launch – Amy Sample Ward

Interview with Rob Wu & Public Launch of CauseVox

Amy Sample Ward — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 01:05:37 +0000

I’m not sure if you caught the news today but CauseVox has launched their public beta! I’ve been following the work of Rob and his team closely as they have shown not just interest, but passion and intent for engaging with the community at large to create a tool that meets the needs of nonprofit organizations and keeps us involved in making the tool better and better. In spite of having a busy launch day, I got ahold of him to ask a few questions. Check out the short interview with Rob below and a preview of some of the functionality launched today!

Interview: Rob Wu, CauseVox Founder

What inspired you to start CauseVox?

A few years ago, Jeff and I went on a pro bono IT consulting project to Uganda to serve a Action for Children, an NGO that fights poverty by preserving families and delivering micro-finance. Like a lot of pro bono projects, we had to fundraise our way to get there, but there weren’t any good tools to make that happen. Long story short, Jeff built a prototype fundraising platform, and we were able to raise more than enough funds to go. We saw the power of grassroots and peer-to-peer fundraising and the impact that it can have. From there we were inspired to scale social good through technology.

Here’s our blog post that explains our story.

What drove you to start CauseVox?

Our experience in Uganda helped us see how valuable technology and fundraising is to creating change. Non-profits are on the front lines, and we want to support them through technology. When we canvassed the environment and talked to small and medium non-profits, three themes kept on bubbling up. We started CauseVox to address these themes.

“Technology is hard to use”

This means long, expensive setup cycles and feature overkill that were not meant for small/medium non-profits. The donor and fundraiser experience also left something to be desired. Our mindset going in was to look at every aspect of the setup and launch of a fundraising campaign and remove what was bloated or confusing.

“My donors are confused…I’m competing with other non-profits”

In the age of the social network, new sites want to be “the hub” for information/engagement and the non-profit space is no different. We’ve seen the rise of a lot of destination sites; sites that allow you to expand your reach and exposure, but often times do so at the expense of your message and storytelling. Your non-profit becomes a commodity in a marketplace of organizations. Every non-profit’s story is unique; it is also unlike any others. We want to give non-profits the ability to preserve this story. By being able to fully customize the look and feel, non-profits can better preserve their core message.

“I don’t know what to ask my support base to do”

We realized that a lot of times, we want a way to help an organization, but don’t know how. Fundraising pages are a tangible way of realizing that. Rather than direct our friends to a generic donation page, we wanted to be able to weave our own personal story within the cause we support. By allowing us to create fundraising pages that contribute to an overall campaign goal, we can take ownership of the causes that move us and also directly see how our efforts contribute. This isn’t the ultimate solution, but it’s a step toward figuring out how to promote better engagement.

What excites you about this work?

We love non-profits and the impact they have. You can say we are idealists at heart and super passionate about causes. It’s exciting to see how much resources we can help non-profits obtain just with a little bit of technology. The opportunity for online fundraising and engagement is limitless. Since we started CauseVox, there hasn’t been a day that we didn’t want to wake up and make the best technology that we could.

How can the community at large feed in to, support and help impact the direction and future of CauseVox?

We want to be a community-driven company; we want the nonprofit community to own the vision for our platform. Non-profits must collaborate to create change, and we are no different.
We’re good at developing technology products, but we lack the deep expertise of non-profit staff. Because that, we come up with hypotheses on how technology should work. We need honest feedback from a wide audience of non-profits to distill themes. These themes are then used to drive product development in the right direction.

As a next step, nonprofit visionaries can join our Advisory Community as a first step in bringing in the larger non-profit community. Outside of that, non-profits need a culture shift an they need to take leadership. Rather than seeing technology as something you buy from vendors, non-profits need to be vocal on what they like and don’t like about the technology that they use. Influencers and organizations like NTEN and Netsquared are prime to be the leading voice in setting vision for how technology is intended to be for nonprofits.

Here’s a run-down of some of the functionality CauseVox has launched:

New Donation Processing
We’ve partnered with FirstGiving to provide an alternative to PayPal. Donors can enter in their credit card and submit it for processing into your donation box without being redirected to another site. This provides a more seamless experience for donors. Donations are disbursed monthly by check or weekly via EFT to your non-profit.

Continuous Fundraising
Fundraising doesn’t have to occur just during planned campaigns. We’ve added in the ability for supporters to fundraise for you year-long — during their birthday, for an event, and much more. Just create an on-going campaign. Your fundraisers can set the end date and target amount to raise on their own fundraising page.

News Feed
Keep track of activity through your news feed in the administrative interface. It works similarly to your Facebook feed.

Support Center
We live on feedback to make this platform the best that it can be for non-profits. Come visit our supporter center, and let us know what you think.

Launching the Global Scale wiki: Learn and share about scaling up!

Amy Sample Ward — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:03:30 +0000

As readers of this blog know, I often mention the idea of “movement building.” There is enormous opportunity and potential for creating real, lasting impact in our world by operating in a movement-oriented way with our programs, events, campaigns, and calls to action. Collaboration and partnerships can easily come together and be successful under and umbrella that puts the work of all those involved toward the movement, instead of the one-time effort or project. Scale is incredibly important to creating movements, and we are all still learning how we scale our work to a global level.

Introducing the Global Scale wiki!

Bonnie Koenig and I have had some great conversations about how we have seen and how we have tackled scale in our work. In those conversations, we realized that we probably had some good examples to share and case studies to provide; but we also realized that there were many, many more people we wanted to be having the conversation with! That’s what led us to start the Global Scale wiki, and we hope that you’ll join us…

With this wiki, we are aiming to create a resource for NGO practitioners where guidelines, lessons learned, tips, links and other help for ‘scaling up’ effective programs can be found.

Today, we’re hoping that by sharing this invitation via the blogosphere (and the corresponding tweets and emails) that you’ll share your ideas and enthusiasm with us – and join us on the wiki. Check out Bonnie’s announcement, too!

Join & Contribute

This wiki is a community learning space, where we recognize that we are all still learning, testing, and experimenting; and where we are all in a position to share and learn. We hope you’ll take this as an open invitation to jump right in with your own case studies, lessons or best practices and also comment if there are questions you hope others can address.

Visit the Global Scale wiki to dive in today: http://globalscale.wikispaces.com

Looking forward to sharing with you there!

Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch

Amy Sample Ward — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:55:33 +0000

I’m so excited to announce the launch of Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch – a new book curated by Jean Russell with a collection of over 60 essays crafting a topography for thriving. I have the great honor to be included in this collection and take such pride in sharing it with all of you!

There are a few ways to dive in:

View the book as a slide show: on the website or on slideshare
View the book on the website: as one page or through the sections on the right
View the book in PDF: download here (we warn you about the file size though!)

I invite you to check it out and connect with any of those that inspire you or get you thinking when you read it. To get you started, I’ve included the introduction to the book below from Jean Russell.

Enjoy!

—–

Thrivability Introduction

Jean Russell, Thrivable.org – Chicago, IL, USA
Thank you for viewing this book. It comes alive in your gaze. I want to introduce you to thrivability by answering some of the questions you have. I am guessing that they might be questions like – what is thrivability and who are these people contributing to it?

What is thrivability – a working definition
In the dance between the individual and humanity as a whole, there is an aliveness. In aliveness, there is a yearning for thriving. All living things strive to move beyond survival to truly flourish. Even in the development of this very project, the aspiration for thriving was clear — the enthusiasm of a very diverse circle of people focused on a simple idea: that the goal of evolving our behavior should be to thrive. And it gives rise….to this book.

Thrivability is our path out of unsustainable practices toward a world where all people have a high quality of life, a voice, and a nurturing earth supporting them. Using whole systems approach, we evolve our way of being together, of collaborating, so that our collective wisdom and action bring forth a flourishing world and thriving life.

Why these words and phrases?
There is no single recipe or discrete list of requirements for thrivability. However, I created several groups of words and phrases that relate to it in some powerful way. Perhaps they reframe a perspective or engage in a critical role. The contributors of this book refined and evolved the title words and phrases. It is an exploration they have joined me in, and I hope you will join us too.

A bit about our contributors
Our contributors are from widely different fields – from social entrepreneurship to philanthropy, from deep tech space to community activism, from neuroscience to labor and economic history, from social network analysis to storytelling. I expect that you, the viewers and participants, are a wide range of people too. Like you, the contributors are from a vast array of places in the world from Stockholm, Brussels, and London to Thailand, Australia, and Uganda, and include Seattle, San Francisco, Portland, NYC, Los Angeles, Houston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston. From noted academics to get-your-hands-dirty entrepreneurs, from scientists to the tree-climber next door, we connect them together to lay out the general topography of a thrivable world.

Together we sketch our view of thrivability. We may not all agree. However, I think you will find, as I did, that while the field of interest may be different, the core principles, values, and beliefs about thrivability come through consistently, as core words  re-appear on other pages. Please enjoy this curated collaborative sketch of thrivability. I invite you into the conversation.

What does thrivability mean to you?
What does it mean for those of us who suffer?
Are we thrivable already, only becoming less so?
How do you apply the idea of thrivability in practice – in your life, at your work, in your community?
How is it possible to co-create a thrivable world?

“A good question sparks more questions,” says one humble, extraordinary, and curious friend of mine. I think he is right.

In grace and with gratitude,
Jean Russell

Thrivable.org strives to equip agents of transformation in order to co-create a thrivable world. We reveal the breadth of domains and their interweaving. We enable thrive agents to know where they are and what they can do and be for collective thrivability.

Public launch, June 10th

Amy Sample Ward — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:09:36 +0000

While I was living in Spain in the early part of 2007, through to now, I have had the great opportunity to work Meyer Memorial Trust and Grass Commons on a new kind of wiki to benefit the nonprofit sector. It has been a long time coming and helps explain how busy and distracted I have been lately, but the public launch is now just two weeks away! Here is an exceprt from the announcement MMT put up on the website yesterday afternoon:

Like many foundations, MMT has been building a “knowledge management” system to archive information in an accessible way to help us be the best grantmakers we can be. But we’ve been approaching this task with a bigger end in mind.

Why, we asked ourselves, would we set up a system that only MMT could use when the need for good information is shared by other foundations… and nonprofit organizations and public agencies and official decision makers and citizen volunteers and… in fact, everyone working for the common good?? Wouldn’t that be a smarter investment for us to make?

What if there was a place where we could all exchange what we learn as we go about our daily business? What if nonprofits could see the data and information that foundations use in their due diligence process? What if organizations and people could easily determine which foundations’ interests match their project goals? What if foundations could quickly see what groups are working on an issue they are investigating? And so on…

Well, we are building such a place. A place where people and organizations can connect about subjects and places. A place called connectipedia…

Want to know more? Want to see connectipedia in action? Want to find out how you can be part of all this? Attend the public launch event at:

2 – 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, June 10
Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center
aka Ecotrust (second floor conference center)
721 NW Ninth Ave.
Portland OR 97209

We would love you to be part of this event and celebration. Several renowned geeks will be there! We’re not requiring folks to register, but if you plan to attend, please send a quick rsvp email.

If you can’t make it to Ecotrust, you can still participate in the launch. We plan to webcast the event so anyone in our corner of the world can make time for connectipedia. (More details about the webcast to come.)

After June 10th, connectipedia will be open for busines!

I’m extremely excited about the unveiling of this wonderful tool. If you are in Portland, you can attend the event in person per the details above. If you are elsewhere in the world, you will be able to attend remotely via the web and be right in the thick of things with us. I’ll be sure to post details about connecting remotely as soon as they are made available. I can’t wait to have you join me in using this terrific new tool!