Samasourcing

Tackling fundraising as both a start-up and non-profit is not an easy task.  Since we are still a very small team with limited resources and time, we came up with some key fundraising guidelines to help shape how we approach fundraising and how we do it successfully and efficiently.  The key lesson learned? Think about the opportunity cost of each application, award, interview, etc. before saying yes to anything.

1) Bring back the good old college common app!  Why can't foundations all follow the same grant application format? We find ourselves spending endless hours on each application - even for small amounts of money. 

2) Pursuing grants less than $50,000 might not be worth it unless the application is very straightforward and not a big time drain. We recently applied for a $5,000 grant that ended up as a 15 page paper...Good use of our time?

3) For very large multi-million dollar government grants, bring in a dedicated grant writer who has grant-writing experience and can dedicate 100% of their time to the grant. The instructions alone for these grants are usually 30 pages+; the application process is complex and figuring out if you are even eligible can take a while.  Bring someone in who has had a track record of success with these beasts! We also need to develop relationships with government contacts who can alert us to these opportunities before they are officially released so that we can properly prepare.  By the time grant opportunities appear on the grants.gov website, the deadline is typically just a few weeks away.

4) Getting a dream donor to write a personal or family foundation check is a lot less painful and much less of a resource drain than going after small-medium sized grant opportunities.  Focus more time on donor meetings, donor events, etc. rather than on $5,000 - $30,000 grant apps.

5) Competitions/Conferences that don't have a monetary prize associated with them should be taken on a case by case basis but the default answer should be no, unless there are a) a significant number of donors present, b) give us the opportunity to meet/network with big potential corporate partners or clients, c) give us the BEST mainstream press exposure - in the league with the New York Times or WSJ, for example.

6) Stay on top of the board for intros to "dream" donors.  Make sure to follow-up with all the introductions they promise.

Hope this is helpful to other non-profit fundraisers.

I'm here in the Netherlands, where Samasource won our first business plan competition a few years back, meeting some potential partners for an exciting new expansion plan for Samasource in East Africa through micro-telecenters. These centers are the brainchild of ALIN, a fantastic org that connects rural communities to knowledge, and Oxfam-Novib (Novib is Holland's development agency)'s Internet Now! program.

Here's what the centers will look like. They're made out of old shipping containers and cheap computers installed and tested by Inveneo.

Here's what one of their existing "Maarifa" (=Knowledge in Swahili) centers looks like inside:

Despite all the talk by the Kenyan government's Digital Villages program and various ICT and communications departments, they've done far, far less to benefit Kenyan people than social enterprises like ALIN, led by the awesome (and humble) James Nguo.

Making this partnership work will depend on winning the Dutch National Lottery's public choice awards in early January 2011, and then making sure that we can maintain the same quality levels at these centers as we do with our larger Service Partners.

I'm confident it will work. Samasource Operations Director Chelsea Seale, along with Nairobi Field Associate Pearl Chan, recently tested a similar model outside Kisumu, Kenya in partnership with Cisco and Inveneo in a small knowledge center called Sega Silicon Valley:

After a training of a few days by Chelsea and Pearl, Sega's 12 trainees are doing online work for Samasource. The main obstacles are finding ways to reduce the cost of training and quality assurance for a distributed labor pool - if only 5-10 people can get online at once, we can't afford a ton of local management at each center. So we'll need to build better technology systems to onboard new workers, have their work checked by volunteers (along the lines of our GiveWork iphone app built with CrowdFlower), and give workers a virtual career path and learning opportunities.

I introduced the concept of a virtual assembly line in a talk at TEDx Silicon Valley last year-- I think it's the defining trend in labor in the next century. It's also one of the best tools in our arsenal for fighting poverty. Here's why.

The major productivity innovation in the 20th century was Henry Ford’s assembly line. He figured out a way to break down the making of an incredibly complex machine, the Model T, into small chunks that people with basic training could complete. He moved the model T from the craftsman’s studio into the mainstream.

The assembly lines of the future apply this same thinking to digital work. 

We now have the ability to use computers to help us break down complex processes, and to insert human judgment where computers need help. This enables a new kind of worker to earn money; for the first time in human history, people who are living far from major centers of commerce can work on assembly lines. 

This year’s Skoll World Forum offered a glimpse of three major trends in social enterprise. It also gave 800 volcano refugees a chance to hang out under a giant ash cloud and put on a TEDx conference, but that’s another story for another post.

Giving work. This year's Skoll awardees are focused on alleviating poverty by helping poor people earn more money for their skills. From the One Acre Fund, which helps farmers earn more from their small plots, to the Peace Dividend Trust, which redirects military spending in war-torn regions to local businesses, giving work was a core theme of the conference.

Empowering women and girls. On the heels of Nick Kristof's Half the Sky and a slew of reports on women and economic development (check out an online exhibition on the subject at the International Museum of Women), the Forum confirmed that women are key to fighting poverty, and that not enough of them are empowered to do so. Groups like Molly Melching’s Tostan, another Skoll Awardee, have shown that women’s empowerment starts with women’s rights, and that age-old practices like genital cutting can be a thing of the past.

Technology for all. As I mentioned in a panel on social media with Jim Fruchterman, Marc Davis, and Monty Metzger, 2 million Kenyans are now on Facebook. 80% of African adults have cell phones, and many of them use the browsers on their mobile phones to access vital information about health, education, and markets for their goods and services. Social entrepreneurs need to use technology not just in the context of connecting with staff or reaching donors -- they need to use it for efficient outreach to their end-customers and beneficiaries.

Check out other posts from the Social Edge Blogging Team at Skoll.

Finally had a chance to recap some of the insights from yesterday at the Skoll World Forum:

1. Job creation is key to peace, not just economic growth: Scott Gilmore of the Peace Dividend Trust (one of last night's awardees) spoke about his success redirecting $400M of US military spending in Afghanistan to local businesses. Connie Duckworth of Arzu Rugs employs Afghan women to make high-quality products for global markets, using the same rationale. 

2. The key to long-term development is in value chains that engage the poor. Andrew Youn's One Acre Fund (another 2010 awardee) has connected 22,000 farm families to markets for their produce. Groups like Camfed are now involved in connecting poor women and girls not only to education, but also to jobs that engage these new skills.

3. Cultural norms can change from within. Organizations like Tostan have made strides against female genital cutting by working within African communities; Telapak applies the same principles to convince people to preserve their lands while finding sustainable ways to derive income from them.

There's also some discussion around the New York Times piece critiquing big banks entering the microfinance space. My take? If organizations charge high interest rates but are structured as nonprofits, such as Nigeria's Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO), we needn't be concerned. For-profit banks with 85%+ interest rates are another story.

More soon!

I'm here at the 2010 Skoll World Forum thanks to Silicon Valley -- Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee and president, rode the .com boom to riches and then decided to give a lot of his money away on projects like this blog and the foundation that runs it. 

So I thought it appropriate to kick off my official blogging at SWF with three technology trends that are crying out for adoption among social entrepreneurs:

1. Crowdsourcing -- 85% of humanity is now literate, including masses of poor people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Moore's Law makes it possible for them to connect to the rest of the world using increasingly cheap computers: $65 is the new $100 in the world of laptops. Most non-profits only leverage the developed-world crowd, and only for the purpose of fundraising. Why not think bigger? Innocentive harnesses the crowd to solve some of the world's greatest R&D challenges through its website -- there's a lot we can learn from models like this one.

2. Game dynamics -- Jesse Schell's talk at DICE 2010 last month on the rise of social gaming wowed the Valley. For too long, people have dismissed gaming as a passing fad. Those people are wrong. In the US, the Wii Fit alone accounted for over $1B in sales last year, and FarmVille, Zynga's most popular Facebook game, has more users than Twitter. In Korea, social gaming (and the sale of virtual goods that social games enable -- see #3 below) is now a $4B industry. There's a lot we can learn here. Subtle competition encourages user engagement, which can be leveraged to encourage people to shop ethically, live healthier, and donate more.

3. Virtual Goods -- When I describe Samasource's interest in virtual goods, funders often give me quizzical looks: "What do virtual goods have to do with ending poverty?" they ask. Well, all those little virtual tractors people buy on FarmVille are part of a whopping $1.6 billion market in 2010. Fonkoze and FATEM, a Haitian charity that sponsors the facility for Samasource's digital work center in Haiti, raised $3.2M on Zynga through the sale of virtual goods in just one month. Non-profits and social enterprises with strong retail brands should be tapping into this new source of income -- if I can buy a virtual bottle of Coke in my favorite Facebook game, why can't I build a virtual school, or buy a virtual care package? Causes, Facebook's link to non-profits, retails those goods on Facebook, but there's a lot more room for branded charity goods around the web.

Let's see what the next two days hold.

As the efforts to rebuild Haiti transition from emergency support to longer-term economic recovery and development, and just before the UNDP convenes a donor conference to address the crisis, I thought I'd share a few thoughts from recent talks and readings.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an Op-Ed highlighting the key elements of successful recovery. I think they could be prioritized better, but here they are:

1. TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY, EFFECTIVENESS

2. HAITIAN INVOLVEMENT

3. SELF-SUFFICIENCY (I'd make this #1)

4. TAPPING THE DIASPORA

5. DECENTRALIZATION

This is a good list of nice-to-haves, but I think it misses the bigger picture. Transparency, accountability, and effectiveness are a by-product of aligned incentives. One of the main problems with aid is that the people providing the money are quite far removed from (and generally not accountable to) the people being affected by it. 

This is particularly true in the aftermath of the recent disaster. Haiti's poor human development outcomes have much to do with the country's political and economic structure, which places power, money and opportunity in the hands of a tiny minority. Massive amounts of donor capital routed through Haiti's existing political system isn't going to pull the country out of poverty anytime soon.

More important now than ever are good jobs: Haiti's population needs to be plugged into global markets for goods and services as producers, not just consumers. The UN is experimenting with cash-for-work programs that employ people as day laborers on construction sites -- this is a good idea, but it won't equip Haitians with the skills they need to catapult themselves out of poverty in the new economy.

Haiti's population is 80% poor, but 50% literate. This is hopeful for companies that need low-cost labor for administrative and data entry work that can be done via the Internet. Outsourcing is a $200B global market, and a portion of this market is French-based. Why not tap Haiti for the one resource it has in abundance: human capital?

To pilot this concept, Samasource set up a program in Haiti to build digital livelihoods among youth affected by the earthquake. So far, we've identified paying work for the US State Department (translating text messages as part of an SMS-based 911 service), and are looking for additional work for the center. You can read more here (from a talk I gave at Google on the subject):

I'm writing from Bengal, the second region on my training circuit for Samasource's three newest partners, Usha Martin Rural Services, Anudip, and Built on Respect (in Ranchi, Kolkata, and Dharamsala, respectively).

I've trained about 60 workers so far in centers that look like this:

And this:

Our workers have incredible stories. Some have waited years to find a decent job -- one young guy I talked to had worked as a security guard for 12 hours a day outdoors in the sun for less than $75 a month. Another worked as a teacher for $30 a month until her daughter got sick and she had to quit.

I am convinced that social outsourcing is going to take off as a sector. There are millions of people just like the ones I met in poor regions of the world, ready and waiting for a job.

When our ad ran on Hulu in late November, we got a couple of emails from people that thought our work deprives Americans of opportunity. Some used very strong language:

from Joe ****** <joe***@verizon.net> to info@samasource.org date Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 7:00 PM subject Your company mailing list <info.samasource.org> Filter messages from this mailing list

hide details Nov 22

I am about sick and tired of hearing about all these companies like yours that take work that could help our country and take it away from us to give to other countries.  The USA is falling apart because of egotistical, money hungry assholes that care more about finding ways to make more money no matter what it does to the rest of us!  So as far as I'm concerned bring the work to us or keep your ads off of our AMERICAN television systems!

 

Reply

 

leila*****@gmail.com ✆  to Joe, info

show details Nov 22

 

Dear Joe,
We are a nonprofit helping the poorest people in the world, including low-income entrepreneurs in the US. If you'd like to engage in a constructive dialogue about how we could help more Americans, please let us know -- we'd be happy to.
Best wishes,
Leila

 

Reply

 

Joe *******  to me

show details Nov 25

 I live in Ohio which has one of, if not the highest unemployment rate in the country.  I have been looking for work unsuccessfully for over a year.  There is an old K-Mart building in my town that would be perfect to renovate into a building that would suit the needs of your company perfectly, which would in turn provide many jobs for my area.  If there is anything you could do to get this going, it would be greatly appreciated!  I appologize for my previous e-mail, but I hope you can understand the reasoning behind it.

Thanks
Joe ******

When arriving in Nairobi, one can quickly feel stifled by people, noise, pollution, so the charm of the city is not obvious at first. This city is like a whirlwind that can be stunning. But after the first shockwave, one gets used to this environment and appreciates the kind of life Nairobi has to offer.

I have been working as a Samasource fellow for one month now; it has been an experience which can be described as a journey of discovery, adaptation, meeting and sharing. Discovering the lifestyle here, adapting to the time and skills, meeting welcoming partners and talented workers, sharing of ideas and skills.

My initial task as a Fellow was to populate a new online database for Samasource for their website. This site now has the profiles of potential employees which allows new and existing clients to get a better feel of the knowledge, expertise and circumstance/aspirations of people they work with. My task was to compile a profile for every worker who participated in a Samasource project. Once the profiles were reviewed and the photos available I uploaded them onto the Samasource website. They are available on: www.samasource.org/impact.

This is great way to literally “put a face to a name” and to connect the workers with employers. It allows one to forget about the distance and understand Samasource’s goals by linking workers to jobs.

In visiting all the Service Partners and people, I learned how Samasource has given not only a “hand-up” but in fact provided life changing opportunity to workers. One of the workers I met was single mother who could not provide for her two children. Samasource, working with the service provider, has helped her to become independent and take care of her livelihood.

I met all kinds of people during this project, most of them are young and educated, went to or are actually at university in various sectors such as Hotel Management, Information and Technology, International Business, etc. All workers seem really motivated, talented and open minded. The service partners in Nairobi always provided a warm welcomed and I had really interesting discussions with some workers about various subjects as life, work, and the impact of Samasource projects.

Daproim (daproim.com) one of Samasource partners, provided me with office space during this project as well as Internet access. Steve, the president of the company, is an enthusiastic young entrepreneur who wants every employee to be treated with respect. He is interested in various training projects aimed at distressed people. Daproim, like some other Samasource partners, offers part-time work to local university students and facilities for disabled workers. Daproim started in 2006 with four employees, today it has already around 10. The plan is to grow to 20 or 30 people in the next years.

Steve is supporting a Cisco training center a few kilometers away from Nairobi. There, young women, often single mothers, are trained to do data entry and transcription tasks. This training is subsidized by an NGO. These women really want to succeed, and you can see in their eyes their thirst for knowledge. Steve feeds their motivation, while acknowledging that he needs to connect these women with jobs. There is no doubt that future difficulties lay ahead. The notion of hard work is on everyone’s lips, as there are no other means to succeed and the only way for them to benefit from a better life. Thus people are totally ready to offer their best.

So as I get used to the hustle and bustle of the city and plan my visits to the different service partners I feel good about lending a hand. I have to say that in my month of working as a Fellow for Samasource and helping create the Profiles database I too have learned the value of hard work! In my next blog I will write more about a typical work day for me in Nairobi.

Things are picking up for us. After a year of slaving away, living on friends' futons, etc., Samasource has generated a quarter of a million dollars in work benefitting 550 people in seven countries. We just did our numbers for our end-of-year board meeting, and it's astonishing. Just over a year ago, our website was a Wordpress blog and we'd signed one contract for $30K.

I attribute any success we've had to scrappiness. For-profit startups tend to have this quality in abundance. Starting up in a garage and living on ramen is part of the founding story of the biggest tech companies in the world (read Founders at Work if you don't know what I mean).

A while ago I wrote a post on useful tools for social entrepreneurs, but I think that scrappiness is less about what tools you use and more about your mindset.

Last month at TEDIndia, one of the other fellows mentioned a Hindi word that captures this concept perfectly: Jugaad. Simply put, Jugaad means resourcefulness, or doing more with less, MacGyver-style.

जुगाड़

Jugaadists (apologies to Hindi speakers) make startups happen, and if you can retain them, they help keep more established businesses nimble and creative. Jugaad is a big part of our culture at Samasource.

Finally, after 18 cities in 30 days (from Ixtapa to Coimbatore, and everywhere in between), I'm back to the daily grind. And this blog.

Here's a pearl if you haven't read it already: Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Ariely, a behavioral economist, enlightens readers about everything from absurd CEO compensation (they make 369x what workers make, up threefold from what it used to be a decade ago) to why we shouldn't trust teenagers to use condoms in the heat of the moment.

The parts most useful to social entrepreneurs are a couple of chapters in the middle, where Ariely describes how market norms (the kind that make you pay for stuff) differ from social norms (the kind that make you want to do stuff for free). It helped me understand how we were able to pull off our Gala last week with an all-volunteer staff, and how nonprofits can score great employees from the for-profit sector if we focus on our competitive advantage (doing good, even if it's for far less pay).

There's also great advice on how to build a good company (make people feel valued and appeal to social norms, not just market norms) and how to stop procrastinating. I'm still working on the latter.

Lakshmi Prathury and Chris Anderson kick things off with a moving reading of Tagore's Mind Without Fear.

Hans Rosling predicts (with the energy of a sportscaster at the top of his game) that average income in India and China will catch up with the US and UK on July 27, 2048!

Just posted this as a response to a note on ReadWriteWeb that our partner CrowdFlower is exploiting children by embedding tasks within social games on sites like Facebook. A lot of the issues raised are similar to concerns we've heard earlier, so I'm posting my response:

---

I'm the Founder of Samasource, a nonprofit that uses CrowdFlower's technology to connect extremely marginalized people, including refugees in Africa, to digital work. We were accused of creating "virtual sweatshops" a few weeks ago, which made me think really deeply about our model and the ethics of sending this kind of work to marginalized people. (While our workers aren't children, they aren't able to do many other types of work due to their location or status as refugees, making them vulnerable to exploitation.) 

 So here are my thoughts. It's worth noting that our perspective on this is independent of financial incentive; owners of a nonprofit don't get equity, and 90% of the income from the work we perform goes directly to workers. 

For something to be truly exploitive, it has to deny people choice. That can happen in two ways: either people are forced or coerced to do something, or they are incapable of making a choice because they're very young, very old, or mentally handicapped. The key thing about CrowdFlower's model is that it's based on choice, rather than coercion. Workers do tasks because they earn money and because the tasks only take a few minutes. It's also built to optimize worker performance and weed out people who do a bad job. It's hard to get accurate results from people who are coerced into doing work. 

From our perspective, this kind of "microwork" is fantastic for our beneficiaries who face grim alternatives for earning a living, like toiling under the sun on a field or in a quarry (those aren't made up -- many of our workers have done those things before to get by.) 

It's also nice for our beneficiaries that these tasks can be done virtually anywhere, at any time. CrowdFlower frees workers from 9-5 monotony by making it easy for them to log in and work when they want to. With Gambit, they're placing these tasks in all sorts of unlikely places that make them become less burdensome and more fun to do. Social games are one example of that. The iPhone app we launched with CrowdFlower (called Give Work) is another. 

The fact that children might be doing tasks as part of a game doesn't bother me in the least. If kids are savvy enough to hold their own in an online game, they're certainly capable of making choices about how they wish to spend their time. 

Child labor laws are designed to protect children from being exploited. In the countries where we work, children are made to skip school and weave rugs, work in brothels, or plow fields. It seems a little silly to put completing a few tasks as part of an online game experience in that category.

This morning at  Opportunity Collaboration, Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui (Board Chairman of the highly profitable microfinance institution Compartamos Banco, in Mexico), made a bold statement: 

Microfinance doesn't help the poorest of the poor. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily contribute to economic development. 

With interest rates of 73 percent (compared to the Mexican average of 100 percent), investment returns of 40 percent, and 1.5 million borrowers, Compartamos is a highly scalable commercial model for microfinance. But it might not turn out to be a highly scalable model for ending poverty, as so many have claimed, because the people who receive microloans are not the poorest of the poor.

Arregui noted that the Poverty Action Lab at MIT has just started a 3-year randomized, controlled trial of the impact of loans from Compartamos on three communities in Mexico, so we might have better answers soon. 

After many sleepless nights, we're launching Give Work today with our partner CrowdFlower (get it here). 

Give Work is an iPhone app that lets you earn money for refugees in Dadaab, Kenya in your spare time. Here's how it works:

1. Download the app

2. Do a task, such categorizing an image, judging a sentence, or something else that takes a minute or two

3. A refugee that has been trained does the same task

4. Once the task has been completed, a refugee gets paid for the work you both collaborated on.

Pretty nifty! Help us out by downloading the app and telling us what you think.

Turns out "as much as possible" means once in 2 weeks, but here are some highlights:

Meeting Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame, at the African Social Enterprise Forum. Craig said he hates doing anything but customer service, answers 150K emails a month, and views Craigslist as a public good. Despite what Wired wrote last month, I heart Craig.

Managing to miss four African presidents speak at the US-Africa business summit, but scoring a free ragball at the soccer demo (World Cup 2010!)

Talking with Dean Kamen, rockstar Segway inventor, about his low-cost power solution that runs entirely on cow dung and costs $2K

Running into a big brown bear in the Eastern Sierras, where I'm (!) snowed in with a bunch of social entrepreneurs at the Rainer Arnhold Fellows retreat.

Also I'm reading 4 really good books right now, which are on the to-do list to write up for readers of Samasourcing...