The long-tail of giving
Social Actions is an aggregator which brings together thousands of charitable actions (from signing a petition to giving money) in one place through the power of search. The aim is to go beyond the larger charities, reaching right down to small causes and niche interests.
This is a classic aggregator, which is exposing the long-tail of causes, giving and campaigning. Places like this make it easier to find things to do that really interest people and fulfil their needs. This is taking power away from “hit” charities and putting it in the hands of smaller organisations.
They’ve even released a widget which brings up the most relevant actions depending on the content of the web page that it is situated on.
However, they could improve it even further by developing recommendations based on what you have done, along with showing what the most popular actions are for certain search terms. This will really help the niche grow.
Hat tip to Bryan Miller
Tags: aggregator, charities, long tail, social actions
April 3, 2009 6:21 pm 1 Comment
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By Christine Egger, April 5, 2009 @ 1:59 am
Andrew, thanks for drawing attention to Social Actions. The improvements you mention (which we’d like to see, too) can be accomplished by combining the Social Actions aggregation (with is open) with other sources of information. We’re seriously committed to encouraging those kinds of meta-aggregations. The Social Actions Developer Google Group, where all kinds of where-can-we-go-next ideas are being pursued, is up to +80 members and growing:
http://groups.google.com/group/social-actions-dev
And we’ve just wrapped the project-submission-period for our first Change the Web Challenge Project Gallery: 40+ apps that distribute the Social Actions aggregation across the web, often while mashing it up with more info and filtering it in a way that makes it more relevant to a particular audience.
Project Gallery:
http://www.netsquared.org/projectgallery/changetheweb
The winners of the Change the Web Challenge will be announced at this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, April 28, in San Francisco:
http://www.socialactions.com/changetheweb