In his quest to seek out people and ideas shifting how the world works to make it better, Scott Henderson (SH) talks with Aria Finger (AF), COO of DoSomething.org, who was recently named one of Crain New York’s 40 under 40.

DoSomething.org is the largest organization in the United States for teens and social change. Almost every week, DoSomething.org launches a new campaign that can make it fun, easy, and exciting for your teen nieces and nephews to take action. Their recent Teens for Jeans campaign gathered over 1,000,000 blue jeans to clothe 2/3 of homeless teens in the country!

In this interview, Finger discusses how important it is for organizations to be transparent and accepting of failure. With a culture of openness, organization members will be more willing to take risks that are vital for growth.

Finger also explains how DoSomething has collected and leveraged data to make their campaigns more effective. Are your teenage nieces and nephews big on texting? Through several campaigns, DoSomething.org found that text message referrals are 45 times more effective than email in getting teens to take action. Based on this insight, they have integrated texting into the core of their mobile strategy.

SH: What is DoSomething, and what makes it stand out?

AF: DoSomething.org is actually the largest organization in the United States for young people and social change. Our whole goal is to make it as easy as possible – and fun and exciting too – for these young people to find a cause they’re passionate about and then take action. We literally just want young people to DoSomething.

SH: You guys have developed a number of partnerships out there. What are some of the things that people might have seen DoSomething.org?

AF: So, this all goes into our framework of running national campaigns around different causes that make it super easy for young people to plug in to get their school involved, their church group, their sports team, whatever it might be. And one of our best known campaigns is called Teens for Jeans, and it’s this big national campaign that we run every January with Aéropostal, the teen clothing retailer; and it’s based on the premise that we have 1.5 million homeless kids in the U.S – so, 1.5 million kids, teenagers, children who are homeless. And the one thing that they want is just a pair of blue jeans to fit in and feel like everyone else. And so, we run this massive campaign every January to encourage young people to run blue jeans drives in their schools. And this past January, we were able to collect 1 million pairs of jeans and clothe 2/3 of all homeless kids in the country.

SH: You’re a very transparent organization. Do you want to share some of the things that you’ve been doing that others may not know about and others may not be doing either?

AF: So, I think that one of the things that we’ve started doing – which is fantastic – is we started putting out quarterly dashboards. So, if you go to DoSomething.org/Dashboard, you can see we’re sort of laid bare. You can see our financials – how much cash we have on hand, how many members we have, places where we succeeded, places where we failed. And I think that one of the problems for the not-for-profit world is failure is seen as something you should hide under-the-rug, you shouldn’t talk about it. And that’s a problem. So, at DoSomething, we have something we call “Fail Fest” every six months where people have to present to the group, wearing a pink feather boa, on their latest failure and talk about why they failed, what they learned personally, what they learned for the organization. And that sort of open transparency lets us take risks, do something that we’re not sure is going to succeed; and I think it’s been really healthy for the organization. We were really scared to do it at first because we thought it might breed some bad stuff, but it’s really been wonderful.

SH: What kinds of things would you like to share in terms of data that DoSomething has been able to accumulate and share?

AF: I think the most interesting thing we’ve done recently around data is really look at our mobile strategy. And so, when I say mobile, I really mean text-messaging because teenagers send about 3,000 messages every month. And we were trying to look at what’s the impact of sending a teenager a text message and asking them to volunteer or sending them an email and asking them to volunteer. And we did several studies through various campaigns, and we found out when a friend refers a friend via text instead of via email. […] We saw 45 times more likely to take action with our campaigns if they were sent a text than if they were sent an email.

SH: What are some things that you guys have out on the horizon that we should be looking for?

AF: I think one thing we launched actually just yesterday [May 21, 2012] is called the Pregnancy Text. Teen Pregnancy is one of the top issues, and our young people have been telling us for a long time that we need to cover it. We all know the U.S. leads the developing world in teen pregnancy. […] What is compelling to them is immediate concerns. If you get pregnant, you won’t be able to hang out with your friends on the weekend or see the latest movie – they need to see real and immediate impacts. So, we launched this campaign, the Pregnancy Text, in which you can impregnate your friend’s phone. And for 24 hours, they will see what it’s like to be a mom or a dad of a newborn and really show it in the immediate effects sprinkled in with data, quizzes, information, where to get help, where to get resources. We want teens to be able to make their own decisions; we just want them to be informed with the decisions they’re making.

Learn more about DoSomething.org.

Listen to the full audio version of this interview, here.

Photo: Stuart Miles
Published: May 28, 2012