templates for entering new listings; promote them as free RHS ads next to search results

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What problem are you trying to solve / opportunity you're addressing?

We have heard that posting a listing is too hard-- this includes the
discovery process for how to complete the forms.  We'd also like to improve
the number and quality of listings-- in particular, the end-to-end listing
process has many pitfalls where titles, snippets and data can get mangled.
 However, AFG are not domain/sector experts and don't have the staff to
hand-hold small organization through the process.  Partners are concerned
about disintermediation.

Finally, AFG's mission is to increase the amount of volunteerism-- making
it easy to organize things like park cleanups would directly contribute to
this mission.

Describe the rough idea:

Organizer visits allforgood.org the consumer site, runs a search (say
[park]) and on the right hand side (RHS) we show promos (aka free ads aka
ad units) for partners offering services to get your listings into AFG. 
Obviously, we'd message that these ads are free, and a link to get your ad
listed.  Offer form validation, which is hard for partners and has a
powerful effect on quality, e.g. geocode listings before accepting them. 
Note: one elegance of RHS ads/promos is that we can offer multiple ways to
submit data, which avoids channel conflict among partners and creates
competition to create the best experience and best forms.

Engage the partners to have these templates written (100+ of them)-- to
avoid abuse, write a restricted terms of service (but which ideally
supports their funding model, e.g. let them offer for-pay consulting
services to handhold organizations).  The incentive for partners of course,
is the chance to control pixels and draw traffic from the afg site.

For extra credit, offer a gadget ad format, where the park cleanup form
renders right on the search results page: run the search, click the promo,
enter your listing and done.

Strawman plan:
1. PM work e.g. mocks (1 week)
2. core engine: simple ad server and consumer UI mod (1-2 weeks)
3. simple form validation API for URLs, addresses, dates (1 week)
4. build some examples and show partners (1 week)
   concurrently, writeup docs and FAQ; finalize consumer UI
5. get live

What are the known issues with this idea?  What is your plan to fill them?

Posting itself is part of a larger process around organizing an event, and
this doesn't address that holistic process, e.g. incentivizing people to
organize, helping them discover the process, helping them plan and run a
high quality event, and doing whatever you can to ensure that it was a good
enough experience that they do it again and cause others to want to do it.
 AFG and posting represent just the marketing step.  IMHO it's OK to just
address marketing.

This proposal doesn't address 'bad' listings-- the obvious thing is to try
it, see what kinds of listings we get, and if the quality is low then
reconsider the process.  Users can already post through craigslist and
other open/unverified channels, so this is nothing new (but it does make it
10-100x easier, which may encourage more abuse)

Does this require anything beyond writing code?  if so, what?  where would
you get this?

1. some legal/policy work, esp. to create the ToS for the promo system.
1. outreach to listings partners/aggregators for participation
3. outreach to syndication partners to get comfort around anti-abuse model
   e.g. so serve.gov is comfortable.

In the 18 month timeframe, how much impact could this have (number of
people impacted)?  have you considered all the steps involved (e.g.
approvals, user signups, etc.) and whether they would slow us or limit
scale?

In 18 months, I'd expect us to go from ~100-200K listings today, to
millions of listings.

Can this be implemented in 3 months or less?  if not, why should we
prioritize this over big ideas that can be?

Yes-- this is ~1 month wallclock.

How does this impact users?

Tons more listings, and hopefully much higher quality.
Much easier to organize an event.

How does this impact organizers?

Much easier to organize an event-- whether you just need data entry, or you
need a full service offering (hand holding).

How does this leverage partners?

Partner provide templates and services to help organizers put up their
listings.

Does this bring up new legal/policy problems?

We'll need a policy/ToS around allowable promos and downstream experiences
from those promos.

In theory, there's no change to the listing ToS-- in practice, it'll
increase scrutiny on our existing policies and processes.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by adam.sah on 22 Jun 2009 at 3:02

[GoogleCodeExporter]

oh, and since the gadget is important, I'm thinking we'd surface these in the 
gadget
as a single promo a la "Embed"... something like "Get listed"

then this promo would only appear if there's template that matches the search 
terms.

Original comment by adam.sah on 22 Jun 2009 at 6:35

[GoogleCodeExporter]

it's worth stating that this isn't a random idea-- it's the natural progression 
from:  
 - there's a lot of ways to provide value in helping someone organize an event,
   (toolkits) and the actual listing collection is a tiny part of that.
 - event organizing is domain specific-- there are winning solutions for each
   type of event.
 - we can engage partners to collect listings, to get scale
 - we should engage partners to collect listings, because we don't understand the
domains.

Original comment by adam.sah on 23 Jun 2009 at 5:42

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by adam.sah on 23 Jun 2009 at 1:37

• Added labels: Type-FeatureRequest

[GoogleCodeExporter]

adding mark to featreqs

Original comment by adam.sah on 23 Jun 2009 at 7:10

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by adam.sah on 28 Jun 2009 at 4:26

• Added labels: Milestone-Roadmap