socially marketing

One of our resolutions for the new year is to post more frequently to this blog, so we’re kicking off 2008 by taking a look at what we learned in 2007 - socialmarkets’s first year.

Bringing this project to life has been challenging on many fronts, and in the interest of transparency we should talk about all of them. I’ll start with one of the most fundamental: the social benefits of charitable efforts is the basis of our work, and calculating it is really, really hard.

The volume of existing research into SROI (Social Return On Investment) varies greatly within the nonprofit sector. For example, there’s good quality and quantity of data for homelessness intervention, and far less of either for advocacy projects. Most of the sector falls somewhere in between.

We’ve been incredibly lucky to have many of the best minds in the SROI field helping us map out the current landscape, usually with nothing more than our gratitude as payment. Their input was instrumental in our decision to hold off on our initial alpha (i.e. proof of concept) release until we added one additional feature to help fill in some of the SROI holes: crowdsourcing. You may already be familiar with that term, or it’s cousin “The Widsom of Crowds“.

In the socialmarkets context, there are two essential ideas that pointed us in the crowdsourcing direction:

• All markets (stocks, real estate, ebay…) self-define the value of its offerings, through the collective interactions of the people who participate in it

• Participants in the social sector have opinions on the relative importance of nonprofit projects and their outcomes, and capturing these priorities can help define the value of the related social returns

The new alpha is just about ready for prime time, so please stay tuned. We want to be models of our favourite buzzwords like transparency and accountability, so we want your honest feedback - for our own education, and to share with the larger community. This is, after all, a grand experiment in social science, and we’re excited to be a part of it.

Here’s to a great 2008!

STILL not at liberty to talk about how the site is being architected but I can safely say that we’re slowly coming out of coding and into QA (quality assurance). It’s really fun watching your specs turn into code which then turns into a usable web site.

The question here is whether or not we’re going to make our launch date on spec (without descoping, otherwise known as the art of throwing out non-essential “features”). It’s quite possible considering the heavy descoping we did just to fit the site into this timeframe but we’ll see (says the ex-tech lead within me). If we descope, that’s fine but I can promise one thing. We’re not going to lose the essential parts that makes socialmarkets what it is.

And what are those things?  Our uniqueness comes from the fact that we add transparency to a process that often has none. We ask nonprofits to report their outcomes to donors. It seems like a simple task but very few nonprofits are transparent in that way. You want to test it? Try it. Donate $50 to any nonprofit you see out there. Six months later, ask them what happened to your $50. You’d be surprised at the various answers you’d get. They really won’t be able to tell you what happened to your $50. And they won’t tell you if the project or the case that your $50 went to was a failure or not.

Believe it or not, failure in the nonprofit sector is not something your average fundraiser likes to talk about. It seems… well, unseemly. It’s as if the nonprofit was not a good steward of your money. What they don’t like to tell donors is that their work is hard and not always rewarding. Let’s get real, folks. If a nonprofit is working with certain kinds of clients, their efforts, despite best intentions and great workers, may fail. That’s OK. It happens. Considering the obstacles in a client’s life, you as a donor and they as a nonprofit may be just happy to have given them some help. And hopefully, the next time around, the nonprofit will try to help that same kind of client a different way until they find a way that works best. Sounds like QA testing for a software program? I hope so.

So that’s where we are both with the nonprofit sector and the software application-to-be that is socialmarkets. We’re in testing mode — constantly. And with the hope that our next attempt may be the one that finally changes everything for socialmarkets, the nonprofit sector and even, our clients.

We just started coding for socialmarkets.org's alpha release in November. I'm tremendously excited about it and looking forward to blogging more about this after the press release rolls out. Suffice it to say, we're employing some cutting-edge architectures to make socialmarkets.org fast and reliable.

I'm not entirely at liberty to tell you about everything until the PR folks here start going but I can say it's going to be a fun ride from now until November!