Anyone Playing With Jumo?
Jumo is a new ’cause and social change aggregator’ site like Change.org.
It’s the brainchild of Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for the Obama campaign. Consequently, the hype quotient is very high.
My question: Does anyone out there really need this? Is this a hula hoop? Or as Tech President asks: “Does the world need Jumo?”
These overview articles from Beth’s Blog and Tech President contain early reviews from many of my favorite online and nonprofit tech gurus.
Steve MacLaughlin at Blackbaud makes these charitable comments: “We are entering a new period where people from outside the nonprofit sector are going to try their hand at driving change. They bring with them new ideas, approaches, and tools to engaging with people. Their experience comes from a digital perspective and there is no such thing as ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ Organizations trying to change the world can certainly benefit from changes in how they engage with supporters.”
Yeah, cool. But I’m not so convinced. Just because it’s there and highly hyped, some (many?) nonprofits will feel they need to establish a presence on Jumo … expending time and resources for a return I suspect will be rather meager.
Sorry, I just don’t like tools, sites, middlemen, whatever, that get in the way of a specific nonprofit building relationships directly with specific donors. And that take a 15% charge for passing along donations.
Any Jumo users out there? Do you feel differently? I’d like to hear from some actual users … not commentators and consultants who think anything ‘social media’ is hot, so long as others use it.
Grumpy Tom
10 responses to “Anyone Playing With Jumo?”
Behavioral Science Q & A
Integrating an individual giving appeal with other communications from a charity can have both positive and negative effects, and the outcome largely depends on how it’s executed. Advantages of Integration Brand Consistency: Maintaining a consistent appearance and messaging across all communications can reinforce the org’s brand identity and strengthen brand recognition and trust among your […]
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I’m not aware of any in-market tests specifically comparing recurring vs. gift frequency language. I suspect the answer might not be the same with all gift frequencies, nor with all people. It sounds like a great opportunity for you to test and find out what works for your audience. Based on the literature, here’s a couple […]
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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Interesting question. I had a quick look at the testing done on this topic. On the positive side, in all cases, over half of donors decide to cover the fee. In some cases, it goes as high as 65%. Not a negligible percentage at all. Here’s another test from iRaiser showing consistent results (see point […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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Jumo may have been invented by a multimillionaire who is capable of and even inclined toward making a major (and I mean seven-figure) gift to a worthy nonprofit organization somewwhere.
But show me the nonprofit organization that has secured at least one major gift at such levels through the use of these kinds of platforms to engage a prospective donor and make the ultimate “ask.”
Me thinks that the face-to-face engagement of donors for major gifts is not the dinosaur that so many people think it is.
You said it so well here: Sorry, I just don’t like tools, sites, middlemen, whatever, that get in the way of a specific nonprofit building relationships directly with specific donors. And that take a 15% charge for passing along donations.
As social media continues to grow the challenge will be figuring out how to incorporate new tools into donor-centric fundraising.
I find these types of sites may attract a couple of tiny gifts per year from someone responding to their friend’s birthday request. I have never gotten real donations or repeat donors on sites like this.
I had hopes for Jumo, but after looking at it, I can’t imagine why people would want to use it when it’s basically the same as Facebook. It’s too much work for the consumer to create yet another account where you have to filter through mountains of generic information.
The only sites I have found that help us are those that provide information that you can’t get anywhere else – ie CharityNavigator.com.
From what I had read, I thought the main concept was to connect people who might be interested in a particular cause. If Jumo can actually do that, it could be valuable to some lower-profile nonprofit orgs who are doing great work that lines up with the interests and passions of of some people. For example, I had a friend who was interested in “adaptive sports” – helping people with physical disabilities participate in sports like skiing and surfing – but he didn’t know about many organizations in that space.
It would also be very valuable if it became a trusted place where people could read comments and opinions from others about a particular organization or cause. It’s very hard to get the truth about what most organizations are really up to. You could search Google, but it would be good to search one spot with lots of comments. I don’t recall seeing user comments on Guidestar or Charity Navigator…
After hearing all the hype, I created a Jumo page for my nonprofit. It was quick and easy, but that’s about all I can say about it. We are on Facebook and have seen a lot of relationship-building benefits of that, as well as some limited use for getting volunteers and in-kind donations. But our supporters are already on Facebook and it’s easy for them to keep in touch with us. I don’t know any “regular” people who use Jumo yet, and in just a few minutes of surfing around the site I didn’t really see a reason why they should. Not to mention that the layout is terrible and hard to read. I’m not very tech-savvy, so maybe I just didn’t “get” it but I seriously doubt that Jumo will amount to much.
My name’s David and I work in development at the Partnership for After School Education (PASE). A colleague and I got wind of Jumo a few weeks before it went live and signed up to be notified when it did, so both PASE and I personally have been on the site for a couple of weeks. I have a few thoughts for you…
First of all, I think skepticism over whether or not Jumo fills an existing need is totally justified. It doesn’t immediately jump off the screen and say “Now you can do X, which you couldn’t do before.” Plus, I think they launched early and got a little egg on their faces as a result. And as someone who personally feels his online footprint is bigger than he’d like and doesn’t give sufficient ROI for the amount of time it can take to manage, I can absolutely understand a first take of “What, another one of these things? Excuse me throw my keyboard through the nearest window.”
That said, I don’t think it will prove useless, for a couple of reasons:
First, it’s brand-spankin’-new, and it could grow in any number of unforeseeable ways. When Facebook first launched, the only functionality available was making person-to-person connections and the only profile fields were basic contact and interest info. Like Jumo it could have been viewed as “redundant”—it was, after all, intended to be a literal replacement of college facebooks, which already existed—and it wasn’t necessarily clear that it was worth messing with (although everyone did so anyway). But as Facebook grew in users it also grew in functionality, and it began to provide new, more tangible services (picture and video sharing, microblogging and feed-streams of friends’ updates, 3rd-party apps on an open API, etc.). Essentially, Facebook figured out what utility it could provide as it went along, and as it responded to its users needs and desires; Jumo could well do the same thing.
Imagine, for example, that instead of merely hosting static organization and individual pages there’s a built-in platform for one-click donations through the site, and then each individual’s page displays a donation history; not only is donating easier, donors become instant champions, and begin to self-identify through giving. Or, in a similar way to how Facebook added “Events” as a built-in app a year or so into its existence, Jumo adds a “Volunteer” app that helps the individuals on the site find volunteer opportunities; after those opportunities, the site could then allow individuals who’d registered through the opportunity with the organization through the site to leave comments…boom, instant testimonials, with no additional work from the org (other than quality control). This is all the kind of stuff that development/fundraising people and communications/marketing people salivate over, that we know are possible, but that we often have a hell of a time generating effectively due to inefficiencies of technology and limited resources. Why would we fight this idea if we could shape it into something we could really use?
Do some of these things exist in other places? Sure—you have your own website through which to accept donations, you can post volunteer opportunities on DoSomething, you can post jobs on Idealist, you can solicit reviews on GreatNonProfits. Might Jumo do a better job, though? Yep. Might it not do a better job and fall by the wayside? Absolutely. The point is that it’s really hard to know…but that doesn’t mean it’s a flawed concept.
And the main reason I think it’s not a flawed concept: While it may not necessarily attract everyone, the people whom it *will* attract are self-selecting in a way that is *incredibly* useful to nonprofit and other cause-based organizations. Everyone is a potential Facebook user because Facebook basically says “Use this website to put your life online,” and everyone has a life. Not everyone is a potential Jumo user because Jumo says “Use this website to learn about and participate in the world of social good,” and not everyone participates in that world. But the people who opt into a website like Jumo are automatically more likely to be donors, more likely to be volunteers, more likely to be advocates, more likely to want to work in the sector. Every fundraising website under the sun talks about how important it is to slice massive heaps of data on potential donors and target the ones who are more likely to become active; now a website comes along that potentially does the first round of that work for us and we’re falling all over ourselves to write it off? That’s crazy!
Jumo might not work—users might not see the point, fail to adopt it, and watch as it crumbles—but if it works even a *little* bit, if it manages even a few thousand truly active users, it’ll be providing us with something: As a cause-based organization you can guarantee that anyone on Jumo at all or, with luck, following you, is a high-quality target. Jumo has the *potential* to give people a manageable way to find organizations they want to be affiliated with—on their terms, rather than on ours, which in theory should have the effect of increasing overall participation. That’s a good thing, even if we’re not totally sure about how it might shake out.
This all might or might not convince you (or any other initial skeptic). I’m not 100% convinced myself, and I don’t think there’s cause to be 100% convinced either way. But there’s also no reason to be Grumpy Tom…
Many, many thanks, as always, for everything The Agitator does for folks like me out on the front lines of Fundraiserland. Keep it all up.
Grumpy Tom,
As an optimistic curmudgeon, I share your skepticism over yet another online “proxy” for charitable giving. I tasted the Kool-Aid and it is pretty watered down I think. So this Christmas I wanted to make donations in lieu of gifts for my grandparents and some extended family and my wife and I decided to support a cause that helps veterans returning home from Iraq/Afghanistan. I had no particular charity in mind really and so I attempted to go through Jumo to help me pick one. Not only is the site somewhat weird (is a news feed of non profit stories or is it a search tool for people like me??), but the causes aren’t really what I had in mind.
Between the watchdogs and the other “proxy” websites (Network for Good, iGive, EarthShare, etc..) I don’t think Jumo really has an identity, at least not yet.
Happy holidays to both of you,
-Matt
PS: you guys should consider doing a series all about Old School fundraising because in the end, the fundamentals of the business really don’t change. (e.g. direct mail vs. email)
Jumo does nothing new.
There are loads of sites that offer personalized pages for nonprofits, online donations, etc. I fail to see how Jumo contributes anything to the current landscape of nonprofit-centric websites, and would much rather see a site like Care2, that’s catered to the nonprofit community for years, receive the kind of attention that Jumo has through all its undeserved hype.
Saw the Jumo story on The Agitator, joined up but discovered its entirely US centric – which is a pity. Seems like many US organisations, Jumo don’t realise there are whole lot of other countries out there ….
Pity
Martin, Sydney Australia (Where Oprah has just been)
A lot of the comments I saw here seem to be dismissing social networks because they are not attracting many donations. I guess my answer to that is — Yes, that’s true, social networking still has a fairly (very?) limited value as a fundraising tool. But its potential for building relationships and keeping your brand in front of a wider audience is very valuable.
Just like at one point, nonprofits had to realize that they did not look professional if they didn’t have a website, at this point I believe that you don’t look professional if you don’t have a Facebook page. I also don’t believe that many direct donations are made as a result of advertising, but such activities do prime audiences to pick your brand out of the clutter when your name pops up again, whether that’s in the media, from a shared link on Facebook, when a friend mentions who they volunteer with, a RT on Twitter or on Google when someone is researching organizations for their year-end giving.
So, true, it is hard to tie giving to social network activity, but even if you don’t think there is any relationship between the two at all, you would be missing out big time in not maintaining a solid social networking strategy when more and more people are getting their information from such sites.
Okay, now about Jumo? I agree that there is probably much much more hype on this platform than will turn out to be warranted. Perhaps it will turn out to attract a much smaller audience, but an audience much more primed to become involved in your organization, similar to the audience acquired by Cause2? But I doubt it will become another giant that organizations should feel they have to dedicate their already strapped resources to. Here’s the new thing I think Jumo’s doing: combining the focus on causes of Change.org and Cause2 with the sexiness of Facebook. But that sexiness will likely fade after the hype of the launch fades as well.
The audience that was attracted to the cause-related networks when they first came out don’t really have a good reason to make the move to Jumo. And the people who jump onto Jumo mainly because they’re excited about the new exciting thing will time out eventually because their primary reason for joining wasn’t because they cared deeply about the content.
That’s my two cents.