We always figured that putting people before products just made good common sense. So far, it's been working out for us. Our relationships with farmers yield the highest quality coffees. The connections we make in communities create a loyal following. And the support we provide our baristas pays off everyday. Read more about our unusually human approach to business in the 2006 Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report.
Colloquial writing, "putting people before products," "relationships," "connections," "communities," "support"--this is a shrewdly written ad leveraging language designed to create an environment beyond mere commerce.
If business is using less business-speak, are nonprofits wise to use more?
On the one hand, Northwestern University takes a strong stance against illegal downloading--so strong, in fact, the University warns that "[t]hough peer-to-peer (P2P) software and similar programs are not illegal, they put your system and the NU Network at risk."
But if P2P is so dangerous, why are Northwestern University researchers developing new software to make torrents download faster? As their own University webpage reports,
The main goal of this plugin is simple -- to improve download speeds for your BitTorrent client. For most P2P applications, the decision regarding which peer to download from is generally arbitrary. When most peers offer good download performance, the random solution works well. However, if most peers are in a different part of the world from you, your downloads can really suffer.
The Ono plugin avoids this by proactively finding peers that are close to you (in a networking sense). These peers generally offer better response time, which can lead to significantly improved performance. We identify those peers that are near you by reusing network measurements from content distribution networks (CDNs), i.e. without performing extensive path measurement or probing.
Our Ono plugin, which seamlessly installs into the Azureus BitTorrent client, can be downloaded from >>>here<<<.
Coca-Cola isn't a nonprofit organization, but it is using a nonprofit design strategy to get people to buy Coke products. Check out its corporate website. Years ago the emphasis would have been on profits, dividends and a rising stock price. Now all that gives way to a focus on water conservation and social benefit.
Few people today would regard corporate governance to be particularly exciting. Necessary, boring, occasionally hard, but dangerous? Nahhhhh.
But it wasn't always that way. Over the past thousand or so years countless people lost their lives as a consequence of documents we now call corporate articles and bylaws. Religious wars, the rise of the nation state, even our modern sense of personal identity flow out of a corporate revolution.
Ground zero for the past millennium is arguably the 910 C.E. Foundation Charter of the Abbey of Cluny in France. In some ways the document is pretty mundane--"every five years, moreover, the aforesaid monks shall pay to the church of the apostles at Rome ten shillings to supply them with lights"--but amidst all the Latin legal language there's a revolution in the works.
The Cluny monastery changed the world by creating what was in effect a centrally governed transnational corporation distinct from local bishops and feudal landowners. Click the link below for a couple key passages:
Following up on discussion from the latest 102W computer science class . . .
Nothing illustrates the ethical ambiguity of nonprofit identity better than the current battle over BitTorrent and other modes of P2P ("peer-to-peer") file sharing. The web abounds with nonprofit torrent networks--I'll let you find them!--while nonprofit industry associations are trying to shut them down.
Yes, the last link is real--even pornographers have formed a nonprofit trade group to fight piracy!
Likewise, nonprofits--most notably the Electronic Frontier Foundation and university internet research centers--are helping to facilitate efforts to anonymize torrent downloading even as universities are working with copyright holders to identify students engaged in downloading copyrighted material.
What does this mean? We'll be talking about this a lot more in class and on this site.
A hearty welcome to students from both of my classes! As I mentioned today, I'll be posting add