We made Mass High Tech today with “Givvy makes charitable giving high-tech…” I really need a better picture!  It’s great to start getting some coverage for our little venture here.  Of course, most of the investors we’re trying to reach are hanging out on the Vineyard or Nantucket and playing golf this time of year.  If you are an investor and reading this - give me a call (617-290-3955).

Nancy Schwartz just awarded winners in her “best taglines” contest - Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards. In general, most company taglines - nonprofit or for profit - are worthless.   A tagline should relate to your mantra or vision about what you want to be.  “Ultimate Driving Machine” from BMW is a great example of a tagline that has stood the test of time.  Contrast that with Nissan’s “SHIFT_” which requires a whole paragraph to explain on their corporate Web site.  You know that tagline won’t last.  Heck, I had to look it up because I couldn’t remember anything other than it was lame.

Many of the pick’s from Nancy’s list are actually quite good.  My favorite is “Stay Close…Go Far” from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania - perhaps tied with “Whatever it takes to save a child” from UNICEF.  You can go to school here and go a long way in life.  Yeah, I like that.  Or, we’ll move heaven, earth and anything else that gets in our way to save a child.  Powerful!

Some others are a bit underwhelming - like “The Art of Active Aging” from EngAGE.  It’s okay. Then there’s “All Building Starts with a Foundation” by Building Future Builders.  Cute, but not emotionally engaging.

So that got me to thinking about our tagline - “Better Givving for a Better World.”  We are trying to make it easier for people to give better - more effectively - which can have a positive impact on the world.  I’m too close to really evaluate it.  Does it do the trick?  Is the “v v” treatment in Givving too much, or does it help reinforce the Givvy brand?  Is it on par with some of the taglines on Nancy’s list?

Alan Watts was one of the best known “pop” philosophers with amazing insights into humanity.  Seth here at Givvy pointed out this great animation tied to recordings of some of his more notable lectures.  It’s worth the few minutes to watch and, most of all, listen…

Seth Godin has a great post from yesterday called “Let me see.“  It’s 18 ideas of how to present data in a way that is more valuable - such as a list of doctors in my down sorted by malpractice rate or car models sorted by crash and repair data (I’d add injuries and fatalities per million passenger miles, etc.).

So, how about let me see…

1. charities sorted by those that my family or friends care about
2. charities sorted by the ratings and reviews of people I know
3. charities sorted by their impact in my own local community
4. charities sorted by those that actually perform services vs. those that fund the charities that perform services (e.g. show me Horizons for Homeless Children, not the agencies that fund HHC)

Sound good?  I thought so…  What do you want to see?

The last week or so our team has been struggling with search performance against our database of 1.4 million charities/nonprofits.  We’re making progress, but the causes for the performance issue have been very difficult to pin down.

Givvy uses the Lucene search engine, which is in its native rendition a part of the Apache project.  By all accounts it’s very robust, highly scalable and well-supported by the open source community.  CNET Reviews uses Lucene and it’s both fast and very usable.  Given that we have been building Givvy using the Symfony PHP framework, we have been using sfLucene (which is really a wrapper on the Zend Framework implementation of Lucene).  We’d love to use Google Search Appliance or something similar, but we don’t have the budget for that now…  Besides, open source is cool, ya?

Seth, our guru of all new knowledge, has been wrestling with this performance issue (also related - memory leak) for the past 2 weeks.  Recently he installed the Apache version which uses Java (Seth is new to Java).  Then he set up an index of 100,000 Scrabble words in both versions and tested the performance.  Seth is a competitive Scrabble player and runs the primary Scrabble rankings site, cross-tables.com.  Having been a Java bigot for a lot of my enterprise tech career (Sybase, etc.) I was expecting Lucene/Java to outperform sfLucene - which it did.  When I asked Seth “how much faster?” he replied “a lot.”  Typical Seth response… so I asked him to be a bit more precise.

While I knew it was “a lot” faster, I did not expect was that in one test Lucene was up to 30 times faster than sfLucene!  Now Seth is frantically trying to re-write our search system to use the Apache version of Lucene so we can try it against our 1.4M charity records.  Stay tuned!

Sometimes I read about a site or piece of software and have one of these “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments.  Gnip is the most recent example.  This has little to do directly with the nonprofit world and giving, but it’s still cool.  What Gnip does is become a central service for receiving and distributing updates from data-feed sites such as Digg, flickr, etc.   The purpose is for publishers of this data to have fewer people asking for the same stuff over and over, and for consumers of the data to be proactively notified (pinged - gnip = ping backwards) instead of having to constantly poll the publishers’ sites.

I saw this on Brad Feld’s “Feld Thoughts” blog (a good blod to read, btw).  Brad’s a partner in the Foundry Group, a VC firm out of Boulder, CO.  He points to a really great article from Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital about Francis Bates, the inventor of the modern mailbox (the flag was his innovation).  The similarity between Gnip and Bates’ mailbox flag is that both innovations cut down on unnecessary traffic - the flag on the mailbox meant the mail carrier didn’t have to stop at every address to check for outgoing mail.  It also meant you could stay inside on rainy days and only go to the mailbox to retrieve your mail once the mailman put up the flag (funny, they don’t do this anymore, do they?).

Best of luck to the Gnip team!

The last few days our development team has been wrestling with a particularly difficult technical issue with the Givvy site.  Specifically, the our site was “leaking” memory on our servers to the degree that Givvy became unusable after only minutes of activity.  For those of you who don’t know what a memory leak is, it’s when the server does something that needs memory, but does not give the memory back when the task is completed.  Over time, the application holds more and more of the memory (think the card game War which ends when one player has all the cards).  At some point the application has all of the memory available on the server and can’t do any more work because doing work requires more memory. Gridlock is the result…

Anyway, Seth and James both worked hard on understanding why this was happening and coming up with a fix (it works).  It should be noted that this leak is somehow systemic to our PHP/Symfony/Lucene environment and was not caused by any of the code these guys wrote.  That said - the problem seems to have been fixed.

Nice work, guys!!

Erich Broksas over at the Case Foundation suggested I check out the Calvert Foundation.  This is a pretty interesting venture that allows individuals to invest in securities that have a fixed rate of return that you set from between 0 and 3%.  Calvert then lends out the money to organizations working on community-related projects such as housing, microcredit and other areas.  You get your money back at the end (1, 3, 5, 7 or 10 years) plus interest at the rate you set.

Unlike donations, your investment is not tax-deductible - but you get your money back.  If you’re in the 33% tax bracket, a $1,000 donation will shave $330 off of your taxes that year, but you’ve given up $670 of your principal.  If you invest $1,000 in a Calvert Foundation Comunity Investment Note for 5 years, you get your principal back at the end of 5 years.  Assuming 4% inflation and setting your note interest at 0%, the “real” amount returned to you is $815, or an inflation-based $185 loss of purchasing power.  During the 5 years your capital has helped build affordable housing, or capitalized socially-oriented small businesses, or provided microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing economies. You can reinvest it or choose to donate it at that time.

Calvert has a cool “Social ROI” calculator that shows how $1,000 over 5 years helps create “7.83 microenterprises and create 15.68 jobs in communities around the world.”  Worth checking this out.

So back in January I posted about a survey we did.  The chart that shows the results of the in-depth survey about the Givvy concept is below.  As mentioned at the start of the year - we were really psyched about the results and it gave us a big boost to get the product development kicked into high gear.

I was at lunch today with my friend Myron Kassaraba and at one point he mentioned his friend Jeb Hurley at Resonance Technologies.  Jeb was actually very generous and helped us with this survey. Our experience with the guys at RT was overwhelmingly positive.

First, their methodology is really great and gets at the underlying motivations.  Anybody can ask simple questions like “would you try this?” and get a bunch of junk data that does not correlate well with the real world.  Resonance gets their respondents to provide in-depth answers as to what they like and dislike about an idea/product concept, and most importantly - how does it make them feel.  From their they can really get at the motivations and underlying needs of the target audience in a way that is much more predictive than traditional survey.

Perhaps importantly for smaller companies, start-ups, VCs and others looking to validate a company (or even a nonprofit service), Resonance can do all of this without breaking the bank.  The service we used - RezTech Predictor - has a base cost of only $9,950.  A traditional survey from one of the larger firms can run into the $50k range very quickly.

I highly recommend you guys check out Resonance Technologies.  If you want an intro to Jeb, let me know.

While waiting for the development team to post an update I caught up on some of my blogs that I don’t get to very often.  On of these, Presentation Zen, is truly excellent and should be on anybody’s “must read” list if they give or help prepare presentations.