As social media predictions begin rolling in for 2010, bloggers, pundits and anyone with a twitter handle seems to be weighing in with their best guesses. Will 2010 be the year of mobile technology? What’s all the talk of real-time web? Will location-based social networks like FourSquare become mainstream?
While all of these predictions are quickly floating across the blogosphere, there’s another important conversation happening – it’s a reflection on 2009, which for many nonprofits has become the year of the perpetual online contest. Some of these contests are crowd sourced, some are based on number of votes, some are based on dollars raised, and all have different rules and eligibility criteria. For those of you familiar with our work at the Case Foundation, you know that we are no stranger to the idea of crowd sourced philanthropy. In fact, we started experimenting with it back in 2007 with two initiatives, the Make it Your Own Awards which supported civic engagement in local community-based organizations, and our first America’s Giving Challenge which engaged tens of thousands of individuals in raising money for causes they cared about. This is something we repeated this year and leveraged an additional $2.1 million for a number of nonprofit organizations across the country.
We’ve seen many experiments, particularly in the private sector from Target’s Bullseye Challenge to Mashable’s Summer of Social Good, Paypal’s Regift the FruitCake, and most recently Chase’s Community Giving contest on Facebook. Pepsi also just announced they are forgoing traditional ads during the SuperBowl to launch their Pepsi Refresh Project, a crowdsourced cause marketing effort to give away $20 million in grants to help revamp communities.
With all of this competition, some important questions have been raised. As a Foundation that cares very deeply about the idea of democratizing philanthropy and making giving easier and more accessible to a greater number of people, we thought it was important to point you to some of the conversations that are already happening across other blogs. We think there is much good that can come from opening up the process of philanthropy and helping redefine what it means to give back and champion a cause you care about. We also know that nonprofit organizations are feeling stretched when it comes to finding resources to appropriately staff and promote these contests. And on the flipside, their supporters are feeling fatigued each time they are hit with another email to vote, or donate, or retweet.
We want to ensure these important and at times difficult conversations continue, and we hope to provide a forum for a more formal exchange in the new year to reexamine how these contests are designed so the greatest good can come from them. In the meantime, here are some of the conversations that are already happening and we hope you’ll weigh in with your own perspectives and experiences.
Do you think that a redesign of online contests could help salvage this concept of online citizen participation while maintaining some level of transparency? Would you prefer these contests simply go away in 2010 – if so, what might replace them?
Tags: competitions contests giving online giving
Glad to see you've got a start on listing out all the contests from 2009. There have been a lot this year and I expect to see more in 2010. Just like ribbons, bracelets, and avatars, it's far easier to replicate an idea than to create a new one.
I question their value in building sustainable capacity. I'd like to see a contest not based on popular vote, but on demonstrating the impact being made. Why can't we reward those who are good at using resources to achieve their mission?
Otherwise, we're just encouraging charities to buy more lottery tickets.
If you'd like to see explore that thought further, I shared it last night in this post: http://rallythecause.com/2009/12/21/giving-contest-hell-unruly-crowds-an...
- Scott Henderson 22 Dec 09, 13:31
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