What Nonprofits Can Learn from a Bunch of Nerds

Over the last couple of years, Facebook users have gone through the love-hate relationship cycle with the social media platform as its privacy settings have continued to change crumble, but the options have been limited to either sucking it up or closing your account and missing out on all the benefits of Facebook - an option now being explored by so many people that if you type in "how do I" in Google, the first autofill that pops up is "...delete my Facebook account." I should say those were the only options until now. 

Four NYU students and self-proclaimed nerds decided to take matters into their own hands and build a new social network. They're calling it Diaspora. Others are calling it the anti-Facebook. New social networking sites and platforms are cropping up all the time, but this one may be just as significant for what it is as for HOW it’s being built. The team of four 19 to 22-year-olds began fundraising on Kickstarter in late April so they could spend their summer creating Diaspora. They blew past their fundraising goal of $10,000 in less than two weeks, and now, just shy of three weeks, they are rolling past $130,000 from more than 3,500 people – and rising all the time.

It's any nonprofit or cause-champion’s dream to capture that kind of support from their networks, so what can we learn from Diaspora?

1. Pursue a cause people are dying to support.
   If you have to spend a lot of time explaining to potential supporters why your project is necessary, you may need to rethink your project. It wasn’t difficult for these guys to rally people behind their privacy battle cry because they’re meeting a need in their community. When you can address a problem people already recognize, they'll jump in to help you succeed.
    
2. Offer measurable results.
   At the end of the summer, the team promises their software will be released, and it will be free. Plain and simple. Not all nonprofit projects can offer such concrete outcomes, especially when the problems you’re addressing are mammoths like world peace, poverty or cancer, but whatever your cause, it’s important to be able to tell people what you will do and then to demonstrate whether or not you have done it. Creating deliverables in the form of SMART goals can help break large issues down into distinct steps which will help you show return on investment.
    
3. Show your passion by putting some skin in the game.
   With two members of the team just graduating from college and two others looking forward to their dwindling summer days as students, they would normally be getting jobs, taking trips or just finding a pool nearby. But they are sacrificing all of that to spend 12 hours a day writing code without pay. While I’m not advocating slave labor at nonprofits, short-term campaigns where you’re rolling up your sleeves and making sacrifices of sleep, food or pay for the common good, often make people want to get behind you and cheer you on.
    
4. Offer a chance to participate.
   The fundraising levels (from $5-$2,000) that the Diaspora team created would make any marketing department proud. And the fact that the vast majority of backers so far have given less than $50 each shows that lots of small-dollar donors want to give a little and be a part of something meaningful. The largest two levels (which are both sold out) provide the extra perk of giving sponsors the ability to check in on Diaspora's daily progress on the build server. Aside from the thoughtfully tailored levels of financial support, they have committed to release their code as free software at the end of the summer so anyone can use it, build on it and make it better. This transparency and willingness to let others participate and take some control are characteristics people like to see in nonprofit projects as well.