Andrew Daley

"One if by Land, Two if by Google."

2011-06-15T08:59:19-04:00

New Hampshire is once again taking its place as one of the two bell weathers of politics as the 2012 Presidential Race starts to heat up; especially on the GOP side. Like Iowa, the residents of the Granite State take their role as vanguards of the process quite seriously and in turn, the Republican Candidates are heading north, and lining up to shake hands across the state.

One of our clients here at Common Sense NMS is the Live Free Or Die Alliance, a non-partisan group dedicated to improving the civility of the political discourse in New Hampshire and also bringing the concept of active citizen participation back into politics. LFDA launched three years ago and is starting to gain considerable traction on issues important to local residents but now, of course, as the country's attention turns to their state, they are increasingly becoming a solid resource for on the ground New Hampshire political news.

In working on their efforts in the Granite State as the process has picked up, it's been fascinating to see the relative strength of the GOP candidates as reflected in the Google search trends of the core candidates. From this unique perspective, we can gain some insight into who has appeal at this early stage, or at the very least, who people are finding interesting enough to go onto Google and type in their name. This is important to LFDA as we helped LFDA receive a Google Grant a year or so ago, and the ability to capture and translate the political trends in search helps them grow their group. Contact us to learn how a $120,000 a year Google Grant can help your C3. For example, if more people are searching for Mitt Romney and what he is doing in New Hampshire, we can then focus the Grant efforts on words relating to Romney and introduce people to LFDA via the Grant and their interest in Romney's Campaign.

As you can see, over the past 30 days, no candidate comes remotely close to having the interest that Sarah Palin does, in terms of search globally. She clearly is far and above the other candidates, in fact, she is more interesting to those online on Google than all the other candidates combined. Of course, this doesn't mean true political support, but it does mean interest, and interest seems to be a precursor to support.

Thanks to the power of Google, we don't have to look just globally. We can look at Search Traffic in the United States and you can even dial down and look at just New Hampshire which we decided to do. Before we pulled this chart, we thought that perhaps within the Granite State, the serious but relatively unknown candidates like Jon Huntsman might pull a little better but just the opposite is true. Within the borders of NH, Palin is even more dominant than she is globally.

But before any Palin fans start planning their trip to Washington for the Inauguration, let's look at what people are searching for in terms of their favorite candidate, and the answer is our post title. So the interest in Sarah Palin is being driven most recently by her gaffe in Boston, not by pure interest in her campaign.

We'll keep tracking the trends in New Hampshire but remember, Google Insights is free and available to all. When you are looking at your organization or your company and want to learn more about what people want, what they are looking for or even where they are searching from, Google can give you a lot of valuable information instantly.

Branding Nonprofits in the Digital Age

2011-06-06T14:42:24-04:00

Once upon a time, branding a product or a nonprofit was wonderfully easy. You created a brochure, or a direct mail piece, complete with pictures and an interesting chart or two, and sent it out. Or you made a PSA with the help of a willing commercial producer and ran it on television and played it for perspective donors.

As they say, those were the days.

Today, nonprofits and causes who attempt to brand from above and follow the mantra of 'we know what we are doing, give us money' collide full force with the modern world of technology, access to information and, in fact, the whole world of new media.

It started and is most clearly associated with movements like Charity Navigator. Instantly, a potential donor could look behind the curtain of a nonprofit and see details on spending and work. It might not seem like much, but just like potential voters used to have to go to the library to see how their elected official voted, the instant access to information means instant decision making.

It goes much further than that of course. So much further that this weekend I was introduced by The New York Times to "Carlson's Law," which has applications to the nonprofit world.

"... 'Carlson's Law,' posited by Curtis Carlson, the C.E.O. of SRI International, in Silicon Valley, which states that: 'In a world where so many people now have access to education and cheap tools of innovation, innovation that happens from the bottom up tends to be chaotic but smart. Innovation that happens from the top down tends to be orderly but dumb.' As a result, says Carlson, the sweet spot for innovation today is 'moving down,' closer to the people, not up, because all the people together are smarter than anyone alone and all the people now have the tools to invent and collaborate."

From a nonprofit branding point of view, here's how I see the application of this law.

It's no longer enough to say you are going to do something, you have to show what you are doing. You have to engage with your constituency in a real collaborative manner, not the usual "will you sign my petition online?" mode. You have become engaged in a way that is uncomfortable for a traditional group and you have to understand that the knowledge and power you once held tightly onto is now available to a lot of people outside your four walls.

If you do this, you will succeed. But if you don't, Carlson's Law has another important warning for you. Take the millions of Americans who are interested in the environment and climate change. If they don't see that the legacy groups are effectively fighting the battle, they now have the tools and technologies they need to organize and push change themselves.

Work with your supporters and brand yourself with them for success. Ignore your supporters and brand top down at your peril.

Digital Darwinism: What Side of Evolution Is Your Nonprofit On?

2011-06-02T17:21:20-04:00

Recently, one of my colleagues at Common Sense NMS was sitting down with a perspective employee. In the course of the interview, the phrase "Digital Darwinism" came to his mind in regards to the revolution we have seen in the nonprofit and cause world over the past five years. To survive today, you have to evolve how you think about your business.

For the past 30 or so years, nonprofits were sheltered from business realities. They were not for profit groups intent on creating positive change in the world: saving the rainforests, promoting unique community projects around the world or even just trying to build constructive and nonpartisan means of communication among citizens.

Nonprofits existed in their own ivory towers and were independent. They never made an attempt to be as up-to-date with technology as a businesses that are driven by the bottom line. In nonprofit culture, there is not the need ,or desire, to budget and adapt quarterly or monthly. Annual budgets are drawn up -- if not in stone, in at least in very strong concrete -- and that's that.

However, one of the many results of technological advancement is that nonprofits can no longer ignore the world outside their doors. Nor can they realistically expect to survive if they are unwilling or unable to embrace the developments around them. It's as if they believe, on some level, that they can stick their heads in the sand and survive -- but they cannot.

I speak from experience. In 2006, when we set up Common Sense NMS and began to advise nonprofit clients on the new and emerging world of social and new media, Veterans For America was one of our largest and most important clients.

Under the tutelage of Bobby Muller, VFA had won a Nobel Peace Prize and was a leading voice in the veterans movement. Then the world changed around them. Younger groups like IAVA and VoteVets were created in the digital age and soon, with other factors involved of course, VFA folded its doors.

I went to check on another former client, The Justice Project, which is a strong organization that featured the work of Kirk Bloodsworth -- the first man freed from Death Row by DNA. The website is down, the account suspended and the organization is apparently no longer in existence. The Innocence Project, however, continues to grow and develop strongly in its place.

Both of these organizations were smart groups, founded by dedicated people, who wanted to do more in the world. Both were also groups of the legacy world, focused on traditional models with traditional strategies and tactics. Both of their missions have been usurped by younger groups whose sole focus is digital.

Is there hope for legacy organizations in the new world? Of course. I see two things that are critical to making sure the evolution follows the revolution.

First, the change has to be driven from top down and it's going to ruffle some feathers. It's critical that leadership within the groups understand the world has fundamentally changed and it's not going to change back. Direct mail is a declining tool, though a still valuable one. Newspaper and traditional PR doesn't' cut it any more. With the use of tools like Facebook,Twitter and Google, the capacity to change how we live and communicate is not open for debate.

You can either engage and evolve and survive or, sadly, like VFA and The Justice Project, you can close your doors and move on.

$15 Billion for Mother's Day -- How About Four Bucks for a Brick?

2011-04-25T18:11:12-04:00

According to the National Retail Foundation, Mother's Day is big business and it looks like this year, total spending could top $15,000,000,000.

Besides this making me feel that the chocolates and card I give my mother every year is dragging the average down a touch, it makes me hopeful that this is a good year to ask everyone to consider donating $4 for a brick to not only honor their mother, but help a mother out in Costa Rica.

While, here in the United States, we are starting to think about what restaurant to take mom to or trying to remember what we got her last year, in Costa Rica, the mothers of one small village have much simpler things on their minds. Working with the amazing folks at the Mastate Charitable Foundation, these mothers are trying to build a small community center for their children to gather and play in.

So, we're trying to help them, one brick at a time.

For the sum of four dollars, which pales next to the close to BILLION DOLLARS that will be spent on spa packages for mothers here this year, you can donate a brick to the Community Center. We need three thousand more bricks to finish the center.

Now, I am not suggesting that a brick be the only present you give this Mother's Day, and of course, if you are a mother, maybe you'll relate to the mothers in Costa Rica whose wish is for a better life for their children.

But I am hoping with the billions and billions spent this year, we can together donate $20,000 to help build this community center. After all, with the great foundation in life your mother gave you, it would be nice to help another mother do the same.

To learn more or to donate a brick, please click here.

Tonight in New York City -- A Celebration, A Feast, And a Reason to Tweet

2011-03-07T17:29:28-05:00

Tonight, in New York City, Gay Men's Health Crisis will celebrate with Savor; one of the top events of the year, but this year's event is going to be one for the ages and reason for all of us to celebrate with them.

First, GMHC is celebrating thirty years of serving those in New York City who are living with HIV/AIDS; providing critical services and support to literally tens of thousands of New Yorkers over the decades. That is reason enough for all of us to pause on an early spring Monday and say thank you to this remarkable group.

Next, tonight's event promises to be the best Savor ever and yes, there are still some tickets available should you be looking for a great night out. Hosted by celebrity chef Ted Allen of the Food Network's Chopped and featuring some remarkable chefs such as Peter Hoffman of Savoy, Stephen Lewandoski of Tribeca Grill, Francois Payard of Francois Payard Bakery and Carmen Quagliata of Union Square Cafe, over 500 guests are expected to descend on Gotham Hall tonight and enjoy a remarkable feast for a very good cause.

At tonight's event, for the first time GMHC will honor the inspiring work of Joan Tisch with the inaugural Judith Peabody Humanitarian Award. This award tonight honors not one but two of the most distinguished activists and philanthropists that have enriched GMHC over the past thirty years and all the men and women GMHC has served.

The Power of Social Media In Egypt And Around The World Is Basic.

2011-02-01T09:02:40-05:00

As a new and social media group, we often get questioned and asked about the power of social media, how it works and how it can help either their cause, or business. Most of the questions are really about the fringes of the media and about frankly somewhat esoteric uses of the media.

What we usually try and do is two things.

First, we explain that as tools and technologies develop, they are not fundamentally changing what we as humans have always done. What I mean is that the WHY has not changed. For example, the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology is one of our clients and 'birders' have always been about communities; 'birders' have formed small or large birding groups in their communities going back since the first person wrote a note about seeing a bluebird on a winter feeder.

But now, the HOW has changed, the tools one can use to create a birder group are not flyers on the wall of a local store, or writing letters to friends. Now, we can create a Facebook group and the community is global, instant and free to join. How does it work? Well, the Cornell Group is just a few months old and has over 17,000 members.

Or Twitter. Yes, it's only 140 characters and no, I am not sure about the revenue model. But over the weekend, if you wanted the best real time updates, going onto Twitter and searching #egypt was the way to go. You could see reactions from all over the world, and even some coming out of Cairo. Was it perfect journalism? No, but it was real.

As regards Egypt, or any powerful country that has relied on the holding of information as a key to power, the Internet, again in its fundamentals, is very powerful. It allows for information to be exchanged quickly, freely and easily. It allows people in Egypt to communicate with people around the world -- we did a live blogger chat for our client Human Rights First a few months ago with a blogger who was on the ground in Egypt.

Imagine if the uprising had tried to take place a generation ago? How would the people in Cairo communicated with the people in Alexandria? Far less London? It would have been far harder, more time-consuming, more dangerous and more expensive.

Today, there's a story about evening news anchors 'rushing' to Egypt to cover the story. Why? Being on the ground five days later, are they really going to bring anything to the conversation that we haven't already seen, tweeted, YouTubed and Facebooked? I don't think so.

Every day we see groundbreaking technologies and cutting-edge tools emerge online. But we still are far more likely to be reminded that every day, the power of what is happening around the world is not at the edges but at the core.

The Global Fund Got It Right On Corruption

2011-01-24T16:32:01-05:00

The headlines scream for attention and plenty of hand-wringing and I told you so's.

Massive Problems With Celebrity Driven Aide; UN Investigation As Sweden Reneges.

Global Disease Fund Seeks to Recover From Corruption

Darling of development world, stung by corruption problems, says others

But there's one problem with the headlines about today's revelation about The Global Fund. The revelations of problems with the distribution with the funds for medical aid into Africa did not come as the result of some deep undercover investigation by some newspaper or by some government agency.

They came from The Global Fund.

Because while virtually every organization that is spending money on the ground in Africa, whether they are helping people get access to clean water, saving the rainforest or helping fight AIDS is going to have corruption and have issues with a percentage of the money getting misspent, what The Global Fund did was decide, proactively, not to ignore that problem.

But there's fraud, the critics cry!

Well, actually yes The Global Fund's Inspector General (and that's a good start right there, if you are going to support an organization that does work on the ground in Africa, make sure they have an IG) says they uncovered issues, quite a few of them.

Here's what The Global Fund found:

Among the corruption uncovered by Parsons' task force:

--Last month, the fund announced it had halted grants to Mali worth $22.6 million, after the fund's investigative unit found that $4 million was misappropriated. Half of Mali's TB and malaria grant money went to supposed "training events," and signatures were forged on receipts for per diem payments, lodging and travel expense claims. The fund says Mali has arrested 15 people suspected of committing fraud, and its health minister resigned without explanation two days before the audit was made public.

--Mauritania had "pervasive fraud," investigators say, with $4.1 million -- 67 percent of an anti-HIV grant -- lost to faked documents and other fraud. Similarly, 67 percent of $3.5 million in TB and malaria grant money that investigators examined was eaten up by faked invoices and other requests for payment.

--Investigators reviewed more than four-fifths of Djibouti's $20 million in grants, and found about 30 percent of what they examined was lost, unaccounted for or misused. About three-fifths of the almost $5.3 million in misappropriated money went to buy cars, motorcycles and other items without receipts. Almost $750,000 was transferred out of the account with no explanation.

--Investigators report that tens of thousands of dollars worth of free malaria drugs sent to Africa each year by international donors including the Global Fund are stolen and resold on commercial markets.

--The UN Development Program manages more than half of the fund's spending, but UN officials won't release internal audits of their programs to the fund's investigators. Parsons said that has blocked him from investigating programs in the more than two dozen nations, including some of the most corruption-prone.

Fair enough, it's a lot of money and it's a lot of issues that need addressing.

Also importantly when compared to overall budget which would be over $20 BILLION, it's not quite as massive as it seems.

The critics will scream fraud, but what they should be screaming is thank god there is a group that is doing business in Africa that is actually watching where the money goes, following the money and where there is clearly fraud, shutting off the money.

The fight to help those with AIDS in Africa will continue. The good work of The Global Fund will continue. Unfortunately, in some countries where the need for help is great, it will continue, someday, when the issues that were identified today are fixed.

Killing Sacred Cows Online

2008-04-28T10:00:45-04:00

One of the last vestiges of hope for traditional marketing outlets, consultants and legacy media companies is to fan the two myths that allows them to continue to draw advertising and marketing dollars -- the myth of demographics online and the myth of age online.

The first questions we get here at Common Sense NMS when we first meet with clients, be they a progressive organization, cause or candidate, we often hear some initial concerns, 'isn't it just young people online' and 'aren't they all just in the big cities and on the coasts?"

We often smile because it seems these clients, with all good intentions, seem to feel that their clients, or supporters, are the one group remaining firmly stuck in 2002 while the rest of the world social networks, Twitters and emails their days away.

This week, we saw two more pieces of collective wisdom that say to us, the future isn't online -- it's the present.

As part of research for a potential client, a congressional candidate in South Carolina, the question about how effective would social networks prove to be in a South Carolina district. In this case, there is a Democratic Primary and the vote turn out will be small -- it was our opinion that a minimum investment in social networks, literally $5,000, could return financially and terms of actual votes.

We discovered that in this rural South Carolina district there were over 62,000 Facebook users over the age of 18 -- 62,000 potential voters in a rural district. Even we, the new media guys, were pretty surprised at the size of that number. We can target those Facebook users right down to zip codes -- something our Director of Social Networks and Cool New Media Tools, Max Bernstein, did with great success for Bill Richardson in Iowa this past winter.

The second interesting piece of data was the release of age demographics over at Daily Kos, a top online political community. Broken into five year segments, 20-24, 25-29 and so forth, the research found that the #1 segment was 45-49 years old and the #2 segment was 50-54 with #3 being a tie between 35-39 and 40-49.

In total, just under half of Daily Kos readers are between 35 -59. That used to be the largest demographic for newspapers, clearly those people are getting their news somewhere else these days.

For all of the traditional outlets efforts to minimize what is happening online, the final decision will rest in the hands of the advertisers. Advertising is, ultimately, the art of presenting your company or product to potential consumers where they are and in such a way that they'll seek you out for more information or to buy from you.

Outdoor advertising, for example, presumes your potential clients are driving a lot.

But, once upon a time, everyone looking for entertainment looked in magazines for the latest gossip, or listened to the radio for the latest songs, those people are online.

Or take America's game, baseball, this year Major League Baseball will let you watch every out of market game for $119 on your computer; will that be every game soon?

The cow is out of the barn and has been for some time, or should I say the consumer, and trust me, they're not going back in. Shut the doors and move online.

Word Of The Week: Manufactroversy

2008-04-18T18:44:19-04:00

One of the challenges in online marketing is that everything you do is happening in a vortex of communication and activity.

For example, our company, Common Sense NMS works for Veterans For America and last week, VFA had a very successful week with their messaging on troop deployments and we saw great traffic and activity online. However, that activity happened in conjunction with Bobby Muller from VFA doing a press conference with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid so it's hard to see exactly the core impact of the work online.

Not so with the word Manufactroversy - quite literally the hottest new word on the Internet and one that Common Sense NMS developed as part of its work pushing back on the movie Expelled.

In fact, the word itself was actually coined by none other than Huffington Post blogger Max Bernstein who is also our Director of Social Networks And Cool New Media Tools (His actual title.)

Manufactroversy was first used here on the Huffington Post exactly one week ago today when Valerie Tarico put up this post. Last Friday, as part of the project, we also launched the Manufactroversy NewsLadder . The NewsLadder is an aggregator tool which captures, with user help, all the articles, posts and videos about the movie and other manufactroversies.

Early last Friday, we googled the word "Manufactroversy" and found there were less than 50 instances of the word online and 100% of them tracked back to the NewsLadder.

What has happened in the last week has been a remarkable example of not only how powerful Google's robot and ability to scour the web has become, but also how the world of communication has evolved in the last twenty four to thirty six months.

Over the past week, the number of links that Google has captured has risen, first to a few hundred, then to a few thousand, especially when James Boyce posted on Monday here on Huffington Post.

As the week progressed, we kept googling our new word and saw the instances of its use skyrocket. By the middle of the week, it had gone over 5,000, yesterday we were over 10,000 and today, there are over 14,000 instances of the word online revealed on a Google search.

Some link to posts we put up, some are reviews of our posts, some are from the Social Network pages we built to support the introduction of the word and the underlying project, disputing the manufactured controversy of Intelligent Design claiming to be science. But all were created in the past week, and all go back to the launch of the word one week ago today.

We knew our efforts were really successful when we started to see our word showing up in other places, "Latest Anti-Obama Manufactroversy is DOA" -- this made me realize what a remarkable time we live in.

Imagine just a few years ago what it would have taken to introduce a word, not only the time and money required but you would have had to work through traditional media sources.

Now, there are great sites like this one, over 60 million blogs, aggregating tools like NewsLadders, and social networks - www.myspace.com/manufactroversy has almost 1,000 members in a week.

Every day, we are seeing how these tools and networks, platforms and applications are changing our world, and the proof is in the growing power of one made-up word: manufactroversy.