The Mercy Corps Blog

Blog Post Posted November 4, 2009, 3:57 pm by Floyd Mann

A new way of supporting Mercy Corps

In the past few weeks we've quietly been rolling out a new feature on MercyCorps.org: personal fundraising pages.

Photo: Floyd Mann/Mercy Corps

Personal fundraising pages allow Mercy Corps' supporters to set up their own pages on MercyCorps.org. Those pages can be customized with your own text or photos for any event or purpose. You can also set an optional goal for your fundraiser, and there are built-in tools that make it easy to share your fundraising page with your friends through Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Because I'm on the team that built them, I've been very excited about launching personal fundraising pages. The initial feedback we've received from donors and supporters shows me I have good reason to be excited.

In my leisure time I am an avid bread baker. A few years ago I started an online community for bread bakers called The Fresh Loaf. Community members -- aware of my connection to Mercy Corps -- had in the past expressed an interest in supporting us and did so, but at the time we didn't have a good mechanism to track money that came in from specific groups online and report those numbers back to them. So when it came time to beta test personal fundraising pages, approaching The Fresh Loaf community seemed like the natural thing for me to do.

I created a personal fundraising page -- you can view it here -- and set an initial goal of raising $1,000 for Mercy Corps, all the while fearful I was setting my expectations too high.

In less than 72 hours we met our goal. By request, I bumped the goal up higher and extended the trial. In about a week and with very little prodding, community members raised over $2,500. Most of the donations that came in were relatively small -- not much more than the price of a new DVD or hardcover book -- but when we bundled our resources together we were able to make a significant statement of support for Mercy Corps. The generosity of our community made all of us very proud. I hope other groups of friends, families, or online communities will have a similar experience.

The software developer in me must add the footnote that personal fundraising pages are new. We don't expect that we've anticipated all the different ways our supporters would like to use something like this or are aware of all of the types of events they'd like to hold. Please, contact us with your suggestions and new ideas. We hope that by working closely with our most enthusiastic supporters, we can make personal fundraising pages a powerful, useful and fun way to help us out.

Visit mercycorps.org/fundraising for instructions on how to start your very own personal fundraising page.

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Blog Post Posted May 19, 2009, 2:19 pm by Floyd Mann

Embracing the social network

Last month my colleague Roger Burks and I attended the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. Roger had been to the conference in previous years and helped lead a session on better online storytelling that was well received at this year's conference. As a recent migrant from the for-profit world, this was my first time attending a conference geared specifically for non-profits.

It was interesting for me to see how non-profits are adopting the latest technologies. My impression has been that in the past non-profits were slower to embrace technology than many companies in the private sector were, which makes sense when you think about it. A company that invests in hardware and software to reduce the cost of making their product gains a competitive advantage over its rivals. This allows them to slash prices and increase market share or pay a larger dividend to their investors, both benefits that are quantifiable on a balance sheet and sure to please shareholders.

But how do you measure the increase in "good" produced by a non-profit using more technology? Besides, non-profit's "competitors" are more often partners or friendly rivals than opponents. None of us want to drive the others out of business; we want to see improvements in the lives of the people we are serving regardless of who improves them. So without the motivation of undercutting competitors by improving efficiency (and frequently a conservative attitude toward responsible stewardship of donor's money rather than entrepreneurial risk-taking), non-profits have often been slower on the technological uptake.

That is changing for a number of reasons. For one, technology is simply more pervasive in our society than it used to be — the younger generation of employees being hired at non-profits these days have been raised in a world full of computers, video games and cellular phones: for them technology is just a part of how they communicate and do business. Also, the quality and ease of use of software keeps increasing, particularly open source and web-based software. While it may take an IT professional to set up and manage a network file server for staff members to share photos, just about anyone can figure out how to open an account on Flickr (including us).

Which gets me to the hottest topic at the conference: social media. The rapid adoption of social media and mobile technology is fundamentally changing the way people get their news, keep in touch with their friends and organize into coherent movements. Those of us involved in promoting causes through the internet were astounded to watch the amount of money raised online in the run up to the latest presidential election, to see the way candidate's websites went from being places to re-syndicate information to the very core of their campaign strategies. The internet as a tool for mobilizing involved citizens and raising funds for causes has come of age.

So like most other non-profits we're now on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and MySpace. We love keeping in touch with our supporters and donors in these places. That said, we'd also be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that access to the online "society" we're spending an increasing amount of time in is not evenly distributed.

While many of our donors can be found in these places, few of our beneficiaries can. Mercy Corps' Centers for Excellence are one of our attempts to keep the gap between technological haves and have-nots from growing too wide, but they are a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the tidal technological shifts occurring right now. So for now it is incumbent on us to represent our beneficiaries in this new online society. And we ask our donors and supporters for help making sure that those absent from these new platforms are not forgotten.

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Blog Post Posted May 12, 2009, 2:52 pm by Floyd Mann

The still somewhat new Mercycorps.org

We launched a new version of Mercy Corps' website about six weeks ago on April 1st (no joke). This update wasn't just a facelift to the appearance of the site: we retooled the entire site from the inside out and migrated to the popular open-source content management system Drupal.

As is to be expected any time you roll out a new technology there have been issues, but the feedback we've gotten to the new site has been overwhelmingly positive. Everyone loves the higher resolution photos we're able to provide in the new layout. The integration of Google Maps and Google Search have both been big hits, making it easier to find what you are looking for and then contextualize what you find.

Organizationally, we're still coming to terms with what this new site means for us. Drupal is more of a collaborative authoring system than a traditional content management system, so figuring out how we can best connect our supporters and donors with the people who work here and with each other is one of our biggest challenges.

This blog is is a good example of the new options that are available to us that'll hopefully allow us to provide more useful, timely and personal posts on the site. So stay tuned for future updates!

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