Mashable's Pete Cashmore wrote about the 10 Web Trends to Watch in 2010 on CNN.com today. I think many of these trends could and should spill into online fundraising and philanthropy in the near future. Here are a 3 trends to keep a charitable eye on:
Real-time
The instantaneous, real-time nature of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks provide immediacy, "a sense of living in the now", and can be "highly addictive." Progressive nonprofits have been catching on and using Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages to deliver this same type of real-time interactivity.
But I think the key here for the philanthropic sector is to move this thinking into more operations. Typically, nonprofits provide a year-end report (sometimes even into the middle of the next year) to show accountability. Board meetings rarely happen more than quarterly. Even online newsletters are monthly. Where's the immediacy? Where's the donor or volunteer's sense of being in the now?
Nonprofits, by their very nature, need to be thoughtful and diligent in their work. Whether you're raising and spending $10 or $10 million for charitable purposes, you need to be transparent with your activities. Technology though, offers a variety of tools to provide that sense of now, today, what's happening.
Ustream.com provides live streaming video of whatever you'd like to broadcast. So is there some portion of your work where you could you virtually open your doors for a day and stream work done by volunteers? Give your staff permission to try their hand at twitter and tweet throughout the day about decisions being made, grant applications in the works, donors being courted, people/places/animals/things that received assistance during that day? I'm sure some nonprofit CEOs out there will instantly pushback on the idea of saying or showing too much, but I think there's a lot of real real-time that can be communicated without giving away names or details, and as they say, timing is everything.
Mobile Payments
Personally, I can't believe it's taking this long for the U.S. to adopt mobile payment systems that are so common internationally. I know that the Mobile Giving Foundation and Mobile Commons have been around but high cost and consumer willingness seem to keep mobile giving as something of a pipe dream for the sector. Here's to hoping that PayPal, Amazon, and Square's commercial efforts can break through and make mobile payments and then hopefully mobile giving more mainstream.
Location, location, location
At first I thought posting your every location on facebook/twitter was just a fad, and I'm not quite sold on giving away that much detail of my own personal life online (or maybe I just don't go to enough interesting places to warrant disclosing my location), but I do see potential for nonprofits to test out this trend. For organizations with large volunteer or advocacy networks that aren't easy to measure or leverage, encouraging use of location-based tools to keep tabs on constituents could create an engaging and even fun or useful opportunity for a nonprofit - think volunteers of an environmental organization posting the location of where they are recycling, buying eco-friendly materials, or otherwise doing something they could label as a "green" activity... or a Foursquare-type contest to see who could volunteer at the most soup-kitchens. Foursquare is already encouraging businesses to develop customer loyalty rewards programs. Couldn't nonprofits do the same?
Changing Our World's Interactive team would love your thoughts on these and other trends that will affect the nonprofit sector in 2010.
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