Jumo

The bet

Chris Hughes had co-founded Facebook and then run Barack Obama's 2008 digital campaign. Jumo was his bet that Facebook's following mechanic could work for activism. You would follow causes and organizations the way you followed friends, and your feed would show you where to give your time or money.

He launched it in public beta on 30 November 2010, after a year spent traveling and thinking about how people find causes to support.

Peak

By civic-tech standards, the launch was a sensation. Within two days traffic overwhelmed the site, and Jumo landed on the New York Times's most-emailed list. Within weeks about 15,000 nonprofits and NGOs had set up a presence, and more than a million people were following issues through it. US traffic peaked in December 2010 at about 114,000 monthly unique visitors.

What worked

Jumo showed the discovery problem was real: people wanted help finding causes. It also showed that a well-known founder with a media moment behind him could get past the cold start almost overnight. Nonprofits and individual users arrived in large numbers with almost no marketing of their own.

The index itself, thousands of causes you could browse and follow, was a useful piece of infrastructure and outlived the company.

What failed — the mechanism

What brought people in gave them no reason to come back. Following an issue is a single click, and it asks nothing more of anyone. Once the novelty and the press cycle passed, little pulled people back. Monthly visitors fell from that December peak of 114,000 to roughly 8,500 by June, a drop of more than 90 percent in six months.

A feed of causes with no reason to return behaves like most engagement products after the discovery phase. It has to keep inventing new stimulation, or it empties. Jumo never managed the first at scale. In August 2011, less than a year after launch, it merged into GOOD, a media and magazine company, with Hughes staying on only as a senior adviser. The code was open-sourced two months later.

What Agora takes from it

A follow button can build an audience fast. That audience is worth little when following is all anyone does.

Agora has no feed of causes to follow and forget. Participation is tied to specific moments with something at stake: a bill moving, a budget line, a reply from an office. The lesson isn't "add more engagement." What it lacked was an obligation on either side, an office expected to respond and a citizen with something concrete to act on. Without one, a following mechanic ends up where Jumo did, however good the first two weeks look.