RPCV’S Open Grassroots Development Organization with Fundraiser

QUEENS, NY- The formal launch of Friends & RPCVs of Guyana, (http://guyfrog.org) will be held on Friday, July 13th at 7:00 pm to Midnight. The fundraiser will be hosted at Liberty Express Restaurant & Bar, 120-12 Liberty Ave, South Richmond Hill, Queens, NY. A raffle will be held during the event, which will include prizes with all proceeds going to the organization. The event will be featuring DJ Sparber.

Earnings from the event will help the organization fund projects in Guyana through groups such as Peace Corps, volunteer agencies, Guyanese non-profits, and other organizations working towards development in Guyana. At this time FROG depends entirely on funding from events such as this one, and other grassroots sources.

“As a majority of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers will tell you, the desire to continue working towards the development of those in need remains strong long after their service is complete,” says FROG Chairman Timothy Delaney, RPCV Guyana 2003-2006. This desire can especially be seen in the many men and women who had the opportunity to live and work in Guyana through Peace Corps.

FROG was created to support community driven projects in Guyana that will bring lasting solutions to the needs of those communities. The organization is a grassroots development organization and will be working with groups in Guyana in such areas as health, education, IT, business, agriculture and the environment to further development.

“FROG aims to give additional assistance to communities in Guyana which demonstrate that they have taken an initiative to address their greatest needs,” adds Delaney.

FROG strives to meet the needs of the Guyanese community through small project assistance. The organization is a non-profit that fosters the revitalization of the Guyanese community through financial and programmatic assistance.

Liberty Express is located at 120-12 Liberty Ave, South Richmond Hill, Queens, NY. $10 donation at the door. If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with Mike Geurink, please call 202-465-6688 or e-mail at mgeurink@guyfrog.org.

With all the content your forward thinking non-profit is producing and maintaining, it’s odd that you wouldn’t consider self-publishing. The technology has been around for a few years and at this point, it’s almost effortless to publish something really worth reading. From your Twitter micro-content, Facebook social timeline, to your blogs, Flickr photos and God know what else you’re using to push your organization, you can put together a really interesting piece of history.

The reasons for publishing are straight forward. From promotion to organizational memory to building revenue, self-publishing your material is a novel and fairly inexpensive approach for pushing your ideas. Pick your target audience, round up the relevant resources and put together something compelling. Your printing options are there.

Two popular web-based technologies that stick out are Blurb.com and Lulu.com. Both exist for indie, on demand, cost-effective publishing – meaning you.

So what is Blurb? Here’s a great YouTube clip on how it works:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5n1Yeq34Eo]

And Lulu? You can also use their software to publish your ideas into books, but they also help you to move other digital content. From the site, Lulu helps you publish “…music, comics, photographs, movies and well, you get the idea.”

With a bit of inspiration, some interesting content and a little effort, you can turn your latest event and idea into something profound. Really, why wouldn’t you want to publish if you could?

During my years in Peace Corps, funding for my biggest projects never came from Peace Corps itself or through the PEPFAR program.  For the length of time involved in developing momentum and community enthusiasm toward a project, funding via either of those routes was cumbersome.  I had neither the time nor the patience to work within that system.

For those of us that decide to work outside the established mode of funding, we’re limited to local fund raising, soliciting our friends and family and using grants wherever we can find them. Unfortunately, the prior two are limited in scope and can dry up quickly. The latter option tends to be quite competive, often difficult to locate and might not work within a project’s limited time frame.

On a number of occasions I was able to use PayPal to solicit enough in donations from my circle of friends and family to develop my projects with little trouble.  But what of the volunteers that don’t have the convenience of a large family or social circle willing to donate over and over to the various projects Peace Corps volunteers (and others) are always engaged in? Where will that money come from?

The funding has to come from somewhere and volunteers, non-profits and other organizations do have options. Though the pie is relatively the same size as always, and we’re all trying to get a slice, there is hope. Crowdfunding has become a realistic approach to circumventing the traditional model of attaining the needed funding. From the P2P Foundation:

“Crowdfunding describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.”

What are your crowdfunding options?  Fundraising via the interweb, P2P lending and to a lesser degree, microfinancing.   Please remember that these aren’t quick solutions to your problems, but they’re a start.

[Disclaimer: Depending on a Peace Corps post's interpretation of official policy, volunteers would be wise to understand their respective administration's stance before adopting any of these tools.  The same applies to a non-profit's official policy and I'm sure individuals need not be reminded to work within the law itself, i.e. fraud.]

Fundraising

Fund raising can turn viral fairly quickly with a few e-mails and a descriptive message. A number of these tools not only do the heavy lifting for you, but make that process fun and appealing. Fundable.org takes the idea that the goal for the project is entirely funded or the money is returned to donors, from Lifehacker:

“Set up a Fundable action with a deadline – say, $1000 for a contribution to your favorite charity asking for 100 people to contribute $10 each. If 100 people don’t contribute by the date you set, everyone gets their $10 back.”

With ChipIn, you can “quickly create a widget stating what you’re collecting for, how much you want to raise, an end-date and how you’d like to receive your funds.  You can then send a link via e-mail or post the ChipIn widget on your personal website, Facebook, MySpace and other accounts.  From there you can start working the communities you’ve already been developing.

DropCash is “a simple way to organize a fundraiser. Are you raising money for a charity, a trip overseas, a family gift for mom, or to pay off a surprise hosting bill? DropCash lets you set up a page so everyone can follow your progress as you near your goal.” 

According Kottke.org, Andre Torrez “came up with the idea and did the coding and [Kottke] helped with the design, HTML, and a bit of IA.”

Change.org works along the same lines as the previous methods, though you have to be a registered non-profit to take advantage of their fund raising tool.  With Change.org, you’ll get a page for your project(s), set up creditcard funding and allow people to monitor your growth as you move toward your goal.  Once someone gives to your group, that person has the option of inviting everyone in their address book to join as well.  Emily Chang sums up the idea of Change:

“[Change.org will] transform social activism by serving as the central platform that connects like-minded people, whatever their interests, and enables them to exchange information, share ideas, and collectively act to address the issues they care about.”

Project Agape utilizes Facebook through their Causes application which “allows users to start a cause, grow their cause through viral invitations, and raise money from their network to support any registered non-profit in the US.” 

Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, Plaxo and Facebook, works full time on Project Agape while working as Managing Partner of the Founders Fund.  Wondeful things are sure to come from the Causes app as Mr. Parker never ceases to amaze.  From Om Malik:

“We want people to be able to leverage the online groups (and causes) and also act upon them” says Joe Green, cofounder of Project Agape, which is still in stealth mode and won’t fully launch for sometime. “We hope that the social causes come back into the real world.”

A number of tools such as FirstGiving.com and GiveMeaning.com exist but there isn’t the time to go through them all.  Of course PayPal and the many alternatives are also useful in fund raising.

P2P Lending

Projects in need of a faster cash injection have the option of peer-to-peer funding for quickly raising larger amounts than the previous fund raising methods. This route of funding comes from a large number of donors pooling small amounts of money while lending at competitive rates, entirely sidestepping the banks. This method does require you to pay back the entire loan.

Lendingclub, which is one of the more popular applications on Facebook, has already passed $100,000 in loans to its users.  Prosper is based on a similar business model and has an application on Facebook, making both of these tools a speedy and viral method for funding.  Another website based on this model, Zopa, lacks an application on Facebook.

Microcredit

Currently I’m unaware of any web tools that allow for microlending to volunteers and organizations specifically though Kiva, which works through partnerships with existing microfinance institutions, is a fantastic tool for aiding established microcreditors.

For more information on microfinancing and the Grameen model of lending, check out the Grameen Foundation’s website. WorldChanging also has a great write-up on microfinance, Kiva and Grameen lending.

A commenter on Guy Kawasaki’s blog made a good point about non-profits trying to work from the same funding pie. Non-profits continue to emerge and grow while the pie stays relatively constant. We will have to cut into the larger and more established non-profits funding streams though this isn’t quite the Herculean task that it once was.

As the previous post emphasizes, most of the resources and tools needed to grow are not only decentralized, but they’re mainly free or incredibly cheap. The biggest problem we face is grabbing eyeballs, and with eyeballs come dollars. So now our tiny non-profit has to figure out how to grab attention and bring in grant money, easier than in the past but still no small feat.

FROG, Ning and Facebook

While serving my post back in 2004, I realized that the idea of connecting all volunteers globally to much needed (and locally unavailable) project resources was only a few mouse clicks away. A number of people were astounded to hear that all of Guyana was wired to the internet, from Georgetown to Letham, volunteers did and do have access to the global community. I wanted to take advantage of this.

Combine the needs of the local community, the craftiness of you average Peace Corps volunteer and the enthusiasm the words “Peace Corps” bring to many, much good could be accomplished using the internet. I ran across Ning at about the same time as this epiphany and it struck me that their platform was perfect for matching volunteer project requests with those willing to help. From donated materials and tools to services and skills (Peace Corps policy frowns upon straight cash donations from outside of friends and family), it became clear that the Ning platform could meet the needs of our projects.

And the potential was huge, unfortunately the few developers that had signed on to help (I’m a useless coder) didn’t have as much free time as the project required. It went belly up.

Skipping to a few years later, I ran across Arrington’s post on Ning’s Facebook app builder last night. Our FROG profile on Facebook has been a definate boon to our organization and brought much needed attention to our upcoming launch in Queens. I had been thinking about a FROG app on Facebook, but had no idea what it would do. The Techcrunch post brought back my earlier idea of connecting volunteers with donors and the light bulb went off. Build the Ning network again, brand it as FROG project and spin it toward the Facebook community. It’ll be great to get the attention for sure but it also takes advantage of a very viral platform and closes a serious gap volunteers find in starting and/or finishing projects.

That’s doable, but…

Great idea but I’m still not a developer and we still have little funding. So what do I do now? The obvious first step was to post a note at the top of the earlier post that’s bringing in a lot of traffic, secondly I went back to an old post on Metafilter on this very subject, third I could post the request all over the web, Craigslist, various forums and so on (not quite as helpful) and lastly, I could shell out a couple hunred dollars (probably way less) and outsource it through Rentacoder.

Wish me luck and keep watching. If you’re a developer and want to help, you can reach me at sstadum [at] guyfrog [dot] org. [Disclaimer: Of course all of this needs to be cleared by our board, but in the meantime I'd like to develop this as a personal project.]

NOTE: Looking for developers to volunteer time on a Ning project for us, anyone out there good with php and have some free time?

In the past, organizations just about had to physically meet on a regular basis in order for most of the heavy lifting to be accomplished and for the start-ups to get off the ground. Much of the coordination was local/hyperlocal or very well funded, allowing for travel. From the onset, the effect limited immediate participation and hamstrung progress.

Before the interweb, telephones, faxes and cells alleviated some of the bottleneck of ideas, but the crossflow of information remained hampered. The exponential growth of web technology has streamlined the idea sharing process, making it easier than ever to establish and cultivate a start-up.

Guy Kawasaki, an early tech evangelist, describes the steps involved with his newest project, Truemors.

0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).

0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.

7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.

$4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.

$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.

$12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

1.5. There are 1.5 full-time equivalent employees at Truemors. For me, it’s a labor of love.

$0. I spend $0 on marketing to launch Truemors.

$29.96. Our monthly break-even point was $29.96 with Yahoo!

$150. Because Yahoo! evicted us, our monthly break-even point quintupled to $150. If you’re interested in buying a monthly sponsorship for $151, you’d make Truemors profitable.

From the beginning of FROG, we knew the operation was going to be bootstrapped. A number of returned volunteers invovled in the project were right out of the program and we were spread across the east coast with one member in Africa. It wasn’t possible to meet in person, so we turned to the web.

How did we do it? What tools did we use? We started out with using only a handful of apps and moved on to others as our needs changed, it has grown into quite the list. Here’s the breakdown:

Communications

PBWiki – we started off here, throwing ideas against the wall and waiting to see what would stick. The wiki still has great potential for our organization, but for the moment we’ve moved beyond this.

Gmail and Google Apps – we had to communicate yet keep a record of our progress, personal email wouldn’t quite work. The apps that come with this work just fine; with spreadsheet, word processor, calendar and now slideshow applications, this was a natural choice. It’s all integrated and free.

YouSendIt – very large files come through here, it’s not always practical to send and host chunky files on Gmail.

LiveMeeting – this has enabled us to meet and collaborate regularly and is used in conjuncture with Freeconference.com, which we used as our conferencing software. I’ve had some thoughts of holding meeting in SecondLife, for the sake of transparency and open participation.

Skype – still trying to get the rest of the group to adopt this. It’s free, you can record your calls and have group sessions. Perfect.

Publicizing

GoDaddy – we registered our domain, GuyFROG.org, appended it to our gmail accounts and it’s been love ever since. You can’t beat the price and their customer support has been solid. I spent a little less than $10 for the domain for a year, we were hoping to land FROG.org, but that didn’t happen.

Blogger – a service of Google, worked well initially as our main website but we have moved passed this and on to a more robust service.

Wordpress – we (the web guys of FROG) decided to move to the hosted Wordpress.com service, thinking it would be a great way to expand the site, add modules and tailor it to our needs. It’s turned out to be a very expensive and impractical idea. A number of core features are only accessible by paying for them, for a group with no money, we’re going to have to bail. After our launch event in July, we’re moving Wordpress to our own servers. Between another board member and myself, we spent less than $40.

FormAssembly – this free tool allows us to build ad-sponsored forms for whatever purposes until we’re able to get on our own server.

Craigslist, Upcoming.org, & Eventful are web-based calendar apps we used to publicly post our launch event and spread the word quickly. They each have unique and common features and I wanted to take advantage where I could.

Idealist – we registered with Idealist, a no-brainer, as a non-proft to take advantage of their services but also to post our event.

Reactee – this shirt printing service allows you to choose a slogan and a keyword that is then placed on our shirt. Anyone can text the included number with our keyword, which is FROG naturally. When someone sees this shirt and texts the keyword (and whatever else they want to write) to the number, a pre-set message written by FROG, is sent back to the texter. A novel way to interact with a passive audience. The shirt costs about $25 including shipping and handling.

Flickr – we can go a lot of routes with Flickr, since they have a robust API. For now the service exists for archival reasons but eventually we’ll be able to do a number of things like print photo albums and posters, build videos and slideshows, share content and so on. Web services like Qoop make printing a painless process. I bought the Flickr Pro account for under $30.

Facebook – we’ve set up a profile on Facebook and with the viral tendencies of the site, we’ve been able to spread the idea of FROG and the upcoming fundraiser quickly. The reach and impact of Facebook for whatever organization is tremendous. Facebook took the bold step of opening up their backend and API to third parties, allowing various sites and services access to its 20 million user base. From HotorNot to Last.fm to Flickr to Digg, you name the service, it’s either on Facebook or will be shortly.

Technorati & Feedburner – these services can push and pull our data much more effectively than a simple RSS feed. If you add services like Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and Popfly to the equation, future mash-ups of our data and media may have greater impact than we can currently anticipate.

Fundraising

Change.org – this is a fairly new website dedicated to connecting movements and people. They have a number of tools at our disposal that will help us raise money, organize people and spread our message. (should be in the Publicizing category also)

PayPal – we’re working on registering with PayPal, eventually we’ll use it to collect dues, fundraise, sell items and so on. It’s cheap, it’s easy and for now it fits our needs.

Future

Future apps? I’m sure I’m missing a few but the obvious are MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. Mash-ups using the sites mentioned above (Yahoo Pipes, Dapper and Popfly) will eventually play a bigger role in data manipulation. Oh, and Rentacoder. Offering jobs to the lowest/bestest bidder will help us tweak our site, develop our ideas and move forward…on the cheap.

UPDATE: We got a little love from Mr. Kawasaki, thanks!

UPDATE 2:  Someone posted a link to the article on Digg, vote it up, it would really help!  Thanks!

The theory behind micro-lending is similar to the “teach a man to fish” analogy. Instead of directly handing out aid to developing nations, micro-lending finances sustainable projects through small loans. In theory, these loans will enable entrepreneurs to end their own poverty as well as develop the local economy.

Kiva.org, a socially progressive start-up, focuses exactly on the idea of micro-loans. Through partnerships with existing micro-finance institutions throughout the world, Kiva allows you to loan money using their site. You will receive updates and information about the project along the course of the 6-12 month loan.

From JoshSpear.com

Kiva takes the micro-lending idea and combines it with the democratizing power of the internet to allow you (or me, or the guy reading this over your shoulder) to connect with entrepreneurs in the third world and give them a loan. You can search Kiva’s website to find a businessman or woman that you want to support, and, as time goes by, you can see the impact that your loan has made on your business partner’s life. Your $25 might do more than buy food for a week. It could supply someone with a lifelong profession.

I made and ordered this shirt for about $20 from Reactee. It’s not the most catchy phrase but it’s a fun concept.

Basically, you set a slogan and a keyword to text to the included number, our keyword being FROG, naturally. When someone sees this shirt and texts the phrase (and whatever else they want to write) to the number, a pre-set message written by me, is sent back to the texter. Cool.

You can get this exact shirt here, or make your own. So far just a handful have texted my shirt, another way to spread the word on FROG.

UPDATE: I received the shirt in the mail yesterday and I have to say I was quite impressed with how it turned out. The design wasn’t as gaudy as I thought it might be and the fabric (American Apparel) was quite comfortable. Unfortunately I didn’t receive any texts while wearing it but I did get a couple of inquiries, one from a girl representing a non-profit, “Genius” was how she described the concept. I do receive regular texts from people who run across the shirt on the Reactee site and from this blog (I presume). Interesting.

Right now I have GUY 10 through GUY 14, if you have pictures or video from before or after please send them my way.

I want to provide you with the ability to do fun things with these photos, like videos, photo albums, posters, print pictures.  Help a man out here.

Peter Moore, a friend to many Guyanese and RPCVs, was kidnapped in Iraq earlier this week. Peter worked with Guyana Geology and Mines Commission from about GUY 11 to GUY 14. For more information, check out ABC News. Please keep Peter in your thoughts and prayers.

The other big item was that a terrorist cell out of Guyana was broken up in Brooklyn with plans to attack JFK airport. Check out more on Google News.

UPDATE: This is only a rumour but I heard this from someone close to him.

[T]he last i heard was that the mehdi army claiming to have him for negotions…but they still havent stated what they wanted or shown any proof they indeed have em alive…