Pixelanthropy: Charities tap into Second Life

Virtual yaks go fast
Just ask Ogilvy Worldwide’s Kathryn Parsons, who helped to craft a recent campaign in Second Life for the UK-based arm of Westport, Conn.-based Save The Children. The nonprofit, with Parsons’ help, created a virtual, online 3-D animal pageant in Second Life last fall, called Yak Shack, after it sold out of the real yaks being auctioned on its 2006 holiday Wish List. Hundreds participated in the online event, buying yaks for 1,000 Lindens (the currency in Second Life), or about $3.50 in real money. Each player who bought a yak for a poor family was able to milk, ride, and customize a yak avatar online and take care of it in a virtual yak barn, culminating in a December contest for Best Yak. Save The Children won’t say how much the event actually raised (or lost). But it will say the event was, more importantly, about raising awareness in a community that is often hard to reach—and woo. “Engaging with young intellectuals is quite difficult, not just for charities but for everyone,” says Parsons. “It seemed like an opportunity not to be missed.” Adds Beth Kanter, a nonprofit consultant: “You can walk someone through an experience in Second Life or sit down with them to discuss the work you’re doing in a way you can’t in the real world or on the Web.”

Colleen Macklin, the chair of the digital communications and design lab at Parsons, agrees. “Online, game-like environments offer not just new ways for people to connect,” she says. “They also help people understand the power of community in ways they hadn’t before. The significance of virtual environments is their promise as a new medium for social activism.”

For Second Life’s first nonprofit organizer, Susan Tenby, that promise is already being realized: Every Friday morning, Tenby’s avatar — a pink, catlike creature with a tail called Glitteractica Cookie (“Glitter” to friends), meets up with a small group of other charity-minded avatars on the Nonprofit Commons in Second Life to trade war stories and share fundraising strategies. In mid-August, the Commons officially launched itself to the world with a “mixed-reality” bash conducted both in the group’s Second Life space online and in the real-life, San Francisco-based headquarters of TechSoup, a technology nonprofit whose mission is to help traditional nonprofits get up to speed with the Web.

It was an unusual scene: Seventy-five avatars, participating from their human’s computers, could see a large video screen broadcasting some of the speeches and presentations taking place in San Francisco, while real-world participants could watch the ongoing interactive chatter between the virtual avatars. Says Tenby, who began organizing nonprofits in Second Life in 2006 for TechSoup: “This is a way for the best and most creative minds in the nonprofit space to talk, under the radar, about how to revolutionize their strategies and their workplaces.”

Contribute Commonwealth Island, a forested retreatand meeting place for various environmentalgroups and philanthropists.

Other regions exist for nonprofits to create a virtual toehold, most notably the forested Camp David-like SIM known as Commonwealth Island, which hosts small displays for a couple dozen environmental and political activism groups. Another region known as Better World Island is home to a gathering of international aid and awareness groups. Individual efforts within Second Life have included a virtual Camp Darfur, which lets residents experience what it is like to be a refugee; a walk-through tour of a malfunctioning human heart created by the American Heart Association; a profitable “fly-a-thon” to support multiple sclerosis research.

Virtual trees have real-world impact
Plant-It 2020, a nonprofit founded by the late singer John Denver, has launched an island on Second Life on which residents can pay 300 Lindens (or $1.11) to plant a tree from among a list of endangered species. For every tree planted on Second Life, Plant-It 2020 will plant the same species of the tree in the real-world rainforest to which it is indigenous. “The island helps charities get past donor fatigue and gives people a chance to have a much deeper relationship with a charity versus simply writing a check and never seeing it again,” says Paull Young, a senior account executive at Converseon, a digital  communications company working with Denver’s charity to promote reforestation.

But while nonprofits have begun traveling into Second Life by the virtual dozen, this new terrain is not easy for newbies to master. Alas, doing good in the real world via a virtual one may sound like fun to newcomers — until they realize that they have to learn how to walk and talk and dress themselves first.

I’m a prime example. To report on the development of philanthropy and nonprofits in Second Life, I needed to create my own avatar persona. I was allowed to make up any first name I wanted, but I had to choose from a lengthy list of often-bizarre last names. Grappling for something familiar, I came up with “Scoop Raymaker” and selected a prefabricated, Barbie-slender avatar template with a distinctly goth fashion sense. After a few tweaks to add a splash of color to my avatar’s black outfit, I launched Scoop into the virtual sky — and then promptly fell down.

There’s a certain finesse required with the “page up” and “page down” keys to affect a smooth avatar landing. Once you’ve got your avatar’s feet on virtual terra firma, it’s time to learn how to walk (arrow keys) without slamming into walls or other avatars. Then it’s time to chat up a virtual stranger; my first attempts at texting another newbie came to naught when I discovered he spoke only Portuguese (not counting the English profanities he flung at me when he discovered I was not also from Brazil).

If landing in Second Life for the first time can be a rude awakening for a newborn avatar, it can be flummoxing at first for a nonprofit organization. Fortunately for philanthropic and nonprofit newcomers, the smiling pink presence of Tenby’s avatar arrived in-world before they did. In fact, Tenby herself arrived online before many of these organizations did when she was hired in 2000 by CompuMentor, a San Francisco-based nonprofit technology consultancy, to help launch TechSoup.org, which today serves nearly 500,000 monthly visitors from 190 countries.

While still working for CompuMentor, Tenby was invited in 2005 by Linden Lab — Second Life’s owner/operator—to become a focus group participant. “I immediately saw the enormous potential of it,” she remembers. “It was more of a platform than a game. But when I started looking for nonprofits in-world, there were none.”

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