Darthia Farm: An Experiment In Social Giving

By Nicole Ouellette • May 10, 2012 • Good For The World • Leave a comment

A couple years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Cynthia Thayer, a local author who hired me to train her on how to use her WordPress blog and also happens to run an organic farm. (This is a very Maine thing: to have two seemingly completely separate careers going at one time but often artfully combining them.) I also knew her through my friends Tom and Beth Walsh who happen to be a next door neighbor and farm share recipient of Darthia Farm.

Sunday, tragedy struck the farm when the barn burned and the animals inside died.

Tom called me up Tuesday morning and wanted to have a website set up right away. Wanting to turn this around quickly without any up front costs to Tom, Cynthia, or anyone else, I threw up a donation page on Give Forward and shared it to my Facebook profile. It was interesting to spend relatively little time on something (besides researching First Giving and other sites like it to narrow down the service I’d use) completely blow up online.

Here’s a screenshot of just how my Facebook friends and business pages I follow shared the news:

The true power of sharing... and beyond the people I regularly keep in touch with, I can't even track the shares through Facebook anymore!

If I click for further sharing information, here’s some even deeper data:

Social media sharing acts kind of like compound interest: one share could result in many more over time.

Now I can see this data because I’m on Facebook and happen to be friends with hundreds of people. The true test of if a campaign is working is ‘Is it driving traffic to the website?’ and ‘Once people get to the site, are they acting on your call to action?’

The results as of 11:30 this morning:

It’s nice to see how social media is helping to spread the word about this farm. Small businesses and individuals do have power to get messages across and these online channels and can help the word spread faster.

Thanks to all who donated so far and will donate. I’ll update this blog entry periodically with results of the campaign.

Why Ending Effective Educational Programs Makes Terrible Economic Sense

By Nicole Ouellette • September 26, 2009 • Good For The World • 2 Comments

Recently, a local school district has closed off a computer technology program open to high school students. Their reasons cited were low enrollment. My old boss Chris wrote an excellent letter about his experience with the program in the local paper. It got me thinking, beyond the impact of one individual student, how do these programs effect the world beyond the classroom?

Schools exist to make productive members of society. And when you look into the data, a lot of these technical programs end up being pretty effective. They increase graduation rates and beyond that, students who go through these programs earn more money, have lower unemployment, and lower rates of substance abuse.

So subjectively, these programs are fantastic. But what is their actual return on investment, beyond preventing bad things from happening to teenagers?

ROI on a student enrolled in a technical program in high school. Not bad. Actually pretty darn great!

Online Fundraising Follow-up

By Nicole Ouellette • June 23, 2009 • Good For The World • 1 Comment

The place to set up an online account where anyone can contribute. You may remember about a month ago I wrote about my friend Susan’s relatives that were going through a hard time financially. I asked:

Is there a site that someone in need could turn to online to help in this desperate situation? And to turn it around, how do people in not-so-desperate circumstances know that their money is actually going to their selected family/charity?

Spend $20 On June 20 For Your Local Economy

By Nicole Ouellette • June 20, 2009 • Good For The World • 1 Comment

We all know buying local keeps money locally and helps local businesses but how often do you think about your purchases?

Spend $20 on June 20 is a concept to raise awareness of what we can do in our own local economies. Our local Ellsworth Chamber of Commerce has been promoting this heavily but I was able to find other locations in North Carolina and New York.

You Tell Me: Legitimate Online Fundraising

By Nicole Ouellette • May 22, 2009 • Good For The World • 2 Comments

So I got an email today from my friend Susan asking if I knew anything about online fundraising for people in need. Here’s the scenario:

My cousin recently gave birth to her first child 11 months early which is scary, but what’s even scarier is that there are lots of health complications, her job isn’t great, if she doesn’t go back to work in 2 weeks (they’ve been with the kid in intensive care for a few weeks now) she loses her health insurance, her husband’s job got “downsized” and they’re almost finished building their house that her husband designed and built with his parent’s help. They’ve been married 1 year. So…their bills are stacking up, they may lose their house soon, and all of us in the family are feeling mighty helpless about the whole thing. How to help? Like many situations, money would solve a lot.