Fighting lice in Vancouver
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April 29th, 2008 by Alex
We knew this day would come. Lice...yuck!
As we struggle to contain the lice outbreak on our kids' heads, we share the following resources and insights:
- Think carefully before using pharmaceutical lice remedies like Nix. They are based on a natural derivative from chyrsanthemums, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily safe or effective. At the very least, you may find that your household gets MORE itchy before it gets LESS itchy. (That's how it worked over here.)
- Don't just treat your household. Ensure your daycare or school CAREFULLY examines all kids' heads, and commits parents to treating kids with lice or nits.
- Educate yourself. The most detailed resources we've found are at http://www.headlice.org
- Spring for the fancy tools. The plastic lice combs that come with most lice treatment products don't begin to do the job. The tea tree oil-based Lice Stop product available at natural health stores contains a much better, metal comb; you can also buy a higher a quality comb from your pharmacist.
- Expect to spend a lot of time and money solving the problem. We're currently spending 2-3 hours per night going over each head with a finetooth comb; and we've already spent $100 having bedding and clothing laundered after we ran out of hot water. (To kill lice, you have to use HOT water and HOT dryer heat.)
- Consider getting professional help. We've just called in the pros at http://www.lice911.ca to make sure we get the job 100% done.
- Build lice checks into your routine. We realize our little one has likely had this problem for a while. If we'd been doing weekly lice checks, we could have tackled this problem much earlier, and had an easier time of it. From now on, we're doing weekly checks on each kid.
- Whatever you do, don't blog about your family's lice. It will only lead to trouble. I'm just sure of it.
Every Human Has Rights makes human rights personal
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April 23rd, 2008 by Alex
For the past two months, I've been part of the digital strategy team for The Elders, an extraordinary NGO that was launched last year by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. The vision is to convene a council of elders for the global village; the founding elders include Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan.
As part of this work, I've been supporting the web team for Every Human Has Rights, a campaign to spread awareness and support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year is the sixtieth anniversary of UDHR, and being part of its celebration is a wonderful echo of one of the first pieces of work I did as a grad student at Harvard, thirteen years ago. (Ouch!) At that time I was a research assistant for Andrew Moravcsik, helping him research an article on international human rights regimes (PDF) that he published in time to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UDHR.
Moravcsik's article focused particularly on the creation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), which, unlike the UNDHR, was designed to be an enforceable document that would give individuals the legal standing to pursue human rights issues in an international court of law. What the ECHR advanced was the idea of personal, individual-level responsibility for human rights advocacy; what it lost was the boldness and breadth of vision of the UDHR.
The EHHR project recognizes that online networks provide a way to have your human rights cake, and eat it too. EHHR is focusing on each of the core themes of the UN Declaration, a sweeping document that addresses basic rights in areas from religion to employement, and from freedom of expression to healthcare. But by asking people around the world to sign on personally -- over the web -- as supporters of that Declaration, it's reawakening the idea that each and every one of us has a role to play in supporting human rights.
And that role doesn't need to be limited to a courtroom. One of the key partners on the EHHR project is Witness, an online NGO that uses video and web technology to tackle human rights abuses around the world. Through EHHR and Witness's user-driven site, The Hub, anyone in the world can be an active advocate for human rights -- a personal witness -- by contributing a video or online story.
EHHR and Witness are just two pieces of a large and growing online ecosystem for supporting human rights worldwide. Global Voices Online gathers bloggers from around the world, including many who are writing under adverse -- even life-threatening -- conditions in their home countries. Ushahidi and the Tunisian Prison Map are putting human rights abuses in Kenya and Tunisia on the map (literally). The Martus project provides digital security tools to protect the effectiveness and safety of people working on the front lines of human rights protection.
The growing online human rights ecosystem of which EHHR is a part didn't exist when Moravcsik wrote his article. At the time, the courts were the best option -- really, the only meaningful option -- for individuals to engage in the public sphere of human rights. What made that interesting to Moravcsik was the way that human rights agreements allowed governments to dig themselves into structural commitments to human rights, with citizens serving as the hypothetical watchdogs.
Today there's a whole new set of tools to give those hypothetical watchdogs real teeth. But now, citizens don't have to wait to be invited into that role, nor do they have to find their way into a courtroom. They just have to pick up a cell phone, a camera, or a keyboard, and they can hold human rights violations accountable in the court of global public opinion.
The technologies are all there....all that's missing is the recognition of meaningful personal accountability for human rights. That's what EHHR puts back in the picture, by asking and every one of us to sign a personal commitment to the bold vision the UN set forth sixty years ago.
Of course, when the Declaration was written, most UN members would not have envisioned a world in which access to global communications could be virtually universal. Now that we have it, it's time to make human rights universal, too.
How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0: Part 5 - Product sales
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April 22nd, 2008 by Alex
This blog post is part of our series on Social Media for Social Enterprise: How non-profits can earn revenue with Web 2.0.
What bake sales once were to PTAs, online storefronts are to today's non-profits. We're used to thinking about participants in non-profit web sites as members or supporters, people we are trying to reach with a message or mobilize around a campaign. But your online community members can also be customers -- customers who may be delighted to spend their dollars in a way that supports their values and your work.
Here are some of the forms that online product sales can take:
- Schwag: Your site can earn money by selling promotional items (t-shirts, mugs, posters, bumper stickers, yo-yos) with your organization's name or a related message. (I'm waiting for someone to buy me an Obama Mama t-shirt.) This is a great way to get your message out and earn money at the same time. While you can earn more money by mass producing these items for sale, you can limit your risk (or test the waters) by using a print-to-order service like Goodstorm (a printing service set up to support non-profits, and recently acquired by Zazzle) or Café Press.
- Educational materials: If your organization engages in education or issue awareness work, your web site can be a great way to sell or distribute educational materials like books, DVDs or CDs. Think carefully about how to weigh your revenue goals against your desire to get the message out: selling your products at high prices may limit their circulation. On the other hand, shipping stuff for free may make it hard for you to fund development or distribution.
- Media downloads: Selling educational or cultural products electronically is a terrific way to earn revenue while limiting distribution costs. If your organization has produced a book, magazine, poster, DVD or CD, could you sell it in electronic form? Once you create an electronic version of any of these products, the marginal cost of each additional sale is zero: selling a thousand copies of your Christmas concert in MP3 form costs no more than selling ten. Again, think about the trade-off between revenue and mission: distributing media products electronically for free (or very cheap) is also a great way to get out your message.
- Social enterprise: If your organization supports community enterprise, you can sell the products of that enterprise on your site. Tilonia.com is an online store specifically created to sell the products of the Barefoot College.
- Mission-aligned products: Even if you're not directly involved in a community enterprise, you can still find mission-aligned products to sell on your site. For example, an organization promoting responsible forestry could sell recycled paper products. You can stock a warehouse and ship products yourself, or you can partner with a retailer or social enterprise, and earn transaction fees from each sale that is processed by or referred from your site.
- Affiliate sales: If you don't want to deal with the costs of production, fulfillment and credit card processing -- or you want to test your visitors' appetite for on-site purchasing before you make an investment -- consider setting up affiliate sales. The Amazon Associates program is a great, unobtrusive way of generating revenue from books or other products you happen to mention on your site; linking those recommendations to an Amazon account earns you dollars and makes the follow-up process easier for your readers. The BookSense affiliate program is similar, but sends your visitors' business to independent booksellers. For a wider range of potential advertisers, check out Commission Junction, which runs affiliate programs for many major retailers.
Before you setup your virtual storefront, here are some issues to consider:
- Do our visitors like to shop online? Unless your site visitors include a meaningful number of people who already buy products online, they're probably not going to start with you.
- What products do our visitors want? If you're already selling products,you know which t-shirts or community products are most popular with your members and supporters. If you've never sold products before, do some market testing before you commit to production or sales.
- How much will it cost us to set up our sales capacity? There are lots of e-commerce options, including Paypal, that make it easy to set up storefronts and complete credit card transactions. Be prepared to invest some money to make your storefront look good, and to make it easy for people to shop. Invest in airtight security for credit card transactions -- ideally avoiding any in-house handling of credit card numbers.
- How much will it cost us to fulfill our orders? Look for products that have low marginal costs to produce or ship. Information products (like document, music or video downloads) are ideal because once you produce your first unit, every additional unit sold is virtually 100% profit. If you're producing physical products look carefully at the costs of both product design and fulfillment, and figure out the price point and sales volume that optimizes your profit margins.
- Can we outsource production or fulfillment in a way that aligns with our mission? Outsourcing the production of your product or fulfillment of your orders can save you time and money, and keep your organization focused on its core mission. But be sure that you outsource in a way that supports your mission and values. Find out about the wages and labor conditions of your contractors; if you wouldn't feel comfortable seeing that information disclosed with your organization's name attached to it, look for another option. Better yet, look for contractors who actively reflect what you stand for: if you're a women's organization, look for women-owned businesses. If you're a development organization, look for partners in countries where you work.
I'll venture to say that most non-profits have at least a couple of good options for products they can produce and sell online. If you have loyal members or active supporters, you have a message that people want to hear. Figure out whether that message fits better on a t-shirt or in an e-book, and you're on your way.
A mathemetician, a librarian, and a web strategist walk into a bar…
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April 1st, 2008 by Alex
I know, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. (Or a great cartoon! Rob, care to give it a try?)
But believe me, if you asked them to write a document, the mathematician and the librarian would come out ahead. Why?
Brackets.
You know, like
(2+2) X (18/3)
Or like
("climate change" OR sustainability) AND (water OR H20)
But here I am, the lonely web strategist, struggling to write a document that repeatedly uses the phrase, "external engagement and social media strategy advice and support". I know what I mean, but will the client?
What I really need is Boolean syntax. Why shouldn't I be able to write in the form,
(((external engagement AND social media) strategy)) advice AND support
See, isn't that MUCH clearer now?
How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0: Part 3 - Earning revenue with advertising
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April 1st, 2008 by Alex
Welcome to the latest installment in our series on revenue sources for non-profit social media projects. Today, I'm looking at what many non-profits first think of (and often, recoil at) when it comes to earning money online: advertising.
If your site attracts a lot of visitors -- or even a niche community of visitors that advertisers want to reach -- you can place advertising on your site to generate revenue. There are three types of advertising to consider:
- An ad service. Ad services handle all the work of finding advertisers, and place ads onto your site based on your content or keywords. In return, they take a (usually large) percentage of ad revenue. The most widely-used service is Google Adsense, which places advertising on your site based on keywords; this means you may have some ads appear on your site that don't fit with your message (for example, a web page about endangered fish may end up displaying ads for fish recipes) but you can veto ads as you identify problems. Other services focus on building specific communities of content based on quality; for example, Federated Media is an ad network for high-traffic bloggers. Some ad services place plaintext ads; others place images; Google itself gives the option of text or images.
- Your own ad system. If you want more control over the ads that appear on your site, you can sell ad space yourself. You can sell ads on a "per impression" (advertisers pay for how many times their ads get shown) or a "per click" (advertisers pay for how many times people actually click through to their ads) basis. You can sell ads that show up anywhere or everywhere on your site ("run of site" advertising) or you can sell ads on specific pages (for example, a youth-oriented brand may want to place ads specifically on your youth services page). You can place multiple ads on a single page, and you can charge higher rates for more prominent pages or spaces -- for example, the top banner ad on your home page will likely command the highest price on your site. Selling your own ads means you can keep all the revenue you generate, but be aware of both cost of sales (you'll need someone to sell those ads) and technical costs (for payment processing and setting up a system for placing your ads).
- Sponsorships. As a non-profit organization, you may prefer advertiser "sponsorship" to traditional advertising. A sponsor (or set of sponsors) typically supports the entire site, though it is also possible to have specific sponsors support specific programs or areas of the site, particularly if they are highly specialized or resource-intensive. You could have one organization as the supporting sponsor of your main site, and another organization as the sponsor of an online community for a specific group of users (e.g. a community of young mothers). Sponsors will typically be credited as the sponsor of a site with a (potentially quite prominent) display of their name, logo, and possibly a tag line, but rarely place a full message on the site as they would with an ad (although in some cases sponsorship could include advertising). Sponsorship can feel less commercialized than an ad (which some organizations feel uncomfortable placing on their sites) and may have tax advantages for the sponsor, compared with advertising.
Advertising is one of the most obvious ways for a non-profit to earn revenue from its web presence -- and if you use a service like Adsense, one of the easiest ways, too. But many non-profits are wisely cautious about placing ads on their site. Typical concerns include:
- possible conflict with non-profit tax status
- appearance of being overly commercialized
- driving traffic away from the non-profit's own site
- introducing off-message ads or content
Before you decide whether advertising is the right fit for you, consider:
- How much revenue do you stand to earn? If you a have a low-traffic site, the upside of advertising is limited.
- How will ads affect the perception of your site and organization? Ads feel particularly inappropriate on sites with a deeply personal or difficult message. Imagine how you'd feel if you saw an ad on a campaign page about Darfur.
- What form of advertising would earn the most revenue? Consider whether to go with "per click" ads (which pay only if your visitors follow the links) or "per impression" ads (which pay simply for appearing).
- How can you test advertising options? Ads aren't all or nothing. Consider placing ads on a few pages on your site, and asking for feedback before you proceed.
- How will advertising affect other possibilities for revenue generation? Be sure to look at the other options we cover in this series. It might be that an option like premium service would yield more income -- and your premium service could be an ad-free version.
Resources to help you learn more:
Using Google Adsense to generate income for your church or non-profit organization
A look at some Adsense alternatives
YouTube views as a proxy for web success
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March 30th, 2008 by Alex
We're often asked how organizations can measure the return on investment from social media. Frank Rich's column in today's New York Times effectively uses YouTube views as a proxy for the overall success of the Obama and Clinton campaigns in tapping the power of the web:
The Drudge Report’s link to the YouTube iteration of the CBS News piece [broadcasting Hillary Clinton's arrival in Bosnia, with no evidence to support her recollection of dodging sniper fire] transformed it into a cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond a third-place network news program’s nightly audience. It had more YouTube views than the inflammatory Wright sermons, more than even the promotional video of Britney Spears making her latest “comeback” on a TV sitcom. It was as this digital avalanche crashed down that Mrs. Clinton, backed into a corner, started offering the alibi of “sleep deprivation” and then tried to reignite the racial fires around Mr. Wright.
The Clinton campaign’s cluelessness about the Web has been apparent from the start, and not just in its lagging fund-raising. Witness the canned Hillary Web “chats” and “Hillcasts,” the soupy Web contest to choose a campaign song (the winner, an Air Canada advertising jingle sung by Celine Dion, was quickly dumped), and the little-watched electronic national town-hall meeting on the eve of Super Tuesday. Web surfers have rejected these stunts as the old-school infomercials they so blatantly are.
Senator Obama, for all his campaign’s Internet prowess, made his own media mistake by not getting ahead of the inevitable emergence of commercially available Wright videos on both cable TV and the Web. But he got lucky. YouTube videos of a candidate in full tilt or full humiliation, we’re learning, can outdraw videos of a candidate’s fire-breathing pastor. Both the CBS News piece on Mrs. Clinton in Bosnia and the full video of Mr. Obama’s speech on race have drawn more views than the most popular clips of a raging Mr. Wright.
New look & feel, kind of almost there
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March 23rd, 2008 by Alex
The new and much improved look of my blog is based on the blog style template at Open Designs, created by fellow-Canadian Collin Grasley. Rob hacked it into Wordpress-iness for me, a process that’s still being debugged.
Open Designs is a very cool site that offers more than a thousand different blog and website looks, all available for repurposing. Once we finish adapting the theme to Wordpress, we plan on repaying the open source goodness by contributing the Wordpress version to the Wordpress theme garden — if that’s ok with Collin.
Please standby while this leopard changes its spots
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March 22nd, 2008 by Alex
We’re retheming alexandrasamuel.com tonight. Could get funky, people!
Good parenting 2.0
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March 13th, 2008 by Alex
Yesterday I Googled each of our kids for the first time, in the form "John Smith".
No, we did not name our kids John Smith. And here's why: there are 4,640,000 results for "John Smith" on Google.
But for each of our kids? None. Zero. Zip.
Sure, our kids may eventually complain that we took them to MacWorld instead of Disney World. Or that we spent too much time blogging, when we could have been bonding.
But they will never, ever have to worry about being unfindable on Google.
And isn't that what good parenting is all about?
Wrap your brand in reflected glory
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March 2nd, 2008 by Alex
Someone needs to tell the folks at Glad: Unless your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, don't build an online community around your brand. That's rule #1 in marketing with social media -- and reason #1 for instead taking an approach we call reflected glory marketing. In reflected glory marketing you create a web site that resonates with your brand, but focuses on something your customer cares passionately about. Think of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, or Amex's Members Project. Or think of some of the projects we've launched in-house: BC Hydro's Green Gifts application for Facebook, or Vancity's Change Everything.
In my keynotes and presentations about marketing with social media, I often make this point by referring to an over-the-top scenario: a company that tries to build an online community about plastic wrap. It seems obvious that people just aren't that passionate about plastic wrap.....but it wasn't obvious to the folks at Glad, who launched the 1000 Uses site in 2006 to promote their Press 'N Seal product.
The site solicits tips on all the different ways you can use plastic wrap, organized by room. It's got a very swishy interface that lets you click on different rooms in a house to see the fantastic things you can do there with plastic wrap. And it aims to incentivize user contributions with a chance to win $1000 each month by submitting a tip.
That's a pretty generous prize, and it succeeded in eliciting well over 1000 tips between the site's launch in October 2006, and the beginning of August 2007. At that point the site appeared to go into....hibernation. That's right, not a single tip posted between August 2, and December 10.Well, not a single tip published.
In an obsessive quest to plumb the psychological and managerial depths of the 1000 Uses team, I spent a rather enjoyable evening in early November coming up with tips that I hoped would give me a sense of the Glad team's tolerance for creativity:
The first two were attempts to test the level of moderation (are they moderating for tastefulness? public safety?) I added the third just to have something I'd feel confident about them posting, but none of my entries made it onto the site. I'd chalk it up to clever sleuthing on their part -- perhaps someone thought to google my name, and figured out I'm a social media blogger? -- except for the conspicuous four-month dead zone between August and December. There was a batch of twenty tips posted between December 10th and 13th (evidently I'm not the only one who thinks of mid-December as plastic wrap season) but nothing since.
I'm going to go out on a big, tightly-wrapped limb here and suggest a few general lessons that can be inferred from the Glad example:
- User-contributed content isn't enough to create a community: even if you can incentivize people to contribute, unless they actually care about the topic (and each other) they have no reason to come back.
- You may spend your way to traffic, but you can't spend your way to success. Glad's traffic strategy seems to involve pointing a kabillion high-value URLs at the 1000 Uses site (http://www.tapwater.com, www.eating.com, and www.whiten.com were just a few of the URLs that I found pointed towards 1000uses.com when I searched on google). I guess if you have a whack of unused URLs sitting around, why not, but a site full of interesting content would be a far more efficient way of generating traffic.
- Contests can't motivate people to write about something intrinsically boring. And of course, before people can be motivated to contribute to a contest, they have to know about it....which is tough when you give other sites and bloggers absolutely no reason to point people your way. (Until now!)
- Don't spend big bucks to build a pretty site -- spend big bucks building a living community. Glad should be grinding its teeth at the four-month gap between contributions, and at the three months since the last batch went live. (Which leads me to wonder...where did the January and February winners announced on the site come from, given that the most recent tips are dated in December?) I'm guessing that the flurry of tips between December 10-13 didn't represent a spike in tips; it's just that someone finally took a few days to go through and post. More regular infusions of attention wouldn't make the site a humming concern, but it would at least convey some sense of sustained interest on the part of Glad consumers.
But this is exactly where reflected glory marketing can offer a better way. Instead of creating a site around its immediate product, Glad could have launched a useful, engaging community that resonates with the market for its product. For example, it could have built on themes like
- Home organizing: Broaden the request for user-submitted tips to any tips about home organizing, and you'd tap into a massive community of interest in topics like home storage and family organizing. Plastic wrap might be one tool to highlight....along with baskets, boxes, label-makers, etc. Even the room-by-room structure could work, but by inviting users to talk about a wider range of topics, you can create a real community rather than a vaguely interactive ad. Turning user-contributors into "curators" of special topics like closets or craft organizing, and you'd deepen the legitimacy and commitment of the site.
- Leftovers: Unleash a passionate community of family cooks with the features of a web 2.0 foodie community like Group Recipes, crossed with the leftovers focus of a LeftOverchef. Invite people to exchange recipes for using leftovers along with food storage and safety tips.
- Preservation: With more and more attention on sustainability, preserving things -- whether it's food, sofa cushions, or kids' art -- has a new urgency. If we can be careful with what we have, and use it as long as possible, we reduce our need for new products or chemical cleanings. Much of the Glad site focuses on preservation uses of its wrapping; why not open a larger conversation about the value of preservation? From preserving art or historic buildings to storing wedding dresses and mementos, many people are passionately committed to some aspect of preservation. Bring them together to talk about what they are keeping, why they are keeping it, and how they are keeping it safe, and you engage them at a far deeper level.
And unlike a brand-centric approach, reflected glory marketing doesn't have to be wrapped in contests to stay alive. It's sustained by the energy and passion of the community itself. And there's no better way than true community passion to ensure your site has a nice, long shelf life.
How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0: Intellectual property
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March 1st, 2008 by Alex
This week, I return to the questions I recently posed about social media and social enterprise:
- How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments?
- And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?
One potential answer lies in the value of intellectual property that non-profits create or distribute through their social media projects. The creation of a sophisticated web site involves the creation of a lot of intellectual property -- property that has financial value. This property can be monetized in a number of ways:
Software licensing: If you create a software service or web platform that is useful to other nonprofits, too, they may pay you to use it. You can license your software by selling it (one-time fee), by licensing (monthly or annual fees) or by hosting (including web hosting along with the software license itself). Before you take this opportunity, though, consider the potentially benefit -- for your mission and your brand -- of giving the software away to the people you serve, or organizations that are working for the same ends.
Content sales: If your staff or site visitors create original content on your site, you may be able to resell some or all of that content to other sites or media outlets. Just be sure that you are completely clear with your contributors that you will or may repurpose their work -- even if the contributors are staff. Make sure your user agreement on the site reflects how you're re-using content, and consider sharing revenue with your users (à la Squidoo, among others) as a way of motivating their contributions.
Data sales: If you have a high volume of site traffic, or serve an influential or sought-after audience, data on your site's users or usage patterns may have financial value. This an area in which you want to tread VERY carefully -- respecting your users' privacy is crucial to building site loyalty, and is also just a good thing -- so we'll return to it in our "gray zones" post. But you are probably ok if you are selling aggregate data, rather than individual data. For example, you could survey your users and sell the results of that survey -- perhaps as a quarterly "subscribers only" report. Here more than anywhere it is crucial to be 100% transparent about your use of data; burying this aspect of your business model in the fine print of your user agreement may provide legal coverage, but it won't make your users happy if they're caught by surprise. If you can explain how data sales support your work -- ideally, not just financially, but in some way supporting your mission -- so much the better.
mini-case: the Environmental Defense Fund launches GetActive
Environmental Defense is a large US-based non-profit that works on environmental issues, with a 300 person staff and a $72 million annual budget. In the late 1990s, Environmental defense had a total of about 8 staff on its online team, which was responsible not only for maintaining the main ED web site, but also a couple of related projects. One was scorecard.org, which provided information about environmental performance to the public. The other was actionnetwork.org, a site that gathered supporters' email addresses and turned them into online activists -- winning an early victory when they mobilized thousands of supporters to win a ban against the practice of "shark finning" (where hunters catch sharks, amputate their fins for sale, and return the sharks to the ocean to die).
As the team behind these two Internet projects outgrew its place within Environmental Defense's organizational structure, it came up with an innovative solution: spin the Internet project team off into a separate company. The new company launched in 2000, and eventually became GetActive Software. GetActive supplied software and services to Environmental Defense, and Environmental Defense got an ownership stake of less than 20 percent in the new company. GetActive earned an estimated $13 million in revenue in 2006, making it one of the largest software vendors to the non-profit sector, before selling to competitor Convio in early 2007. Later that year, Convio announced its intention to go public -- putting Environmental Defense in a position to reap the rewards of a still-forthcoming I.P.O.
For more see:
- Environmental Defense: From Brochureware to Actionware (2001 interview with GetActive founder Bill Pease)
- Taking Stock:There's Profit in Nonprofit Groups ,(Information Week, 2003)
- Aquisition Frenzy (The NonProfit Times, 2007)
This iPod weighs four pounds
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February 21st, 2008 by Alex
Today is the 8-day anniversary of my iPhone, and in those eight days a whole bunch of people have asked if I've lost weight. At first I thought it was just that the iPhone made me look thinner -- you know, like a good pair of jeans. But this morning I stepped on the scale and sure enough, I've lost four pounds.
I've done a retrospective analysis of the past 8 days of my life, and I think all four pounds can be directly attributable to significant iPhone-related lifestyle changes:
| More time spent surfing while standing up with iPhone, rather than seated with Macbook Pro | .1 |
| Walked to two meetings I previously would have driven to, because I can leave my Macbook at the office and can walk further when I'm not carrying it | .5 |
| Took kids for a long stroller ride while chatting on my Bluetooth headset | .25 |
| Elimination of snacking while waiting for Treo to S-L-O-W-L-Y load a web page | .5 |
| Skipped dinner because I got into bed with my daughter and my iPhone and couldn't tear myself away from the iPhone even after my daughter fell asleep | .25 |
| Walked to the bus after a meeting (rather than bringing the car) because I was able to have a walking-meeting-by-iPhone rather than rushing back to the office | .25 |
| Found a healthy recipe for dinner on Epicurious rather than ordering Thai food | .25 |
| Used iPhone during drive to work to access bank account, pay Visa card so there'd be money for groceries, rather than foraging for whatever (inevitably) higher-cal food happened to be in the cupboards when we got home | .75 |
| Avoided scheduling a meeting during my workout time because I was able to review an accurate current schedule on my iPhone | .25 |
| Overall reduction in anxiety-related snacking due to increased sense of well-being from iPhone-y goodness | .75 |
| TOTAL WEIGHT LOSS | 4 lbs |
When you compare the up-front cost of an iPhone the cost and performance of other weight loss programs, four pounds in a little over a week looks like a pretty good deal:
- If you sign up for Jenny Craig, you'll pay $77 to $119 per week (not including food) to lose 1-2 pounds a week; if it takes you seven weeks to lose 10 pounds, that translates into about $585 (compared to just $499 for a 16 GB iPhone, which at the current rate, will have me down by 10 pounds in just 2.5 weeks).
- NutriSystem charges $293 per month (including food), and you can figure on losing ten pounds in four to ten weeks -- so figure it may cost as much as $732 to lose the weight an iPhone can take off in just four weeks.
- People lose weight faster on the Zone -- something like 8 to 10 pounds a month -- but it costs $40 per day; you could buy two iPhones for that money -- with Bluetooth headsets!! -- and lose weight with a friend.
Coming soon, the latest Apple campaign: iSkinny.