Last year, Samantha Millman started organizing, raising money for, and spreading awareness about the Justice Ball, LA-based Bet Tzedek’s annual fund raiser. She describes here why she is involved, how she got into fundraising online (after being inspired by Entertainment Tonight!), and the ways she has found success since she took her cause to the Internets over a year ago.

How did you become involved with the Justice Ball in the first place?

My involvement with the Justice Ball is tied with my involvement to Bet Tzedek. My father had been involved with the organization since before I was born and it has always been a part of my life. As I got older, I began to see how the mission fed into my own values. I am Jewish and it is a Jewish organization. What I like about [Bet Tzedek] is that it is a social justice organization that is Jewish, but it focuses on justice issues for all people. It gives access to justice for people who have had their rights violated, people who have been taken advantage of by their caretakers, and those who have experienced many other kids on violation. That resonates with me.

I had been looking for a way to get involved with the organization at a non-attorney level. I was watching Entertainment Tonight a year ago and Kevin Bacon was talking about 6 Degrees and I thought it looked like it was an easy way to get involved and organized. I called my father and told him about it and suggested that we do it for Bet Tzedek and he encouraged me to go forward with that.

How did it initially work out?

The 15,000 I raised for Bet Tzedek was actually through Six Degrees, which is powered by Network for Good. You can actually still check out the “charity badge” I used to raise the money. I was able to raise that money by emailing friends, family and colleagues and asking them to donate and then spread the word. After that ended, I wanted to find a way to stay involved with Bet Tzedek. I decided to join the planning committee for The Justice Ball and, aside from soliciting law firm sponsorships and selling tickets, I helped create and maintain a Myspace profile for the event.

Coming into 2.0 fund raising relatively cold, how did know what to do?

I basically looked at how other people were doing it on Six Degrees. I was paying a lot of attention to Katya’s blog and I read some of the blogs on her roll. She is a great resource for organizing and spreading good info.

In the first year, the Justice Ball didn’t really do a whole lot of good by way of the Internet. It was a practice run. I didn’t really understand the importance of interaction. I just put up our information and I hoped people would find it. It was far more 1.0 than it was 2.0. This year we’re working with an interactive approach to get people excited.

How did you recognize that you weren’t 2.0 enough, so to speak?

No one was responding. People don’t take time to find you. It needs to be more of an interactive experience. You can’t just be an Island in the middle of the ocean and expect people to find you. Rather than let it exist on its own this year, we did more to tie the Justice Ball into Bet Tzedek, rather leaving it at, “Hey! Come to this great party!” By doing this, and showing that the money from the ball would be going to something meaningful, people seemed to be be more willing to send emails out on its behalf and to send me emails and wall postings and whatever else to talk about how excited they are to be involved.

I read blogs and now I realize that its important to comment on them. Nobody knows that you’re out there if you’re just lurking. And the opposite is true, as I love to read about what people are saying about the organization and I like to look back at where they’re coming from. It is more of a community experience. Intellectually I know this, but executing it is really difficult. I am still trying to master it and I could be doing better.

How do people respond to the organizing you’re doing now?

It is interesting. We’re getting a different type of response. A lot of people who know about us are attorneys and they don’t spend a lot of time online. Though we are bringing people to the table who have otherwise not have been involved. They’re not coming in huge numbers, but they are coming. We have 47 fans of Bet Tzedek. If you look at other pages, there are thousands of members. But I feel strongly about it because the people who are fans on Facebook might not have otherwise known about us.

What else are you reading to keep up with how to better organize?

Again, I am a big fan of Katya’s blog. It’s basically 2.0 for dummies in a really good way. It is so easy to understand and from reading it, I get a lot of terms that I otherwise didn’t know. It was hard coming to all of this without a tech background. I didn’t get social networking or what Twitter would be important. She has a great way of explaining things in common terms. She makes business savvy techniques make sense in terms that I can put into action.

Now we’re trying to figure out how to convert all of this into donations. It’s a hard conversion to make. I don’t want people to think that we’re seeing them as big credit cards, because we’re not. But the Internet is a great tool for organizing people and I want to figure out how to turn support from being a badge into getting people further involved.

If you were to meet someone in a similar situation to the one you were in over a year ago, coming to the table cold, what would you tell them?

I would give to them advice that I follow poorly. I would tell them to take a second before diving into the world of online organizing and think about where your supporters are. Are they college students? Do they read blogs? Are they professionals? Are they on Facebook? You need to make a smart decision about where you are spreading your tentacles. Grow your base and interact with them. Make conversation. I don’t take that advice all the time about interaction and community building, but where I have made the effort, things have turned out great.

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