This post is by Jenny Li, summer intern at Sparked hailing from UMich. Jenny spent the summer improving Sparked’s nonprofit experience. This is her last report.
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As Captain of Nonprofit Happiness, I’ve spent the summer figuring out what makes nonprofits happy.
As discussed earlier, we found that successful challenges make nonprofits happy, and that there are controllable factors for challenge success. Looking back at all the challenges from the beginning of Sparked to February of this year, historically, 47% of nonprofits are happy (have closed a challenge and marked it successful) while 15% are unhappy (marked their challenge as unsuccessful), and 37% don’t close their challenges, which means that we don’t know much about their state of mind.
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Armed with this knowledge, I came up with tactics to increase nonprofit happiness, and tested them on challenges that came in during a two-week period. If successful challenges are instrumental to nonprofit happiness, then I would guide all challenges so that they would have all the factors for challenge success.
As reported in my initial post, the reasons for failure usually have to do with poorly written challenges.
I began by emailing nonprofits suggestions for changes, such as uploading resources for design challenges, clarifying information, and adding links to information. Moving on from email, I also commented on challenges, sending in suggestions to add more information. I also directly manually edited some of the challenges–small things like correcting hyperlinking and spacing, adding links, changing formatting, improving challenge titles. So did monitoring 241 challenges improve happiness?
The numbers definitely look better–though the percentage of expired challenges are higher than historic (nonprofits tend to take a while to close challenges – I’ve seen challenges get closed quite a while after expiration). The percentage of closed challenges marked successful are also higher than historic, and even better, the percentage of closed challenges marked unsuccessful is much lower. This is great! Even though 50% of the challenges in the two-week period are still open, these numbers are looking pretty good. So which tactics should the Captain of Nonprofit happiness continue to do and which ones didn’t work?
Emailing the nonprofits was not very successful. Nonprofits responded best to comments posted directly on their challenge pages… this tactic resulted in edits to the challenge title and brief that resulted in better responses by volunteers and better overall results.
