Transcript

The Future of Social Networking for Non-Profits

February 03, 2011

0:00:0

ANNOUNCER: Special guest, Ben Rattray, CEO of Change.org, on the subject, The Future of Social Networking for Non-Profits.

The call was recorded on February 2, 2011, and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on the PDF Network and other upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com. Enjoy the show!

******************

NANCY SCOLA: We’re delighted to have Ben Rattray with us and Ben is the founder and CEO of Change.org And Change.org launched in 2007 shortly after Ben finished up at Stanford and over the last couple years it’s grown into one of the highest profile online advocacy and political organizing efforts on the internet today.

So, Ben’s going to talk to us a little bit about social networking for non-profits, and also he’s going to give us his insights into the future of hyper local online activism.

So, with that Ben, you ready to go?

BEN RATTRAY: Love to, thanks everybody, excited to be here. Although “here” is currently in my home office. I decided not to go in today. Total pleasure to talk.

So, about four years ago, we launched a social network for non-profits and failed, fairly miserably in my perspective. I think (inaudible) for the first couple years, had some modicum of success because we had lots of organizations that were interested and signed up for the service and what not. But in my estimation, we generally failed. It just didn’t take off in the way we hoped, didn’t have the sort of (inaudible) and overall (inaudible) from my perspective.

So, thankfully, the last year especially, has been a lot more favorable for us, we’re currently back on track, we’ve got about 3 million people on the site every month, growing at about 175,000 new people a month, new members and we’re winning campaigns for social change often at a local level almost every day.

So, it’s been quite a ride and I’d love to shed some light on our decision making because we’ve explored a lot in this space. I’ve done a lot in sort of trying different things from donations to advocacy to volunteerism in the social networking space and we’ve come out actually focused on a much more specific opportunity, which I think is organizing for social change online. And my guess is we’ll be acquiring more than half-a-million people a month by the end of the year and winning campaigns multiple times a day.

NANCY SCOLA: I’m sorry to jump in, but can you give people an overview of basically what Change.org is in a fundamental way. You know, as if you’re introducing this for the very first time.

BEN RATTRAY: For sure. So, we’re a platform that allows us to start, join and win social action campaigns. That’s pretty much -- we basically allow people to start campaigns to identify something they want to change the world that’s very specific. And from the tools and the support and also of the scale to win campaigns.

I’ll just start off with a quick example, an illustration of what we do and then dive in kind of the higher level perspective of where I think we’re at in social networking for non-profits and the biggest opportunities that we see.

So, a really good illustration of the sort of stuff we do. So, about eight weeks ago a woman -- a (inaudible) woman in South Africa was walking down the street in (inaudible) and she was apprehended, thrown into a shack, raped and almost killed for five hours. Oftentimes what will happen is women after this happens, they’ll kill themselves. It’s a phenomenon called ‘corrective rape,’ in South Africa. It happens about 10 times a day in Capetown alone where men will try to turn women (inaudible) by raping them. This is awful, awful stuff and this is the stuff you see every day.

Now what this woman did, Millicent, instead of reclining she actually connected to other women who have had this same thing happen to them, and tried to get this guy in jail, successful, actually got him in jail, he posted $10 bail and came after the women, threatened their lives, they fled to a safe house, they didn’t know what to do, and they started a petition at Change.org, calling on the Minister of Justice of South Africa to condemn ‘corrective rape’ as a hate crime, which has real legal consequences in South Africa, it means there’s additional resources, (inaudible) from police, so on and so forth.

All right, so we find this out, (inaudible) tools for someone to start a campaign, our human rights editor, Adam (inaudible) sees this on our site, he knows the women, ends up getting on Skype with them in the safe house and talks them (inaudible) the campaign and provides them sort of advice and support about how you might run an effective campaign, using the web and doing offline organizing.

So, it’s (inaudible) campaign and got more people involved and we sent them to the (inaudible) mentor a membership letting them know about this stuff, overwhelming response. And over the past six week have had 140,000 people from 175 countries take action. And melted the email server of the Minister of Justice of South Africa, I got a personal call from the Chief of Staff of the Minister of Justice asking us to stop, what we could do.

I said, look, these women -- we represent people running campaigns on our site, we don’t run them ourselves in most cases. I said these women (inaudible) this little group that started this, they want a meeting with the Minister. And the Chief of Staff said, we can’t do that, we’re not sure, yada, yada. And I said, we’re going to go public with the story and tell this to the press within the next 48 hours if you don’t accept a meeting.

They didn’t accept the meeting so we went to the press and (inaudible) worked with this grassroots group of women in South Africa and in the first week-and-a-half it was covered by the BBC, Al Jizheera, the biggest newspaper in South Africa, the biggest radio station and a bunch of press called the Minister of Justice, get it going on the first time on record ever acknowledging ‘corrective rape’ on the BBC South Africa, and then just about a week-and-a-half ago, accepted a formal meeting with these women who have been affected by ‘corrective rape.’

So, it’s an illustration that it’s an amazing story of these women and they’re rock stars and it’s awesome and a total honor to work with them. But that’s the basic model we have, where anyone, anywhere at any time who wants to change anything can start a campaign with (inaudible) tools, can give advice and support on how to run effective campaigns, which is a huge and important part of the model, and then if they have resonance can get to scale, like the 100,000 or more people is the actual campaign.

So, that’s it, that’s an example an illustration of some of the things that are happening on this site.

So, I’ll dive sort of back into some more specific or some generalities about where I think where at on private sector for social networking tools, and then back into (inaudible) about where the biggest opportunities lie.

So, we learned a lot in this process of exploring and attempting unsuccessfully to be a platform for social networking. I think that there’s this huge amount still, and it surprises me this still happens now there are all these sort of different bugs and frothiness and excitement about tools and about Twitter and Facebook and the fixation -- you know, when I ask people when people ask me, what should we be doing? How should we use these tools?

Most of the time, my first question is well, what do you want to do? What is your strategy? Getting lots of followers on Twitter and lots of fans on Facebook, that’s not a strategy. And one of the problems with sort of the false attempt online and on private sector in many cases, is the supposition that numerical additions to Twitter or Facebook pages, that’s the return on investment. You’re getting more people overall. And I’ll give you sort of some number of reactions we’re getting and the kind of response we get from Twitter, Facebook and email, and you’ll see driving traffic isn’t one of the reasons you would do this. I think primarily, at least.

So, we ask what is this for? What is your goal overall? And (inaudible) and (inaudible) because they’re only really two possible major goals that you might have around which you organize a social media strategy. One is you want more donations, and the second is you want more action or effective organizing. And the third is (inaudible) whether you want more numbers and more engagement, but if more members and more engagement isn’t getting you more donations and more effective actions, then what are they for?

So, ultimately you want to be really rigorous about what the usefulness is for. And the reason I think a lot of times you get people talking about, oh, well it’s really about kind of the new member engagement, general (inaudible) and awareness. That’s because they are not seeing (inaudible) numbers are the two most important things for most organizations -- donations and action. And so they sort of -- you know, there’s a lot hand waiving and desire to engage in some other metric that might be more self-serving for the effectiveness of these tools.

So, in any case, I’m going to dive into what I think the relative effectiveness is on these two different domains, the raising resources and sort of helping to win the advocacy campaigns that many of us care about winning and the causes themselves (inaudible) donations.

So, donations through social networking tools has more or less been an abject failure, more or less. There certainly have been tens of millions of dollars raised but there have been many more than tens of millions of dollars spent in human resources from non-profits trying to raise funds on social networking sites.

If you look at the most successful of the platform and much celebrated and much maligned with causes on Facebook and look, you know, as maligned as causes on Facebook is, they’re still raising more money using social networking tools than anybody else probably combined. Despite that, it’s in the tens of millions of dollars that more than 100 million people having interacted with the application, much, much less than $1 per person, you have (inaudible) talked about like three years ago, they’re getting really good at what they do, but there’s just not much there yet, at least.

And so this isn’t this huge amount of money. I would say the situations in which donations make sense is when there’s a compelling narrative for getting people involved in a collective fundraising endeavor, just asking people to make donations in a fairly traditional way or having the kind of Tweet content, which I think are very cool things. Like they’re not driving lots of revenue.

On donations, we haven’t had the sort of all aligned, like frankly, we don’t even accept donations through Change.org anymore, it’s just not interesting. The reason it’s not -- it’s interesting is the second thing, okay, if it’s not going to raise money, a lot of money, can it help us advance the change we see? Can it help us to win the battles we’re trying to fight on the (inaudible) side. And this is where I think it’s actually really interesting, but not in the way that most people think.

So, I think most people think, all right, so you know, we have Twitter and Facebook, these are viral platforms and we’re going to on and we’re going to take our content, we’re asking Congress for x, y or z; and we’re going to ask people to tell Congress x, y or z on Facebook or Twitter. And (inaudible) you don’t get the raw numbers that you might hope that would justify the expense of your resources.

Let me just give you a quick (inaudible) calculation. Okay, so a week ago, we had Ashton Kutcher Tweet out a link to one of our actions, one of our campaigns. And then we simultaneously the same day sent an email out to about a million-and-a-half people and asked for the same action. And I (inaudible) really excited, right, I’m like (inaudible) Skype chat and, oh, Ashton Kutcher’s promoting our campaign, it’s so exciting, it’s at 6.5 million followers on Twitter. And most of the staff at the end of the day I knew it was going to be askew in ways that people didn’t predict, but I didn’t realize how askew it would be.

And (inaudible) not what they thought and maybe was about comparable to the email we sent or whatnot. So when Ashton Kutcher Tweeted, we got about 2,000 people that went to the site, and about 250 people took action. Email, we got about 75,000 of people getting back.

So, the differential is 1200 times greater on email in this case -- 1,200 times greater. Now of course it’s a function of -- a follower’s not a follower’s not a follower. A lot of people with massive followings on Twitter got those followings acquired them through the suggested users’ list that happened not now, it happened a few years ago and it’s this -- people that are very (inaudible) surveying and brilliant model by Twitter to conjure this sense that there’s massive people following these celebrities when truly the actual con -- I mean, every single person who joined Twitter for like months and months and months, automatically were added to these people’s feeds and most (inaudible) never came back and so there’s this artificial inflation. So, it’s not that Twitter’s not interesting, these are numbers are radically askew.

So as far driving actual raw numbers at a traditional advocacy campaign, I wouldn’t focus on (inaudible). What I would do thought, what I think is really interesting and when we’re winning lots and lots of campaigns is by using social media strategies to tactically -- and from a messaging perspective to be much more compelling and effective in the types of campaigns that we run.

So I’ll give you an example of what just happened over the past few weeks on our site. So, I see a news article on the Huffington Post about a month-and-a-half ago, and it was a hit piece on Kaplan University, which is owned by Kaplan, which is owned by the Washington Post company. This is (inaudible) and sort of very well known thing in general, it’s kind of below the radar that it’s subsidizing effectively Washington Post as a publication. It’s a prop, it’s the reason why the company is what is today.

And it was about the sort of exploitive nature of this private university and the radical amount of expenses from all these students who aren’t really getting value out of it and most of them are falling default in the loans and very few people are graduating and most of them aren’t making more money after doing so.

So, this is a really interesting story. Now as a normal organization you might say, well we’re going to go run a campaign against this, right? But we’re going to write it up ourselves and we’re going to just then send it out via email and then we’re going to put it on Twitter and Facebook and hope it works.

So, instead of doing that we said, well who are these people that are being affected, where are they and can we help them more effectively advocate for their own well being? So, we started looking on forms and we found a bunch of women, actually mostly women, who were organizing around this who themselves had been subjected to amass tens of thousands of dollars of debt, who were deceived into believing that they’d be able to use that credential in their state, many of which in the states don’t actually accept the credentials they were offered.

00:15:00

And any, this amazing woman who is organizing around this and we connected her and we said, you know, this was a woman named Shannon, and we said, this is a (inaudible) we’d love to help you run a campaign, and she says, well this is awesome, I’m only organizing people online and we helped her launch this campaign and this has really been all her, and it has totally taken off. But it hasn’t just taken off in raw number, that’s only -- we sent it out to a small segment, let’s say 12,000 people taking action.

I mean, this has been on the (inaudible) higher education, ABC News, it was covered in USA Today, getting massive overall traction in pressuring the Washington Post company. And the reason it is, is because she’s using a lot of clever online tactics to do things, like imagine your ability to go contact former reporters of the Washington Post through social networking sites, letting them know of this and asking for comments. Imagine being able to go into all your personal network and connecting to all the people that are readers who like the Washington Post going and actually directly on the Twitter reply sort of replying to people that are just following in a prominent way, or the public editor in a prominent way who (inaudible) journalists.

The pressure you can exert through using these very transparent, open peer-to-peer communication tools for the kind of advocacy that advances the public good is an incredible opportunity. Now it’s not just --

NANCY SCOLA: I’d like to jump in with a quick question: if she’s already doing an online organizing effort on her own, what does she need Change.org for? What do you guys bring to the table?

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so just three things: tools, support and scale. So, you know, and this is sort of very much -- you know, so (inaudible) been writing about sort of the impotence of ineffectiveness, of social (inaudible) largely speaking for organizing social change. And I think that he’s both right and some of what he says, but trivially so.

So, it’s definitely true to having 100,000 people Tweeting about an issue in a disconnected fashion (inaudible) very interesting. There’s not much there, there really isn’t. I mean 10,000 people coordinated in a way through a tool and a strategy and in a constructive way channel for very specific change of whom you can follow up on a regular basis? Like we’re running campaigns every week. I mean, it’s just -- (inaudible) does not like us right now for a very good reason because there’s really effective, interesting organizing going on, and people need the tool -- just having a bunch of people on a Twitter stream, like even effective organizing tool, it’s an amazing outreach tool. It’s an amazing tool just it’s not the “one” tool. If you don’t have a way of aggregating (inaudible) and (inaudible) constructively, synchronously around a very specific strategy, you have nothing.

And so I think that one is its tools, two is important, second incredibly overseeing, right, is the overlooked business strategy.

So, let me give you an example of this, what we’re doing for the Washington Post. And hopefully -- so we look at the Washington Post, it is -- they’re not responding right now, they’re clearly very irritated about what we’re doing. But they’re trying to (inaudible) duck and cover and so our thoughts are like, if you’re normal, if you’re Shannon, you might say, well I might keep on trying to get more people to sign this petition against the Washington Post, and of course, (inaudible) returns on that. So, there are a lot of other pressure points.

What happens in the case the President of Columbia University is on the Board of the Washington Post company and that Columbia University is part of a consortium of non-profit universities of critiquing the private school -- extraction of wealth from the poor, oftentimes single females in this country.

And so that’s a pretty clear pressure point, right? Without that strategy and recognizing that if we ask the President of Columbia either condemn these sort of pernicious practices of tapping the university which is under his domain as a Board member of the Washington Post company or to resign from the company, like there’s no way we’re not going win that. That just -- one of two things will happen; there’s no way we’ll be able to exert enough pressure such as one of two things will happen, and this is like in realtime, like we’ll do this today or tomorrow hopefully, you know, most people don’t know that strategy matters. Power of dynamics and mapping matter. And what we want to do is try to notch the tools but the strategy and support and finally the scale, and we help people - the reason this is in a (inaudible)of higher education, the reason it was in ABC News, the reason why it was in all these publications is we do media (inaudible) for these people.

So, like people starting campaigns on the site, we do media average. So, ultimately, to just bring this full circle, that what we care about, we care about winning. We don’t care about, oh, we have this petition already and let’s see how many more signatures we can get for social media tools. We say, okay, if our goal is to have a third- party evaluator adjudicate claims between Kaplan University and the students, who are getting screwed right now, that’s our goal. What can we (inaudible) and social media tools allow us in many cases to identify the kind of people who are most personally impacted, who have an amazing personal narrative which gets told in a public way, resonates with many more people. And this is why we’re getting so much -- I’ll just mention one more example of this, which I think is really interesting.

So, we’re running a campaign right now with someone on the site who’s running a campaign right now attacking NFL and calling the Super Bowl Committee to make much more public resources and sort of alerts about the human trafficking that’s going on around the Super Bowl. Happens every year, right?

So, look, over the past decade, I mean people --

NANCY SCOLA: Can you just explain that a little bit because when I first thought --

BEN RATTRAY: Oh yeah, so that 10,000 mostly young girls are trafficked in around the Super Bowl every single year to service men who buy under aged women, oftentimes traffic like illegally for sex. It happens all the time, very untold story, and this happens at major sporting events around the world, happens at (inaudible) in the world to happen, it happens then.

So, it’s a pretty awful thing and one of the things we’re trying to do and a lot of grassroots organizations try to do is to raise awareness about this and caution the police, caution local authorities, hotels, and overall provide publications to recognize that a lot of these ‘johns’, I’m not a big fan of ‘johns’ but ‘johns’ aren’t awful people if they knew that the women who’s sex they’re buying are not consensual, that these are under aged women trafficked from another state, held under physical and psychological harm for these pimps, that they might do something different.

So, anyway this is a campaign that someone started on our site. And so what we did we connected other affected women who have previously been trafficked, and we did this largely through social media tools and so rather than just saying, well Change.org going to launch this campaign calling on the NFL to raise awareness about this issue, and hand out leaflets that a lot of these grassroots organizations are trying to provide.

Somebody else started the campaign using social media tools identified other affected people. We had a woman who’s a previous victim at previous Super Bowls, who was trafficked there, wrote a personal story and a letter to the NFL asking the NFL to implement a policy of greater awareness about this.

There’s a former Cowboys’ football player now that’s done a PSA about it. And we’re getting press by trying to go out and get other NFL players using Twitter to sign on this as well.

NANCY SCOLA: (Overlapping remarks) a strategic partner and a media partner for these folks, not simply an organizing platform?

BEN RATTRAY: Oh, yeah, (inaudible) tools, tools are important. But like strategy and scale are -- you -- look, I was talking to -- not that I want to critique or whatever -- so I saw this petition it was an environmental organization focused on dolphin issue and it got like 1 million signatures. It just didn’t matter, it just didn’t matter.

Just adding random names to a petition, it just doesn’t matter. It’s a massive opportunity, that’s a new story, right? Going back to those people and ask them to comment on the news story involving people, unfolding a narrative campaign identifying which people and which states and going back to them with specific asks? Tell them to tell their personal stories -- anyway, there’s just huge amounts of value in that mass group of people that took getting names, just isn’t interesting.

And we want campaign with like 500 people, I was literally getting companies to change policies. And it’s just organizing.

NANCY SCOLA: How resource sensitive is it? (Overlapping remarks) hold people’s hands as they go through this process?

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so two things; so one is -- so we have -- we’re building out teams of organizers around major (inaudible) verticals, right, and hiring basically best in class organizers to run on and offline campaigns and immigration, education, gay rights, so on and so forth.

And the goal is you know, we basically do demonstration cases and we provide lots of training and as we scale -- you know, we have 1,000 campaigns launch on the site every month, my guess is we’ll be double or triple that in the next six months. You know, we are going to be doing very much like what a campaign would do is recruiting other trainers. So people who are winning campaigns on a platform, people who are grassroot organizers, demonstrated expertise, we’re helping to train and we’ll help them be the first line of defense assisting other people and running their campaigns.

NANCY SCOLA: Okay, great.

BEN RATTRAY: And I can keep on going!

NANCY SCOLA: And I can throw in some questions there. So one of the critiques that you hear, particularly when Facebook causes, which you mentioned got a new round of venture capital funding, I think it was a month or two ago, was that that approach that they’re kind of pioneering and that potentially you’re pioneering doesn’t create a sustainable connection between a potential member for an advocacy group and the cause itself, right?

So, these sort of one-off hits and you’re organizing people for a moment, but then they disperse and you can’t build sort of a sustainable organization that way. Is that a fair critique is even if it is, do you may be not care because that’s just an old model?

BEN RATTRAY: I think -- I ask myself, what are the number of people in this country who care about pro-choice issues? The really (inaudible) they’re presented with an opportunity to take action on an issue of choice, those really compelling and they though by taking action they can make a material difference on that, like 50 million people -- I hope it’s more than that, but let’s say it’s 50 million.

If you ask yourself, what are the total number of people that are accessible by organizations and the pro-choice movement that’s trying to mobilize for social change? It’s probably about a few million people. And the difference there isn’t the lost appetite, I mean one of the problems with the progressive sector is that we’re so focused on big, national, large, abstract, huge victories that take lots of resources the problem is they so infrequently win and I think people don’t get the sense that their voice really matters.

And so the thing we’re focused on most, the thing we really, really care about is winning. And so the reason we focus on loss, often on very small (inaudible), focus on individual cases of you know, let’s say -- I’ll give you an example.

So, an example is like Edna, right? Employment (inaudible) discrimination act but in 30 states in this country are going to be fired for being gay. It’s an awful, awful thing, most people don’t even know about. But that’s a really inaccessible -- first of all, it’s a terrible acronym. (inaudible) thing for most people and it seems abstract so there’s no real critical moment for that. And so rather than looking at that big national issue and try to mobilize people around, which isn’t that exciting, we look at the manifestation of big, national issues and local context and identify situations where we can win.

So, we’ve done this several times over the past two months where the student teacher in Oregon who was fired for being gay. One of his students asked him if he was married, he said no, asked why, he said I can’t get married, he said why, because I’m gay, I can get fired for that. Connect to other parents in that area and (inaudible) in Oregon, have some sort of campaign on the sight, did a lot of media outreach, got a lot of negative press and exposure for the school and won.

The reason I bring this up is you know, that’s an individual isolated case, I mean just one that’s (inaudible) University where a woman was fired for being a lesbian in the (inaudible) and we won as well and they have now a non-discrimination policy.

The reason I mention these is you know, getting involved in small campaigns, if it’s like, oh, just add your name to this and that’s it, that’s the extent of the experience, you do have a disconnected, atomized activist experience not engaging over a period of time.

If you win and you involve people in unfolding their narrative of that campaign, the engagement factor we see with people with the likelihood of coming back and taking more action is radically, radically greater. I mean one of the problems is, sure, I mean, getting people involved in a disconnected action that doesn’t have a real theory of change, isn’t actually changing much in the world, that’s a pretty dies-empowering, uninteresting thing. You’re not going to get return engagement.

If you provide people opportunities for real winning, I think it’s much different.

NANCY SCOLA: What is that vehicle versus named engagement? Is it a traditional organization or is it sort of whoever comes up next with the next potential win in that space?

BEN RATTRAY: (Overlapping remarks) What I would do if I were a big activist organization, and I won’t their names because mostly they’re clients of ours and they do awesome work, but what I would do is I would say, well you’re a big national goal, I would say if I were ACT, (inaudible) our big goal -- and actually the Sierra Club has actually done something similar -- our big goal is climate change legislation and its massive and energy efficient and whatnot. And we’re not going to win right now, it’s not going to happen. What can we do in the meantime to build a movement of people around the country engaged in this issue? With this long narrative (inaudible) because we know we’re not going to be able to win for another three years.

I look at the local manifestation of all these issues and there are thousands of them, I’ll say, what are our organizing opportunities. Can we organize people (inaudible) from ACT recommended this to me and I thought it was a brilliant idea: can we organize around carbon emissions taxes in different cities across the country right? Right now there’s a lot of budget crisis, you have all these city council members deciding whether to raise taxes on property taxes. And I said, well it’s a lot more attractive to raise it on the biggest political leaders of each city. And you start doing those and picking off those victories, you have incredible momentum in demonstration cases for how this might not be so bad or tragic (inaudible) it might be as a national piece of legislation.

So, I look at those local manifestations and I try to win this campaign, and you win it for two reasons: you win them intrinsically those are just good things to win; and instrumentally because even if your goal is a big, national victory of (inaudible) climate change legislation, the most effective mechanism to build the movement necessary of people and of victories to get to that point is focusing on local.

I’ve been challenged for organizations that have traditionally focused on the inside game of politics in DC exclusively. So, that’s what I would do.

NANCY SCOLA: Great, and I do want to ask you about local organizing because I think that’s sort of a fascinating next step and you’ve talked a lot about that.

But I do want to remind people that if they have questions, they can hit *6 and we will get you lined up and then take you off mute so you can ask your questions.

So, it is the question of hyper-local organizing, I know you talked about that just being the future for you all. One of the critiques people make about the internet as an organizing platform is that it’s somewhat difficult to do local because very often you don’t know where people -- if you’re interacting through Twitter, you might not know where the actual location is, Facebook the same thing. So, how do you kind of use these tools in a way that’s effective without necessarily geographic information that you might want if you’re running a localized campaign?

BEN RATTRAY: What you find is -- we just won this -- and when I say we won, it’s a member, right, it’s someone who just started a campaign and I just want -- in Arlington, Texas. There’s a case of fracking -- fracking is a natural gas extraction that’s really dangerous and emits a lot of toxic fumes which causes nausea. This is a case where the woman who was organizing locally, door to door, in her community in Arlington, Texas, trying to prevent a major national gas company from doing this national gas extraction literally within 400 yards of a bunch of low income homes. The company was going and trying to buy off a lot of the mostly immigrant population here that didn’t understand the real consequences.

So they needed approval from the city council and the woman started to campaign and it was pretty compelling and we said, you know, these local stories are really local manifestations of broader national problems in many cases. So we actually helped her launch a campaign online to augment her offline strategy and it took off and we had about 10,000 people take action. But we flooded the city council with kind of awareness and messaging and transparency and spotlights that they’ve never gotten before for any issue.

And this is covered in a five minutes segment for the local Fox news in Arlington Texas a few weeks ago, and there’s this interview of this one city council member saying, I’ve never received so much interest about something from across the country. We had to really look into this. And they blocked it. They prevented that from going through and being approved because of the transparency and (inaudible) there looked at not just by their own individual constituents, but by people across the country.

And then ironically of course, because people across the country were looking at it as well, more people in Arlington found out about it. And so I would say from trying to organize for local change, although ideally you have as many people as possible from the local area, no doubt. But to get awareness, I wouldn’t avoid the many other thousands of people that might be interested (inaudible) on behalf of the public good from outside places.

NANCY SCOLA: Okay, great. Folks, again you can press *6 and we’ll see on our interface here that you have a question and we’ll go ahead an unmute you and you can ask your question.

So, Ben I promised I’d ask you about (Jumo), right? This was the big attention-getting news in sort of the online, non-profit organizing space over the last couple months. Big New York Times story about it when it just launched, I think Chris Hughes who is the founder of Jumo who was also on the Obama campaign around when Facebook was being kicked off way back when at Harvard, he was on the Colbert Report talking about this organizing platform before really much had happened on it.

What do you make of that model? Does the non-profit organizing space need a new platform? And what are you predictions for how successful they’ll be?

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so I guess a couple things. One is I think there’s critique early on a little bit like internal on kind of the progressive sector by (inaudible) somebody else, do we need yet another organizing platform, a lot of people said, oh, it’s like Change.org. The irony is that it is similar to what we were doing in 2007, it’s not so much what we’re doing now. And also I should say it’s a meta analysis. Any competition -- and I don’t think this is (inaudible) really not doing very similar things -- but I think competition is great, I mean it’s really important.

I think they’re (inaudible) shows a reflective reaction against competition in the non-profit sector for sometimes good reasons because organizations are doing similar things and you know, if you’re competing for the same dollars and it’s not clear like who’s doing more impactive -- the determination of where you get funds in the non-profit sector isn’t always based on your impact and effectiveness because it’s marketing because the people who are giving you money aren’t the people who are benefiting from the service you’re providing.

It’s different on the internet, right? So, the internet shoos (inaudible). People go either zero (inaudible) and people were going to go whatever they think is most compelling so I think that having more internet platforms trying to mobilize towards social change is not a bad thing. And also I think that Chris -- it’s exciting that there’s sort of more energy and funding and interest in the space.

As far as the actual implementation so -- I mean, so I think it’s quite clear to me that what was launched isn’t going to work. Question is whether you know -- and this is often the case-- when we launched, it didn’t work. The question isn’t whether that’s going to work and I can go into why, I think it’s clear it won’t, but why -- like what will happen next?

Chris is a very smart guy, he’s got a great team, you know, and I think that it’s -- one thing that I wouldn’t want to see is a lot of (inaudible) really critical and say it doesn’t take off in the next few months, like oh, you just write it off.

But internet platforms take a long time, they’re just not easy to build, there’s ton of testing involved and so I absolutely look forward to seeing the iterations on the site and expansion and where it can score.

NANCY SCOLA: Will it work as designed?

BEN RATTRAY: I just -- people -- the supposition is in part that people want to go follow strings of information for non-profits. I mean, the challenge there is most non-profits are submitting press releases and it’s interesting -- I mostly don’t wake up every day saying, I’m going to find out just what’s going on in the lives of the non-profits that I generally care about. It’s not a very common use case.

And so I think there’s an issue with engagement, driving recurring traffic, yeah, I just think it’s a tough nut to crack and that it doesn’t effectively address the consumer need that is in the space which is people want to take effective action, they do want to be involved.

Like most of the time on most days in most organizations don’t have interesting ways for people to get involved in the (inaudible) social change that people can see in front of them. I think that’s the need that people have, they do want to make an impact. But I don’t think it’s following just a general stream of information that non-profits produce.

NANCY SCOLA: And what percentage of the campaigns that are launched on Change.org come from individual organizers and what percentage comes from your more established advocacy groups? Or are advocacy groups looking like something competitor or something that they can kind of leverage?

BEN RATTRAY: So, our goal is not to be in the position of running your own campaign. Our goal is to always be supporting and enabling other (inaudible) campaigns, you know, (inaudible) organizers comprise about 80 percent of the campaigns, non-profits about 15 percent and then we set (inaudible).

What we love is when there are organizations that come to us and say, hey, we want to run this campaign. What do you think, we want to do it with you, we want your help, and we actually help them run the campaign. So, they’ll launch it on our site and we’ll push it together and we will help them with strategy, we’ll help them with outreach.

I mean, the situation in South Africa where these activists fighting corrective rape have just been rocking it on the site, and it’s a small grassroots group. They have an (inaudible) and they just do amazing work. And so anyway, I don’t think we’ll at all -- I think to some extent we’re pushing organizations on organizing tactics and saying, well what is the (inaudible) change here and how do we effectively leverage people to advance civil change beyond just the traditional and stuff.

But we love working with organizations. I mean we have -- we’ve worked with a lot of organizations on sort of the, well you’re doing awesome work, we’ll help you. And then we’ll help non-profits sort of build their membership through a paid model as well which is how we’re building the team we’re building.

NANCY SCOLA: Again, folks *6 to ask your questions. I’m going to jump in with one more.

You recently re-designed Change.org, it seems like a complete overhaul. And one of the things that jumps out if you’ve been following the Change.org story is that there was story maybe two years ago to put news and blogging and information and sort of social participation at the front of the site, so you would have these different verticals in some ways about food or women’s issues or whatever it was where people are providing news and commentary on that day in and day out.

And the first thing you notice when you look at the site now is how that’s been pushed to the back of the scene. Why didn’t that model work?

BEN RATTRAY: Well it works, just not as well as the actions. So, we got to like 3 million people a month and all these factions -- we’re winning campaigns on a fairly regular basis, but when you have -- when you have a predicated model, we had editorial, the news about what’s going on in the world and then action, ways we take action.

And our conception was you would read articles and those are engaged and then kind of convince you to why you needed to take action. That was really important and necessary as mechanism to build an engaged audience, to get people overall engaged in what we were doing and to win campaigns. But what we found over the past six months were the actions were just taking off and you know, you wouldn’t even know -- like all these things were happening and we were winning and people’s stories were just remarkable you wouldn’t see those on the site because you just see a bunch of news on the home page.

And so we made -- in any situation like this when you’re trying to focus and sort of pivot an organization, there’s going to be some loss. And I feel like, you know, we had some awesome content that’s less focused on right now, and there is some loss there, there really is. Like our editorial team is awesome, they’re still on board, there’s still essential, they’re doing a lot more organizing.

And we realized as important as these sort of content might be, the opportunity to build a platform of tens of millions of people across the country and across the globe taking action, like that’s the thing we wanted to focus on and I think one of the challenges of web companies in particular is you find simplicity sells. Like you know, we want to be the best in the world at one thing and it’s running social action campaigns and trying to be the best in the world at writing about social issues and running campaigns is not easy to do. And the irony is right now, we’re almost four years from the day we launched the first (inaudible) of the site, but there are fewer features on the site.

And this is something that I think causes did really well and I think that you know there’s a deep understanding of the mechanics of the web on that team is being really, really good at one thing and then expand from that.

And right now things are -- we just doubled in size over the past like four, five months and (inaudible) doubled in size and my guess is we’ll double in size the next three or four months again. And it’s because we found the one thing that people really want, which are the tools, the support and strategy and then the scale to win campaigns, locally and across the country.

NANCY SCOLA: Any other aspect that has sort of been dropped, as you mentioned the fund raising part of the -- what was the thinking there?

BEN RATTRAY: (Overlapping remarks) To some extent but if you care about the issues we care about, okay, we care about (inaudible) campaign, right? You can’t buy (inaudible) quality. You just can’t buy it, I don’t care how much money you have, you can’t buy sort of the resolution of corrective rape in South Africa. And you can’t buy the sort of resolution problem in -- all these -- we have all these (sounds like; dream act) students that are coming on the site and starting campaigns. They get their friends out of deportation hearings that otherwise (inaudible) that they haven’t been to since age 2. You can’t buy those things.

But fundraising is totally important for (inaudible) organizations, certainly for service organizations. But for activist organizations, they are secondary to winning, and if you really care about winning -- let’s take (inaudible) protection again, client -- again, the -- anyway, the great opportunity to work, they raised $300 million, right, to sort of fight on the climate side.

Money is not what’s going to buy a movement of people on the climate (inaudible) side. You can’t buy that. You have to have people, that massive number of voices, but lots of strategy and effective organizing. And that’s the opportunity we see, that’s why the web is uniquely special.

I mean, you know, having -- if you’re looking to fundraise, having one person get $1 million isn’t a whole lot in getting a million duplicate one dollar. If you’re looking to advance social change, having one person versus a million voices, like there’s nothing comparable. There’s nothing like the web to mobilize people in real time across place to all in unison calls for the same thing that you have strategy as to why that might impact something, you have real power and that’s what we’re looking for right now.

NANCY SCOLA: And do you worry at all about not reaching certain people who might not be using the tools that you’re focused on?

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so -- well there are a lot of people that are not caring what we’re doing. And even (inaudible) on the web. Yeah, I mean our goal is tens of millions of members in the United States in the next few years and I think we’ll get there, but we’re just starting.

0:45:01

And you know, the biggest opportunity I think that no one is really - the nut no one has cracked so far is (inaudible) that few people how is the mobile side, right? And that’s where the accessibility goes up dramatically, we’re very interested in mobile, very interested in sort of mobile organizing, but also very focused on the current opportunities. Once we have 10 million or 15 or 20 million people domestically as members in the next few years, which I think we’ll absolutely do, at that point we sort of -- not that we saturate the market, but like once we get that kind of scale, we’ll focus on the other people that we also need to mobilize that are more difficult to reach.

But one thing we found on the web is like be really, really good at one thing and that’s what we’re trying to do first.

NANCY SCOLA: Talk a little bit about lessons learned in the past, what’s in the future. Let’s talk about the tools, Twitter, Facebook. What do you see as being successful?

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so top line, Twitter has more influence, Facebook has more people. So, it depends on what your goal is. If you’re looking just for distribution, there’s nothing like -- I mean Facebook is where you should be focused on, optimizing for sharing on Facebook; 800,000 people come to our site everyday (inaudible) every month from Facebook.

It’s a massive, massive traffic opportunity. It generally is kind of a little bit more of the same. Like they’re just augmenting the existing number of people that have been on the site. What’s interesting about Twitter is not so much the raw traffic opportunity is the influencers that are there that might augment your campaign by writing about it. There’s lots of journalists, there’s lots of celebrities, these provide organizing opportunities. There’s people you can reach out to directly to try and get them onboard. But I think Twitter is probably a more interesting tool to be honest for organizing, I think Facebook for raw numbers and distribution is clearly the superior approach.

NANCY SCOLA: Great. We have a question from Drew.

PARTICIPANT: Can you hear me now? Okay, so it seems like you pretty much know way a lot about the landscape of online organizing. Can you just discuss I guess critique of (sounds like: As.org), they seem to have a huge list, huge amount of members and do some similar things to Change.org.

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, totally. I know the guys at (Oz) well, a few thoughts. So, one is --

NANCY SCOLA: (Inaudible)

BEN RATTRAY: Yeah, so (Oz) started basically the idea was taking the MoveOn model and making that an international movement and progressives. The tie-line is breaching the divide between the way the world is and the way we want it to be.

Great leadership, great vision and whatnot and they’ve really taken the Moveon model. So, what they’ll do is they’ll run very large international campaigns, across multiple countries, (inaudible) globalist in perspective. And so (inaudible) extremely good at the craft of distribution and optimization on campaigns, right? Really, really brilliant and analytically great copy. Like you should sign (inaudible), really, really strong.

I think the critique of them would be -- and the numbers are right -- they’ve got 7 million members, truly engaged, they’re like -- literally, the biggest advocacy tool int eh country like being -- the world -- drive actual number. I think the concern that people had is like are they winning, right, and what is the fear of change behind the actions they’re running.

There’s no doubt they have impact and they’ve had impact. And they do have people on the ground across the world that are running campaigns and so frankly like I’m sort of ambivalent. One, I’m really impressed by one of the people which I know (inaudible) great at what they do and the craft of the online stuff they’ve been doing. And I think they do a better job, a much better job of online organizing than people give them credit for. I think they could probably do even more and that would be the general critique. It’s a touch thing. If you run the international organization literally 30 countries have distribution pretty significantly across that number, actually running campaigns and doing it from the ground is not easy, but there’s no one better in the world right now in doing the sort of the online stuff than them, and I think they’re getting better and better at the offline stuff as well.

NANCY SCOLA: Thank you. We have time for one more quick question. Okay, well thank you so much Ben, we really appreciate it.

BEN RATTRAY: Thank you so much and thank you all. If you have any questions at all, just email me anytime at [email protected].

[END OF AUDIO]