Jumo

GOOD is a publishing and marketing company “for people who want to live well and do good”. Founded by Ben Goldhirsh, the son of the founder of Inc Magazine (a hugely successful traditional print magazine), GOOD was one of a handful of “philanthropy magazines” that launched in 2007. While the other “philanthropy magazines” folded, GOOD has evolved to encompass online content, live events, and now a kind of advertising/marketing agency that helps organizations do socially connected campaigns.

Now GOOD is buying Jumo. Interesting…

First off, why isn’t Jumo working on a standalone basis? While Hughes says that the organization had a “very successful start” and counts over a million users, in all my surfing of the philanthropic web I haven’t once found reference to activity on Jumo other blog posts saying how great it is going to be.

While people like Amy Sample Ward and Beth Kanter are far better sources to comment on the technology aspect of Jumo, from a donor perspective I must say I don’t understand the drive to create a social network based around nonprofits. Nonprofit and for-profit brands may be ways that people define themselves and thus be the sort of thing that people want attached to their online social persona. But for the vast majority of donors, nonprofits are not the central way that they seek to organize their social network.

GOOD on the other hand seems to be figuring out that there is a huge interest in social sector related content, especially when it is presented as an integrated part of the fabric of life, not somehow separate from politics, business, culture, food and technology. Rather than being for “donors” or “philanthropists” or some other adjective that applies to only a slice of people’s persona, GOOD proudly proclaims it is “for people who give a damn”.

So what will GOOD do with Jumo? Speaking to the New York Times, Goldhirsh said “I’ve always felt the real potential of GOOD was to connect people wanting to take action with the organizations and businesses that could help them do that, and Jumo is the connective tissue that will allow and enable that to happen.”

We’ll have to see how Goldhirsh puts that vision into action, but I’m struck by his choice of words. Rather than seeing a social sector-social network as a standalone entity unto itself, maybe it is the “connective tissue” that ties everything together.

Let’s imagine a 20-something Millennial. She works at a for-profit company importing sustainably grown coffee that hopes to turn a profit while leveraging the power of the free market to pull people in the developing world out of poverty. She listens to U2, makes microfinance loans on Kiva and loves Apple products so much that she wears a t-shirt with the Apple logo. She’s a political news junkie and is disgusted with both parties. She makes donations to nonprofits but feels that the products that she buys, people she votes for and where she chooses to work are just as important elements of her impact on the world.

Our 20-something Millennial doesn’t define herself by the nonprofits she supports.

She defines herself as someone who gives a damn.

What she wants isn’t a special place she can visit to express her social self before returning to the “real world” of work, life and play. Instead she wants a world full of work, life and play that is built around a connective tissue that infuses all of her life with meaning.

There is no work-life balance in our Millennial’s world. No need to “give back” as if her success in life somehow extracted value that must be repaid. There is only meaningful experiences that honor the many priorities of the individual: self, family, and member of the global community (and many smaller communities).

There is great need for nonprofit oriented transactional platforms, such as Global Giving, Charity Navigator and GuideStar. But I doubt there is a need for a nonprofit oriented social network.

I look forward to seeing what GOOD does with Jumo. If they pull things off, they might just move from being a content platform for people who give a damn to an immersive experience, extending across the online and offline worlds for a new generation that views social impact as the connective tissue that connects their interests and passions.

The Nonprofit Times has released their annual Power & Influence Top 50 list for the social sector. While the NPT isn’t terribly influential itself to the best of my knowledge, their annual list gets a lot of attention and I think it is generally well done.

The most interesting new member of the Top 50 is Scott Harrison, the founder of Charity: Water. Here’s a guy who seven years ago was a nightclub promoter with no connection to the social sector. Today, Charity: Water, the nonprofit he founded, raises $16 million a year, gets a ton of media attention and in my mind represents a case study in how to effectively use social media to connect with donors.

The vast majority of people on the NPT 50 have spent long careers in the social sector to build the power and influence that the paper is recognizing. Bill Gates is an exception, but it took billions of dollars for him to make list without a long history in the sector. However, Scott Harrison had quite a short social sector career before being named to the list. Whatever you think of social media, the way in which people who know how to harness it can build their own power and influence incredibly quickly is amazing (the one other person on the list with such a short social sector career is Wendy Harman, director of social media for the Red Cross).

So what is it that Scott and Charity: Water are doing with social media that has landed him on the NPT 50? Most importantly they treat social media as a tool, not a strategy itself. In other words, the core of what they are doing so well is fantastic communication with social media simply acting as an accelerator rather then thinking that social media itself is the key to success.

For instance, in this video, Charity: Water doesn’t just pull our heartstrings, they use fantastic storytelling skills to communicate the very real statistics that underlie the problems they are trying to address.

(click here to see the video if you are viewing this in an email)

In this next video, the organization, and Scott, show the humbleness that is required of anyone who is trying to achieve results. While most nonprofit marketing paints a picture of a world where nonprofit interventions always succeed, Charity: Water shows that they understand that talking frankly about their failures is important as well.

(click here to see the video if you are viewing this in an email)

What Charity: Water and Scott’s naming to the NPT 50 demonstrate is that social media isn’t just about having a Facebook page or being on Twitter. It is simply a tool that fantastic communicators can use to greatly accelerate their power and influence. The key to success in social media has little to do with getting the technology part right and everything to do with getting the human communications part right.

By Tessie Guillermo

The demand for technology by nonprofits as a tool for social change has been rising. However, the supply of technology funding has lagged significantly in comparison. Unfortunately, funders don’t know what they don’t know and have so far been unable to keep up with the fast pace with which their grantees are adopting new technologies.

The dramatic demonstration of technology’s role in recent global events (Haiti, Egypt, Japan) provides impetus for this demand growth. Everyone wants technology and believes they need it, but acquiring and using it effectively is a function of knowledge, affordability and the supply of funding for technology. The supply of technology funding on the other hand, is highly variable and quite limited.

At ZeroDivide we have recently released, “Amplifying Social Impact in a Connected Age,” which looks at the gap between the demand for and supply of technology funding, particularly as it relates to the application of technology for program impact. We wanted to find out if there was opportunity for changing the supply curve for technology funding, and what might be required to do so.

While there is overwhelming interest in increasing funding for technology, 68% of participating funders cited “limited staff familiarity and expertise” as the #1 barrier to increasing investments in their grantees’ technology activities. Technology expertise is still the domain of IT, and increasingly the communications departments, but rarely is there fluency throughout most philanthropic organizational infrastructure.

Seventy two percent of respondents reported that their foundations invested 10% or less of their annual grantmaking in nonprofit technology capacity or tech-related activities and most of those grants were directed to traditional technology infrastructure or administrative operations. Skepticism about the impact of technology, particularly the use of social media, in achieving social change objectives is high due to the lack of standards for measurement and documentation of results.

Funders expressed anxiety about their relative lack of technology expertise compared to their grantee. One respondent captured this well saying, “grantees—they’re way out in front of us on this (technology-related) work." This knowledge and pressure from grantees is the greatest push factor for funders to invest more resources in technology funding. Technology service providers validated that the market for technology services is inefficient and resource intensive. They indicated that funders allocate technology funding for nonprofit capacity building by primarily funding discrete activities such as a training for grantees, or a single hardware purchase or software project.

The research surfaced three key recommendations for how to transform the status quo. Changing the “slope” of the technology funding supply curve, building the market for technology capacity and integration for social impact is possible in at least these key ways:

1) increasing funder education and engagement activities through “how-to” guides, case study reports and peer convenings and partnerships;

2) strengthening funder advising offerings that move them from idea to action, particularly for small to mid-size foundation with no or limited staff with technology expertise; and

3) expanding the pool of investment through mechanisms such as collaborative funds, matching grant programs, donor-advised funds, leveraging public sector and private industry investments, and exploring community benefit agreements that created funds such as the California Emerging Technology Fund, the California Consumer Protection Fund, and ZeroDivide.

Philanthropy must literally "get with the program" on technology funding, and get smart on the benefits of allocating sustained resources to this area of grantmaking. By doing so, the potential for technology to increase social impact can be fully realized.

ZeroDivide will be hosting two webinars to discuss their new report. A funders-only webinar is scheduled for April 5 at 2pm EDT (email jeff@zerodivide.org for details). A webinar open to everyone is scheduled for April 6 at 2pm EDT, click here to register.

PS: For those tech savvy readers, do you have a suggestion for a bookmarking service that can auto-post bookmarks as a blog post? Diigo.com has been recommended to me. Does anyone have an opinion of their service?

Most interesting to me was the fact that while Patty’s title is head of social innovation and the G-Team concept is directed at helping nonprofits benefit from Groupon’s services, the G-Team project is a purely for-profit project. While Groupon takes no cut of funds raised via G-Team, the activity is profitable for them because it brings new users to the Groupon platform. These new users often make subsequent purchases and so G-Team acts as a sort of profitable marketing investment for Groupon.

While I can already hear some people complaining that this somehow minimizes the degree to which we might celebrate Groupon’s efforts, it of course also means that the G-Team concept and the degree to which nonprofits can benefit from Groupon’s efforts can scale incredibly rapidly. The G-Team is simply not corporate philanthropy. It is a profitable project that is fully integrated into the business model of Groupon.

How fast can it scale? Well the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend that Groupon did $33 million in revenue in 2009 and $760 million in 2010! CEO Andrew Mason wrote in a memo to his employees that he hopes they achieve “billions in revenue” in 2011.

One of the reasons Groupon is growing so quickly is that they are considered one of the first, and certainly the most meaningful, successful approaches to helping local businesses leverage online marketing to drive sales. G-Team is simply acknowledging the fact that “local businesses” include nonprofits. Of course, as it was pointed out by an audience member on the call, helping local businesses grow is a pretty good form of job creation and so there’s an argument that Groupon’s core business is creating social impact.

To me, the big take away is that Groupon is a good example of the way in which a for-profit company can create a blend of social and financial impact. They are a living, breathing, quickly growing example of Jed Emerson’s Blended Value proposition.

Sean’s note: After watching the Red Cross’s perfect handling of a social media faux pas by one of their employees, I asked Wendy to write a guest post explaining how they approached the situation. It seems to me that so many social sector organizations worry about ways social media can hurt them and I’m impressed by the way the Red Cross just demonstrated that the real issue isn’t about technology, but about the attitudes of the people using it.

By Wendy Harman

Late last Tuesday night, a small slip of a finger caused a mistweet from @RedCross.

Several hundred followers of the American Red Cross Twitter account who were awake at the time immediately responded – some with wonder and laughter and others with concern.

I was not awake. My ringing phone woke me a little after midnight.  I didn’t answer but did wake up and see my blackberry had “blown up” with emails and Twitter DMs. The phone call was from Jackie Mitchell, head of Communications and Marketing at our Chicago chapter, and she had been alerted about the mistweet from @PRSarahEvans.

I deleted the mistweet and then began texting with Jackie:

• ME: Trying to think of something funny to say to clear it up
• JACKIE: Hmmm. Maybe “Rest assured. The Red Cross is sober and we’ve confiscated the keys.”
• ME: Thank you – that’s good.

So, I published Jackie’s pitch-perfect idea, and then watched and responded until 4am as thousands of tweeters continued to react to this silly mistake. By morning, it was clear that the public was standing behind us, saw the humor, and embraced our response. I posted the whole story to our corporate blog once I got to work on Wednesday morning, and the rest is history – it was already a viral story and many people actually found the mistake and response charming enough to pledge donations to the Red Cross because of it.

Before Tuesday evening I had been a casual fan of the mistweet. I’ll admit it – I have found it hilarious when stuffy corporations and Congressmen make this mistake.  I’ve watched a handful of them and each time their stuffy response seems to fan the flame of humiliation. So, I knew the stuffy answer wasn’t the right answer.

Prior to taking this job I was a plain old member of the blogging community (that’s all we had then), so I try to always put myself back in the shoes of the social community as I go about my duties. If I were outside of the organization, I’d find this gaffe hilarious, not because I wish harm on the Red Cross or because I think their services were hindered, but for the same reason I might chuckle if a friend trips on a crack in the sidewalk. It’s unexpected and therefore fundamentally funny to see a normally quite serious humanitarian organization tweet about craft beer using the lyrics to a popular song.  So, my immediate thought when I saw our mistweet was to address it with an equally unexpected reaction – lighthearted humor and acknowledgement.  After all, this wasn’t a purposeful message gone wrong and it wasn’t about the mission of our organization. Our Twitter account just tripped on the sidewalk, and instead of throwing a temper tantrum about tripping, we acted like any self-aware person would: we dusted ourselves off, looked around to acknowledge the trip with those who caught it, and had a chuckle with them. Our response to the mistweet assured those initially concerned that we were not injured – i.e. that nothing had changed about our ability to continue as the premier humanitarian organization we are – and that it was ok to laugh at this anomaly and maybe even identify with and empathize with our humanity a little bit more than before.

Every time I see a nonprofit or company using social tools, my brain reminds me that there’s no such being as nonprofits and companies – there’s only a network of people doing work under the same name with the same goals. Social media belongs to real humans doing a very human activity – connecting with one another over shared interests. We’re honored that our mission can serve as a shared interest and that our community allows us to be part of their conversations and activities.  In turn, our goal as an entity is to provide value and to empower people to get help and give help with these tools.

NTEN conference calls get great attendance and have robust backchannel discussions. You can get all the details about the call here.

I hope you’ll join us as I ask Patty to discuss Groupon’s social enterprise roots, her hopes for their G-Team integration with The Point and her view of the social impact potential for Groupon over the long term.

[Sorry for the couple of days without posts. Teaching my kids to ski took precedence!]

In 2007, New Profit launched America Forward, a bi-partisan effort to work with policymakers, legislators and other leaders to encourage the deployment of public and private resources towards supporting social innovation. It was America Forward that advanced the idea of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation as well as the concept of the Social Innovation Fund, both of which have become a reality.

The Gathering will feature speakers from all sorts of backgrounds, but I’m intrigued to see that Steve Johnson is being given a prominent role.

Johnson is the author of Where Good Ideas Come From. I cited Johnson’s thinking in my post titled Philanthropy’s Period of Rapid Innovation. That post included the video below which does an excellent job of explaining the core idea of the book (note that this production style was used to similar effect by Bill Gates in conjunction with his recent annual letter).

(click here to view the video if you are reading this via email)

Johnson was also a speaker at a TED event in Oxford where he discussed some of his ideas in more depth.

(click here to view the video if you are reading this via email)

Johnson’s core argument is that good ideas do not spring forth from any one person or at any one time, but instead are the output of a dynamic process of refinement of other ideas and our own ideas. He points to evidence that periods of rapid innovation in various fields were supported by some sort of mechanism which assisted in the acceleration of idea exchange.

I believe that social media is acting as a platform for rapid idea exchange in the social sector. It is encouraging this rapid idea exchange that makes me advocate for transparency, for talking about failure, for the Social Innovation Fund to share all applications, and for foundation and other social sector blogs to embrace a conversational instead of a newsletter approach to blogging.

Philanthropy has a little bit of this dynamic, but not much. For the most part, foundation annual reports are ignored and seen as a compliance or PR document, not a source of wisdom. This is understandable since foundations do not have “shareholders” to which they need to report. However, while foundation CEOs may not need to write robust letters, doing so may be an opportunity to communicate with and influence stakeholders and other grantmakers.

Bill Gates’ annual letter – which he started at the suggestion of Warren Buffett, whose own annual letter to investors is voraciously read and reported on by the media – seems to have emerged as a good example of how grantmakers can use the format to communicate with and influence stakeholders.

I first wrote about Bill Gates’ letter and the influence of Warren Buffett the day before his first letter came out in 2009. At the time I speculated that Gates’ letter might emerge over time as a new standard for philanthropic leaders. I don’t think that Gates’ letter yet ranks up with Buffett’s, but I do think it is evolving and hope to see others follow his lead.

This year’s letter focuses on the opportunity that Gates’ sees to eradicate polio worldwide. This would represent only the second time a disease had been totally erased (with smallpox being the other one). Instead of simply reviewing the Gates Foundation’s activities, the letter makes a case for governments and other funders to join the polio eradication cause. Rather than just viewing a “win” as limited to polio itself, Gates’ argues that beating polio will “energize the field of global health by showing that investments in health lead to amazing victories.”

In addition to the letter, the Gates Foundation website features a video of Gates discussing the points in the letter. However, it is a video found in a blog post written by Gates just before the letter came out that really steals the show.

From a communications standpoint, this video is a home run. In under four minutes, the core message of Gates’ 24 page letter is illustrated powerfully. If Gates is serious about using his letter to influence others (and I think he is), then moving beyond the print letter to videos like these, that are actually likely to be viewed by policymakers and other foundation leaders, should be core to his strategy.

Image by Sean Percival. Click to enlarge.

TechCrunch describes the first iteration of Groupon (refering to founder Andrew Mason’s The Point service for nonprofits) as a “Boring Social Good Thingy”. The company pivoted when Andrew launched the side project Groupon and then pivoted again when it moved from a simple “Daily Deal Widget” to what TechCrunch calls a “Social Commerce MONSTER”.

The illustration then suggests a possible next pivot for each company. For Facebook, the next pivot is labeled “The Next Google (or Friendster)” referring to the potential for Facebook to emerge as the most powerful web company in the world or fade away as early social network leader Friendster has done.

The next pivot for Groupon is labeled “Walmart”, essentially taking the “Social Commerce MONSTER” label and projecting that Groupon will go on to become a leading retail company. I think the best way to understand my post on Groupon as a social enterprise is to re-label the next pivot for Groupon as “Walmart (or a Social Enterprise MONSTER)”.

Who knows? As the first iteration of Facebook shows, how a web company starts off doesn’t necessarily dictate what it will become. But on the other hand, Groupon is alone among the listed companies (or any major web company to the best of my knowledge) that began life as a social enterprise.

This is the first time I’ve written a blog post about the activities of a client. But the Peery Foundation’s experimentation with Twitter was featured as a “Next Practice” in a report from the Monitor Institute and I feel that their blog is noteworthy in the context of the limited way in which most foundations use their blogs.

Dave Peery and his program leader Jessamyn Lau run the Peery Family’s philanthropy on their own. Yet the duo have made waves in Bay Area philanthropy. They were the ones who anonymously (they’ve agreed to go public now) stepped in to offer FORGE a large grant after the Tactical Philanthropy community had rallied around the nonprofit’s efforts to embrace radical transparency. They’ve been co-funders with groups like the Skoll Foundation and the Draper Richards Foundation. They were early supporters of Vittana, which has gone on to become one of the most innovative new applications of microfinance. And they started to use Twitter in early 2009 in order to crowdsource their strategy – their efforts were even highlighted as a cutting new practice in the Monitor Institutes report on the future of philanthropy.

You can read a post that Nathaniel Whittemore wrote about Dave Peery here. Note the way Nathaniel talks about Dave’s listening skills.

Recently, the Peery Foundation launched a website, where you can find out more about their approach and their portfolio  and see numerous micro-documentaries about their grantees.

You will also find their new blog, titled PF Whiteboard. Dave launched the blog with these comments:

“Last year we conducted an experiment.  As we were undergoing a strategic-planning process, we decided to open up our discussion to include other minds in the field who were on Twitter.  Truth is, I had no idea how to use Twitter, but Jessamyn showed me a few things and we decided to see how we could use it during our discussions about the direction of the Foundation.  We’re a small shop – there are just two of us running the day-to-day, so being able to include other ideas was extremely helpful – and fun!  We just began by sending out tweets that summarized what we were discussing, what questions we had, and inviting people to chime in using the hashtag #pfwhiteboard – thus creating a virtual whiteboard of ideas to aid in our planning.  We netted a number of new connections, relationships, and some fresh thinking.  We hope to do the same here, on the PF Whiteboard.

We think of the Peery Foundation as a learning foundation.  After we all, we are a family foundation without a highly professionalized staff, but we’re thoughtful about the work we do and aim to improve every day.  Blogging on the PF Whiteboard, I believe, will probably be of greater value to us than anyone else as we’re able to put our thoughts and experiences to paper and learn from the rest of you.  We hope you’ll comment and share your opinions.  Ultimately, we really hope the content here can serve the field of philanthropy in some way.”

The reason I’m excited about the Peery Foundation blog is because I think that Dave and Jessamyn get that social media is best understood as a conversation and a conversation is most interesting when you focus on listening and learning.

They’re even willing to take listening to extremes, such as this recent post by Jessamyn in which she attempts to crowdsource her own annual review by asking readers who she has interacted with to give her feedback on how she’s doing. While she offers the option of emailing her the response, she encourages people to post their feedback as a public comment.

When I wrote recently about the way that social media is leading to philanthropy’s own “period of rapid innovation” the key argument I made was that good ideas come out of environments that accelerate idea exchange. In that post, I pointed to the way that Melinda Gates had recently responded to questions from another blog and argued that blogs that only talk were really just newsletters and that blogs that listened and responded to the broader conversation were the ones that mattered.

Dave and Jessamyn are just two people. That handicaps them in terms of human resources, but it frees them to experiment in ways that hierarchically structured, staffed foundations have a difficult time doing.

If you care about social media and philanthropy, I encourage you to follow the Peery Foundation’s new blog, follow them on Twitter at @DavePeery and @JessamynLau and most importantly to engage in the conversation they are trying to stimulate.

By Daniel Ben-Horin

This is a condensed version of a panel presentation I gave at the European Foundation Center conference in early June. The panel topic was: “Social Media: Threat or Menace?” No, I made that up. The panel was called, Social media: A fad or the future?

I decided to take a personal tone. People of a certain age, and/or a certain techno-anxiety level feel a lot of pressure to ‘operationalize’ social media in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds. Nothing much good comes of this, and one of the worst things that can occur is a kind of passive-resistance, or not so passive. People block what they can’t understand. Or make poor decisions.

The audience was about 80 ‘early adoptors’, actual or would-be, from European philanthropies across the continent.

1. Social media is not a ‘tool’.
Social media is about  choosing whether or not to operate in a different way in the world, a way of looking at innovation, collaboration and communication that can’t be left at the office overnight.  That doesn’t mean that if you tweet at work, you have to keep tweeting compulsively at home! But either you are truly excited by the possibilities and embrace them, or you are rolling a stone uphill.

2. Social media mileage will vary.
Most of my friends think that the values of social media and of effective philanthropy — values of transparency, innovation and collaboration—merge to form a completely compelling unified proposition.
But communications cultures vary and the social media norms of the States are by no means universal. What is most important, I think, is distinguishing between the personal and institutional stance toward social media. On a personal level, can you explore social media in an open enough way to discover if it meets any intrinsic needs of yours?

On the institutional level, it is true that since philanthropy is a key player in the public sphere, you should indeed, on some institutional level, join the conversation. But if you don’t find yourself engaged personally, find  people you trust and who do enjoy the process and allow them truly guide your social media practice.

The good news is “you can stumble if you’re humble,” which is a phrase I didn’t coin but really like. You can make mistakes, accept correction, do better next time and, in the process, achieve your goals… as long as you do it in plain view.

3. Social media flattens.
A cat can look at a king, as the saying goes. There’s not much point in standing on ceremony 140 characters at a time; it is a waste to take a command and control mentality into the social media arena. The opportunity here is to push out ideas in real time and see how the marketplace of ideas responds. The opportunity is to respond in real time to others’ ideas… ”others” whom you don’t necessarily know. The opportunity is to observe and interact with others as they interact with each other.

The social media context encourages mass participation by lowering the barrier to entry.  This results in a scenario where there is much more signal and much more noise. What does happen, amidst all the noise, is that the people who contribute the greatest perceived value are able to grow their network of followers without the permission of a single entity (editor). It is very democratic, very much including the messy parts of democracy.

4. Collaboration, innovation and noise
No one is forced to follow anyone or friend anyone. Think of the numbers in context. What does it mean to have 200,000 Twitter followers? Are they the kind of followers who follow a thousand other Twitterers (which is the same as following no one at all)? And, always, come back to what do you yourself enjoy and find meaningful in interacting with others using new tools.

Configuring your social media practice to your interests and personality is a dynamic process; at the beginning, it feels overwhelming but soon you find your way.  As the popular metaphor goes, social media is a rushing river; your words, wise or foolish, will disappear (only to be resurrected when you run for the Senate). What will truly build and what may last are relationships and ideas. 

When Facebook and Twitter came along, email — my palette! — became passé on a certain level. So when I entered the new waters, I did so grudgingly and instrumentally.  It took me a while to see that (a) I could have fun by just being myself; (b) lots of people I care about—personally and professionally—are in the new waters; (c ) If I just relax and trust that I have something to offer, it all works.

Social media and philanthropy share this: They are, at the core, about people. The SM field is advancing so rapidly in response to whatever people want to do, trivial or profound.

So, as philanthropists, what do you want to do and how do you want to do it?

Keep an open mind.

Punch at your own weight.

I’ve culled the list down to my favorite ten videos. Now I’d like to ask the Tactical Philanthropy community to vote for which three of these video’s should be shown at the inVision 2010 conference after the attendees have spent the day learning about how to use visual media to create social impact. Please vote via the comments section to this post!

• Mr. W from the German Ministry for the Environment. Can you guess who he is?
• Charity:Water’s video showing what lack of access to clean water really means. Starring Jennifer Connelly.
• An award winning ad about the effects of global warming.
• The mind blowing Lost Generation video (which you must watch to the halfway point to see the amazing twist)..
• Piano Stairs, changing behavior by making things fun. I want these in my house!
• Choose a Different Ending, an interactive video that lets the viewer decide what happens next.
• Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy.
• The Magic of Giving from the Peruvian Cancer Foundation.
• The Girl Effect inspired Tipping Point Community video.
• The MasterCard Foundation’s video telling the story of their grant to Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance provider.

Here’s what’s happening. First we are getting a strong response with videos of all sorts coming in from readers. You can find links to what we’ve collected below. In addition, the organizers of inVision 2010 a conference being held on Thursday and Friday in San Francisco that will focus on “tapping the power of visual media in the social sector” have reached out to me and asked to feature some of the videos during their closing plenary. I’ll be publishing a finalist pool of videos on Wednesday and the attendees of inVision 2010 will vote on their favorite to pick a sort of “jury prize” selection. The Tactical Philanthropy community will have the opportunity to vote as well and then on Friday I’ll publish the results and feature the best videos.

So here’s the list of submitted videos so far. You can submit your video to the collection by posting a link in the comments section of this post, emailing me or tweeting me at @tactphil. The deadline for submissions is 7:30am pacific time tomorrow.

City Harvest’s clever video about how we waste food (note: no apples were harmed in the making of this film. Seriously. Note the comments).

Mr. W from the German Ministry for the Environment.

The Free Hugs Campaign video.

Charity:Water’s video showing what lack of access to clean water really means.

StoryTellers for Good’s video about random acts of kindness.

An award winning ad about the effects of global warming.

A video from Healthy City showing how maps and data can be used to improve communities.

The MasterCard Foundation’s video telling the story of their grant to Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance provider.

The mind blowing Lost Generation video (which you must watch to the halfway point to see the amazing twist)..

Piano Stairs, changing behavior by making things fun.

Choose a Different Ending, an interactive video that lets the viewer decide what happens next.

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy.

The Nike Foundation’s classic Girl Effect Video.

The Magic of Giving from the Peruvian Cancer Foundation.

The Girl Effect inspired Tipping Point Community video.

San Diego Social Venture Partners introduction video.

A one-year retrospective on the progress (and goofy fun) of Tashi, a paraplegic kitten, by Tabby’s Place.

The Rainforest Action Network’s video protesting the unsustainable use of palm oil by Cargill.

MoveSmart.org’s overview video.

Hero’s of Hope’s overview video.

A video about Hewlett Foundation’s grantee African Population and Health Research Center.

A public service announcement from Camfed.

What if African villagers raised money to support high society arts organizations? The video is here.

I Am Jane public service announcement.

A video about Cesar E. Chavez Service Clubs.