Oct 5, 04:40 pm: Online Community Summit: Corporate Social Good Initiatives (Notes)

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Corporate Social Good Initiatives:

Meg Garlinghouse: Yahoo! for Good

  • Yahoo! for Good was to enable to people to connect to whatever cause they wanted too
  • As a corporation, Yahoo! is interested in the environment/green
  • At 9/11, realized how much they could leverage community to help w/ cuases (donate now button on front page)
  • Uniquely positioned to connect people to causes (don’t have a lot of ability to write checks to nonprofits — evaluating nonprofits is not their competency)
  • Philanthropy is integrated into everything they do; not separate
  • Y! and Green — built 18seconds.org, Yahoo! Green
  • Nonprofits can use Y! Answers to get their questions into the public consciousness and to get the intelligence of their communities
  • Some nonprofits interested in “friendraising” not “fundraising” and able to take advantage of Y!‘s social messaging tools

Erin Bush: AIM for Good

  • works in messaging and social media
  • AIM for Good launched sept 14
  • Being a corporation should not stop them from contributing the social good. The real question is how. The decided to use their online audience to foster participation w/in that audience. They also have an ability to target demographics. Buddy list and AIM client a powerful tool.
  • How does this balance against the multiple corporate obligations?
  • AIM for Good Mission: provide a unique network hub for cuases, issues, environmental awareness, disaster relief, and support to help the AIm community participate and engage, that may also serve as a communications vehicle in the evnt of a major catastrophe. 3 pillars: awareness, action, partnerships
  • They have a way to point people to appropriate resources (particularly in the event of a disaster).
  • They have an ability to react quickly
  • use widgets powered by Network for Good
  • portability of taking causes to other social networks
  • hard to define ad strategy (very stringent)
  • when ads not sold run PSAs

(informal addition) Hong Qu: YouTube

  • announce YouTube nonprofit program, help to connect organizations to donors and supporters
  • eligible nonprofits have the right tax status
  • application process
  • benefits: donate button next to every video, nonprofit profile page can be linked to any specified landing page, some of the videos will be chosen to be promoted in other parts of the site, to users.
  • (from room) tremendous potential to spread word quickly

Discussion from the room:

  • Q. Will AOL make information that appears on non-AOL sites available? A. Yes! No more garden wall.
  • Q. People almost never know about the kinds of services that the companies are offering? Seems like a huge opportunity to get the word out. A. (Y!): consumer site so most of their programs directed to consumers. (AOL): Wide reach but need to make sure that the issue is appropriately relevant.
  • Q. If I’m a nonprofit, I need to go to a lot of different places to get people interested in their mission? Is there a way to innovate around microformats? Nonprofits posting and any way for these folks to pull that in? How are we going to make this work across all the different spaces? A. (Y!) Commitment to the open standards. (from the room) Integration via APIs and tool kits but it is also about integration into process. The tension is about capacity to manage all the different possibilities. About being able to manage the staff capacity. Using the bigger communities to tag and make photos available. (Y!)Looking at how to use passionate users to help with this problem rather than using the staff time. Give supporters an ability to make micropresence.
  • Q: What is Google doing to vet the nonprofits to make sure they are who they say they are? How are they going to scale? A. Every application needs to be human verified to get volunteers to make sure that it is real. (from AOL) Partnership with Network for Good who does that for them. (from Y!) They trust their community because they don’t have a nonprofit program but try to make it possible their users to act on the issues they care about by providing them good information.
  • Q. For Google, how is a nonprofit selected to be on the front of YouTube? A. The video doesn’t appear — a thumbnail. Not sure about the criteria. But do know that is rotated among many nonprofits. Donation comes through Google checkout.
  • Q. Where are the various CSR efforts being aggregated? A. The challenge is that the companies effort is attached to the consumer not the nonprofit. (Y and AOL): Partner with nonprofits on consumer facing campaigns.

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Marnie Webb  |