Applying Hot Dish Technology to Online Organizing

Many organizations use news and current events to keep their websites fresh and engaging, but until recently, the tools to fully harness these features in organizing strategies has been missing.

Last week, NewsCloud announced Hot Dish, a joint research-driven project with Grist.org and University of Minnesota researchers, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. With news readership among young people on the decline, we are seeking new ways of engaging this audience using news and current events on social networks where time online is skyrocketing.

Hot Dish is the first of several publications being used to experiment with engaging younger readers on Facebook.

For two months, 16- to 25- year old U.S. residents can sign up for the Hot Dish action team, share news and participate in one or more online and offline challenges. Completion of these challenges earn them points which place them in competition for some great eco-prizes: from a trip to the Arctic with Quark Expeditions complete with CO² offsets, to a green MacBook, a $100 nonprofit donation of their designation or $150 in yoga classes.

The kinds of challenges they can take on vary widely. Some challenges reward participation online in the Hot Dish community e.g. posting stories, sharing a comment, inviting their friends to the application. But many challenges require them to get involved in their communities e.g. installing a CFL light bulb, hanging their clothes out to dry, writing a letter to lawmakers or to the local newspaper, volunteering or taking part in an earth day activity. There is even a bonus challenge that allows for improvisation.

When young people submit their challenges, they are often required to share photo or video evidence of their accomplishments. After our Hot Dish moderator reviews these, points are awarded and the member’s story is shared with the entire Hot Dish community in the action feed.

We don’t think it’s necessary to provide prizes as incentives. For many communities, being seen as an active online member is enough recognition. However, for the purpose of building a large community quickly for this research, we decided to test the use of incentives for this project.

Hot Dish helps us keep tabs on the demographic of our community, as well as the issues and stories that are driving participation and growing in importance. We can even link challenges to specific stories. For example, later this month, we’ll be sharing stories with the Hot Dish community about the need for Earth to return to levels of 350 ppm CO². With each story, we’ll encourage members to take specific actions related to the 350 movement.

By leveraging Facebook, Hot Dish helps mission-driven organizations reach not just their members – but also their members’ friends. Hot Dish features have been designed to drive and reward interactions between readers and between readers and their friends. This makes Hot Dish an outstanding recruitment and retention solution.

Hot Dish provides support for many of the advanced Facebook application elements: minifeed stories, the profile box, the wall publisher, email attachments, the application tab, notifications and requests. With Facebook, we can quickly determine which of our members are the most highly networked and the Hot Dish leader board helps us identify our most active community members.

   

 

 

Not only does Hot Dish provide mechanisms for tracking member activity online and offline, but it gathers statistics about the activities of the community for our research, data which is also helpful to organizations wanting to learn more about their online membership. Facebook also provides statistics data with each application. And, integration with Google Analytics is also quite easy.

The technology behind Hot Dish has been built to be easily replicable. In fact, next month, we’re launching two more sites for the University of Minnesota and University of Washington (these two will go lighter on the action team).

Facebook applications on any topic can be easily constructed, either as branded, private label sites or as cooperative coalitions of organizations working together to build support for specific topics.

Organizations can work cooperatively publishing and sharing news on a specific topic, building community online on Facebook, even if they user different web platform technologies or are separated widely by geography.

In the future, NewsCloud hopes to expand its support for PHP and build Drupal and Plone extensions – these features will allow any organization running these website technologies to collaborate in Facebook with other organizations while presenting the entire news and action team concept within their existing website.

The source code for Hot Dish will be released to the open source community at the end of our project. You can learn more about the research here.If you are interested in learning more about Hot Dish technology, please feel free to contact me at jeff at newscloud dot com.