Prelude Interactive

There’s an increasing amount of scuttlebutt regarding a “1-click donation” feature or “Giving Easy Button.”  I’ve thought about this through the SxSWi and NTC conferences, where the idea kept popping up.  (Hat tip to @katyaN4G who suggests using pictures instead of text, including one individual, and making sure that individual is a puppy or kitten.)

Here’s what I think would be needed to make that happen, and make it work well.  I’ve heard that some organizations are already trying this – is that true?  Who? Leave a comment!

Card On File

Card on File is the payment industry term for when your credit card information is stored somewhere for later use.  It is not the same as “recurring” or “scheduled” transactions, because the transaction amount is fixed in that case, whereas with Card On File, you can charge any reasonable amount at any time, as well as execute chargebacks, delayed captures, and other transaction types.

Not every transaction gateway supports Card On File.  If your transaction gateway doesn’t support it, One Click Giving is not possible.

Amazon’s Patent

Amazon has a patent on 1-Click Shopping.  Would they enforce it to prevent innovation in One Click Giving?  Could they?  Any patent lawyers want to weigh in on that?

Transaction Silos

1-Click Giving would be much more powerful if it did not have to be reimplemented for each website and service.  If Network For Good, Authorize.net, PayPal, VeriSign, and others each have their own 1-Click Giving solution, donors may be confused and frustrated that a seemingly identical service is not as convenient as it could be.  However, I think the number of people who give so often to so many organizations (where this would actually be a pain) is fairly small.

Security

1-Click Giving cannot work without trust.  Users must trust that only they can click a button that will store their credit card.  Some donors do pay attention to an https:// URL when submitting credit card information, but fewer would be concerned if they don’t type in their credit card information on that page.  If the 1-Click Giving / “Give Button” could be drawn in via an iFrame, SSL / HTTPS security could be maintained, the host page would not necessarily need SSL, and the transaction would be fairly secure.  I am not a security expert, please take this with a grain of salt.

What about fraud?  Would a copycat service ape the Give Button in order to capture credit card details?  Sure – but the credit card industry is exceptionally adept at identifying and preventing this fraud.  Convincing donors of this is another story.

Ubiquity

The Facebook Like button has an almost universal reach.  Most people are logged in to Facebook most of the time.  If 1-Click Giving could be tied to a Facebook, Twitter, OpenID or other ubiquitous login type, it would become much simpler and more effective.

Business Models

One of the best pricing models available for an organization building products and services around donations is to charge a percentage of the money moving through their system.  What’s good for the cause raising funds is good for the vendor, which aligns everyone’s interests.  In order to make 1-Click Giving truly cross platform, some extremely painful negotiations will need to occur, and keep occurring.

HelpAttack! is an Austin startup that allows people to pledge their online activity – whether it’s Tweets or Facebook updates – to a nonprofit of their choice. For every Tweet you send out, or action you take on Facebook, you can pledge whatever amount you choose (most people pledge a total of about $35 a month) to any 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The idea is to get people into the habit of giving, by connecting it to what they’re already doing – wasting time on the Internet!

During the month of March, HelpAttack! is partnering with the American Red Cross for National Red Cross month to help support the many programs and services the Red Cross provides to people all over the country, and around the world. Recently, they’ve played an important role in responding to the victims of the earthquake in New Zealand

You can help support the Red Cross and HelpAttack!, two very worthy causes, by clicking here

My good friend Paul Litvak referred me to a newly published academic book called “The Science of Giving,” edited by Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Christopher Y. Olivia.   So far, it is phenomenal.  My favorite thing about research, data analysis, and social science in general is that it can turn conventional wisdom, common sense, and the obvious into truth, falsehood, or a nuanced look into how the world, and people in it, actually work.  Buy the book.

My aim is to read, think about, and review everything in the book.  Please note that I am not an academic, or an expert of any sort in any of the fields discussed.  I’m just a big nonprofit technology junkie, and the stuff in this book has the potential to move the sector forward past 300B of annual giving.

Chapter One:  Feeling Good About Giving; The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior

Does giving and helping make people happy?  Do people also respond to guilt, sadness, and empathy when giving?  Is there a self-reinforcing cycle of happiness and giving?  The answers to all three, supported by the reviewed research, is yes.  The authors found, however, that not nearly enough work had been done investigating the effect of induced negative emotion.  Is that why I toss out the endless Plan USA mailings even though I’m already a donor of theirs?

Throughout the first few chapters, the interplay between self interest and reward, and selfless giving begins to take shape.  One interesting experiment shows that children who are prompted to remember happy or sad memories both help themselves to greater rewards during an experiment, but only those prompted with happy thoughts do more to help their classmates.

You might be familiar with the ‘dictator game’ experiment, where one participant has the power to distribute all the resources between themselves and one other person.  They can keep all the money for themselves, or not.  An experiment showed that people who self-reported being happy were more likely to give at least $1 to the other person.

So, happiness helps people give.  But does giving also cause happiness?  Yes: several experiments show that after being told to distribute a set of funds either for themselves or other people, those who gave the money away were happier at the end of the day.

My favorite section explores a tricky issue for donation messaging.  Should you tell people that giving will benefit them by making them happier?  People “erroneously believe that spending money on themselves makes them happier than spending money on others, suggesting that there is ample room for people to be ‘educated’ to the contrary.”  Should people be explicitly benefited when they give?  A discussion follows warning against monkeying with “behaviors that arise from intrinsic motivations.”   Rewarding children when they perform well can  undermine their natural motivations.  Furthermore, monetary incentives – matching, or gifts, and severely undermine socially motivated, altruistic behavior.

I’ve heard of this experiment at a day care center a few times now – when the center started applying fees when parents were late picking up their children (thereby grabbing a few extra minutes of free child care), parents actually started being late more often.  The fee moved the parents’ calculus from the social domain into a financial one, making it easier to break the social contract.

It has been very exciting to watch HelpAttack!, our little startup, start to gain traction.  Over $1,400 has been donated to a variety of causes, and we’re starting to get our first signups from nonprofits who want to do more with the service.

Read Write Web covered us and did a great job outlining some of the larger issues at work in the online giving space.  People we don’t know, and have never met, are talking about us on Twitter and on their blogs, which feels pretty amazing.  Our official press release is excerpted below.

Can you help us spread the word?  Even a mention on your social network of choice can go a long way.  You can pledge directly to Mobile Loaves and Fishes or Movember, or search for your favorite cause in our database.

HelpAttack!, a new Austin-based start-up, offers nonprofit organizations the opportunity to collect year-end gifts through Twitter. The online service allows social media users the ability to give to their favorite philanthropic causes, simply by updating their social status online.

Online fundraising is the most rapidly growing way for nonprofits to receive funds from individuals. According to Convio, 35-42 percent of online giving occurs in the last two months of the year. HelpAttack! supports nonprofit organizations’ fundraising goals by collecting donations through a stream that readily syncs with users’ daily activities. Furthermore, the unique platform encourages repeat monthly giving, catalyzing the shift from year-end gifts to year-long giving.

With over $1,200 already given through the HelpAttack! post-to-pledge system, funds are currently being funneled to nonprofits throughout the United States. There are nearly 6,000 nonprofits to choose from, and new causes being adding every day, so anyone with a favorite cause and a Twitter account can take part.

“This new way to donate is easy, fun and offers a layer of social responsibility to online activities,” said Sarah Vela, HelpAttack!’s CEO. “We invite all nonprofit organizations seeking new ways to collect funding through year-end campaigns to visit the site, add themselves if they’re not already listed, and share this new way of giving with their supporters.”

While the pledge system offers nonprofit organizations a new-found funding stream, it also raises the organizations’ visibility on social networks. Many users choose to promote their personal pledge to their followers, and once engaged, are apt to support their organizations’ messages focused around fund drives and special events.

“Right from the start, HelpAttack! expanded CASA’s awareness in the community by featuring us on their site” stated Callie Langford, Communications Manager of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). “HelpAttack! has really been a no-fuss way for us to receive additional donations, engage with new and old donors, and share details about our upcoming events.”

Currently focused on giving through Twitter, HelpAttack! has plans to soon engage with other social communities, allowing people the opportunity to pledge and give across multiple platforms.

We’ve recently launched a complete website rebuild for Greenlights.  Their web properties are actually spread across three distinct frameworks – Joomla, a WordPress blog, and their SalesForce.com Sites driven events portal.  We started with design work from Creative Pickle, and made it all happen.  These are just a few of the features we helped build:

• Custom SalesForce.com integration of contacts, organizations, and events.
• ADA (American Disabilities Act) Compliance
• Online payments with Authorize.net
• Custom Joomla modules showing upcoming SalesForce.com-driven events, as well as related content from Joomla and WordPress.
• A browser compatible, mobile friendly design, with Chrome Frame support for IE6

The Greenlights project was perfect for Prelude in several ways.  First, Greenlights is a wonderful organization serving other nonprofits.  We think that these kinds of capacity building entities within the nonprofit sector are critically important.  Second, our expertise with all three platforms – Joomla, WordPress, and SalesForce.com, meant we could address all the requirements of the project.  We also helped consolidate these websites, providing a uniform look and feel for each and moving their blog from wordpress.org to their own dedicated server.