Social Executive for the Social Entrepreneur

The L3C designation is helping entrepreneurs start for-profit businesses with non-profit souls.

Through eBay’s Giving Works platform shoppers contributed nearly $1.5 million dollars to Haiti. Eight US nonprofits have received more than $1 million. eBay is at the forefront of the e-philanthropy movement and I’m excited to bring you an interview with Robert Chatwani.- Jason

What is your role at eBay and how does that impact the philanthropic sector?

As eBay’s head of Global Citizenship, my focus is on harnessing the reach and scale of our core businesses – eBay and PayPal – to create a positive impact. This goes beyond philanthropy. We think about citizenship and sustainability in terms of People, Planet, and Communities, the latter being the part that directly affects the philanthropic sector. We do this by fostering entrepreneurship for global sellers, keeping goods out of landfills through the sale of pre-owned products, and raising funds for nonprofits through sales on eBay.

What does it mean to be the largest online engine for fundraising?

The eBay charity program was built to capitalize on the philanthropic instincts of eBay’s 89 million member community. We’re tapping into this amazing resource by providing a flexible platform for giving – an out-of-the box, commerce-focused solution for online fundraising. The program has provided nonprofit organizations around the world creative and highly flexible ways to raise funds at a time when charitable giving is declining. Based on their individual needs, nonprofits can adapt the eBay Giving Works platform to work for their unique business models.

Where do you see the future of online philanthropy? How do you see and hope to see eBay shaping that future?

In terms of giving – we see two large macro trends taking place. The first is that online giving is growing fast, at a rate that’s 7 times faster than offline giving. Given that contributions through eBay Giving Works have risen while the economy has declined, we see this as a sign that online giving is where philanthropy is headed more and more. The other trend we see is that many more consumers are thinking about social and environmental values when making decisions about what to buy. These consumers have new mindset, and they’re more practical and socially conscious than ever before. eBay empowers them to vote their conscience with their clicks.

Do you think the internet and social media has made philanthropy more accessible to the everyday person?

We have seen time and again that the everyday person appreciates flexibility and adaptability in their giving habits, especially in a recession. The eBay community has shown that even small actions, when brought to scale, can have a big impact. It’s what enables many in our community, both shoppers and sellers, to do good in whatever way is most comfortable for them. We’ve been very impressed with peoples’ generosity, particularly in a recession.

How can online giving be mobilized to respond quickly to disasters like the Haiti earthquake?

We have seen an incredible outpouring of support for Haiti relief efforts coming from the eBay community. More than 425,000 donors and sellers have raised nearly $1.5 million in support. This includes sellers who have decided to designate a portion of their final sale price to charities supporting the relief efforts, and everyday shoppers, who have given at checkout or through PayPal. Celebrities have also participated by selling items on eBay to support charity.

Related posts:

1. Business Giving vs Individual Giving
2. Online Strategy: Capital Campaign Interview
3. Integration & The Future: Solicitation Letters Interview
4. Campaign Strategy: Capital Campaign Interview
5. Next Generation of Philanthropy: Jolkona Foundation

Run down this checklist before you start your own business.

Let me take a second to share with you, my reader, about a couple of different ways we can work together. I want this blog to be interactive and useful for you, and I encourage you to email me with ideas and input on new posts or other content at any time.

• Free Advertising for my Nonprofit Readers: If you check out the bottom of my left-hand sidebar you’ll see a link to a number of my readers’ websites. If you want to participate send me a 200 by 100 pixel jpeg and a url.
• Link Exchange: If you have a nonprofit or philanthropy blog I’d love to talk about including you in my blogroll. Link exchanges are a great way to increase your ranking on Google and other search engines.
• Online Awards: I want to be your go-to source for upcoming online awards that can benefit your nonprofit. If you hear about an award that I have not posted about please let me know so I can share it everyone.
• Featured Fundraiser: Every month (or so) I highlight different fundraisers from a broad range of career levels and backgrounds. I operate entirely on referral, so keep your ears open for someone you think I should feature.
• Online Fundraising Campaigns: In an effort to create best practices and industry standards for online giving, I’m collecting stories about what does and does not work in online fundraising. If you have participated in a successful campaign or know of anyone who has, please share your observations.

The Nonprofit Carnival

Every month a different blogger will post a link to a number of blog posts about nonprofits and giving. This March 31 I will be hosting the The Nonprofit Carnival. If you run a blog for or about nonprofits or fundraising, submit you post at blogcarnival.com or at nonprofitcarnival@gmail.com and I will try my best to include it in this month’s post. Closing date for submissions is March 28.

Related posts:

1. Nonprofit Carnival: Day in the Life
2. August Resource Round-up
3. Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants
4. Join an Interactive Community?
5. March Goodness & Pepsi

Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather than the multi-site WordPress MU. To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can be used on single installations of WordPress. Congratulations, BuddyPress! And congratulations to all the people who’ve been waiting with bated breath for this to happen.

The first thing I thought when I heard the news was, “Awesome! Now everyone can put BuddyPress on their site if they want it.” The second thought I had was, “Shoot! Average WordPress users won’t want to try BuddyPress if they have to switch their site themes over to the BuddyPress default theme just to try it out.” The third thought I had was, “That can’t be right. I’ll ask Andy.”

As it turned out, you could keep your current theme with BuddyPress if you added a couple of files and made a few file edits. There was even a link on the BuddyPress site to download the necessary files. That still seemed a little clunky, though, so Andy, super awesome guy that he is, went ahead and made a plugin to get you started. The BuddyPress Template Pack can be installed directly from your WordPress admin (Plugins > Add New), and will walk you through the theme additions step by step.*

Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can keep your existing theme. Seriously, could BuddyPress have made it any easier for you to add social networking to your site? I know I can’t wait to try it out this weekend, how about you?

* Don’t forget to install BuddyPress itself, or the template pack plugin won’t do anything!

Online communities offer everything from tips to mentoring for time-strapped mothers.

In a recent post, Who Talks to Your Donors, I mentioned two different styles of fundraising. One style involves board members soliciting donors, and another style involves staff cultivating and soliciting donors.

Does your organization primarily use Board Member or Staff to ask for donations? And, how do you think it should be done?

I see advantages to both sides. Can Board Members really know an organization like a staff member can? Is it sustainable to have staff solicit gifts when the average staff member stays at the organization less time than the donor?

Related posts:

1. I’m Not Here to Raise Money
2. Who Talks to Your Donors
3. Annual Board Solicitations
4. Characteristics of a Model Board Member
5. Cold Calling or Networking

A Report from the 3.0 Development Cycle

Menus

There’s been a flurry of blog posts about the integration of the WooThemes Custom Navigation into WordPress core, so I thought it was time we posted the official word. For 3.0, the main user-facing feature we wanted to include was a better site menu management system. Currently, dealing with menus is clunky, using Page IDs or in some cases categories, if a theme uses categories instead of pages for the menu. We wanted a menu system that had the drag and drop ease of the widget management screen, could combine Pages, Categories, and Links, was able to be re-ordered, allowed submenus, and enabled hiding specific Pages or Categories from the menu altogether. We were in the process of building this when WooThemes introduced their Custom Navigation system. Watching their introductory video, it seemed that their system did pretty much everything we wanted to do for core, so we reached out to them about contributing to core.

As you’ve probably heard, it worked out, and the first patch has been submitted. It does require some code modification, which is happening now. The decision to incorporate the Woo menus happened right before our planned feature freeze for the 3.0 development cycle, so we pushed our freeze date back by two weeks to allow the addition. We’re now targeting the 3.0 release for early May, and we think it will be worth the extra two-week wait.

I’m personally really happy that it worked out this way, because I think it will show commercial theme and plugin authors that contributing to core is a win-win proposition. More people can contribute to and improve the basic functional code now, while WooThemes can continue to innovate on top of it for their customers. They get massive bragging rights (which I have no doubt will lead to even more customers), core gets a nice menu system without having to reinvent the wheel, and WordPress users all over the world will benefit. I’m hoping other plugin and theme developers will take a cue from Woo and look at core as a place for collaboration, rather than competition.

The Merge

It was announced at WordCamp San Francisco last year that WordPress and WordPress MU would be merging codebases. This has now happened in 3.0-alpha, and we’re working on smashing bugs and tidying up a few screens. If you’re currently using a single install of WordPress, when you upgrade to 3.0 you won’t see any of the extra screens associated with running a network of sites. If you’re currently running MU, when you upgrade you’ll notice a few labels changing, but upgrading should be as painless as usual. If you’re going to set up a new WordPress installation, you’ll be asked as part of the setup if you want one site or multiple sites, so that’s pretty simple. If you want to turn your single install into one that supports multiple sites, we’ll have a tool for you to use to do that, too. So if you’ve been worried about the merge, have a cup of chamomile tea and relax; it will all be fine.

Patch Sprint!

Okay, so where are we now? The new feature freeze date is on Monday, March 1, 2010. That means that after that date, no more enhancements or features will be added, and we’ll switch gears to focus solely on crushing bugs and fixing up the features that have already made it in. That means we only have a week to try and finish up the many Trac tickets on the 3.0 milestone that either need a patch or have a patch that needs testing. You can help! From now until noon eastern time on March 1 (that’s 17:00 UTC on March 1), head on over to Trac and pitch in. If you hit a wall, hop into the core development channel at #wordpress-dev on irc.freenode.net and hopefully one of the friendly core contributors can give you a push.

March Goodness

Razoo is doing it again, this is year 2 in their March Goodness competition. But this year they are only letting in a small number of nonprofits. Check out the requirements to sign-up and submit your application before February 26. Grand prize is $20,000 with a number of prizes based on region around the $1,000 level.

Pepsi Refresh Project

If you are a person, business, or nonprofit with an idea to make a difference you should check out this project. Every month Pepsi will pick 1000 ideas which will be voted on and the top 2 will receive $250,000. For more information and to submit an application.

Related posts:

1. A Little Help: March Madness
2. Award & An Idea
3. Chase Gives $25,000
4. Grants & Awards Update
5. Awards Update