Social Media and Social Justice: Facebook Causes

by David Deutsch

The rapid growth and expansion of social media is nothing short of startling. To illustrate just how fast social media has spread, consider this: while Facebook has been available to the general public for a little more than four years, some 550 million people—about one out of every 14 people on Earth—have Facebook accounts. This one website has revolutionized the way we communicate with one another. Can anyone think of anything in history that has swept across humanity so quickly, short of a plague?

There is a good reason Facebook is so popular. It offers people the opportunity to connect in ways never even dreamed of five years ago. And Facebook is being used for multiple purposes: staying in touch with family and friends, reconnecting with old friends, embarrassing your loved ones with old pictures, promoting a business or blog ... the list goes on and on.

Facebook is also being used to promote social justice. For instance, the Causes application, co-created by Sean Parker, the developer of Napster and part-owner of Facebook, has a specific focus on social justice. The Causes application has two major functions: it connects people who advocate for specific causes and collect donations for those causes. According to their Facebook page, Causes is harnessing the Facebook experience to change the world:

Any Facebook user with a little passion and initiative can create a cause, recruit their friends into that cause, keep everybody in the cause up-to-speed on issues and media related to the cause, and, most importantly, raise money directly through the cause for any U.S. registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit or Canadian registered charity. We process the donations automatically via credit card, tally the results, and report the donation activity via a public "scorecard" in the cause. This allows us to reward people who grow their causes, donate, and successfully raise money.

In other words, the Causes application allows people to start their own cause, connects people to existing causes, and facilitates fundraising for legitimate nonprofits. The site claims to have over 24,000,000 active users every month. By comparison, the most popular single television show in U.S. history had 74 million viewers.

Here’s how Causes works: let’s say you are passionate about a hypothetical charity, which we shall call “Save the Poor Rich People in Santa Monica.” If you wish to connect with this charity over Causes, you’ll need to first add Causes to your Facebook profile, at which point you can search for the cause and join.

But—what’s this?!? You searched and searched, only to find out your cause is not listed! What to do, what to do? Don’t panic, because you can create your own cause and invite people to join it. Once you set up your Cause you can promote it in any way you wish. But if you want to collect donations with the Causes app, you first have to register with the folks who run Causes and prove to them that you are a bona fide nonprofit organization and not some fly-by-night group seeking to collect money. Causes also facilitates interaction, allowing people to communicate and collaborate on the site itself. Take a look at the app to see how it works.

How effective has Causes been? That depends on what you mean by effective. If you define it as “helped raise money for various charities,” then the answer is decidedly mixed. The number one charity by far is the Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders Service of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta which, as of press time, has raised $1,173,384 through the application alone, while other Causes have barely raised any money at all.

There is another way to measure success. With the Causes application, every cause now has a relatively equal opportunity to raise awareness and funds. While before it required thousands of dollars and hundreds of labor hours to promote an issue, the Internet allows for easier promotion of even the most obscure groups. Causes can also serve as an information clearinghouse. If, for instance, your child gets sick and you need to connect with people who are also suffering, the Causes app is a great aggregator for gathering and sharing information and providing moral support. So in this way, the application can probably be judged as a relative success.

While Facebook is easily the most popular social media application in the world, it is by no means the only one. And Causes is not the only way people have used Facebook to achieve social justice. But it organizes and facilitates initiatives in a clean and unique way. Log on and connect to a Cause that means something to you.

Comments

Comments closed.