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Trends that are Shaping Social Media in the Public Interest: Social Looping
Social looping occurs when organizations meaningfully connect people to the impact their participation (financial, social or political) has created for a cause and provide tools to inspire and enable those people to reach out and encourage their social graph to take further action.Why have online initiative such as charity: water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva grown so fast and generated such brand affection? Effective social looping has a lot to do with it.
Supporters of a cause or charity want to know the destination of their donations, and non-profit organizations and donation platforms like charity:water, DonorsChoose.org and Kiva are answering that question with information and powerful storytelling and images. Furthermore, they are making it easy for their participants to share specific people and initiatives in need and the celebrate the successes along the way.
Examples include:
- Online microfinance platform Kiva.org posts on its website profiles of entrepreneurs, so lenders can see who they are donating to. There are also profiles of lenders in the community, and background information on the microfinance institutions that receive the donations and send them on to the entrepreneurs. Kiva also posts statistics and financial information online, with an explanatory section on “How Kiva Works”; and Kiva representatives say that there will be efforts for even greater transparency, including a contest for user-submitted videos about the Kiva model, after criticism that earlier versions of Kiva.org’s language suggested that lenders were indeed able to donate money to a particular entrepreneur (much like the “sponsor a child” charities of last century).
- Other fast-growing charities that try to illustrate where exactly donations are going include Invisible Children, a non-profit that spreads awareness about child soldiers in Northern Uganda, educational charity DonorsChoose.org, and charity: water.
- Invisible Children, for example, as part of its Schools for Schools campaign, blogs photos of schools being built thanks to donations from Invisible Children supporters.
- DonorsChoose.org posts photos and thank-you notes from the students whose classrooms received requested school supplies or were able to go on an educational field trip based on donations from the site.
- And on its web site, charity: water uses Google Earth maps to track progress of wells and other charity: project projects and their partners across the world.
Read the full Social Media Blueprints report and learn about the other trends that are shaping the use of social media in the public interest: Social Media Blueprints 1.0
Posted in: Trends | Tagged: entrepreneurs, kiva, microfinance, socialgraph, sociallooping
