Websites, crowdfunding, and twitch, oh my! (our ideas for ConstruCasa)

WEEK FIVE

…have we already been at university for that long? This week we discussed our ‘final’ choices and decisions on how we want to help our NGO. After much consideration, the SplitUnited came to the conclusion that creating a crowdfunding profile, creating a twitch account and revamping the already informative ConstruCasa website are of main importance!

After making this decision, we decided that we should write a summary of what crowdfunding is, where the most donations go, and why it is important and successful!

So what is crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding, which has exploded in the last decade has become a very popular form of realising solutions to problems through monetary contributions from a plethora of individuals via the internet. Instead of financing innovations through the traditional financial system ( loans from banks), crowdfunding is a form of alternative financing- allowing all individuals from any cultural, or socioeconomic background to present their ideas to the world of web-surfers. The crowdfunding model is powered by three actors: the innovator, the supporters and the platform which brings all three parties together and launches the product. 

Crowdfunding has reached a peek since its creation in 2006. In 2014 crowdfunding expanded by 167% ( raising $16.2 billion) and has nearly doubled again in 2015, raising an amazing amount of $34.4 billion. Interestingly enough, according to Statista, the most active and sponsored category within the crowdfunding world are social issues, contributing to 30% of all the fundings. Based on this information, which was quite a surprise to me and my group, we will utilise this source of funding and creating awareness.

The biggest advantage of crowdfunding is that ANYONE from ANYWHERE can support ANY project because they believe in the cause.

READY, SET, GO! THE STEPS IN CREATING A CROWDFUNDING PROFILE!

We found the YouCaring crowdfunding platform (www.youcaring.com) most useful and suitable for our NGO. It was founded in 2011, initially to help students to fundraise money to pay for their tuitions, but through the following 4 years it evolved and raised $ 281 million for individuals, communities and non-profits. It stands out from other competitive platforms because it’s free of charge. The only fee is the 2,9% and $0,30 per transaction taken by the donation processor.

Furthermore, creating a fundraiser is really easy – with just a few steps you can start fundraising: first you need to register at youcaring.com platform. You have the quick and easy option to create a profile by signing up to Facebook or by entering you name, email, and password.

After creating a profile…its simple; all you have to do is write an honest and heart warming story, upload interesting photos and wait for donators! 🙂

What makes a good website….

Website development and our ideas
After comparing HerFarmsNepal with the ConstruCasa website, we started to analyse how we can improve their website. The problem with the most non-profit websites is that they look unprofessional and hence shoo away their visitors. Our idea is to improve the total income of donations by creating a welcoming, user-friendly website.

We want to implement new sections within the website, a blog post, linking the social media to the website and so on. The ConstruCasa.org website is missing the footer section of what makes a successful website as well. In the footer section, there can be another column that can use with the latest stories and updates towards the help of the new visitors.

Why we want to do this

One of the most important platforms for any NGO is its website. If you want to be successful, you need a modern website. Over the last few weeks we have become acquainted with with WordPress, a multifunctional platform with endless possibilities. Every website built on WordPress platform is user friendly ( an important success factor!) There are five aspects of a user-friendly website: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. By understanding these aspects, we can define what the term user-friendly means in terms of web design.

 

Learnability
This is how easily people can find your website. Can they find what they want easily? Can they understand the structure and the design? If someone can’t find what they were looking for they are more inclined to leave than to continue looking. The aesthetic, and modernity of a website is also of great importance as it suggests to the user that the given company has invested time, energy, and monetary value into it. You know the saying, ‘First impressions are everything’- well that is exactly how it works in the online world. In our modern age, websites are usually an individuals’ first expose and experience with a company. If a website is plain, ugly and outdated people will search for a website which presents the same information in a clean, tasteful way.

Efficiency

In addition to learning how your website works, visitors must be able to to do what they came to do quickly. Having a website that visitors can move through efficiently makes their experience much better. Long page loading times and too many pages on the path to your website’s goal can diminish the efficiency of your website. 

Memorability

If you have many return visitors to your website, memorability is very important. Maybe you are a printing company with a file upload system, maybe you have an important notifications portal on your website. Whatever your situation, you want people to be able to navigate and use your website quickly and easily each and every time. Avoid changing your website’s structure too often, don’t implement huge updates and changes to the system all at once if you don’t need to, and make sure you get feedback whenever you make a change.

Satisfaction

If your website is pleasant to use, your visitors will be satisfied. This means they are satisfied with your business, which is always a good thing. Make sure you are doing whatever you can to satisfy your users. By making your website focused on your visitors, your visitors will be much happier, giving you, in this case, more donations.

Every element is important in your website as stated earlier, but what makes it really memorable is the user friendly experience on the website. If someone’s aim is to donate money, they should be able to do it very fast, and as easily as possible.

Therefore, we believe ConstruCasa’s website needs a big mid-section button for donations. Maybe near the button, state the mission on a very basic argument, clean and modern. Let the visitors decide if they want to have a monthly subscription or just a one-time donation.

Keep all the visitors updated with your social media, with the help of a plugin installed on the new WordPress website. About the blogging part on the new website, our group was thinking that a blog post will be mandatory by each volunteer, to share their experience and post positive vibes about their time in Guatemala. Those things help a lot with the advertising and management of the new incoming possible donors.

Also the language barrier won’t be a problem, the easiest way to solve it is to install again, a plugin, that will copy your whole website, giving you the chance to edit everything in your own language. It is actually really simple.

WordPress templates that would work with ConstruCasa’s vision and mission:

Benevolence Template:

http://themes.wplook.com/benevolence/

Charitylife Template:

http://themes.wplook.com/charitylife/

Rise Template (you would really like this one):

http://wow-themes.com/demo/wp/rise/

Lots of love and happiness,

The SplitUnited

Gaming for Good 🎮

How can we enhance and catch potential funders for Constru Casa?

Firstly, a part from making their website focused on the viewer, by linking pages so a good interface and navigation through the web is possible, Constru Casa must also be up-to-date with the latest trends. Making viewers “feel like home” that welcomes them into a known environment. You can do this by sharing common interests, just like you do when you met somebody new.
Twitch, a platform Google is looking to acquire, is worth 1 billion dollars at the moment. You watch as your friend breaks a block, jumps through and over the previously impenetrable wall to reveal a secret room with three pipes.

It’s live streaming video entertainment has been going on ever since 2011, and is now 4th in Peak US Internet Traffic. This is below Apple and Google but surprisingly ahead the giant of social media, Facebook. Why? Facebook is the perfect example of a social network. These help people make reciprocal connections with one another, while media platforms content producers with their audiences. What is distinct about social networks is you are connected through mutual, two-way friendships, or likes that originally came from another like. Media platforms, on the other side of the network, allow users to be followed by foreign users without following them back. So you are very welcome to follow me, but don’t expect me to follow back because neither I’m interested nor care about it, it’s that kind of “friendly” relationship. Some other examples are Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch. The mayor advantage with this is it allows audiences to engage with each other around a content and influential environment, because there’s no personal conversation/contact between the “follower” and the blogger/gamer/artist, just a work space. Twitch allows people to broadcast themselves and to chat by text alongside the video, discussing strategies, asking questions, or just talking smack.

How can this be associated with our NGO?

Imagine the discussions where people discussed strategies, techniques and methods was used to found raise an NGO. Plus, donate while you play.

In the past,

Mining For Charity – http://www.twitch.tv/miningforcharity

Last year, on May the 3^rd , Twitch launched a large cross-collaboration project focused on a growing community viewership while supporting charity. “Mining for Charity” was brought alive. This concept united the idea of raising money for charity as the way to win the game. 4 teams were established to compete during a 4 week competition to obtain points. At the end of the competition, the team with the most points will be crowned the winning team and receive $5 000 cash prize for the charity of their choice, and they accomplished so. This year Immunity Project, an organization developing an HIV vaccine to give away for free to the entire world is participating with Twitch. As Constru Casa, Immunity project is a non profit, donations help keep the lab conducting research and prepping for the clinical trials to begin. Their aim is to gain $75 000 to improve the vaccine formulation until the human clinical trials can begin.The image above provides some examples from past found raising events.

Oh, by the way, Twitch receives 45 million viewers a month.

Our first challenge for Constru Casa was to find potential loyal donors, with a special emphasis on the loyal. This would let them look ahead time, at long-term challenges and possible solutions, for the contrary they would just be depending on casual donations, like tourism in high and low seasons. Just like any good mayor in a city wanting new permanent residents, bringing joy and building a bigger family. But competence between NGO’s, charities and fundraising societies have made a market out of non-profitable organizations, where Constru Casa doesn’t want to belong. Our first approach was finding an identifiable victim, based on the theory, portraying each family with a photo and a description catches more attention worldwide, but is this actually an act of good faith? This doesn’t take in consideration the point of view of the end user, the people actually making the family, the lives of the families in the need. Instead we should embellish the fact Constru Casa isn’t only on building houses, its about the lives that will inhabit it and their growth in society. They maintain their relationship with them for about 4 years, an overall of 16 meetings, fulfilling their promises of providing accessible housing for the poorest in Guatemala and their integration in society. The full picture is, a gamer (preferably popular, with many views) sponsors a specific NGO and the entire amount of money he earns during those “x” amount of hours goes directly to the charity in function. This is a great way of reaching a broader audience, and particularly a young one, which could potentially think of joining Constru Casa in the future as a volunteer. The company highlights the average age range of users is 21 years old, with 76 % of viewers aged between 18 and 49. Joining these two concepts automatically brings Contru Casa’s awareness.

Interestingly, 68% of users have cut back on TV to join online communities,

…therefore “when video game historians look back on gaming a decade from now, 2013 will be the year they cite as the tipping point of streaming”.

A retrospective compiled by the company is available on this blog. It offers an overview of how Twitch has grown since the beginning of 2013. To view the complete document, please visit: (http://www.twitch.tv/year/2013).

© 2015 Bogdan-Alexandru Demeter.  All rights reserved.

Ciao!

Itsy Bitsy Spidergramming

Warning: this is not for kids.

I wouldn’t usually talk about spiders, but this is an interesting one.

On Monday, after the wonderful tutoring given by our class mates we were introduced to this new concept. Spidergramming can be used to visually express the orientation of a persons values, dimensions (as we learnt in Cultural differences) or activities that need supporting, in the case of our NGO. This fits in perfectly with this week’s theme of Technology Stewardship because it’s another way of accessing an excellent tool for creating an overview. It helped us to prioritise what Constru Casa’s activities are mostly oriented to and therefore highlight sectors they are missing. Believe or not we also discovered things that we ignored in the past.

From Nancy’s initial Spidergramming Model we changed a few things:

1. Open-ended conversations was changed to simply “Conversations”.
2. Customer support was modified to be “Volunteer Support”.
3. Individual Feedback was removed, and then returned as “FeedBack”.
4. “Marketing and Advertising” was added.
5. Technology was added the last! (We took your advise Nancy – “HINT: Never start with the technology, always start with the activity that needs supporting”).

Final Spidergram:

*Our Spidergram scores from 0 to 5, meaning more important orientation are further away from the centre. Just in case this needs clarifying, the centre represents “0”.

Team Work : Constru Casa has a very small team, just 8 members. It was founded in 2004 and has been running for almost 12 years now. Caroline Van Heerde was the founder and creator at the time, but her role was then passed on to Julie, our contact person. From our first interview with Julie she explained how Constru Casa’s organization is split into two. They currently hold two offices, one in Guatemala and the other in Nebraska. The end organisation is located in Guatemala, but their main founding and volunteers are Americans, and this is the main reason the second office was needed, to facilitate US accounts, paper work such as Visas, and financial matter from donations. Overall, to be a “small organisation”, as Julie described, their Team work is impeccable. For this Team Work has the highest score in our Spidergram.

Volunteer Support: Second best! Why? One of the questions in our early interview was…What is the typical volunteer? Julie replied, “American students, high school teenagers, founders in the internet and big groups from church”. But, what is so great about their Volunteer Support? Contru Casa tries to accommodate everyone that seeks to help them,  “You Get What You Give“. Apart from this, they have expanded their relationship with universities, such as us!, and send feedback to existing donors encouraging them to continue building new homes for Guatemalans. For more amazing stories about volunteers, check out this link. Volunteer Support scored a four.

Projects: Ups, we actually have two second best! Contru Casa keeps re-inventing it self. Their mission to improve the quality of life among Guatemalans living in extreme poverty through the provision of basic housing doesn’t stop there. Recently they incorporated an Integral Program (Fundraising Kit) to support you during every step of the way toward reaching your goal to help. So apart from building a house, they now want to build a community; schools, library…to improve and change people lifestyles. Not only this, but Constru Casa has recently added the option to build using eco-friendy blocks from Interblocker, following a revolutionary method called EARTHSHIP. Projects also scored a four in our Spidergram.

Technologies: Our NGO is connected to several social networks. These include: Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, Google Ads and obviously their website. We must not forget our Skype meeting from two weeks ago. Constru Casa could potentially improve their technological orientation, not to mention its one of our challenges. This scored a three in our Spidergram.

Conversations: We need and want more conversations. Due to a misunderstanding our meeting with the Construction and Project Manager couldn’t occur last week. This would have been an excellent source of information as to the design of the houses. This is a tricky one. That’s why they say distant relationships are difficult and complicated… but lets not be demotivated by the 9000km that separate us! Conversations scored a two in our Spidergram.

Marketing and Advertisement: Although they utilise free advertisement such as, Facebook, Twitter… and the rest mentioned previously, but none of us had heard of Constru Casa before. Don’t be mistaken, this is a good sign. All those organisations you might recognise, likek Oxfam, Red Cross… are massive NGO’s. They have 3rd parties that manage their marketing. “Basically if you want to raise 2 million dollars, you have to spend 1 million dollars in advertisement, and we would rather use it to build homes”. Constru Casa don’t use these kind of things and currently they only one person working in promotion, but soon they might have 2-3. They promote themselves sending emails to ex-volunteers and donors that have worked with them before. Marketing and advertisement scored a one in our Spidergram.

This links perfectly to Feedback to Volunteers: If people don’t get to know their NGO they won’t even get the chance to help. This scored a zero.

Resource Documentation: As a group we found it terribly hard to learn about Contru Casa. We believe their documentation could be seriously improved, by opening a blog and posting what is happening daily. Also how are their houses made, the design, the concept, updates… This scored another sweet and nice zero.

These findings are essential to help and manage our NGO’s needs, or else we couldn’t potentially help them.

© 2015 Bogdan-Alexandru Demeter.  All rights reserved.

The Split making connections!

The SWEETSPOT continued…

Since week 1 we have discussed and analysed Dave Pollard’s ‘sweetspots’ theory from multiple angles. We were first introduced to his theory in Personal Branding,which I thought was very interesting and helpful in understanding what our expertises, passions, and aspirations were. These exercises gave us a deeper understanding of our personal and potential professional-self.

We utilized this knowledge gained and transferred our new understanding of ourselves to our Community Project. Now that all members knew their passions, gifts and purpose, better known as their sweetspot, we knew which individual was most suited and more importantly passionate about what subject. For instance, I am passionate about psychology and up-cycling projects, and that is exactly what I researched on our Wednesday meeting. I found a very interesting Stanford study about the psychology of philanthropy titled ‘How to increase charitable donations, appeal to the heart, not the head’. It states that there is a positive flux in philantrophic behaviour when an organisation presents an ‘identifiable victim’. Along with other useful tidbits, this  information could change the donation flow of ConstruCasa. Furthermore, I also found extremely interesting articles, step-by-step instructions and videos about plastic bottle housing in Nigeria, Honduras and Guatamala!

On the complete other side of the ‘sweetspot’ spectrum, Thomas spent his time sprawling questions on an A4 piece of paper- creating an interview for our Wednesday Skype-date with a ConstruCasa construction man. When analysing Tom’s purposes, gifts and passions he was perfectly adept for this job as communication is not only one of his gifts but also one of his passions.

Learning about our sweetspots has helped us tune our already well-organised, passionate and loving team! I don’t think our team sweetspot could be anymore ideal for our NGO: we are all design entrepreneurs who enjoy crafting to improve the world we live in. Understanding our communal sweetspot has helped faciliate and aid the general productivity, interpersonal relationships and individual passions of our group.

Thats it for this week!

Lots of love,

The Mighty Treehugger

A Friendly Introduction, A Powerful Ally

There might be a reason why…..OH, Hello everyone!

Two days ago we begun formulating questions to research, social, business and environmental factors of ConstruCasa. Eager to start, we planned a meeting with the general manager for today. Poor Julia had to deal with us for 40 minutes (Thomas is to blame).

Less than 5 hours ago, our interview with Julia Boileau concluded. It was an excellent experience to find out what were the needs and expectations of our client, something vital we learnt the hard way in last week introduction project. Here we had the chance to investigate even further about our NGO-ConstruCasa.

ConstruCasa is a non-profit organization that aims to improve the quality of life among Guatemalans which live in extreme poverty. Their goal as an organization is to provide accessible housing for the poorest. Cheap housing solutions in a limited amount of time. But their relationship with the families doesn’t end here, apart from support programs and community development projects, they also have a later-on visit to actually see if the maintanance is still a priority.

What is interesting about ConstruCasa is that they developed a cheap and an accesible way to build up the houses. A cement block with a U-shape around of it, instead of having four corners, with this technique you only need a coulomb in the middle, which makes it anti seismic. The advantages of this project are that they don’t have to wait as long for the cement to dry and the house is fully built in a short period of 2 weeks. The main idea is to visit a community, start the construction and finish in a short amount of time.

How do they fund their program? The challenge is to get people that want to donate for housing to actually get closer to the main aspect. Apparently its easier to catch potential funders if the NGO is concentrating its forces on schools, community buildings, rather than individual housing. People often say: “I don’t have a house my self, why would I pay to make it possible for other”? Due to this, they decided to change their strategy by introducing the “Integral program”, a program that will focus in the near future on placing schools and municipal buildings.

ConstruCasa is a small organization per say. We learned the hardway that if you want to raise $2 million, you have to invest $1 million, and they don’t quiet have that money. We understand that the challenge for them is to actually get known on a new frontier, to get more people to be interested in their cause. There is definitely a problem of advertising and marketing, and we, the SplitUnited, together with ConstruCasa, are aiming to achieve and overcome these difficulties.

Just take a look at what wonderful things ConstruCasa has achieved so far! Happy smiles say it all!

© Logan Sierra, courtesy of Constru Casa