JustCoz Blog

I would like to unsubscribe. I no longer want your organization posting tweets under my name. How do I make it stop?

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:53:38 +0300

Hi,

To unsubscribe first make sure you are logged in to The twitter account with which you registered. Next, go to the page of the Cause you support and simply click the Stop Supporting button.

Please let us know if there’s anything else we can help you with. Also, for a better response time you can catch us on Twitter (@justcozapp)

JustCoz 101

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:50:00 +0300

We keep getting questions about the best way for a Cause to use JustCoz. Our initial answer is that being a pretty simple and open service there’s really no one way to do so. There are quite a few Causes that make a very good use of our system and each one of them has a unique style of doing so. We truly believe that your best conduct is based on getting to know your supporters, what they like and don’t like etc.

Following is a short list of what we see as a good starting point behavior that might help you kick-start your use of our system.

How to start?
The beginning seems very tricky, you added your cause and it’s been authorized and you have a message to send out but now what? You still don’t have any supporters. What we suggest is to simply send your twitter followers (via Twitter, not JustCoz) a message offering them to support you by donating a tweet a day (for free) and add your JustCoz page URL (http://justcoz.org/YourCause).
Make sure you use your own words in this message; part of using JustCoz effectively is avoiding anything that seems automated as it is immediately associated with spam. After you’ve got some supporters you can start broadcasting your daily messages, some of which, can be used to recruit more supporters.

Always add a link
Fact: People are far more likely to act upon your message if there’s something to click. If you can’t think of anything to link to simply link to your JustCoz page, you can always use the extra supporters.

You don’t have to send a message every day
Yes, you’re limited to one message per day but it doesn’t mean that you HAVE to use it. Try to be consistent (don’t disappear for too long) but unless you have something that your supporters would want people to think they care about, don’t say it. The last thing you want is to annoy your supporters or their followers.

Remember that it’s your supporter’s tweet
When you broadcast a message Your supporters’ followers don’t read it as a retweet or as your message but as a tweet from whoever they follow so make sure the wording of your message supports this; so for example, let’s say that you want to promote an event in New York. If you write something like “Join us for our event in New York” think of your supporter saying just that. It may not make any sense. If instead you’ll write something like “Join YourCause at their event in New York” it will be more effective and will keep your supporters and their followers happy.

Keep an eye on your reach
Having a lot of supporters is great but sometimes you may have just a few but each one of them has so many followers that your message reaches far more people than you may think. Your reach is located right below your supporters count on your page.

Help People stop supporting you
Sometimes people just click a button without knowing what it does and then find out there’s a tweet being sent through their account automatically and want it to stop. Other times people just decide that they don’t want to support you anymore. In both cases the way to do so is to go to your cause page while logged in to the supporting Twitter account and simply click the Stop Supporting button.

Keep an eye on Twitter’s status
We make a great effort to keep JustCoz a stable and trustworthy tool. However, sometimes there are Twitter down-times and errors that are not under our control. If something doesn’t seem to be working properly it’s always a good idea to first check http://status.twitter.com/ and make sure everything’s ok on that front. In any case we are always available for any questions you may have on our Twitter account (@justcozapp) or via email (info [at] justcoz [dot] org].

We hope to publish more more posts like this one in the future, if you have any suggestions or specific questions we didn’t answer please feel free to drop us a line.

How effective is JustCoz? (and some more updates)

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:11:11 +0300

We have updated the site with some changes we think are very interesting.

———

We now have a “Reach count”, which we have added to each cause page, just below the number of supporters.

The Reach count is the calculated effective reach of any broadcast sent by the cause - the number of people who will be exposed to a tweet from the cause. The way we calculate it is we take the list of followers from all supporters and then we “de-dupe” that list by making sure every person appears only once (so that if, for example, A and B are supporters of a cause and C is a follower of both A and B, C is only counted as one person).

We believed from the beginning that JustCoz will be a platform that greatly increases a cause’s ability to reach people but the numbers are even more impressive than we thought. Almost all active causes, even those with only a few supporters, already have a reach count that is bigger than their Twitter follower count, and some have 50-100 times their follower count!

We think it is important that causes recognize this magnitude of effectiveness and utilize our platform because it makes a big difference.

So, if you have a cause and have “only” 5 or 10 supporters, have a look at your reach number and you’ll begin to understand how many people you can reach on a daily basis with your message of good will!
Also, remember that you can use JustCoz to promote your JustCoz page - ask people to join your supporter list and your next broadcast can reach even more people!

———

We’ve also listened to your comments regarding the homepage cause list and have tried to improve it. It now features an A-Z list of causes as well as search functionality. We have over 130 active causes already, so finding the one that you want to support just got much easier.

———

Please continue your wonderful support, and keep that feedback coming - we really want to hear what you think and how you see JustCoz evolving into a great place for causes to have their message heard.

Introducing the "Donated Tweet" (#DT) signature

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:26:00 +0300

We’ve been growing quickly, getting about 100 new supporters a day and our reach is at about 800,000 twitter users.

We’ve been getting some feedback regarding the broadcast tweets by some people, telling us that it feels weird that the tweet looks exactly like an ordinary tweet and there is no way for a follower to understand that this tweet has been relayed.

We think it’s important that the service stays as transparent as possible and we think that it is a good idea to “stamp” the tweets with a defining signature that will denote them as what they really are - donated tweets.

This is why we’re introducing the #DT signature:

From now on, all broadcasts sent through JustCoz will be signed with the #DT hashtag, (which stands for “Donated Tweet”) followed by the twitter screen name of the cause. This might look something like this:

Watch the new #STRVD film from Doctors Without Borders, “CONGO: The Malnutrition That Shouldn’t Be” http://bit.ly/9UT126 #DT@MSF_USA

We believe that this change will enable followers who are exposed to a broadcast to understand where the message is coming from and that it has been relayed through the user. The tradeoff, sadly, is the loss of about 10-15 characters, making the effective length of the broadcast shorter, but we feel that this will create a positive impact on the viewers of the tweets which will hopefully more than compensate for the loss of a few characters.

So... We launched!

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:53:23 +0300

Yup! JustCoz is now officially accepting causes. In fact we pretty much put everything else on hold just to deal with the amount of organizations wanting to be a part of our vision.

Many apologies to all those who suggested a cause and haven’t been approved yet. We’re going over the constantly growing list as fast as possible and if your name is there we’ll get to it.

Also, thanks so much to everyone who tweets/blogs about us. your support means the world to us. this is truly amazing. Thank you!

If you want to read the official announcement you can find it in Jeff’s blog.

moving forward

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 09:24:52 +0300

Just a short update. Some more changes deployed, we’re getting close to the launch and trying to finish up as many things on our todo list before that. Truly exciting times.

We're (sorta) live

Sun, 23 May 2010 19:08:56 +0300

So, our alpha test version is up on http://dev.justcoz.org/

We have not enabled broadcast yet, and the list of causes is not final and not official (we’re trying to get as many of the causes listed to come on board).

Hopefully we can launch in two weeks with at least 10 causes and the ability to suggest your own cause (which you can already do…).

BTW - i’ve opted to using @Anywhere for the post-join Twitter message and i am not sure i like it… the ajax delay makes it almost unusable IMO, so i might switch back to either server-side implementation or just a Twitter redirect…