Growing in web, social media, and nonprofit worlds.

College Confidant, a new social enterprise started by five Harvard students, thinks the answer is simple: college students.

The service is the project of Nitesh Banta, Amy Skaria , Tej Toor, Kai Wu and Amit Patel. The team recently won the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum Elevator Pitch Competition. Way to go guys! I hear Tej did a bang up  job giving the pitch, but everyone helped her prep and gave valuable feedback in preparation.

It’s worth noting that I’ve blogged about another of  Nitesh’s projects, Summer Workation, before. Since then, Nitesh has been in high gear with Summer Workation, attended Singularity University’s summer program which is pretty interesting on its own, and now with College Confidant he hopes to “increase accountability for high quality college counseling”.

College Confidant matches curious college applicants up with current college student advisors who share their interests. The idea is that since current students are familiar with the applications process having recently been admitted themselves. College Confidants can share a unique perspective on a range of issues that applicants have questions about. With the professional college admissions advising often costing upwards of $200 an hour, the prospect of advice from a student at your dream school for $12-$20 is appealing.

CC is hoping to connect you with the right Chinese speaking, oboe playing, Premed, Soccer star at Stanford to advise you. You’ll get the inside campus scoop on your favorite clubs, sports, and activities and get to reflect on how best to frame your involvement in your application.

It’s an interesting idea and in this market the team will likely have a strong first mover advantage. They already have Confidants trained to advise on admissions questions at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford with more schools on the way. Once word gets around campus and students sign up to be Confidants on lots of campuses it will be awful hard for a competing service to gain as much traction. And with a spiffy new website and a growing presence on Facebook and Twitter, word is definitely spreading.

What was your college admissions process like? Would you have found College Confidant’s service helpful?

Once we get started they are all over the computers. For most of them it’s the first time they’ve ever used one. They’re tickled when they get the hang of it. Double clicking, notepad, saving documents, drag and drop, folders- they take turns learning the basics. One student, Edmund, pulls me aside to ask if the copmuters have games. I’m not sure so I tell him I’ll find out and show him when class is over. 10 minutes later I come back and see him and Gideon happily playing pinball Later on we do a lesson for the teachers. They pick it up quick and realize how much time excel can save them in compiling semester grades.

It’s 6 am in Arusha and the birds are waking up too. It took a whole day to get here. I left at 10am Monday from Washington DC and finally made it to Tanzania at 2pm Tuesday.

Getting off the plane was a trip- right onto the tarmac the way it used to be in Tel-Aviv. Then I’d forgotten the address of our apartment here while I was filling out the entrance form. The agent waved me through to go get the address from Sanjay waiting outside -”just come back here once you have it.”

The 45 minute ride from the airport to Arusha is eye opening. The road is bumpy and superdusty. A few wispy dust cyclones actually emerged in the road in front of us!

Cars drive on the left side of the road. You can see Mt. Meru in the distance looming over the whole landscape. We passed a bunch of small villages on the way- lots of storefronts plastered with advertising. Signs for Coke, Pepsi, Kilimanjaro beer, Tigo and other cell phone carriers, are everywhere! Big run down, almost airport-shuttle looking vans called dalla dallas are everywhere, each one crammed with 30-40 people.

In spite of all the dust and how dry it is, there are areas that are incredibly lush. There is some serious greenery here too- banana trees, Eucaluptus and Jacarandas which are my favorite here. Jacaranda trees are in bloom now with huge tufts of bright purple all along main avenues. The center of town is much more developed – lots of hotels, restaurants, shops, and a visiting circus (really). The gap between rich and poor is apparent everywhere here. Walking into a tourist hotel is like stepping into another world.

Kilimanjaro beer is amazing. Do we have this in the US? Why not? Also the coke is better since it’s made with sugar cane instead of corn syrup.

Wednesday morning we made it out to the lower school at Shepherd’s Junior which is around Mama Lucy’s house -the classroom we taught in used to be her front poorch. We took a ride in one of the school’s vans and Mama Lucy met us there.

A note on Mama Lucy

This woman is incredible. She’s packing some serious kindness and has this huge infectious smile. We greet her with Shikamoo which is what people say out of respect when greeting their elders here. It translates literally to “I touch your feet”.

It was a holiday in honor of the country’s first president, Nyerere, but class five showed up to meet with us anyways for their computer class. These kids are awesome. They are so respectful. When anyone walks in they all stand – that reminded me of yeshivah. They address their teachers as teacher instead of Mr. or Ms. “Good morning teacher Stacey!”

Once we get started they are all over the computers. For most of them it’s the first time they’ve ever used one. They’re tickled when they get the hang of it. Double clicking, notepad, saving documents, drag and drop, folders- they take turns learning the basics. One student, Edmund, pulls me aside to ask if the copmuters have games. I’m not sure so I tell him I’ll find out and show him when class is over. 10 minutes later I come back and see him and Gideon happily playing pinball Later on we do a lesson for the teachers. They pick it up quick and realize how much time excel can save them in compiling semester grades.

In the afternoon we pick up AJ and Melissa Leon who’ve joined us here for the next weeks. Melissa has taught ESL by using twitter before and she’s got a whole curriculum for teaching the kids at Shepherd’s Junior ready.

In town in the evening I exchange some dollars so I’ll have some spending money. The exchange rate is $1 = 1300 shillings. The wad of shillings I get back from my hundred dollar bill feels like monopoly money.

Everything is new here. I’m enjoying learning a bit of Swahili, meeting new ppl, and the kids most of all. More soon.

Tutaonana! (See you soon, or lehitraot)

I wrote this from 30,000 feet on my way to The NTC, The Nonprofit Technology Network’s (NTEN) annual conference, though now I’m finally posting it from the conference hotel. I’m excited. I’ve been looking forward to this for over a year since Beth Kanter told me I ought to go last spring.

If it had worked out for me to attend last year I would have been overwhelmed and a bit lost. I’m sure I’ll still be overwhelmed this week (there are 1,400 folks coming to this shindig!), but this year I have the advantage of going with the anticipation of meeting up with friends and many people I’ve spoken and collaborated with via phone, email, and twitter.

This year 09NTC for me is a reunion. I feel like I belong and that I have ideas to contribute to the discussions. If you’d like to get a taste of the conference, but won’t be attending, you can be there virtually with me since I’ll be liveblogging! I’m flattered that Holly Ross asked me to help in this way and excited to be joining such a great team of bloggers in this effort. There are apparently some neat features in the liveblogging tool that I’ll get to play with like polling the audience, twitter integration that will pull my tweets while sessions are going. You can visit my ntc liveblog directly from here.

My session picks

There are so many great sessions, and I’m still undecided about some time slots so these may change, but here are my picks for now.

On Monday

10:30 I’ll be at “Online Outreach – The Seven Things Everyone Wants”
1:30 I’m at “You Made a Video, Now What?” with See3’s Michael Hoffman
3:30 at “Email Segmentation – Targeting works”.

Tuesday

10:30 I’m at “Old School Best Practices Applied to Social Media – Is social media for me?”
1:30 at “Community Management – Evolution of Online Communities”
3:30 at either “No Country for Old Media – SM Flash Causes, Twestival, etc.” or “Learning From the Presidential Campaigns”.

Day of Service

Sunday morning I got to participate in NTC’s Day of Service. Britt Bravo and I met with Albert Bricker from the St. James’ School which is a Bay Area Catholic school. We talked about blogging strategy, focus, and tools. It was a lot of fun and Albert’s actually already up.

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Today I’m sharing a video. It’s my first crack at iMovie- Enjoy!

Some Show notes:

Social Media Breakfast DC 2/5/09 with Jeff Pulver

Tweetsgiving

Happy Birthday Is, Risa Herbstman, and Jocelyn Harmon

Q: What would you like organizations you care about to ask of you aside from giving money?

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Recently I have been learning more about job search advice. I have just finished up my own job search and I will be starting work next week at the New Israel Fund. I have increasingly found Twitter to be a great source of articles and tips for job searchers and I thought I’d share some of the links I have found there.

Help – I Lost My Job! – a collection of 27 articles from the Wise Bread Blog for people who have just been laid off though there is a lot for anyone starting a job search in there as well.

CAREER TOOLBOX: 100+ Places to Find Jobs is a list of resources from Mashable with useful categories for recent grads, blogging jobs, and industry specific areas.

33 Ways To Find A Job Online – a bit to extensive for me, though worth looking through. Keep in mind though that 80% of jobs are found through offline networking efforts.

35+ Job Fair Success Do’s and Don’ts – I found Job Fairs to be motivating more than anything else. Even if you don’t come away with a job you want to apply for, you get a sense for what’s out there and a lot of practice presenting yourself.

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network – New York Times piece on the cold necessity of networking.

10 Easy Ways to Find a Job During Winter Break – This piece from the new column of one of my favorite job search authors, Lindsey Pollack, will make sure you put the time off from school to good use.

Social Networking Resources

Free eBook- Using the Social Web to Find Work – Chris Brogan shares salient thoughts for job searches from his blog. Nice free download.

Leverage Twitter for Your Job Search – Darren Rowse focuses on job searchers on his new blog Twitip. Be sure to check this one out if you’re new to Twitter as his blog is full of great Twitter resources.

How to Use LinkedIn When You’re Unemployed – Alison Doyle shares the goods on this essential social network for job searchers and really everyone in today’s transient workforce.

Fish Where The Fish Are – Use LinkedIn To Job Search

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In the wake of the TweetsGiving campaign I have been thinking a lot about the factors that contributed to our success and how we can learn and take things even further. I’ve already shared some basic stats from the campaign, but I agree with Beth that numbers can’t come close to telling a complete story. Thanks for the nudge to reflect further on Beth! Here’s some of my thinking at this point and a bit more data. Stacey has also reflected further and offered further insight into the donation stats.

What Happened?

Once Stacey and I realized we were on to something we got Matt and Vince to work immediately on a site and logo without knowing exact details on what actions we would be asking people to take or the exact shape the campaign would take. I reached out to Carrie and Dave and they were psyched and really helpful in getting the exact structure of the campaign crystallized and getting that focus reflected in the site content. The whole team did a lot of reaching out to spead the word a bit in advance. I spoke with Beth, Deborah, Joe, Tom, and Tamar who each had some ideas and agreed to tweet about it. On Tuesday we set the ChipIn Widget live for donations and settled in to wait until noon to ping our networks and release our idea to the wild.

Then a funny thing happened. Chris Brogan tweeted a link to the site. He likely found it in his ego feed since his name is on the site in the story section because of the inspiration we got from his TrickOrTweet Halloween campaign. I was on the phone with Dave when he saw Chris’s tweet and we all got really excited. “Everybody go now!”

Just like that Tweetsgiving was on. Tweets, donations, and blog posts came rolling in. We hit $1,500 in the first 2 hours. It was tough for the 4 of us to stay responsive between twitter, the gmail account we had set up, and keeping the site up to date with new Top Turkeys and blog posts. From the numbers alone we felt it was a resounding success and we’ve come away energized and grateful to the twitter community.

Factors Contributing to Tweetsgiving’s Success

Simplicity
Clarity and simplicity were key to this. We were asking for something very simple – share your gratitude and give a brick ($10). This nugget was easily remashed and retweeted making it attractive for people to express themselves creatively and feel like they were part of something larger. Tweets like “have you given your brick yet?” “just donated X dollars to #tweetsgiving” became pretty common and we started to retweet some of the inspiring and unique ones from the account.

Timeliness
The tie in of gratitude and giving to the Thanksgiving holiday was a natural sell. In the days leading up to the holiday and our campaign we noticed that people were already using twitter to reflect outloud about the blessings in their lives. Gratitude was already at the forefront and themes like health, education, wealth, jobs, and family were prompting people to share. Tweetsgiving tapped into that, encouraged it further by making that reflection a communal activity, and presented donation to a worthy cause as a relevant action.

Having read Nancy Schwartz’s nonprofit tagline report (so worthwhile- thanks Nancy!) I insisted that we be super thoughtful about our tagline to cement the connection further and we came up with “Put the giving back in Thanksgiving.”

Our timing also helped us to avoid the issue of Donor fatigue which is always something to be concerned about in social giving campaigns. I think we stayed on the right side of this for a few reasons.

• it was only 2 days and people had that expectation we’d quiet down soon
• it was during a time that I suspect is quieter on twitter generally since a lot of people who normally tweet from work are traveling already

Integration with Twitter
Tweetsgiving was very rooted within twitter itself and I think that definitely was important to the campaign’s success.

In all there were 9,456 visits from 7,563 unique visitors resulting in 15,830 total pageviews. Here’s a basic breakdown of where that traffic came from including the five biggest traffic sources to the site.

twitter.com (referral) 3,700     39.13%
(direct) ((none)) 2,993     31.65%
search (organic) 608     6.43%
facebook.com (referral) 378     4.00%
google.com (referral) 172     1.82%

StumbleUpon only got us 169 visits and the combined traffic from Facebook and StumbleUpon accounted for less than 6% of total traffic. That surprises me and I think it’s worth considering whether including those social buttons on the site actually detracted from the twitter focus of the site and diluted our main calls to action (share gratitude and give).

In rough terms our traffic was
40% from twitter + 30% direct visits + 9% search + 6% Facebook and StumbleUpon = 85% of all visits

This means that only 15% of visits came from blog posts and articles. The press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers. I also suspect that a large percentage of direct visits were from repeat visitors checking up on the site again, though I have to look into the analytics further to confirm that.

Evangelists
Individuals tweeting gratitude, sharing the link, and talking about our progress played a huge role. We did some outreach in advance, but largely I found that the individuals who went all out to champion the campaign emerged from the crowd organically.  We recognized some of them as Top Tweeters, but eventually we fell behind in listing them there. Mari Smith, Tori, and Brian Colman stand out in my mind. We considered giving some of them the password to the tweetsgiving twitter account itself, but decided that it was more authentic for people to share their enthusiasm as their own non-turkey selves.

Ego
Another aspect that played into the financial success of the campaign was the recognition we gave to our Top Turkeys who donated $100. Peter Kim has some thoughts on the value of ego traps like this and we had considered that thinking in advance. The On The Wires section showcasing blog press also incentivized people to share the story with audiences in other forums.

Wish List for the Future and Things to Consider and Improve

Disclaimer
I am very pleased with the way Tweetsgiving turned out. Though we set the goal for $10,000, it was an experiment that Stacey and I would have been proud of and considered a success even if we raised less money. We also felt strongly that the amount of reflection and gratitude we inspired people to share would be central to success as well, though we didn’t set a specific target for a number of gratitude tweets.

If we had thought of the idea a month before the holiday I am positive there are things we would have done differently and better. But with only six days, many ideas didn’t get implemented in time.

Aggregation
I would have liked to have a live aggregation of gratitude tweets on the site similar to the implementation on votereport (Alison Fine and Andy Carvin I’m looking at you! How did you do that and can we talk?) We did link to the twitter search results on the site, but I strongly suspect that if people knew their tweets would be displayed immediately on the sight it would encourage even more people to share thoughtful gratitude tweets and retweet. It’s already in the works, though Matt and I would love to talk to anyone who has suggestions on this implementation for the future.

Automation
We did have the Tweetsgiving account set up with Tweetlater to autofollow those who followed us. Interestingly we did get one complaint from someone who followed us and didn’t like being auto-followed back. I also wonder if there was more potential there. For example, I used the Tweetsgiving twitter account to follow people speaking about thanksgiving who I found with twitter search. I noticed many of these people tweeting that they had donated and some direct messaged us to thank us for connecting with them. These people were easily convinced to explore the site and learn more. I did try to set up Twollow to automate this process, but found that it didn’t function properly.

There is definitely the potential to use search keywords to identify twitter users to whom your campaign is relevant. Since manual twitter search isn’t easily scalable, I expect this kind of automation to be taken further in future campaigns. What are your thoughts on automation? I wonder if auto following with keywords the way twollow is intended to work removes the connection from the human level too much in a large campaign. I’d love your feedback on that. Good idea, or creepy?

Recognition
Especially after seeing the effect of the Top Turkeys, in the future I’d like to recognize all donors by name, twitter name, and amount given. There could be an opt-out option in the donation form for people who want to give anonymously. I’m curious to see the effect that would have on the size and number of donations as people identify a social norm in the level of giving and possibly try to one up each other.

Recognition for all donors has the advantage of enabling enthusiasts to tweet thanks to all recent donors not just Top Turkeys since they’d be able to see all donations coming in. Inspired by the recognition Peter Deitz is giving donors to his $20,09 campaign for Social Actions (Help them out! – they are seriously awesome over there) Stacey has added a donors page to the site recognizing everyone who gave. We’re happy to take your name down if you’d rather not be listed. I would have liked that information to be automated for immediate display upon donation and possibly a few different giving levels with explanation of what change you will be making possible with each new level of giving.

Data Collection
While Epic Change did get a lot of new donors through the campaign in hindsight I realize that we should have collected more information about them while we had their attention at the donation stage. The advantage of the ChipIn widget was the graphical display of progress and the fact that it was fast to implement. Similar campaigns should definitely invest time to thinking carefully on this. Craft a clear well flowing form that collects essential information, but isn’t so long people tune out.

For Tweetsgiving I’d have liked to collect name, twitter username, url, email, address, recopied gratitude tweet if the donation was $10 or more, what you want displayed in the Top Turkey section as your name if you are giving $100 or more, and a checkbox for Epic Change newsletter subscription.

Team Building
In the future in a campaign like this I would gather a swarm of committed people to organize and brainstorm together in advance. This group could reflect together on who they each knew individually to ask directly to donate, share gratitude, retweet, blog and offer feedback. I’d set up a google doc where this group could share ideas and a list of people to reach out to. I’d have a conference call to build team rapport and plan a second call in advance for the first night of the campaign that would be open to the public.
Connecting voices to twitter names and avatars goes a long way to building teamwork and can lend a valuable grassroots feeling to any social campaign.

Measurement

One issue I’ve found trying to analyze the way the word spread is that search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages (anyone know a way to dig further there?) I have an RSS feed from the whole campaign of “#tweetsgiving” but I know many tweets didn’t include the # and that doesn’t encompass all the ways the message changed- alternate links people used and phrases that caught on and were retweeted.

Stacey has a post up with her reflections and some details about donations. Most notable is the fact that all but six gifts to Tweetsgiving were new donors. The median gift size was $10 and over half the money came from Top Turkeys who gave $100 or more. Be sure to check out her more detailed breakdown.

What’s Your Take?

For me this thinking raised more questions than closure. I think this is just the start and we can all expect to see twitter and other social networks used for social causes more frequently and on a larger scale in the future. Several people have already reached out to us to collaborate and brainstorm with them about their plans. That’s great!

What does this all jar for you? What’s the biggest question in your mind now? What else was central in your mind to Tweetsgiving’s success and what avenues remain to be explored to take things further and improve? Please share and dissect with us so we can learn together!

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One of the most repeated pieces of blogging advice I have read is that it’s important not to hold back on your good content. I am having a hard time with that lately because on the one hand I am sitting on 3+ weeks of great posts in not-so-rough-draft form, but on the other hand I have said I would be posting Monday-Thursday. If I stick to that posting schedule, some of the thoughts I have in the moment won’t be relevant if I wait for the right or perfect day to share them.

Chris Brogan and others have stressed the importance of having a blog editorial calendar. I’m finding it hard to plan ahead in that structure so that things are still relevant when I share them and so I also don’t feel stifled. When I’m having thoughts like, “no you already have X number of posts ready for next week. Publish that thought later!” it’s time to cut loose.

If this blog is really going to be about me exploring and sharing as opposed to being about me obsessing and responding to traffic data then I need to be more liberal with the publish button. I generally reflect in a working notepad file, but I’m going to experiment with doing that thinking right inside the blog text area. It may get bumpy, or less polished here while I play, but I expect that this freedom I’m granting myself will have me sharing more which I’ll enjoy! I hope you’ll keep questioning, posing ideas in different ways, sharing your experience, and reflecting right along with me in the comments or elsewhere.

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I have been amazed at the response of the twitter community to the TweetsGiving campaign. The firehose of gratitude shared through the #tweetsgiving tag during those 48 hours was overwhelming. Now that TweetsGiving 2008 is over (and we’ve met our goal!!) I wanted to share some data about our efforts. This year during TweetsGiving…

• ~3,000 gratitude tweets were posted including the tweetsgiving tag. search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages so that’s an estimate, but check out the awesome wordle visualization of these gratitude tweets below.

• TweetsGiving was one of the top trending terms over the 48 hours of the campaign. The screenshot below from twitscoop gives a sense of the campaign as it spread in real time. Note the rise in activity in the first and last hours as word initially got out and as urgency built to help us reach the goal by the deadline.

• $11,021 were raised in 364 donations

• The TweetsGiving site had 15,830 Total Pageviews from 7,563 Unique Visitors in 101 different countries.

• TweetsGiving received over 100 press and blogger mentions (currently 107).

I had an amazing time putting together the TweetsGiving campaign with Stacey and the rest of our team. Thank you Stacey, Dave and Carrie, Matt, Vince, and Sarah. Thanks to Tori, Brian, and Mari for tweeting up a storm with us and feeling empowered to make this event their own. I can’t express my appreciation enough for everyone who tweeted thanks, donated, blogged, shared, or reflected with us to help make this Thanksgiving truly amazing.

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First of all, if you haven’t yet been to http://tweetsgiving.org, go now, I’ll wait.

The Scoop

So, Stacey called me on Wednesday night, with the name and twitter account for TweetsGiving, asking for ideas.  We settled on the idea of getting people to tweet their gratitude, and immediately began thinking about who we could bring on board to help make it happen. Today, after a lot of brainstorming and hard work by many amazing people, #TweetsGiving was a top trending term in twitter and our campaign is well underway to building a new classroom in Tanzania for Gideon and his classmates.

So many twitterers tweeted gratitude throughout the Twitterverse, demonstrating that social media can mobilize an outpouring of Thanksgiving. If you’re not on twitter you can still participate and donate to a worthy cause. Also consider sharing your gratitude in your Facebook status instead.

Here’s the graph of our presence throughout the day on twitter.

Wow. I’m feeling wow.

Yesterday I was pumped and today I am so inspired and happy that this project came together from a mere inkling of an idea six days ago. It has grown into such an amazing campaign.

I’ve been overwhelmed all day by the willingness of the twitter community to step up and get involved in this project. A search for the #TweetsGiving tag really demonstrates how deeply we’ve threaded twitter with gratitude. So far, we have raised over $4,000 (and counting!) towards our goal of $10,000. In just 12 of 48 hours!

This screenshot from this afternoon shows #TweetsGiving as the third most popular term (And there are over 4 million twitter users!).

Thanks!

Since TweetsGiving is about gratitude, I will say that I am so grateful to all those working on the project, especially my partner in crime Stacey and countless others who have reached out to me throughout the day. You rock! I am also grateful to the gazillions of tweeters and the 150+ people who have so far generously donated to TweetsGiving.

On a personal note, I am so grateful to have my mom and sister and so thankful to have all four of my grandparents active in my life. Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the blessings that come with being an American. I will have more to say on that and about what I’ve learned from this project after Thanksgiving. I will definitely have more to say once the frenzy winds down. (But not yet! Keep it coming!)

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