We have written about social shopping, which is the heart of the Zavee platform, but are you familiar with “social giving”? Social giving is Social Media used for philanthropic or other non-profit purposes. Social giving wasn’t widely discussed even a year ago, but two events – the disputed elections in Iran and the earthquake in Haiti – gave rise to a tremendous amount of Social Media activity, which in turn got people thinking about the role of Social Media in the non-profit sector.
According author Geoff Livingston, who follows social giving closely, social giving can be a source of both new donations and newly engaged donors and activists. Social giving also can engage consumers in corporate philanthropy campaigns.
- In the wake of the elections individual Iranians used Social Media to get news out of the country after the government had restricted conventional media access.
- A post on Philanthropy Potluck discussed campaigns the author called “social giving contests”, in which consumers determine how companies distribute funds as charitable contributions. The post cites campaigns by Target and Tom’s of Maine, in which the public got to “vote” for potential recipients of donations.
- Immediately after the quake in Haiti, the American Red Cross and other organizations launched texting campaigns that raised over $30 million from individuals who sent a text message that automatically added a donation to their wireless bill. More than $20 million was raised by the American Red Cross alone, a sum unlikely to be raised as quickly, if at all, by conventional solicitation methods. The Red Cross using the same text2give program to raise funds for victims of the earthquake in Chile.
Zavee’s social giving feature combines several social giving concepts. Like the social giving contests, Zavee shoppers control the distribution of the 20% of our fees that we have committed to donate to civic and charitable causes that have joined Zavee. The mechanism for directing Zavee contributions is called Care Shares(tm). In addition to their cash back rewards, Zavee shoppers earn points called Care Shares based on the amount of each purchase from a Zavee merchant. Zavee shoppers periodically select which causes will receive their Care Shares. Zavee contributes cash to those causes based on the Care Shares allocated to each cause, which means that shoppers who purchase more control a larger slice of the contribution pie. (Yet another reason for shoppers to purchase from Zavee merchants.)
Santas Race for Charity (via Lincolnian)
Shoppers make their own decisions about how to allocate their Care Shares, but the networking features of Zavee encourage shoppers to discuss the various causes in our program. We take networking a step further by putting the causes themselves in the network. That means that they can engage directly with shoppers to provide information, answer questions, announce events and otherwise enrich shoppers’ understanding of the value they provide to the community. The benefit to causes of communicating effectively is clear: greater awareness and understanding by shoppers can lead to greater allocations of Care Shares, which means greater contributions by Zavee. Causes also can encourage their own members to join Zavee, who presumably will be inclined to allocate their Care Shares to the cause to which they belong.
The Zavee takeaway:
- Causes may not be as far up the curve as companies (to say nothing of individuals) when it comes to Social Media, but events like the Iran elections and the Haiti quake response demonstrate the potential impact Social Media can have for non-profits.
- The non-profit sector is likely to develop uses for Social Media that are both creative and effective. Businesses should be watching.
- Programs like Zavee, which combine the consumer-business integration of the social giving contest with the active participation of the causes themselves on the network, will be one way to for causes to gain a great deal of value from Social Media.
