Regarding your use of the “less than” symbol, it gets interpreted by my weblog server as the start of an HTML tag : you can indeed put some HTML in your comments. This HTML is probably filtered because some tags are not allowed (I think). You can at least insert HTML links.

Regarding the “Beneficiaries of all fields of social innovations” I refer to, they are all people who are the “targets” of the actions of non-profits. Echoing Green specifically asks for who benefits from my work. Usually, most applicants have a very specific target and their application gains at including details about their “market segment” (sort of…). In my case, my primary target is the social innovator, i.e. the non-profit leader who is trying to change the world. But in the end, the people who suffer from the lack of IT in non-profits is not the non-profit leader herself but the people this non-profit targets in its programs. These people in pain don’t necessarily suffer from a need for IT (digital divide) but may be suffering from the inability of non-profits to reach them because a non-profit program was not using IT for extending its reach to them. In other words, as you said, the people hurt or affected by the injustice I am trying to tackle with are the people who benefit from non-profits.

Following your comments on my answer to question 3 and in order to clarify the meaning of some of my sentences, here is an attempt at rewording it :

It is not realistic that a single organization can address this injustice. Therefore we focus only on non-profits’ access to IT skills and services. Giving them access to software or hardware is out of our scope. And we limit our projects to non-profits requiring the equivalent of at least one full-time IT specialist. We also primarily focus on assisting non-profits with some presence in France because of legal constraints induced by our business model. We may assist non-French non-profits with higher impact global social innovations as soon as we find a legal way to let their programs benefit from the advantages of the French tax law on donations to charities.

Is it better ?

You ask : “what is social efficiency ?” I think of social efficiency as a ratio that divides the social value of an action (its impact in terms of benefits to the public good) by the cost of this action. I may have said “social value”, too. In industrial engineering, the term “value” is sometimes considered as the ratio between quality and cost. This “social effiency” expression may be nothing more than some sort of neologism or even jargonism (does such a word exist ? :o) )…

Regarding your last comments : once again, thanks a lot for your very valuable assistance. I wish I can meet you some day (if ever I visit Texas or you happen to visit Paris, France !) You are not butchering anything. On the contrary, your detailed comments help me think deeper and better about what I am doing and writing. When you have some more ten min chunks of time to spare, don’t hesitate to keep on commenting my next pre-application work.

Next steps for me are :

• to post a couple additional pre-application pieces suggested by the Echoing Green applicant coaching guide
• to post the application pieces themselves
• to invite a couple of friends and relatives to join you and my in commenting, correcting and enhancing all of this
• to send this by email to a group of business schools teachers who agreed to support my effort (I won one full day of pro bono assistance from them in a social entrepreneurship competition, this will happen this week on Friday)
• to package everything in a consistent application to Echoing Green via their website, before December 1, 2008.

Comments:
- Replace “No” with what you are responding no to.
- Change “only focus” to “focus only.” The adverb only describes the verb to focus, and should follow the verb.
- Replace passive speech “the access by French non-profits” with “French non-profits’ access”
- Singular and plural issues. IT skills and services is not something that is “amounts.” It is not a group of objects than can be counted, “skills and services” is singular. It can be reworded to make it plural, listing individual skills, but it does not keep to the original text. I removed “signifcant amounts of.”
- “Accessing software or hardware is out of our scope.” What does this mean? What exactly do you do then if its not “hardware or software?”
- Avoid repetition. “Only focus,” has already been used and “on IT needs” was declared in the opening sentence. I replaced them with “limit” and “our projects.”
- Avoid wordiness and adjectives without a noun. In, “full-time equivalent of services and skills,” what is full-time? A full-time employee perhaps? I reworded the sentence and added “specialist” as the noun.
- Avoid repetition. I removed “services and skills.”
- Avoid useless repetition. “Needs and projects” is repetative unless there is a difference between the two.
- Avoid contractions. Contractions should not be used in formal speech. “Won’t” should be replaced with “will not.” But I removed it because I reworded the sentence because the “will” requires the infinitive “be” which isn’t necessary.
- Avoid asides. In this case it means (…). The word yet gets the meaning across sufficiently.
- Avoid repetition. I ended up using the following sentence: “Smaller needs are not yet supported,” but I saw that was essentially what the prior sentence stated, limiting the projects to those requiring at least one full time employee, so I just deleted the sentence.
- Avoid wordiness. “Direct help to” can be replaced with “assisting.”
- Be careful. Only use localization where appropriate. “Foreign” means outside of France for you, but to this US based organization it may mean outside of the US. Since you already established in the paragraph you were French-based it is not an issue.
- Avoid wordiness. “Not in our immediate scope,” can be replaced with “beyond our immediate scope.”
- Does “we are considering partnerships with foreign non-profits” conflict with your prior phrase “Assisting foreign non-profits is beyond our immediate scope?” Use a wording to imply a future action to avoid the conflict.
- Avoid repetition. I removed, “in the need of free IT skills and services.”
- What is social efficiency?

Personal Comment:
Sig, I doubt we know each other seeing as I’m halfway around the globe. I just subscribed to your blog because I read one of your technical articles written in English. I saw your request for assistance and thought it was for a good cause and an easy way to help out in flexible ten minute chunks of time. (Time is very scarce for me.) I hope I am not butchering your submission so I try to explain all changes I recommend with the reasoning behind it.

I wrote a note in < and %gt; but it did not display.

Can you clarify “Beneficiaries of all fields of social innovations suffer from the lack of technology-powered social innovations and from the under-exploitation of technology by non-profits?”

Who are these “beneficiaries?” Are they all people, people in first world societies, or are they are just people who benefit from non-profits?

Comments:
- Use present tense in response to a present tense question, “Who… is hurt,” not, “Who was hurt.” (No “had”, “would have,” use, “is,” and “can.”)
- Avoid passive speech (“beneficiaries would have been helped,” to “Non-profits help beneficiaries.”)
- Time-ordering of actions, which comes first (“launced and developed” or “developed and launched?”)
- I replaced “unseen” with “yet unforeseen.” “Unseen” means not seen, “unforeseen” means is not seen beforehand. I think it gets the message across better.

Comments:
- Keep subject and object in same sentence if possible (lack of access creates a digital divide.)
- Don’t ask questions in response to questions (“Why should,” “Why isn’t”.)
- I would add descriptive adjectives and adverbs (indispensable tools, critical mission of fighting poverty,) but I will attempt to be as faithful to the original as possible.