Millenials Almost as Philanthropic as Grandma

A new Harris Interactive DonorPulse Survey reports that 75% Americans 18-29 say they or someone in their household has made a contribution to a nonprofit in the last twelve months, compared to 95% of Americans 65 or older. What's more, about 50% of them reported total contributions of over $250 for the year, while 75% of their grandparents gave that much.

What's more, 60% of those young people agreed with the statement: 'Most charitable organizations are honest and ethical in their use of donated funds' compared with only 50% of their grandparents.

This is very encouraging for e-philanthropy. If only nonprofits figure out how to reach young people, and motivate them. Hint: it ain't direct mail.

This data is summarized in the Wall St. Journal of 24 April.

Lessons from Amazon to Nonproifts

These days, when Amazon does something online, pay attention.

In a New York Times article yesterday, Bob Tedeschi explains how two new shopping comparison sites are launching. Amazon has been testing "ProductWiki" since November 2005 and the founders of DoubleClick have started ShopWiki. Both encourage site visitors to enter their opinions about products they've purchased. Both use the wikipedia format that allows users to edit each other's posts, rather than a blog or bulletin-board format that just lists each post sequentially.

The point is, these online gurus believe, that people want to express their opinions and will return to a site to view their edited contributions and add more.

What does this mean for nonprofits? One would expect that people might feel more passionate about animals, voting, international relief, education or religion than they do about toasters? More involvement by your supporters in your site's content will make more supporters feel more invested in your site than in your competitors' sites, and it will encourage more visitors to visit more often and spend more time looking at your pages.

How do you do it? There are free ones, like jot.com, where you can set up a wiki about as easily as you can set up a blog. If you know of others, or have preferences, please share them here. You don't have to use wiki technology, however. For smaller volumes, you can just post extracts from people's email on your site.

If you'd like to "edit" this story, add your comments below.

Rick...

Registering Kids to Vote by Cell Phone

Mobile Voter, in partnership with Music for America, has won a grant to register thousands of young voters at hundreds of concerts across the U.S. this summer. At these concerts, performers will tell their audiences that they can register to vote by text message. The software will enable them to request forms on the spot, by supplying their postal address.

The have announced the winners of the first-ever national competition to support innovative nonpartisan strategies to register young voters ages 18 to 29. In 2006, Young Voter Strategies, with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts, will work with 13 groups nationwide to register 350,000 young voters.

Each project will focus on registering a subset of young voters, including young African Americans, community college students, Latinos, Evangelical youth, high school seniors, four-year college students, tech-savvy mobile phone users, young single women and more. Groups will use innovative internet, email, and mobile phone strategies, streamlined peer-to-peer tactics, presentations by high school teachers and college professors, and creative outreach by celebrities and musicians at concerts.

Competition winners will each target different groups of young adults using strategic and innovative tactics:

Mobile Voter and Music for America will register 18 to 29 year olds nationwide using creative text-messaging and Internet technology in conjunction with concerts and celebrity outreach.

For more information about Young Voter Strategies and for the full press release, visit: https://youngvoterstrategies.electionmall.name/e-contentstrategy/news.asp

Certified Email gets hearing at NTEN conference

In Seattle on March 23, representatives of both sides (and the middle) of the Certified Email argument made their case at one of the sessions. The CEO of GoodMail was there, as was the CTO of GetActive, a service bureau for nonprofits, and the Postmaster of AOL. Opposing the idea was Danny O'Brien of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Neal Bastek of Free Press. Kimberly Reckner of the American Red Cross was in the middle. The Red Cross will test the system over the coming 90 days and decide whether the emails that go through the GoodMail system get better response than those that don't. You can watch the session on streaming video or listen.

(for a primer on Certified Email, read our earlier post.)

The arguments against this idea really evaporated when AOL announced on March 3 that it would rebate fees to nonprofits. The crowd at "DearAOL.com" should have declared victory then and left the field. Instead, they continue to whine and offer "slippery slope" arguments. Here are some of their arguments, and the truth that conflicts with them.

1. "The internet is supposed to be free." No it isn't. It's always had costs associated with it. If you're not paying for the computer, the email software, and the technicians to run it, then someone else is. Many nonprofits pay a service bureau to send their email. Many pay copywriters to create it. Most pay lots of money to make sure there's a landing page ready to accept the responses.

2. "This is an obstacle to free speech." Nonsense. Free speech isn't free to deliver. If certain emails were blocked or charged more because of their content, that would be a free speech issue. But this is a fee to cover the costs associated with a premium delivery service.

3. "This will cause more spam, not less, because now spammers can just pay a fee to get their mail delivered." More nonsense. Getting your mail certified is a lot more complicated than sending a fee. You have to have applied for the AOL Whitelist, where they monitor your emails for spam complaints. You have to have an opt-in list. If there are too many complaints against your emails, they will strip you of your certification. So only qualified, opt-in lists can be sent with the Certified Email system.

4. "Our emails will no longer go through if we don't pay." Your emails will continue to be delivered as they are now. In other words, if you're not on AOL's whitelist, your bulk emails will probably be delivered without live links and without graphics. That's the way it works now.

Nonprofits need to understand they're not the ones with the biggest stake in email delivery. Banks and other financial institutions would love to cut back on paper statements, but they can't without a reliable means of distinguishing their emails from those of phishing scams. Nonprofit emails are a tiny portion of all emails sent through the AOL system.

There are some concrete benefits to a valid email delivery guarantee system. Among them:

• millions of trees will be saved when hundreds of thousands of bank customers and credit card holders get their statements via email instead of postal mail.
• nonprofits whose content is regularly mis-identified as spam or smut, like those that deal with breast cancer or rape victims, can get their emails through filters that would normally screen them out.
• response rates eventually will probably go up when donors have more trust in the system.

The DMA requires its members to use a "sender ID" system to help cut down on spam. Certified email is "sender ID" on steroids. In addition to Sender ID, certified email offers these benefits:

1. certifies that the sending domain is a legal entity or is compliant with permission-based list building practices
2. provides any guarantee that the message received was not altered in transit
3. establishes a system that builds a mail reputation for the sender (e.g., how many recipients reported the message as spam, or requested to be unsubscribed)
4. provides closed-loop accountability (e.g., if a sender’s complaint rate is too high, decertify them and cease to reward them with any further delivery benefits)
5. supports any special trust promotion in the UI of major ISPs (e.g., label the message as trustworthy and certified)

The Q&A session after the NTC panel discussion exposed even more muddle-headed thinking. One person complimented the technology but wondered why GoodMail couldn't offer it as a nonprofit. "Why did you have to make a buck off it?" he was asked. I really hoped he'd say, "Because I dream of being filthy, disgustingly rich." Instead, he mentioned that he had invested $10 million in the creation of the technology.

Later on I challenged a particularly obnoxious participant, asking him if he was also opposed to paying the Postal Service a similarly discounted rate to deliver his postal mail. "No," he responded quickly. "That's the government." "So, I asked, you'd be ok with paying the government a fee to deliver your email?" "Yes," he replied. "Then you'd get your email delivered as efficiently as your postal mail," I answered. When I explained that he's certainly entitled to push for such a socialist solution, he got very defensive and said he wasn't a socialist. You can take offense or not, but when the government runs commerce, that's socialism.

Rick...