socially marketing

The FAQ page has turned out to be a surprisingly interesting exercise in the socialmarkets site implementation… and has brought me back to the blogging table!

FAQs are an essential part of good site design. If done well, they are a great time-saver for site users and site managers alike.

Because we are committed to transparency, socialmarket’s FAQs are particularly important. We want to be forthcoming about the issues we deal with, and to resist the temptation to sweep the thornier ones under the rug. Instead, we are including them in the FAQs, where they can be seen, discussed, and perhaps even de-thorned.

But FAQs are also, ideally, succinct. When answers outgrow their limited FAQ real estate, we will pick up the discussion thread here on the blog, where the real estate is virtually unlimited.

The next few blog posts will be exactly that: a closer look at the FAQs we thought could use more explanation space than we provided on the FAQ page itself.

socialmarkets.org is a Web project by Allan Benamer and Jeff Tuller designed to create a social capital market that will more effectively link together donor capital with nonprofit projects and case listings. Think of it as a NYSE for the nonprofit sector. Yes, we understand that that’s a controversial notion, but we believe that it has merit regardless of the excesses and market failures we’ve seen. We are looking for a better and more fundamentally open and transparent way to fund projects and case listings at nonprofits. We believe that a simple market based on concepts such as “social return on investment”, “user generated content”, “social networking” and “open APIs” can address issues of accountability and transparency so often harped upon in the mainstream press. And it can more clearly link what nonprofits do and what they’re funded for in a way never before imaginable.

Reach out to us, talk to us, we want to engage with all the stakeholders in our sector: philanthropists, nonprofits, and technologists. We are in this for the long haul and we’re not going away. A limited set of wireframes for our project is available upon request.