CrisisTextLine.org is a text message hotline that connects teens with counselors at any time of the day. They are now opening up their data to help professionals and politicians understand more about teen crisis. To date they have handled over 3 million texts and are now opening up this information for people to explore. We talk with Bob Filbin, the chief data scientist at CTL about how their system works and why it matters to open up their data.

Caroline Reese & the Drifting Fifth are a Pennsylvania-based alt-country/Americana band. They’ve performed throughout the East Coast, appeared on Gene Shay’s famous WXPN Folk Show, and recently opened for Ben Folds.

Episode 18

Speaker 1: So I’m here in the Crisis Text Line offices, with none other but Bob. So, who are you Bob? What do you do here?{1;31}

Speaker 2: So my name’s Bob Filbin. I’m the Chief Data Scientist at Crisis Text Line.

Speaker 1: How long have you been with Crisis Text Line?{1:38}

Speaker 2: So I started actually before the system even launched, last August. I started with one other guy, the head of engineering, Chris Johnson, last February. And our goal was to build an app, a web-based app that counselors could log into and use that to text with teens in crisis.

Speaker 1: The concept sounds good, but tell me a little bit about some of your early impact and stats behind your year data analysis. You probably can’t wait. I’ll stop interrupting, you can tell me right now.{2:15}

Speaker 2: So we’ve already, in our first year, exchanged 3 million messages with teens in crisis.

Speaker 1: Geez.

Speaker 2: Yeah, which is amazing. The demand actually exceeds our supply in some ways, the number of counselors we have. So our big challenge right now is not getting the word out to teens in crisis. They’re using the service. It’s can we get enough counselors to respond to that demand.

Speaker 1: Interesting. So how are you findin

Perla Ni, the founder of GreatNonprofits.org took a risk and organized a Stanford student group called Statistics for Good to figure out if their platform was suffering from a courtesy bias. Sometimes we don’t get the complete truth when we ask people to give us feedback especially when we know we are being judged or if we think we might lose a free service in the future. GreatNonprofits.org aggregates real feedback from the people that nonprofits seek to help, the question is are these people just being nice when leaving reviews and exhibiting a courtesy bias?

Josh Woodward’s song “Tik Tik” was featured in this podcast. Find his ‘pay what you want’ music site: http://www.joshwoodward.com/

Episode 17

Speaker 1: This is “Using The Whole Whale,” a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the non-profit world. This is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com, thank you for joining us.

So I went to the doctor the other week and just got a check up. Don’t worry, everything is fine. They went through the normal things of testing this and that, and he went through the you know, “Do you smoke?” I was like, “Absolutely not.” And he went through the, “Do you drink? How many drinks a week do you have?” And that’s where you do the like, the quick pause, do the mental math and then just like, take 30% off that number and give them that number. And so what happens there actually happens to a lot of us when we survey our audience and we try to find the true answers and get that honest feedback. And it’s a good thing, I have to say, that doctors are not in charge of doing the average census for how much Americans drink. Because I think it would be woefully under reported.

Welcome to episode 17 of Using The Whole Whale. We are talking with Perla, the founder and CEO of greatnonprofits.org. A Great organization that allows people to leave reviews of non-profits they interact with. And we also have with us on this cast, Xioao, a current student at Stanford and she runs and is part of the Stats for Good program there that uses stats to help non-profits understand their data. So we are going to be diving into an interesting bit of work they did, kind of related to what happens when you’re dealing with the observer effect. Often referred to as the Hawthorne effect. Where in the act of observation, right as an observer, impacts the person who you’re observing. And so this happens, you know, on the surveys like we mentioned, that you’re maybe trying to get honest feedback for.

One of the things and effects that this can cause is what is called a Courtesy Bias. Wherein the person that you are potentially offering a free service to may not say that this was terrible. They don’t want to be mean to someone that just gave them something for free. And it was something that was kind of weighing on Perla’s mind at greatnonprofits.org. Where they’re trying to aggr

United We Dream works for the 11+ million undocumented immigrants in the US and they are using text messaging to help do this. We talk with Adrian, the data and technology manager about how they are using text alerts and communication to help immigrants keep up with the requirements/deadlines of the US Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)

Baifan, a Brooklyn based band, whose bass guitarist is Whole Whales’ Front-End Whaler, Simon Glenn-Gregg.

Episode 15

Speaker 1: This is Using the whole whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the non-profit world. This is George Weiner, your host and the chief whaler at WholeWhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

So I am going to start off this week’s podcast with a somewhat struggling stat. There are over a 11 million undocumented people in the United States. Now as you can imagine, if you are undocumented in US there are any number of basic human rights that you simply don’t have access to. What’s more, reaching this population is pretty difficult. Because as you can imagine if you are undocumented in U.S, you don’t necessarily want to be given you know. Twitter handle left and right trying to build followers and reputation.

Welcome to Episode 15. We are talking with United We Dream that’s working on this kind of exact project to reach this population and help them register for the services that they are due qualified for. We are talking with Adrian the data and technology manager, United We Dream. And they are doing something very interesting by doing text messaging to help this population and reach this population to get access to the services they need and that they qualify for. Welcome to the show. All right, we are here with United We Dream and I am talking with Adrian. Can you tell us who you are and what you do.

Speaker 2: My name is Adrian and I am the data and technology manager for United We Dream.

Speaker 1: Awesome. And this is a wonderful organization. Can you tell us what United we Dream is trying to do?

Speaker 2: sure. United We Dream is the first and largest immigrant network in U.S with 25 state representatives with 52 billion across the country. And our main mission is to advocate for the rights of immigrant youth and their families. Right in many ways that we do that is advocating for access to education at the state level advocating for the pathway specific shared by the relief for families on document issues. And fighting deportation of many of our community members.

Speaker 1: Can you tell us a bit about how you got involved in what decision matters to you?

Speaker 2: Sure. For me in early 2009, when I went to college. I think it was the moment for me. I grew up in Texas which had this situation for quite a while again the situation is just the cause the original documented students can attend. In public universities as i speak usually the situation is only granted to U.S citizens but may be not granted to those undocumented irrespective of how long you lived in the state. Texas was the first one to grant that . For me it’s getting into college and having that access what you so badly realized in that hey i am not eligible to go for work. pretty much no kind of scholarship was really available to

Charity Miles is an amazing fitness app that is also raising money for non-profits through ads. We learn about what it takes to create an app for social change from Gene Gurkoff.

Episode 14

George: This is using the Whole Whale. A podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This is George Weiner, your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

George: What if I told you that there was a way that mobile ads were helping people be healthier and also drive donations to nonprofits? Well, perhaps you probably wouldn’t believe me.

George: Welcome to episode fourteen. I’m gonna be talking with Gene Gurcoff. And he actually built the app for that. It’s called Charity Miles where every mile that you run, walk, or bike is sponsored through mobile ads and then the profits sent to the charity of choice by the person using it. So we’re gonna talk to Gene about his adventures of building an app and whether or not you know he would recommend it for everyone. Things that he learned. I’m really excited to jump into it. Well let’s talk to Gene.

(transition music)

George: Hey Gene, welcome to the podcast today. I’m excited to have you hear. Can you tell me what is it that you do?

Gene: Hey George. My name is Gene. I’m founder of Charity Miles. Charity Miles is an iphone and android app that allows people to earn money for charity when they walk, run, or bike. The money comes from corporate sponsors like Humana and Timex and Johnson & Johnson who pay for advertising in the app. And then we pay them money out at 25 cents a mile to our charity partners.

George: That’s awesome! How long have you been at this?

Gene: I have been at this for almost three years. I thought of this idea in August of 2011. Took me about ten months to go from the idea stage to actually building a working product that we were able to launch and getting all the right partners on board. So we launched it of June of 2012 and we’re coming up on our second birthday. National Running day this year which is June 4th.

George: National running day. Of course there’s a National Running Day.

Gene: We launched on National Running Day.

George: Amazing. So what are the top line numbers. How many users do you have? How much have you raised so far?

Gene: We have had about 500,000 downloads. Monthly active is about 40,000 right now. And so far to date we’ve raised about 700,000 dollars. Not an audited number there, but like last I checked it was about 700,000.

George: Obviously not a small drop in the bucket, that’s a significant amount of money.

Gene: But our goal really like right now we’re just laying the tracks. And my goal’s to be able to move a billion dollars to charity by 2016.

George: Wow! How did you come up with that number?

Gene: It’s a big number and–

George: Big frickin’ number.

Gene: I think it is totally doable. Our, well we are for our clients, our playing clients which are our advertisers, is a mobile advertisement platform that allows them to connect with our members. And last year company’s spent 10 billion dollars on mobile banners. And I think that–

Geo

Democracy Works & TurboVote, Co-founder Seth Flaxman talks about using data and technology to help people vote via mail. Their main product, TurboVote has had great success due to their team’s ability to gather the most accurate list of election locations in the country. They have made voting via absentee ballot as easy as getting a movie from Netflix, which is the first step of their larger plan to make voting easier in the US.

Episode 13

George: This is Using the Whole Whale. A Podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This is George Weiner your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

George: I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s probable that you have missed the chance to vote in more elections than you’ve actually voted in elections. And this is something that really frustrates today’s guest, Seth Flaxmen who’s a co-founder of democracy works. Welcome to episode thirteen where we’re gonna be talking with Seth about how they use big data and aggregated polling locations in order to make it easier for people to vote via absentee ballot. This project gained the attention of little known companies like Google who actually contacted them for that database. So we’re gonna talk with them and see where this project is going.

George: Seth thank you for having us here today on the podcast. You work for and you are the founder of Democracy Works. Tell us a bit more, who are you and what do you do?

Seth: Co-founder actually.

George: Co-founder.

Seth: Co-founder

George: Yeah I already got one wrong. Nailed it.

Seth: I have to make sure to give Katie credit you know. Owning half the organization.

George: So tell me what do you guys do?

Seth: So the idea’s to use technology to make a seamless modern voting system for everyone. That’s the sort of 30,000 feet deal. And turbo vote is the main sort of program we have a site and the idea there is that anyone should be able to sign up online one time and then get all the help they need to stay registered to vote and voting in all of their elections for the rest of their life. So an entirely voter centered design voting system. But we just launched this year our second program called Ballot Scout and it’s a tool for local election offices. We did a nine month technology study to figure out what tech election offices actually wanted and would spend some money to acquire. And what they really want is a way to track all the mail ballots that they’re starting to send people more and more. Cause in 32 states now everyone can vote by mail. Every year more people vote by mail, but the tracking system isn’t that good so ballots get lost. People call them constantly ask them where their ballots are, have them returned. So that’s our second program.

George: So it’s pre