Inside Facebook

While much time has been spent debating the viability of media businesses built on the Facebook Platform, far less attention has been paid to those developers innovating in areas that have traditionally been much slower to change. One developer, Causes, has been doing just that.

Founded by Joe Green, former Harvard roommate of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, former President of Facebook, Causes (also known as Project Agape) is changing the way social and political activists evangelize and raise money. Inside Facebook sat down with Causes co-founder Joe Green to learn more about the company’s progress since the company launched just over one year ago.

Joe, what milestones did Causes achieve during its first year, and what are you hoping to achieve in year two?

Our first goal was always to figure out how to get people to start Causes and spread awareness, and during our first year, over 12 million Facebook users registered and created or joined over 80,000 causes.

We put donations in initially as a way to increase impact. We thought it would take a while for donations to ramp up, but we’ve been positively surprised. We raised over $2.5 million for nearly 20,000 non-profits in our first year - almost all of them small donations, which we’re very excited about. Now we’re starting to focus more on trying to increase donations.

Which demographics have you found the most traction with?

It’s hard to know much about demographics, because it’s hard to target this type of social product. You put it out there, and it will spread where it spreads.

We want to create broadly applicable solutions that both allow the hard core activist to take a lot of ownership and allow others to participate somehow. Even when Causes are featured on your profile, they’re an important part of your identity.

How have you seen Causes drive offline activity?

We ran the Causes Giving Challenge in January, and we had people taking their laptops to classes to get people to sign up, and starting phone trees. Causes is really integrated with the real word, and these days, it’s harder to distinguish between what’s happening online vs. offline. For example, you can go to Obama’s website and pull down a phone list to call - is that online or offline? It’s all integrated.

We also did a national program with the United Way, where all their local campaigns competed to see who could get the most people to join their causes and donate, that was really successful.

What are you doing around the 2008 elections?

To be honest, we haven’t focused a lot on the campaigns, because we want to make sure we focus on our core strength. Campaigns on Causes are bottom up, but presidential campaigns are very top down and very brand focused. We may have more impact on things happening down the ballot, however.

How has your experience on the Facebook Platform compared to that on other social networking platforms?

Well obviously the MySpace Platform is still in a much earlier phase. The Facebook Platform has allowed us to get immense distribution, but there’s also a lot of spammy apps. Many apps are using Facebook just like they used email in the past. Facebook is trying to address this, but it’s a slow process to get things aligned.

MySpace has done a good job of using their native communication channels for the platform, not creating new ones. In the native channels, social conventions are already developed - MySpace users are more judicious about how they use comments. By contrast, requests and notifications were hardly used on Facebook before the Platform, except for friend requests.

MySpace has also done a good job with home page boxes, because they allow applications to create their own communication mechanisms. If they’re spammy, people will just remove the box altogether.  But you can’t do that with Facebook requests.

How do you expect the upcoming Facebook profile redesign to affect Causes?

The profile redesign has its positives and negatives, and will be very controversial. People enjoy featuring their Causes on their profile. The new Publisher and application tabs will be very interesting. For example, if a friend asks you to join a cause publicly, we think that’s a pretty interesting social dynamic.

Thanks Joe. Any final thoughts?

The non-profit world is just waking up to the world of peer to peer activism and fund-raising. I think we’re just on the cusp of a lot of exciting things.