CARE’s Social Network: A Missed Opportunity

The problem with non-profits getting into the social networking space is that they tend to think of it as an extension of their existing campaigns instead of truly trying to innovate and offer something new to the world. In my opinion, if you aren’t going to do it well, then partner with someone who will. I’m talking about Care.org who recently launched http://we.care.org, a ’social network’ (and I use the term loosely) aimed at encouraging communication around various development projects. The biggest disappointment here is that CARE is a huge multi-national, billion dollar organization with enough money, resources and people at their disposal to make a web presence that truly matters. Instead, what they’ve done is created a place for CARE donors to come talk about CARE matters and….well who cares? It feels like they did this to say to someone, “we have a social network”. This is fine, it’s what people might expect, but it’s not innovative. And it’s a real shame that CARE, a well respected leader in the NGO world, has missed an opportunity to lead the pack with some real innovation and utility. DoGoodWell points out a few sites that are doing a better job at this here but I’ll also mention idealist.org.

From an internal perspective, I’m sure CARE didn’t devote a lot of time and resources to this because spending money on a ‘web site’ might seem frivolous to them. Herein lies the problem. Your social network shouldn’t be ‘just a website’, it should be a service provides a unique function. If only for the fact that they already had ‘just a website’.

Regardless, from a technical standpoint they’ve really dropped the ball in a few places. I’ll explain how and what those effects are in the hopes that they won’t be repeated….

1. It’s not very attractive.
The CARE “I Am Powerful” campaign is a brand that uses black, yellow, orange and white colors in a way that is appealing. It works. They used the same brand for their care.org website, which also works. Using the same theme for an entire social network experience is bad. It just doesn’t please aesthetically and orange on black kind of makes my eyes hurt. Designers don’t solely exist to make things ‘pretty’. An aesthetically pleasing website is inviting, it makes people want to stay and it encourages participation. Just ask Facebook who’ve managed to become the place to go for refugees from the horrid designs (among other things) running rampant at MySpace.com. If the goal is to encourage more people to get involved in supporting CARE causes, then there should be more effort focused on appealing to that new audience instead of pandering to your existing one.

2. No Data Portability
When people talk about data portability, they aren’t just blowing steam. There’s a clear purpose. By allowing people to transfer data from one social network to another, and by allowing quick log-ins using technologies like OpenId, you increase the chances that people are going to sign up for your service. There are thousands of social networks in the world, if not millions, there needs to be a focused effort to reduce the amount of work it takes to join your initiative if you truly want people to get involved. This means letting go of some control.

3. Too Many steps to Sign-In
This brings me to my second point. The number of steps it takes to get people to sign up is directly proportionate to the number of people who navigate away from your site. To break that down, if there are three steps to becoming a member of your site, then each visitor has 1 in 3 odds of actually finishing the sign up procedure.

The fact of the matter is, people get lazy. If they have to fill out the same ten questions every time they join a new social network, chances are they’ll stop truthfully answering questions and they’ll start entering gibberish or ignoring your forms all together. In a worst case scenario, they roll their eyes and continue surfing the net…never to return. Again, if the goal is to encourage new dialogue, and new participation, this isn’t helping.

Google recently opened up it’s user base in support of the data portability movement as did Facebook and Myspace. Between the three of those businesses, that’s a confirmed audience of about 200 million that you’re ignoring by not incorporating data portability technologies into your service.

Ordinary people probably don’t know about the technology or much less care, but what they do identify with is ease of use.

4. It’s a Walled Garden
How many times have we seen this, when you sign up for one part of a website, you go to their forum or blog just to find out you have to sign up again with a new or different user name! This is incredibly stupid. I’ve been a member of CARE’s community for some time (in full disclosure my girlfriend worked there) yet when I went to log into the we.care.org site, I got the above message. This is a real shame because they aren’t even leveraging their own user base for this new project. I’m sure they’ve got millions of people in their database, it would have been quite simple to create a function that referenced email addresses from that database to authenticate potential existing members.

Beyond this, as of yet there’s no integration (to date) with other websites. Wouldn’t it make sense to create an embeddable widget or application that people could place on their blogs to raise money for CARE programs? Wouldn’t it make since to create a Facebook application or MySpace app that did the same or that share CARE success stories?

If CARE doesn’t want to spend the time or money developing these types of things, they should release and API and let their community do it for them.

5. Lack of Utility
Another problem is there’s a lack of usefulness. Why does we.care.org exist? Does it serve a purpose? Was it built as a marketing tool? The only things you can do at Care.org are aggregate (preselected) web feeds, read (editor approved) blogs, create groups and invite your friends to do the same. To their credit, they’ve added a few customizable widgets for user profiles but you can’t modify them to include the things you care about. For instance If I wanted to follow humanitarian blogs that the CARE editors don’t know about, I can’t do it here.

What makes social networks great is that usually, I can customize them to be “my space” (no pun intended) on the internet. This means, for example, I go to my Facebook profile or my iGoolge page and see a whole bunch of things that relate to me because I’ve designated them as important. Thus, I’m inclined to make that space my homepage (the first place I see when I launch my browser) because I’ll always have my favorite sites and news sources right there, only a few clicks away. Why would I choose to go to the CARE website and create profile, only to have an editor narrow my choices down to the things that they decide relate to CARE. Why do *I* care? I’m already at the CARE website!?!?! Frustrating to say the least.

6. There’s a Big Security Flaw.
I’m not going to go into detail here but when I tried to log-in to the site, I inadvertently got caught in a cycle that exposed a huge security hole in their site. When I tried to ‘create my profile’ I got the message below which is basically trying to log me in as an administrator. Eventually I was able to log-in without signing up or verifying my identity. HUGE VULNERABILITY. I assume this was an attempt at “#4″, if so it needs to be accomplished more effectively. If I was on a public terminal someone might try to hijack my account and go on to cause further internal damage.

I took some other screen caps that I won’t post (because I don’t want anyone to hack the site) but the site admins there might consider taking a look at this….immediately.

Ultimately my goal isn’t to attack what I do think is a step in the right direction. More nonprofits should consider taking advantages of social media because of the opportunities it provides to connect with people. Rather, the goal here was to show that where CARE could have gone that extra distance to create something unique and serve as the example for other non-profits and NGO’s. Instead they’ve played it safe. They did enough to say they did *something* using the web. Maybe that’s all they care about but rest assured eventually someone will get this right and big groups like CARE will be forced to play catch up once again.