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CONTRIBUTE BLOGS
04/02/2009 18:22
by Marcia Stepanek
When in Britain last week at
the Skoll World Forum, I was
referred to a recent article
in The Observer written by
Joss Garman, the 24-year-...
03/02/2009 22:35
by Marcia Stepanek
As the recent copyright woes
of Obama poster artist Shepard
Fairey show, there's a war
raging over what some now are
calling a new art form in ...
02/16/2009 07:24
by Marcia Stepanek
I just finished reading an
advance copy of "The Blue
Sweater: Bridging the Gap
Between Rich and Poor in an
Interconnected World,&qu...
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Top Stories:News
PART ONE: CROWDSOURCING
 ON JUNE 24, THE NONPROFIT New York
Philharmonic ended its annual concert in Manhattan’s Central Park in a
highly untraditional way: it asked concert-goers camped out on the lawn
to take a quick moment to text-message their preference for the final
musical number as conductor Bramwell Tovey waited on stage. Would it be
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebees? Or an orchestral version of Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze?
Hendrix proved the more popular choice—74% of those texting chose
Hendrix—so the orchestra wasted no time launching into a spirited version of Hendrix’s 1960s-era counter-cultural anthem.
The
vote, however, did more than cap a concert. For many people in
attendance that night, it signaled a new era of social engagement for
the tradition-bound orchestra and underscored what other institutions
in today’s cash-pinched charity sector are just  beginning to figure
out: crowdsourcing—using the Web and online social media to invite mass
collaboration —is critical to 21st century advocacy. The rise of social
media—from mobile phones to online social networks to digital
video-sharing—is forcing many charities to expand and accelerate their
use of new Web capabilities to drum up much-needed new converts,
dollars, and ideas. “We need to engage people we have never really
reached before,” says Vince Ford, the Philharmonic’s director of new
media. “We need to reinvent the way we build support.”
Call
it the engagement imperative. Says Joe Rospars, Barack Obama’s new
media expert: “The biggest lesson nonprofits can draw from Barack
Obama’s ability to raise more than $100 million online in a faltering
economy is that fundraising now flows from engagement—it’s no longer
enough to simply believe in the cause. Now it’s critical for people to
participate in a cause, and feel like they've had some input, before
they decide to help it pay for stuff."
To be sure, some advocacy groups are just starting to invite public
collaboration to better engage existing and potential supporters. Some,
like the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, are using the Web to
crowdsource social action—in this case, an ongoing boycott of
businesses that discriminate against people for their sexual
preferences. The HRC is offering a digital “Buying for Equality” guide
that lets people see—in real-time and on the fly—which businesses have
unfavorable policies. The guide, itself, is also crowdsourced—created,
Wikipedia-style, by people who want to share their personal knowledge
of those businesses and policies online. A mobile version of the guide,
accessible by cellphone, has helped to boost participation in the HRC’s
activities, which—in turn, leaders say—has helped to increase
membership by more than 10 percent.
Another way cause advocates are starting to use the Web to fan engagement
and collaboration is through open calls for short, digital “cause
videos”—brief, home-made mini-documentaries that people can post on
nonprofit sites and link to other video-sharing sites, like YouTube and
Vimeo, among others. Manhattan nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, for
example, invites members to make and share short, “cause videos” to advocate
for improved bike safety in New York. One of the videos up for a while on
the group's site, called Bike Lane Emergency, was sent in by bicyclist
Nicholas Whitaker, who made the 2-minute video by attaching his video camera
to the handlebars of his bike during a dangerous spin through city streets.
Its goal was to show how bike lane safety is not being enforced across
Manhattan and build support for reforms.
Other nonprofits, like the Humane Society of the United States, are
using the Web to crowdsource reports of wrongdoing—in this case, news
of animal abuse not being covered by the mainstream media. In January,
the Humane Society famously drummed up more than a half-million hits to
its fundraising Web site after posting a digital video investigation,
put together in collaboration with members, reporting the alleged abuse
of downed cattle at a California slaughterhouse. The video got some
138,000 hits on YouTube, then was picked up by CNN and led to recall of
145 million pounds of ground beef, the temporary removal of beef from
many school lunch menus, and eight congressional hearings exploring the
possibility of a link between animal cruelty and food safety. Executive
Vice President Michael Markarian said the video also helped the
nonprofit raise millions of dollars in new and expanded donations.
Sameer Padania, manager of The Hub, the new digital video-sharing site
for human rights activists that is an extension of the nonprofit
Witness.org, says that increasingly, “people have cameras in cell
phones. They’re using social media to capture and share not only the
important moments of their lives, things that interest them, but also
things that anger them, that relate to social injustice.” Inviting
people to share that footage for a cause, he says, can help nonprofits
create or become a part of a movement rather than take a more
traditional, top-down approach to advocacy.
Still other nonprofits, like Global Voices Online, are giving status
quo organizations a run for their money by crowdsourcing news from
around the world, asking international bloggers to send localized
dispatches on subjects often overlooked by traditional news networks.
Much of the group’s early coverage of the government crackdown on
pro-democracy demonstrators in Burma last fall, for example, eventually
made it into the mainstream—and helped the nonprofit raise more dollars
to keep covering such stories at the same time. In recent months,
Global Voices has expanded its mission to organize crowds of concerned
citizens around the world to share incidents of government censorship
on the site. Says co-founder Ethan Zuckerman: “We’re not simply raising
money here; we’re building a movement.”
Business is taking
notice, and some firms are working with charities to boost customer engagement around social causes. Amnesty International, for example, runs an
instant text-messaging program with the U.K.-based mobile
telecommunications company, Vodaphone Group Plc. The campaign taps into
the widespread use of mobile phones and instant text-messaging in
Norway. Since the start of this year, the human rights nonprofit has
signed up 25,000 people in Norway to receive “urgent action alerts”
twice a month on human rights issues locally and around the world. Each
time an alert is issued, a subscriber pays .25 Euros, or about 37
cents. It costs about 75 cents a month to stay on the list, and each
time someone responds to an urgent action alert—and about 10,000 do
each time—members pay another 37 cents. Amnesty Norway gets about 50
percent of all of instant text-messaging fees, while Vodaphone pockets
the rest. This not only generates signatures on Amnesty’s urgent action
petitions but also drums up regular income to fund Amnesty’s ongoing
programs, to the tune of about 100,000 Euros, or about $150,000 per
year. “It’s an example of the mass power of small donations,” says
George Irish, a fundraising consultant who worked with Amnesty on the
program.
Pop singer Alicia Keys gets it, too. The celebrity has been
crowdsourcing cash for an African AIDS nonprofit all summer long,
asking audience members attending her concerts to text in donations
from the audience. So far, the singer has raised nearly $50,000 for the
charity online in real-time, from thousands of $5 donations, texted in
by fans from the floor—literally, for a song. Jennifer Singleton, the
top fundraising executive for Keep a Child Alive, the Brooklyn,
N.Y.-based nonprofit that enlisted Keys, says the group has turned
increasingly to text-messaging for dollars to offset a steady drop-off
in traditional donors and donations: “SMS [text-messaging] is not a new
language, but it’s a new language for donations.”
Underestimate crowdsourcing for mass support and engagement at your peril, says Jeff Howe, a writer for Wired
magazine who coined the term “crowdsourcing” and just wrote a book by
the same name. “Before, people had to be together physically in order
to create a group of people who could work together for social change.
But with how the Internet is evolving, suddenly, that’s not true
anymore. Now we can create a virtual crowd simply by the technology
that we keep. We can get together with others simply through our shared
interests. We can self-organize now with just a little prompting from
others, into close-knit or far-flung groups that are project-oriented,
on the fly. This is unprecedented in human history. This is a social
trend that is inevitable, and it can be terribly exciting—or terribly
threatening—for existing organizations.”
No kidding, say experts and nonprofit leaders. As some are discovering,
new types of leadership strategies are going to be required to manage
the surge of public input that these new forms of mass engagement are
generating. Nonprofit management expert Paul Light, a professor at
NYU’s Wagner School, says most advocacy organizations are in for a
surprise. “The concept of being donor-driven or community-driven is a
new one for many nonprofit leaders more used to calling all the shots,”
Light says, and the new mass participation can, and will, start forcing
change throughout the organization.
Clay Shirky, NYU professor of new media, agrees. “The key to making
crowds your friend is going to depend on how well you engage them to do
the work for your cause. Mass collaboration, if managed smartly, can
help you build support" for your cause. The smartest organizations
harnessing these technologies, he says, will figure out how to use
social media in ways that engage whole new communities of supporters to
participate with their pocketbooks, as well—"and not just this year,
but repeatedly this year, depending on how perpetually they feel
they’re being engaged in the cause.”
To be sure, not all nonprofit experimentation with crowdsourcing has
gone smoothly so far. Some groups, like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, are
still trying to figure out how to boost the engagement of crowds—but
without overhwhelming already stressed staffers with high levels of
extra work just to manage it all.
Last spring, Shelley Bernstein, the Brooklyn museum’s new manager of
information systems, sought to crowdsource an entire art exhibit, and
sent out an email asking anyone interested to send in museum-quality
photographic images that best fit the theme, Changing Faces of Brooklyn.
Bernstein got 389 images. Then, she issued another open call for
curators. This time, 3,344 people accepted, and over six weeks, this
online “crowd” sorted through the images and tallied their selections,
which eventually were whittled down to comprise the museum’s June
27-August 10, 2008 exhibit, Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition.
Entirely Web-sourced and Web-curated, the exhibit represented the first
use of crowdsourcing by a nonprofit in this way. “I wanted to try using
new media to build our community, expand it, and ask people from the
outside to participate in what we do,” Bernstein said. She also was
inspired by the 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds,
which argues that large, diverse groups of people sourced by the Web
will make better judgments and smarter decisions than an elite few, no
matter how individually brilliant they are.
On one hand, Bernstein said, the crowd chose many of the photographs
that professional curators did, proving that mass collaboration can
work, to a point. But most importantly, the exercise proved that mass
participation also can overwhelm small staffs with “tons of extra work”
simply to accommodate all the input into decision-making, Bernstein
said. “On one hand, it worked very well raising interest in and
knowledge of the museum and involved thousands of people, literally, in
one of our projects,” she said. “But the key lesson here is that you
need to learn how to manage all of the new input, or it can create all
sorts of new headaches that could, if you're not careful, eat up the
very resources you’re trying to expand.”
Amen, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, the CEO of The Rainmakers Group, a
Washington, D.C.-based fundraising consultancy whose clients are mostly
small- to mid-sized traditional charities. “It’s almost shocking to
note that so many of these tech-savvy organizations who are trying to
get better at engaging people still have no clue how to capture the
interest they’ve gotten and convert that into solid, on-the-ground
fundraising strategies offline,” she says.
But this, too, will come as more nonprofits share the lessons they
learn from their crowdsourcing experiments, experts says. "There's no
turning back now," says Shirky. Indeed, crowdsourcing to excite new
levels of public engagement is an unstoppable, inevitable next step in
the evolution of the Internet—an unprecedented and critical opportunity
for groups looking to sustain themselves over the long-run. Says NYU’s
Paul Light: “The charities that embrace the changes and experiment with
them successfully will be the ones that will survive.”
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By Marcia Stepanek, with Cristina Maldonado, Richard Balestrino, and Rebecca Sherman contributing. Icon illustration ©2008 by Brian Stauffer c/o the ispot.com.
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Coming...
Part Three: Mobile Action
Part Four: The Cause-Wired: A Roundtable
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