Front Porch Forum is asked frequently to offer a social networking services for local nonprofits and other groups. Looks like Change.org may be able to help these good folks now (from TechCrunch)…
Change.org uses social networking to help social causes. For the launch, they’ve already partnered with 50 non-profits, like CARE, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International. Any other non-profit can launch their own network as well, as long as you have a government approved tax ID number.
They have modules for all an organization’s main needs: events, fund raising, forums, blogs, members, and posting photos/video. I really like how Change.org is evolving overall. The site is about connecting people passionate about a particular cause and not engaging in a shouting match or symbolic gestures of online support.
Other useful services for non-profit work include Wild Apricot, Idealist.org, Tree Nation, and Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees.
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
Kirby Winfield offers a good post today, for as far as it goes, about helping people connect to their local communities through the internet…
It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment.
The Internet has been criticized for its isolating impact on society. In many cases increased engagement in online activities results in exacerbation of the “bowling alone” phenomenon.
There is a huge market void in local online media. With the exception of business search/reviews, no one has solved for community connection and conversation at the neighborhood or town level at scale. This brings me to the opportunity of “digitizing local.”
Some of the most passionate and well informed citizens in the country still communicate about their communities through print newsletters, in person meetings, and other offline means. These people thrive on being active locally. If you can somehow harness their knowledge, energy, and networks, you can create a vast forum of local influencers and relevant evergreen local content…
This, of course, is exactly what Front Porch Forum is all about in the 19 Vermont towns that comprise greater Burlington.
He goes one to say that no one has cracked this mystery at scale. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to look at it. Kind of like saying that none of the big box retailers have yet to really feel like a valuable local business. It could be that, when it comes to local, the internet will deliver on its promise of decentralization and small scale and we’ll see thousands of super-valuable local sites rising up, each unique to their own special community… not the one-size-fits-all big box approach emanating from Silicon Valley. Kind of like 100 years ago when every town had its own stand-alone, locally owned, daily newspaper.
Of course, the chains came along and gobbled up those papers eventually and left us with the USAToday model.
Maybe the internet will help usher back true local flavor and thousands of successful local media companies that enliven and enrich their home towns in ways that no clever distant mashup could ever achieve.
Mike Lanza and some friends have created something called Playborhood.com…
As parents of toddlers and babies, we’re concerned about whether we can provide a better life for our children than we had. We’ve certainly done well financially – better than our parents, by and large – so we can provide an abundance of material goods for our children. However, we weren’t hurting at all for material goods when we were kids, but we find that kids of today are sorely lacking in what was the greatest joy of our childhoods: free, unstructured play.
Free, unstructured play (or what we refer to as simply “play”) has virtually vanished from the lives of most children in America. We are committed to doing whatever we can to bring it back for our children and yours.
At Playborhood.com we will to build a community of parents in the United States, if not the world, that will become more aware of this problem, discuss solutions, and implement the best of those solutions.
This issue also motivates me in part to pursue Front Porch Forum. I commented on Mike’s piece here.
From Mike on an FPF neighborhood forum in Charlotte, Vermont…
Thank you for your work. Front Porch Forum is a great service and worthy of a donation to help out. It’s in the “basket.”
Thanks to Mike and the dozens of local folks who have donated cash during Front Porch Forum‘s early stage. This represents a small part of our revenue stream, but an important and much appreciate one. Many FPF members consider it a “voluntary subscription” with some even signing on for an automated monthly contribution. If you would like to support our work at any dollar level… by all means click here! Thanks!
Antonio Rodriguez, founder of Tabblo (acquired by HP), makes some interesting points about East vs. West Coast dot.com start-up environments. In part…
The hardest part of embarking on a consumer Internet startup here in New England is finding wealthy veins of talent to mine out of big companies that provide relevant experience sets. From my non-technical entrepreneur friends I often hear about how hard it is to find class-A engineers that know “web stuff,” and we ourselves at Tabblo had a very hard time finding good direct marketing talent that understood how factors like viral adoption could be weaved into a coherent user acquisition plan. Both skills can be learned by those who are really talented, but this takes time and discipline— something is hard to cultivate…
2. Thanks to the more conservative nature of investors here, ventures in the consumer Internet space often fall prey to the business equivalent of premature optimization, favoring getting to revenue at the expense of adequate distribution (users) or product refinement. I don’t know that I would go so far as to espouse the Y-Combinator idea that you just need to “make something users want” and everything else will take care of itself— in fact if you’ve taken venture capital and are expected to deliver venture returns, it is irresponsible not to understand what the path to positive cashflow is, and to be testing the key assumptions at every step of the way. But an over-emphasis on this can lead to a dangerous situation where amidst slower growth than expected (which happens to just about every startup I’ve known at some point), the management team gets distracted by the “monetization problem” just to focus on something that might in the short-term appear to be more directly controllable. And when you’ve got a board of investors that encourage this trap, things can get ugly quickly.
Incidentally, the VC fund which we raised our money from at Tabblo, Matrix Partners, and our board member David Skok were A+ at helping us to avoid this trap. David was always pushing us to focus on solving the distribution problem at the cost of prematurely optimizing a business which would not at that point not have been at scale. Revenue is important, as is understanding the drivers of the business, but I’ve seen way too many entrepreneurs prepare for board meetings replete with spreadsheets and powerpoints that are more fitting of HP’s printer business than of a rag-tag bunch trying to find a market with their product.
Both of these shortcomings can together create a vicious downward cycle that takes anyone who is not sitting on top of a golden egg idea down quickly.
But best of all, the best thing about starting a company that will eventually need regular users to scale (which is the case with all consumer Internet businesses) is that we are much less subject to the echo chamber effect of the Valley. In the Valley everyone is twittering, sharing links on Delicious, digging articles left and right, and uploading pictures to Flickr from their super phones, but the rest of the country is really not quite ready for a lot of these applications. And the sad part is that most of the companies that I’ve seen started appear to be aping a lot of these initial Web 2.0 experiments instead of trying to think about how to move the adoption curve back into the mainstream.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more