Facebook generation: 10 tech revolutionaries

What do you mean?

JOE: My background is as a political organizer. I grew up in Santa Monica and worked on wage campaigns and various things around students’ rights, and then got to college and worked on a local L.A. campaign, and then went and worked on the [John] Kerry campaign. Most well-done grassroots organizing uses some version of a house meeting to convince people they have power in numbers. Cesar Chavez, when he was organizing migrant farm workers, knew they were the most powerless groups in the country at the time. He would go and form a relationship with one person and then get them to host a meeting at his home and invite their friends and family, so he’d tap into existing social connections. And then he would get, at that meeting, two or three of those people to agree to host their own meetings.

Our core guiding principle, if you will, is similar — all about leveraging social connections for social change. We believe that every individual has power in their social connections, but most people don’t really know it and they don’t really know how — or even if — they can turn that into the ability to impact change. And so our goal is to show people, hey, by inviting 20 friends, you can have a huge impact because you’re going to invite 20 friends and they may donate some money, they may take other action, they may volunteer.

This is a for-profit business, right?

JOE: Both of us have come to this primarily for social reasons. We did consider being a nonprofit but to do this at the scale we wanted to do it, it had to be for-profit. But our primary motive is to empower individuals and to make the nonprofit process a lot more efficient. So our business model right now is that we can raise money very cheaply. Nonprofits are spending a lot of money hiring firms to do direct mail and phone. It’s costing them 30 to 40 percent of what they take in — and it’s locking out smaller nonprofits who don’t have the institutional machinery to raise money in that way — and then it also locks out smaller donors, especially young people who can afford to write a $50 check once a year, but nobody ever asks.

We, though, take a very small percentage of the transaction. The entire transaction cost on Facebook Causes is 4 percent, which, compared to what nonprofits pay now, is a pretty good bargain.

So how does it work?

JOE: Anybody can create what we call a cause. We tie into the Guidestar database of the 1.5 million nonprofits, so the cause creator gets to pick an organization that we call the beneficiary of the cause. So you could have a hundred different breast cancer related causes and 25 of them might benefit Susan G. Komen and 15 of them might benefit the American Cancer Society and they might benefit different hospitals. They can benefit anything that’s a registered 501(c)3. So the idea is that there is this thing we call the marketplace of causes where, because it’s really easy and cost-free to create a cause, you can experiment and try lots of different things, and many causes will get created on a given topic, and a small number of them will get very large and many of them will just stay small, which is fine, or it could just be among friends. But the idea is to create a very simple, fluid system, and a system where it’s really centered on the issues people care about and their networks of friends — not the individual nonprofits as the middlemen.

How many causes are there so far?

JOE: Somewhere over 10,000. We’ve got 2.5 million people so far donating $10, $20. Over 500 of the largest nonprofits have signed up as partners. Our attitude has been that we have a lot to learn in the nonprofit world, and so we’ve tried to open as many lines of communication as possible. Why do you think traditional nonprofits are so eager to embrace you? JOE: They see that millions of people are using it; they see the Internet taking off and they’re not exactly sure what to do about it.

I’m a big fan of the book, Bowling Alone. When you look at how nonprofits were after World War II, they were really very chapter based and very social capital rich. Today, the chapter system has really sort of gone away, and the distinction between being a donor and a member has kind of disappeared.

SEAN: Part of the problem with the nonprofit industry, from our kind of pedestrian perspective, is that it’s so difficult to justify going after, as donors, the younger demographic because young people are not high-value donors. And so the economic incentive to pursue young people as donors just doesn’t exist; there’s not a lot of social capital between members of these largescale direct-marketing-oriented nonprofits. In that world, it’s hard to include everybody.

And so if you can restore social capital and bring it back into the process and ultimately make it much more efficient to raise money from young people or people who maybe aren’t super-wealthy who are not yet in that giving stage in their life, then you can actually engage them in the process.

Facebook is not a dating application, it’s not a way of specifically staying in touch with college kids. It’s a multipurpose social map, a general purpose communication network. What we’ve been looking for is a way to grow this network large enough to reach a critical mass that would allow us to begin moving into other demographic segments. Causes is it. We have this phrase that we come back to a lot, which is unlocking the power of your social network.

Facebook Causes is a way of leveraging the power of your social network to raise money or ultimately achieve a social goal. We’re very much trying to take social dynamics that exist in the real world and represent them online, which wasn’t really possible a few years ago.

So where do you both see this going?

JOE: We’ve been very focused on growth right now — just getting the application used by as many people as possible. We’re also going to be working on building out a lot more types of actions people can take and various ways to raise money around cause. One of the real powers of the Internet, though, is rich media. You have the power to make a cause real for someone. Instead of saying, ‘end malaria,” you can show someone what it means to give a bed net to a child. You can say, after watching a video, ‘Give us ten bucks, and you’ll save the life of one child by buying one bed net.’ You’re much more likely to get someone to give that way.

SEAN: What’s interesting about Facebook, and distinguishes it even from My- Space is that it’s so incredibly real. Causes is all about sort of broadening that concept of identity to include one’s higher calling, if you will — what you think about, your values, your beliefs, your sense of social purpose and mission. Second Life is about virtual identities. Facebook is about real identity, real relationships. There’s a much deeper social capital on Facebook than, say, something like Second Life.

JOE: When I was a student at Harvard, we did a study twice a year about college student civic involvement and what we consistently found was that this generation of college students cares incredibly deeply about changing the world, and probably has expressed more interest, in fact, in that of any generation since the 60s but doesn’t understand how to do it and feels that the existing institutions really are not responding to them.

We think we can show people that young people can make a difference. I mean you look at this one breast cancer cause now on Facebook. It has amassed more than a million members in seven or eight weeks. I mean, it’s pretty hard to argue that this young guy who started it hasn’t made some kind of impact. He’s not the Susan G. Komen foundation. He’s one guy trying to get a breast cancer study funded at Brigham and Women’s Hospital up in Boston. He’s already raised something like $40,000 so far for that cause. It’s not big money — yet. But by exposing people to the power of their social networks, it can be.

Anybody can create what we call a cause; a cause can be about anything — Save The Whales, Pave My Street, Elect John Edwards, whatever. People are donating $10, $20, and there are some who have given thousands of dollars so far.

My grandfather grew up very poor in Minnesota. He was Jewish, and he sold Christian bibles door-to-door to pay for night law school. Later, he got to be friends with Hubert Humphrey when [Humphrey] was mayor of Minneapolis. Minneapolis was very anti-Semitic back then, and Humphrey worked to change that. When he got elected to the Senate, he didn’t have a lot of money. The only luggage he had was cardboard, so my grandfather and his law partners bought him his first real set of luggage and sent him off to Washington. I like that image of politicians without a lot of money, motivated by possibility.

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