The reliability of water supply is a major issue for millions of households in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Although water is meant to be delivered to communities via a piped supply on a rotational schedule, the water often isn’t being piped when it should be — leaving families waiting indefinitely for supplies. Hoping to provide a solution, we recently came across NextDrop.

The NextDrop system, designed and set up by a team of Stanford and Berkeley graduate students, began operations in Hubli, India last year, having won a grant from the Gates Foundation, according to a report on MobileActive.org. In order to communicate with residents when the water is available, valvemen call the NextDrop interactive voice response system upon opening their neighborhood valves. NextDrop then texts the inhabitants of the area the news that water is being piped 30 – 60 minutes before it arrives, as well as texting the engineers at the utility live data on the water delivery. Residents are then contacted randomly to verify the accuracy of the data supplied by the valvemen. If there is any conflict between the data supplied by the valvemen and the residents, the engineers are alerted. These engineers are also able to step in if the valves are not initially reported open when they should be.

According to mobileactive.org, the Hubli pilot initially launched with 180 participating families across five water valve districts in Hubli, and NextDrop now plan to go on and expand to encompass 1000 households covering 25 valve areas over the next year. Crowdsourcing may be one of the simplest ways of solving social problems we know of; relying on the participation of those it benefits. What other social problem could you apply the model to? (Related: Free water-saving tool with toilet paper purchase — Shampoo brand is a reminder to save water — Indian farmers control water pumps by mobile phone.)

Website: nextdrop.org
Contact: team@nextdrop.org

Spotted by: Judy McRae

NationBuilder Is A One Stop Shop For Creating A Website For A Political Campaign

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Leena Rao

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There’s no doubt that politicians and political campaigns need to engage with the web, whether it be for fundraising, event outreach, news, debates and more. While Presidential and other heavily funded campaigns can afford to hire digital consultants like Blue State Digital to coordinate their online efforts, many current and potential candidates simply don’t have the resources and funds to build a fancy platform from scratchEnter NationBuilder, a SaaS platform that allows political candidates to build a sleek website in minutes that supports fundraising efforts, a blog, volunteer outreach, payment processing, calendars and more.

NationBuilder includes the ability for non-techies to create a branded website, blog as well as import contact lists and send email blasts directly from the site. In terms of social media NationBuilder allows you to have integrate multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and Tweet and Facebook Message from these accounts. Even the ability to send mass text messages is fully baked into the platform.

One of the most useful features of NationBuilder is a finances dashboard that will track the number of donors, average donation per supporter, amount raised in the day, the month, the year, the primary to the entire election cycle. Users can set a goal for the amount of money to raise or number of donors and a prominent thermometer displays the progress to your supporters. And NationBuilder hooks directly into Authorize.net, PayFlow Pro, and other payment processors.

Other features include event management with ticketing, volunteer organization, maps, calendars and uch more. It is essentially a one stop shop for creating a website for a political campaign. Pricing ranges from $20 per month to $500 per month. Email and text blasts are extra and the startup allows users to try out the platform for free for two weeks.

NationBuilder was founded by Jim Gilliam, a documentary film producer who also has significant web experience. He helped launch Business.com as its Chief Technology Officer, and worked at Lycos back in the day. Gilliam founded NationBuilder as a passion project and quickly realized the need for an inexpensive, easy to use platform to help political candidates (and nonprofits) build a presence on the web.

Brands and businesses are looking for ways to leverage Facebook’s recently unveiled Questions tool in ways that differ from what they’re already doing on Q&A sites such as Quora, Yahoo Answers and LocalMind.

The feature, which Facebook rolled out to all users March 24, functions as a recommendation engine. It also presents a major opportunity for businesses to conduct market research and crowdsource in a far more elegant way than was previously possible, according to Ben Grossman, communication strategist for marketing agency Oxford Communications.

“We know from Nielsen that recommendations from friends and family and the opinions of online strangers are the top two most trusted forms of advertising,” Grossman told Mashable. “Facebook Questions offers the perfect opportunity for brands to tap into exactly that.”

Businesses, groups and organizations can use Questions in several ways. For example, Grossman said:

• Ice cream parlors can find out what the flavor of the week should be.
• A gym can find out what time is best for its new hip-hop yoga class.
• Radio stations can determine the hottest concerts for the summer.
• Manufacturers can do a pulse check on fans’ holiday shopping plans.

“The best part about this is that it’s in a trusting, social and real-time setting,” he said. “The opportunity to gain instant feedback from a brand’s biggest fans is amazing.”

Fittingly, we had some more questions about Questions. Below, Grossman weighs in on the feature to help brands better understand the tool.

Mashable: How is Facebook Questions different than the Q&A tools already online?

Grossman: Though Questions certainly falls into a similar category as Yahoo Answers and Quora, there is are two very major differences:

• Answers to questions are not free-form; users are limited to multiple-choice responses.
• Questions (and their answers) are not catalogued by search engines at this time. Public Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora will still remain important for public-facing customer support and inquiries.

Mashable: How will Facebook Questions change the way users of Facebook Pages interact with their fans? Why is this important?

Grossman: Though third-party Facebook application development companies such as Involver and Wildfire have developed turn-key “poll” applications, many users were likely to get hung up on that pesky “Applications Permissions” box that demands access to users personal information.

Questions changes that. No permissions are required, and the Questions platform lets you answer and talk about questions with all your friends no matter if they’ve engaged with a third-party application before or not.

The other great thing about Questions is it comes with a setting that allows users to add more answers to the multiple-choice answers. This bit of flexibility will really and truly allow businesses to learn from their consumers — they just have to know the right questions to ask.

Questions also demands a higher level of fidelity to opinion statistics for brands. If brands bind themselves to the Questions platform to pose questions and they relate to the brand’s business, it’s going to be a lot clearer to all the fans what public opinion is. If the brand doesn’t follow through by acting on that opinion, Questions has a nice comment area that gives fans the perfect place to call a brand out on it.

Mashable: How have you or Oxford used Facebook Questions so far? How do you plan to use the feature in the future?

Grossman: Oxford Communications decided to test out the functionality and float this question out to our fans:

Within 15 hours, we had engaged 13% of our fanbase and had not only gained votes on answers we had given to the question; we also had fans suggesting (and voting for) new answers, including local couponing sites, LiveTVChat and more. For us, it was an opportunity to enjoy a high level of engagement with our followers, emerge as a thought leader and learn a little all at the same time.

The next frontier, after some additional testing, will be to activate Questions on behalf of our clients. Next month, we are planning on extending Legends Outlets Kansas City’s “Charity Check-In” program through use of Facebook Questions. On Legends Outlets Facbeook Page, Legends Outlets is currently encouraging its consumers to check-in with Facebook Places in order to trigger the brand to donate $1 to a pre-determined, local Kansas City charity.

Next month, the brand will be doing the same, but we will also be employing Facebook Questions to ask the fans what charities they would like to see appear as part of the ongoing Charity Check-In program. We’re excited to help Legends Outlets partner with the charities that mean the most to its fans, while raising their friends’ awareness of ways they can give back to the community.

Mashable: What was your initial reaction to the new Facebook Questions tool?

Grossman: Any time Facebook adds a new standard application to all user and business profiles, I get excited. When Facebook adds major new functionality like Questions, it stands to shift the social dynamic of over 500 million people, creating richer, more diverse and increasingly dynamic conversations.

Beyond the impact it will have on users, the widespread release of Facebook Questions is also emblematic of the continuing trend we’ve seen from Facebook: As soon as a new trend in social media begins to rise up, Facebook acts quickly and decisively. For those long-time Facebook users out there, Questions will hearken back to the days when Polls were far more common on Facebook. But this round of Q&A-based functionality released by Facebook is likely more of a direct response to the increasing popularity of up-and-coming sites like Quora and LocalMind.

What I love about Questions is how true it is to Facebook’s zeal for transparency and trust.

Will You Be Using Questions For Your Business or Brand?

How do you plan to use Facebook Questions for your brand, business, group or organization? Let us know in the comments.

How can non profits and charities make use of this new tool to speak to and engage their supporters in their work and develop better more informed feedback on their services and interventions?

This article titled “Today’s networked activists can achieve real change” was written by Paul Hilder, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 21st March 2011 16.13 UTC

Were the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia simply a consequence of the internet and its mysterious powers? Or was New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell right to argue, in a widely read piece, that today’s networked activists are trivial and ineffective by comparison with the courageous sit-in organisers of the civil rights movement?

As someone who has spent much of the last decade harnessing the internet to organise networks and movements for change, I find myself taking these questions personally. But they also miss everything that is really interesting about the ferment of social change today.

What is really going on is much richer and more interesting. It has seismic implications for the organising models of NGOs and political parties – and even corporations and governments. It heralds both danger and promise for the future of global justice and human development.

In a time of turbulence, the lessons that a rising global generation of activists draw from recent events – and the movements they build – matter. Let’s begin with some basic common sense.

First, social change is made by human beings, not by Silicon Valley. Anyone relying naively on technology is likely to find themselves isolated. The disciplines that matter most are timeless: spotting unmet needs or injustices, working with the social grain, and coming up with an effective, empowering and sustainable response.

On the other hand, by making new things possible, visible or attractive, technology has repeatedly inspired changes in how we organise our societies. It all depends what we do with it. Different things work in different contexts. The challenge is to learn, innovate and adapt, combining the experience of the past with the reality of the present and the promise of the future.

Old organising models don’t always work, especially in new contexts. When millions of people around the world marched on a single day against the Iraq war, many of us were inspired by what the New York Times called the rise of the “second superpower”.

But frustration with the failure of these marches, and the boomerang of disillusionment that followed, were more important lessons for today’s generation of network organisers. The transience of Facebook groups and Twitter is neither new nor unique to the internet. After 2003, it was clearer than ever that we needed to find new ways to sustain and channel progressive social energy.

Later, Make Poverty History not only reminded us of the scale of popular feeling but taught us another lesson: that we cannot rely completely either on coalitions of established NGOs or on well-meaning celebrity activists, and that building dynamic new movements is unlikely to happen from the top down.

These experiences led many of us to explore new kinds of institutions: call them network movements. Avaaz.org, which I helped to launch in 2007 and which has since grown to over 7 million members worldwide, is today the largest example of such a movement – Jonathan Glennie has talked approvingly about it here, as have Gordon Brown and Al Gore elsewhere.

Through Avaaz, millions of global citizens have come together successfully to change government policies from Brazil to Japan, to donate millions of dollars to democratic movement-building and civilian reconstruction from Burma to the Middle East to Haiti, and to spread a simple, contagious idea: that most people everywhere want a better world, and that by coming together, we can help to build it.

Avaaz has given support and solidarity to courageous activists in all sorts of challenging and dangerous situations. It has flashmobbed parliaments. Gladwell may not be up to speed, but it has even helped organise sit-ins – notably at the Copenhagen summit, where non-violent activists read out the names of millions of petition-signers, were thrown out, then encircled the negotiations and made sure the weak outcome could not be greenwashed.

Internet or Facebook petitions that are never delivered to their targets deserve our scorn. But petitions are a vital tool for citizens. They help build movements, as the Chartists recognised long ago. And they can combine high-level lobbying and media shaming with the legitimacy and force of participatory democracy, as Britons saw in the remarkable recent success of the Save our Forests campaign by the network movement 38 Degrees (whose board I sit on) and its allies.

From Egypt to the streets of Britain, network organisers are working with the grain of individualistic solidarity and combining old and new tactics to do things that are potentially as historic as the civil rights or independence movements of the last century. But there are two larger challenges that confront us everywhere.

First, we need to find new ways to ensure that these potentially transformative social dynamics can spread as widely and as positively as possible, through poorer and emerging economies, and in prevailing public conversations from global media to the doorstep.

Second, we need to get better at building new institutions for governance and economies that reflect these social lessons and are strong enough to last. Otherwise, social victories will be fleeting, and we will fall short of the coming challenges. That is why I’m now working with the global development movement at Oxfam – to share these lessons and take them to the next level. Hopefully, we can now start having the really interesting conversations.

• Paul Hilder is director of campaigns for Oxfam. Previously he was campaign director for Avaaz.org.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Charities and Non Profit Organisations looking to make use of Augmented Reality to promote their cause and/or seek donations should consider the product developed by Virtuteq.com. Built on the 'Layar platform', the simple content management system allows charities and non profit organisations as well as other for profit companies to easily create and update their own simple augmented reality layars, viewable on both iphone and Android mobile phones through the camera viewfinder.

This service could be used to identify locations where specific charitable projects have been carried out, thereby providing to supporters and local people or visitors, 'visible' evidence of a charities effectiveness using before and after photos or links to a video or to a web site.

A site where a non profit or charity was wishing to raise funds to begin a project, could be identified by the charity or non profit organisation on their bespoke layer, which could link to an opportunity for local people and supporters to donate to make the project happen or to comment on how they would like to see the project be developed in future.

At large and small scale fundraising events such as a fun run or music festival, directions to the venue, orientation around the event site and links to additional information about the event could be easily and cost effectively updated in the planning stages and during the event itself by charity and non profit staff. In this way those taking part, but who may not know the area where the event is taking place, could be guided to travel links, parking, help points and up to date event information as they arrive, take part in and leave the event site, anywhere they have access to a mobile phone signal.

There are multiple potential applications for this product in the charity and non profit sectors as well as within ‘for profit’ businesses and corporations. For further information or to ask how Virtuteq can help you, visit the Virtuteq web site at www.virtuteq.com

Important writers note to ensure transparency: The writer of this article/blog host is the Commercial Director for Virtuteq.com

Zynga Gamers Raise $1 Million For Tsunami Relief

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Rip Empson

20 hours ago

On Friday, social gaming giant Zynga joined tsunami relief efforts by enabling in-game donations through virtual goods in Zynga games like FrontierVille, FarmVille and CityVille. Today, the company announced that — in just 36 hours — Zynga gamers donated more than $1 million to relief efforts.

Zynga partnered with the Save the Children to raise money for its Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children Emergency Fund.

Zynga representatives said that the campaign was created in under 24 hours and is the largest charitable campaign in company history. It is also the first CityVille Zynga.org campaign.

While we applaud Zynga (and its gamers) for their collective magnanimous spirit, the fundraising efforts continue. Gamers can contribute by buying designated virtual goods like a sweet potato crop in CityVille, a Kobe cow in FrontierVille, radishes in FarmVille, and a royal flush for Zynga Poker — or can donate by using this direct link.

Those who wish to donate in the non-Ville game Words With Friends can use the Save the Children button inside the game. Players in all games within Facebook can also send funds using the Zbar, or the bar that sits on top of the screen. Facebook will also be donating its traditional 30% cut on the Facebook Credits used to contribute to the relief.

While the devastating Japan earthquake and tsunami have passed, the recovery and mourning have just begun. The disaster could become the most expensive earthquake in history. The crisis could get even worse, depending on what happens next at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Now, more than ever, the Japanese people need our help and support to get through this crisis.

You don’t need to pack your bags and fly out to Japan to help, though. There are plenty of ways you can help online, whether it’s with your wallet or simply with your Twitter account. New technologies make it possible to lend a helping hand with your texts or even with virtual crops.

Every little bit counts. Here are a few ways you can help the victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami:

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1. Text to Donate

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The American Red Cross has once again launched a texting campaign to raise money for relief efforts in the Pacific region. Last year, the Red Cross was able to raise over $20 million for Haiti relief through simple text donations.

If you would like to donate to the American Red Cross for Japan Earthquake Relief, just text REDCROSS to 90999. Each text will provide $10 towards the Red Cross’s humanitarian efforts.

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2. Donate via Facebook

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The Red Cross has also launched a campaign on Causes to raise at least $25,000 for relief efforts. By logging in to Facebook, you can donate anywhere from $10 to $500 to help Tsunami victims and their families.

As of publishing time, the Causes campaign has raised over $40,000 from over 1,000 donors and 3,000 promoters.

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3. Buy Virtual Goods

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Virtual sweet potatoes and the Japanese Tsunami may not seem related, but buying digital crops could help children affected by the earthquake.

Zynga, known for its effective social good campaigns, has partnered with Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake Tsunami Emergency Fund to get its users to donate money through the purchase of virtual goods in CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille and its other games.

100% of the proceeds from the purchase of sweet potatoes in CityVille, radishes in FarmVille or kobe cows in FrontierVille will go towards Save the Children’s efforts to provide relief in the Pacific. The world’s largest social gaming company is shooting to raise $2 million for relief efforts.

Zynga has raised millions of dollars over the last few years with these types of social good campaigns, most notably for the relief efforts in Haiti.

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4. Embed Some Code

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If you run a website and want to get your customers or users involved in relief efforts, all you need to do is embed a simple snippet of code.

The Hello Bar places a simple message at the top of your website with just a few lines of code. The service, which is in private beta, has decided to open its doors to anybody willing to help the victims of the crisis in Japan.

Simply sign up with the invite code “helpjapan” and you can quickly get the code snippet you need to embed a customized Hello Bar that will drive donations. Check out our full article for more instructions on how to add the donation bar to the top of your website.

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5. “Like” a Facebook Page

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The people over at Explore.org are donating $1 for every “Like” of the “Dog Bless You” Facebook page, up to $100,000.

Explore.org founder Charlie Weingarten delivered the challenge at South by Southwest yesterday. “Search and rescue dogs are a critical resource for emergency situations,” he told the audience.

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6. Ways to Help on Twitter

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Harness the power of your Twitter account to do some good for the people of Japan.

Earlier this morning, Twitter published a blog post detailing ways you can help with the relief efforts. Not only have they updated Japan’s mobile website with the latest information on the disaster, but they have also published a list of hashtags to tweet and/or follow related to the crisis.

Here are some key hashtags to remember:

• #Jishin: focuses around general earthquake information
• #Anpi: a hashtag for the confirmation of the safety of individuals or places
• #Hinan: Evacuation information
• #311care: a hashtag regarding medical information for the victims
• #PrayforJapan: A general hashtag for support and best wishes for victims of the crisis

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7. Donate via iTunes

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Apple is also dedicating resources to the crisis in Japan. They have created a simple donation page in iTunes [iTunes link] that makes it simple to donate anywhere from $5 to $200 to the Red Cross with just a few clicks.