Building to Scale at DoSomething.org

# DoSomething.org - 100,000 to 3 million members in 3 years

A presentation for NYU and SVA students at Social Enterprise Bootcamp.

## Intro

- Barry Clark
- Director of Technical Product
- I manage the engineering side of our big projects at DoSomething.

- Largest org in the US for social good.
- 3.1 million members.
- We run huge nationwide campaigns.

## This Presentation

- I'm going to cover the 7 things that were most critical to our growth.
- We learned them on the job and and continuing to learn and get better at them.

## 1. Setting a huge vision

- This is our CEO, Nancy Lublin.
- Sets the vision for our team.
- Repeats it all of the time.
- "Fight for the user".
- Includes our vision for growth: 5 million members by the end of next year.

## 2. Focusing on one thing

- We were doing too many things: petitions, quizzes, campaigns, facebook apps.
- We were spread too thin.
- Figure out the one thing that makes you fly.
- Invest in that.
- Don't put time into other things.
- (Especially things that don't push your core KPI)

- STORY: 20 to 200
- We killed all of the other things.
- We invested in campaigns and the platform for those.
- Now we're scaling them out.

## 3. Validating ideas

- There's no shortage of amazing ideas in our org, and all non-profits.
- We all have a bias towards our own ideas.
- But we have to develop a bias against them.
- We take pride in invalidating ideas—disproving them as quickly as possible.

- STORY: MGC
- STORY: Fantini's SMS blast.

- We're about to do this next with mobile app ideas.
- Fail fast and when you fail DROP IT.

- A note on A/B testing: it's for optimization.
- STORY: 11 Facts.

## 4. Measuring one KPI

- All of the ideas you're testing should push your one KPI.
- Ours is member count.
- Member count.
- Report backs.
- equals impact!

- What's your most important KPI?
- Measure it.

## 5. Listening to our users

- The most important thing to us is our users.
- We spend time with them, and listen to them.
- You can listen in customer support.
- You can listen in user testing.

- STORY: Talk about campaigns template user testing.

- Warning: just don't do everything users say. Listen for the underlying reason.

## 6. Understanding our growth engine

- Figure out your growth engine early.
- How are you getting users? Where are they coming from?

- STORY: Ours was fastweb, PR, partnerships. Also mobile referrals.
- Go for sustainable growth. Be aware of risk factors.
- We're now pushing for SEO. (73% of our traffic now comes from organic search)

## 7. Hiring mission oriented people

- When I joined DoSomething we were 20 people, now we're 57.
- Being mission oriented helps hugely when hiring.
- STORY: I'm at DoSomething because I found something called our culture book.
- Our mission is to help young people across the US take action for social good.
- Other perks of being non-profit and mission oriented: Grab freebies! (non-profit lisences, conference tickets, Google Adwords, beer)

## Conclusion

1. Setting a huge vision
2. Focusing on one thing
3. Validating ideas
4. Measuring one KPI
5. Listening to our users
6. Understanding our growth engine
7. Hiring mission oriented people

## Resources

- www.dosomething.org
- @dosomething
- @baznyc
- www.barryclark.co

- Alex Shultz - Stanford Startup Class: Episode 6 - Growth
- Chamath Palihapitiya - How we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users