I'm moderating a panel at SXSWi called "Crowdsourcing Innovative Social Change." The panelists include Amy Sample Ward, Holly Ross, David Neff, and Kari Dunn Saratovsky.
Everywhere you turn, you're hearing about social media. Especially
when it comes to fundraising. We know that
social media is good for a lot more than raising money. We know that
social media can be used to change the world. That's why we're asking you to share your case study so we can feature it on our SXSWi panel.
We're looking for stories and examples of how nonprofits have leveraged social media tools in their program work. Have you used social media as part of your volunteer or board
recruitment strategy, outreach or educational program delivery,
crowdsourcing ideas for program development, professional development
or integrated in other areas of your nonprofit's work? We want to know about it
And the best part - We'll choose three case studies to be featured at our SXSWi session and, of course, add the information to the WeAreMedia Wiki.
This holiday rather than working, we decided to take a brief vacation and travel down the beautiful California coast. Only problem was by Christmas night we realized that we hadn't even opened those guide books we took out of the library or done any planning whatsoever -- and I was somewhat to hesitant to fly totally blind.
Would using simple crowd sourcing via social media/social networks be a faster, easier, and perhaps better way to plan this trip? After all, that's how teens these days plan their activities. And for that matter, how much advanced planning did we really need to do if weren't booking flights?
For an easy and simple experiment, I did the following:
(2) Set up a google document that anyone could edit and asked for tips about places to see, wildlife viewing, and restaurants.
(3) Sent out a tweet asking for suggestions and pointing to the document
Within an half hour, the document will filled with some fabulous tips. I did need to do some filtering and critical evaluation. I spent another half hour reviewing the the suggestions, cross-referencing with our guide books and sites like YELP, Trip Advisor, and Web sites. I also searched for some decent iPhone apps that would be useful while we were on location. (For example, we ended up in Disneyland for the kids and the Disney Wait Time app was invaluable)
The wildlife viewing and ocean waves were soothing. Someone on Twitter mentioned an elephant rookery that was a must see and in deed it was. One of the highlights of the trip was meeting @hardlynormal a Twitter activist for the homeless.
So, here is a somewhat simple and easy recipe for getting input on plans. Maybe this works only for crazy people like me who might crowd source advice for their vacations, but I got a lot of value from it. It wasn't overwhelming or time consuming and I think it made for a better vacation experience.
How would you apply a simple crowdsourcing to your nonprofit's work?
Should online contests be redesigned or just go away? That's the question that Kari Dunn Saratovsky asks in a post over at the Case Foundation blog, one of many blog posts and tweets about the controversy surrounding how the Chase Bank handled its online contest
to give away $5 million dollars this holiday season. The conversation provides a lot of good lessons for companies wanting to embrace selfish giving without cause washing.
Here's a summary and chronology of blog posts and Facebook and Twitter chatter. I'm sure I've missed something.
11/16/09: Chase launched the online competition in November. I blogged about it on November 16 as part of a trend of focusing online competitions on regional and local givings. Many other nonprofit and do good bloggers helped promote the contest. The press release from Chase describes the two-step process:
In Round One of the Chase Community Giving program,
Facebook users will vote for non-profit organizations they think should
receive a portion of Chase's philanthropy funds. To reinforce the local
focus of this program, 501( c)(3) non profits with an operating budget
of $10 million or less will be eligible. Facebook users will be able to
nominate non profits that serve the general public in the following
areas: education, healthcare, housing, the environment, combating
hunger, arts and culture, human services and animal welfare. The Chase
Community Giving Advisory Board will review the top vote-getters to
help ensure compliance with the program's rules. On December 15, the
top 100 qualified vote-getters will be announced to receive $25,000
each, and will move on to the next round.
In Round Two, the top 100 organizations will have the
option to submit a Million Dollar Grant proposal to Facebook users,
detailing the difference they would make in their local community with
the significant extra resources. Facebook users will vote starting
January 15, and on February 1, the qualified organization receiving the
most votes will be announced as the winner of a Million Dollar Grant
from Chase. The next five organizations with the most votes will
receive $100,000 each. Additionally, the Advisory Board will donate $1
million to the nominated charities of its choice.
12/17: The Dark Side of Online Contests. Kjerstin Erickson over at Skoll Foundation's Social Edge wrote an insightful post about the contest design, pointing out how not having a leaderboard was problem and the need to balance social good and marketing objectives. Her post was summarized on the Chronicle of Philanthropy blog on that same day.
12/17: SSDP and other groups were disqualified from the contest. If you look at the posts on the SSDP Facebook Fan Page, you'll how the open organizing took place. They asked contest sponsors for an explanation. Without a response, they escalated their organizing efforts reaching out on Facebook, the blogosphere, and main stream media. They start organizing boycotts and asking their fans to post on the Chase Fan Page (which at that time was opened for comments)
12/19: NY Times, Stephanie Strom writes "Charities Criticize Online Fundraising Contest by Chase". That I afternoon after reading the article, I wrote a post summarizing Stephanie's piece and adding my own two cents about the lack of transparency and contest design. The post got retweeted over 160 times. Later that evening, Nathanial Whittemore over at Change.Org wrote a scathing open letter to Chase. According to the metrics on the blog, the post got almost 7500 views and 114 retweets.
12/20: I wrote a follow up post expanding on design lessons learned in light of other, larger, crowdsource charity contests coming up which was also retweeted 140 times.
12/21: The Chronicle of Philanthropy continues its round up coverage. Blog posts continue to summarize and dissect the controversy focusing on transparency, design, and social good.
2009 The Year of Perpetual Online Contests: Case Foundation Blog. Kari Dunn Saratovsky recaps the
conversation and lets us know that the Case Foundation is planning host
an online forum to make room for a discussion about online contest
designs. The conversation starter, "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?"
Chase Facebook Fan Page removes fans comments on the wall and fan commenting ability.
12/22: Disqualified groups continue to share their frustration about a lack of response on their blogs as well as Facebook Fan Pages. SSDP sets up a protest site called "Chase Boycott"
We don't know where this will go next. Maybe this will all fade away with the holiday upon us and all will be forgotten by the opening round for the top 100 organizations to compete for the six and seven figure grants in January. Or maybe it will fester.
It's unclear how much damage this has done to their brand, if at all - and if damage could have been reduced if they were more responsive earlier on.
If anything, it provides lots of learning which is the heart of success of social media and potential for constructive discussion and debate about social media, online giving, transparency, and more. Should the folks at Chase wish to respond, they are more than welcomed to write a guest post on this blog.
Update: Ami Dar makes a great point that we should acknowledge Chase for trying something new. I agree, but I think they're missing a fantastic teachable moment about learning, experimentation, and a conversation about online contests, transparency, and reshaping philanthropy.
As a board member of Ushahidi and an advisor to Global Voices - very pleased to see them on the list of recipients which also included those listed below. (Since Google didn't include a link on the page, I've included a list with links below) I'm curious how they came up with the list - a small committee within Google or did they crowdsource names internally?
Pepsi is taking a bold move. It's not spending money on Super Bowl ads for Pepsi beverages. Instead, Pepsi is using the money for lethal generosity through its Pepsi Refresh Project, a crowdsourced cause marketing effort to give away $20 million in grants to help revamp communities.
Rather than donating the money to nonprofits through a traditional corporate responsibility grant program, Pepsi will jump on the online contest bandwagon. Pepsi will invite "applicants" to submit big ideas to change the world and then ask a crowd of Pepsi Fans to vote on them. Pepsi
will have contests every month for 10 months beginning Jan. 13.
According to a post in GigaOm, The Pepsi Refresh Project will award $5,000, $25,000, $50,000 and
$250,000 to individuals and organizations that turn good ideas into
projects that make a difference. The grant categories will be:
Health
Arts & Culture
Food & Shelter
The Planet
Neighborhoods
Education
Right now you can give your email to Pepsi to be alerted about details. I was relieved to see that they at least, presumably, respect our privacy and had this disclaimer:
Notice: Pepsi will send a one-time reminder about the Pepsi "Refresh Project" to the email address you provide. It will not be collected or used by Pepsi-Cola Company for any marketing purposes.
The Chase Community Giving
contest on Facebook is one of the biggest online contests before Pepsi announced their contest,
open to more than 500,000 charities. As of this writing, 1,027,398
people joined Chase’s fan page to cast votes for their favorite
charities. The top 100 "eligible" vote getters, announced a few days
ago, received $25,000. They are going to participate in the next round,
"The Big Idea" where the 100 charities share their big idea for
changing the world and get votes. The winner gets $1 million and
five finalists will receive $100,000.
The top 100
included a mix of nonprofits with an operating budget of under $10
million with programs in designated
Chase corporate responsibility areas: education, healthcare, housing,
the environment, combating hunger, arts and culture, human services and
animal welfare. (Very interesting to see the American Cancer Society
was on the list as its budget - according to a 2005 annual report linked on
their Guidestar Profile is well over $10 million)
Several groups who were in the top 100 (before Chase removed the
vote tallies on individual profiles), were not on the final list, apparently disqualified.
Here's what Stephanie Strom, New York Times reported:
JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.
The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.
What can Pepsi learn so its contest can truly make a difference in local communities, help them sell more soda, and avoid having its brand get tarnished?
1. Open or Closed Set of Participants: Contest sponsors need to decide ahead of time how open to be in terms of who can participate. It's more than the basic eligibility requirements -- nonprofit versus individual or for-profit or particular interest areas or even the legal language.
With some contests, the contest sponsor vets a list of participants before letting the crowd vote. This is how Target ran its contest and more recently PayPal's FruitCake Challenge.
This way, the contest sponsor's dollars are donated to a known set of
organizations that have been selected based on corporate values, goals,
or philanthropic strategy. There's a cost here - the cost of not getting the absolute best idea because the person who thought it up wasn't eligible to participate.
But there are some things to think about with a completely open contest, one where anyone one submit an idea and the crowd votes on the best idea and the one with the most votes wins. The sponsor needs to ask if they are truly committed to the idea that gets the most votes, no matter who suggests it?
With the recent Chase Online Giving Contest, there were last stage disqualifications. And although they had a disclaimer in the contest official rules "... or organizations otherwise not in alignment with Sponsor's
corporate social responsibility guidelines. Any
organization determined to be ineligible at any time will be
disqualified. Sponsor retains the right at its sole discretion to
determine eligibility and reserves the right to disqualify any Charity
for any reason whatsoever" this disqualification made them, as Nathaniel Whittemore said, look like jerks - not to mention inspiring a chasesucks hashtag and causing some negative reactions.
2.Leader board or Open Voting Records: The big mistake that the Chase Online Giving Contest made was not providing a leader board, that tracked participants progress. Leader boards and dynamic vote counts help make a contestant's job of getting out the vote easier. With the Chase Bank Online Contest, the lack of a leader board created a lot of extra work for the nonprofits. They had to spend time combing through pages of other organization's voting records. Also, it doesn't make for a clear call to action message.
A leader board can also keeps the sponsor honest.
3. The Role of Experts: Pepsi has a list of some difficult social change problems to solve! And it's great that they're going to use social media to crowdsource ideas and redirect their Super Bowl advertising budget to provide money for implementation. Nonetheless, there is a role for subject matter experts and maybe even the people in the local communities who know the most about the problem and may be affected by the problem (and solution.)
Some contests, for example the Knight News Challenge and Case Foundation Make It Your Own, have handled this need for expertise by having a two-tiered process. The crowd identifies the top contenders, not the winners and a panel of experts selects the winners. The Brooklyn Museum of Art's Click Exhibition used two crowds - a general crowd and a crowd of curators (Allison Fine and I profiled this project in the chapter on crowdsourcing in our forthcoming book, The Networked Nonprofit)
4. A Balance of Social Good and Marketing: Is Pepsi really committed to solving social problems in its communities or does it think that redirecting its SuperBowl advertising budget and using social media to promote its generosity can sell more soda? We know that corporate greed is being replaced by generosity and we know there is potential synergy between financial performance and attention to community and social needs.
I'd love to see a theory of change for this contest. Perhaps it exists. The above diagram describes the theory of change for Prizes from a recent report by McKinsey I hope that Pepsi will be transparent in sharing that if it has one.
Do these contests really have impact? Do they really help nonprofits or distract from their work? Or is this just marketing?
The Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook is one of the biggest online contests thus far,
open to more than 500,000 charities. As of this writing, 1,027,398 people joined Chase’s fan page to cast votes for their favorite charities. The top 100 "eligible" vote getters, announced a few days ago, received $25,000. They are going to participate in the next round, "The Big Idea" where the 100 charities share their big idea for changing the world and get votes. The winner gets $1 million and five finalists will receive $100,000.
The top 100 included a mix of nonprofits with an operating budget of under $10 million with programs in designated
Chase corporate responsibility areas: education, healthcare, housing,
the environment, combating hunger, arts and culture, human services and
animal welfare. (Very interesting to see the American Cancer Society on the list as its budget - according to a 2005 annual report linked on their Guidestar Profile is well over $10 million)
Several groups who were in the top 100 (before Chase removed the vote tallies), were not on the final list, apparently disqualified. Here's what Stephanie Strom, New York Times reported:
JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.
The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.
There was not a public leader board that lists the progress of contest participants and is considered a best practice. It's unclear why Chase did not use a leaderboard, a contest best practice and way to make it transparent. Instead, contest participants had to log in and look at other organization's vote tallies. These were removed in the final days of the contest.
If you look at the contest official rules, in addition to the eligibility criteria, they've added these additional points to control who gets the winning money:
... or organizations otherwise not in alignment with Sponsor's
corporate social responsibility guidelines. Additional reasons a
Charity may be deemed ineligible include, but are not limited to, the
Charity and/or its management being subject to any investigation for
fraud, financial misconduct or other criminal activity. Any
organization determined to be ineligible at any time will be
disqualified. Sponsor retains the right at its sole discretion to
determine eligibility and reserves the right to disqualify any Charity
for any reason whatsoever.
If they wanted to have some control over who received the money, why not just award the money through tradition methods? Or only allow a pre-selected group of organizations to participate?
Since 2007, when the Case Foundation launched its first America's Giving Challenge, social media-infused online contests to raise money for charities
have gained popularity. There have been many remixes of online charity contests since the Giving Challenge, so many that I can't quite remember all of them. These contests are based on:
Voting: Organizations need to rally their supporters and stakeholders to vote them online and spread the word
Donors or Dollars: Organizations need to raise money and the organization with the most donors or dollars win.
The pool of applicants is either open to everyone, tiered, or starts
with a group of charities hand-selected by the contest sponsor.
Closed Pool of Contestants: The contest sponsor hand picks the charities. This is how Target ran its contest and more recently PayPal's FruitCake Challenge.
This way, the contest sponsor's dollars are donated to a known set of
organizations that have been vetted based on corporate values, goals,
or philanthropic strategy.
Open Pool of Contestants: Some contests have the crowd vote or donate - and the ones with the most votes or donors win.
One thing is for sure, if you're designing a contest, you need to think about how transparent and open you want it to be. Or else you, the sponsor, might as Nathaniel Whittemore says, look like a jerk.
Yesterday, I had an opportunity to be interviewed as part of a series of online interviews with nonprofit social media gurus about how to use social media. The month long event was hosted by the Case Foundation and called "Gear Up for Giving." The other gurus included respected colleagues and friends Holly Ross, Marnie Webb, Allison Fine, Katya Andresen, and Geoff Livingston. (Sarah Koch from Causes will be the last session on Thursday)
I'd like to dissect the format and share a bit of the content. I think this format could be easily be used by many nonprofits, even those who share policy research. There were some terrific questions asked, and while I took a stab at the answers, hoping sharing the questions might inspire a few guest blog posts.
Format
The sessions used an hour long talk show format with Case Foundation's Kari Dunn Saratovsky as the host. The tool was a live streaming platform called Ustream.tv that lets anyone with an inexpensive web camera and internet connection to broadcast to the world. Ustream provides a live streaming video window, an archive of the video, the ability for the audience to log into the chat room and ask questions and a social stream.
Engaging the audience is a very important to the success of this genre. This requires giving your audience plenty of opportunities to ask questions prior to and during the event. For this series, there was a guest post on the blog and a request for people to ask questions via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Kari came to my house a half hour before the interview went live. She booted up her laptop, plugged into my Internet connection, and set up her Webcam. She has a list of questions that had already come in via email and started with those questions. During the hour, she asked questions, I answered. A simple conversation, except that we a couple of hundred of other people were following along in the chat room, Twitter, and Facebook. As new questions came in through the Ustream chatroom, Kari would select them as follow up questions.
While Kari was sitting next to me in my home office, her colleagues Kristin Ivie and Sokunthea Sa Chhabra were in the chat room engaging with the audience, watching the "social stream" (comments from Twitter and the chat) and forwarding questions to Kari to ask live via AIM. After the interview an archived copy of the video was uploaded into Youtube and an after the interview blog post.
Ustream also has a feature that lets you put a marker in the video and tweet that section of the interview. (You'll see those below and the Case Foundation Twitter account is tweeting these tidbits today)
I was a little nervous that an hour-long talking head interview might be boring. I brought a couple of props to make it fun and more
interactive, including my finger puppets. I used them to answer some of the
questions and to make a few points.
And the Winners Are
The Case Foundation was also raffling off a Flip Camera and $250 donation to a nonprofit. I decided to give away copies of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith's Trust Agents, Shel Israel's
Twitterville, and Nancy Smith, John Smith, and Etienne Wenger's Digital
Habitats. We asked folks to leave a comment on the blog post sharing why they wanted the book. (I'm going to ask for follow up case studies ....)
The first question that Kari was terrific. What 3-5 questions should organization's be asking as they venture into social media? I actually got a chance to respond in the comments of the blog right before the interview:
Is your organization ready to be a learning organization? That is
value "mistakes" as opportunities to learn and improve what you're
doing?
Does your leadership understand the potential value and is willing to invest in low risk experimentation?
Can you articulate a clear set of "starter goals" that might incorporate learning?
Can you shape and identify a beginner starter project (s) that doesn't take too much time?
Are you ready to engage and build relationships with your stakeholders?
Here's a list of the questions that were asked and link to the spot in the video where I answer it. If you have follow up questions or want to share your answers to these questions. Leave me a comment! Better yet, if you'd like to write a guest post answering the question, leave a comment too.
Note from Beth: One of the things I love about blogging is the conversation in the comments because it always leads to understanding, insights, and learning. I've been keeping a careful eye out for thoughtful comments that could turn into guest posts. That's where this post about crowdsourcing came out of it!
About three months ago Beth Kanter wrote about the Crowdsourcing of Vision at the Smithsonian Museum
In a comment I suggested that crowdsourcing for visioning purposes was
reminiscent of the use of OD (organizational development) principles
and methods often found in large-scale organizational or system change
initiatives. Beth asked me to elaborate. This blog post is my response.
Let's look at why and where crowdsourcing can be useful when organizations
(private, public or not-for-profit) are facing important new or
emerging issues.
Crowdsourcing – collective wisdom and collective intelligence
When
consider crowdsourcing in the above context as a method for obtaining
pertinent information and perspective from relatively large numbers of
people, it is useful to differentiate between it and collective
intelligence, a related concept.
Collective
intelligence refers to the outcomes generated by pooling knowledge from
diverse groups, using it to research and debate and then refining the
resulting understanding into useful and actionable information.
Crowdsourcing
collective wisdom refers to the aggregation of anonymously produced
data from groups of independent, diverse and decentralized people
(crowds). The information gathered is typically summarized into a
collective judgment or perspective – the “wisdom” expressed by the
crowd.
Crowdsourcing as a technique for gathering useful information stems from the concepts outlined in The Wisdom of Crowds,
by James Surowiecki; With a nod to the definitions above, the practice
of crowdsourcing can be useful for tapping into the attitudes, opinions
and beliefs of the “crowd” represented by an organization’s employees,
customers and other stakeholders.
Many nuances and constraints have been applied to Surowiecki’s original
ideas, and examples advanced wherein the ideas work more or less
effectively. Whether you agree or disagree with the concept, there’s a
fundamental attraction, and empirical evidence, to its utility. A
crowd made up of diverse people with as many perspectives as there are
people can, when faced with a question, problem or idea, generate a
coalescing of sense and thence a consensus.
Indeed, a number of processes for working with small or large groups stem from
the same basic premise – organizational development, whole systems and
socio-technical systems theory rest on significant input from a wide
range of different actors. A crowd’s aggregated collective response to
a question or challenge creates a perspective or a position. In
Surowiecki’s terms this represents its collective wisdom.
Can Today’s Organizations Access The Collective Wisdom of Crowds
The workforce and other stakeholders of any given organization is a form of
crowd. An organization’s crowd is likely to be more homogenous than a
general crowd, to be sure. In the context of crowdsourcing, this
relative homogeneity becomes important. It provides boundaries or
constraints that complexity theory tells us are useful for bringing
focus to the reasons for and expected results from the crowdsourcing.
For quite a few years now there have been sustained clarion calls for the
development of learning organizations, more responsive and flexible
cultures and for changes to fundamental assumptions and models of
effective leadership and management. Hundreds of thousands, if not
millions, of dollars have been spent on visioning, strategic planning,
culture change initiatives, coaching and more effective internal
communications.
There are competency models galore, climate and culture surveys, and a wide
range of other assessment, diagnostic and developmental tools and
processes aimed at “harnessing the employees’ and the organization’s potential
However, the structure of most organizations is still clearly hierarchical and
relies on learned command-and-control leadership and management
techniques. Most leaders, executives and senior managers have been
steeped in industrial-era management science assumptions. Their mental
models began with these fundamental assumptions during their education
and their first jobs. They have reached senior decision-making and
leadership levels with the help of models that preceded today’s digital
hyper-linked and networked environment with its wide, deep and rapid
access to large numbers of people and vast amounts of information.
It is the rare “authentic” or natural leader that possesses or grows in
him-or-herself the wisdom to bring humility, purpose, values, clarity
and inclusive decision-making to creating and leading a responsive,
adaptable and effective organization.
Jim Collins codified these rare qualities in Level Five Leadership, a featured article in the Harvard Business Review’sBreakthrough LeadershipIf you want to harness collective intelligence of the organizational crowd, you must have humility and good listening skills.
From yesteryear to tomorrow
Enter social software .. blogs, Twitter, wikis and various widgets (like IM
interfaces that help people connect, converse, swap ways of doing
things and gather feedback from colleagues and customers). Using social
software for purposeful activities tends to create gigantic, wide,
always-coursing feedback loops that will not be stopped.
So.. in this new electronic networked environment, how can today’s
leaders go about developing vision, values, and a range of other
elements of strategy and tactics.
We know from pre-Web experience that there is indeed something tangible,
observable and useful in the knowledge and intelligence contained in
and offered up by crowds when faced with an issue. Four or five decades
of organizational development and organization change theory, practice
and results have shown us that.
Many of us have been paying attention to the evolution of the Web’s impact
on our lives and work for some time now. We tend to believe that the
adroit, open and sincere use of social software to tap into and listen
to a given organization’s crowd can materially help leaders and
managers evolve into people who do not rely on charisma, positional
power, coercion or dishonest political manipulation. Acknowledging and
seeking ways to use the crowdsourced wisdom typically requires
humility, listening and servant leadership to face and embrace the
responsibilty to lead and manage effectively.
An important caveat … in spite of much work by many organizations towards
inclusive engagement, it only takes a little bit of perceived
ambiguity, loss of perceived control, shifts in markets or constituents
for control-oriented hierarchy to reassert itself very quickly.
Notwithstanding the apprehension of many of today’s more traditional or conservative
leaders and managers, the possibilities of crowdsourcing useful vision
and wisdom from employees, constituents and markets has been made much
easier with the capabilities of today’s interconnected and interlinked
Web. And, just as importantly, increasingly people want AND expect that
their voices will be heard.
The job of a leader in today’s hyperlinked and transparent organizational world is to instantiate the crowd’s intelligence and / or wisdom with a clearly-stated and purposeful mission and objective, and then listen ! This is where social software and methods like crowdsourcing can shine. They can and I believe will, eventually, replace or augment even the most sophisticated culture change initiative or surveys and diagnostics.
It can help leaders and managers learn to really listen, and to respond in intelligent and mature ways to the conversations that carry the collective wisdom of an organization’s ‘crowd’.
These days (and certainly tomorrow) it’s less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about listening to conversations and championing, catalyzing and coordinating the collective wisdom of any given organizational crowd.
Jon Husbands is a Listener, watcher and facilitator. Change agent who's been around many blocks. This post was originally published on his blog, Wirearchy.
The opera will be performed throughout the weekend of Deloitte Ignite (4, 5, 6 September 2009). They're investigating how short, 140-character contributions can build upon each other to create a non-linear narrative – like a Choose Your Own Adventure story or a game of Consequences. The story is line is being summarized regularly on the blog. Here's Act 2.
In addition to the summary, the music director is blogging about on how the story can combine with some music and acting and singing to become a finished piece.
Anyone can contribute. Just tweet your line of the story to @youropera
This isn't the first time a classical music organization has turned to social media and crowdsourcing. A few months back, the San Francisco Symphony used YouTube to crowdsource auditions for a mashup peformance.
Here is an example of an artistic program or creative process undertaken as a crowd and it isn't a cheap publicity stunt. How do you evaluate this? In the traditional way, a music critic would attend the performance and publish a review. I wonder if they will crowdsource the review? Woudn't it be cool for the audience to rate the opera using their mobile phones?
I wonder what they thought about before starting this experiment? I came across Jeff Howe's definitive book on Crowdsourcing and in the last chapter he offer guidelines for crowdsourcing. I wrote the following trying to translate some of the ideas for nonprofits and use it as framework when looking at the Opera project.
1. Pick the Right Model
Crowdsourcing is a not one crowd fits all approach. It's an umbrella term for different approaches that all have one thing in common: a contribution from the crowd. There are four categories of crowdsourcing -- each of which suggest a particular goal. Many successful crowdsourcing projects use a combination.
Collective Intelligence or Crowd Wisdom: This is the "we are smarter than me" rule. A group of individuals has more knowledge to solve a problem than a single individual. At its most low tech level, wisdom of the crowds is a suggestion box.
Crowd Creation: Crowds have creativity. Jerry Michalski use the metaphor of the global brain to describe this. Now wonder some arts organizations - museums, orchestras, and now operas - have embraced crowdsourcing as a creative technique.
Crowd Voting: This category uses the crowd's judgement to organize vast quantities of information. TechSoup Global has been one of the leaders experimenting with type of model through its Challenges. And, as Stacey Monk points out, these are not without their challenges.
Crowd Funding: This category taps the collective pocketbook, allowing large groups of people to provide funds one small donation at time. Spot.Us is a great example.
2. Pick the Right Crowd
This is one of those common sense points. For example, if the @youropera followers are tone deaf or have never been to an opera or if @youropera didn't explain what an opera libretto was in plain English and encourage participation from those who were not professional opera librettists (not sure if that is the right term) - then there might not be a resulting opera. Obviously, they reached out to people who are opera lovers and Twitter users.
3. Offer the Right Incentives
According to Howe, attracting a Howe, attracting a crowd is much easier than keeping it. He goes to say that the most important criteria for success is the existence of a vibrant committed community. You need to understand their motivation. Is it an oportunity to participate with other people who share an interest, learn something new, have fun or what? Maybe just the opportunity to contribute a 140 line to an opera to be performaned by a major institution is enough. Maybe they will acknowledge contributors.
Other crowdsourcing projects have provided incentives - like cash. Take for example, Ideablob. Howe also points out that some people might freely donate their time, knowledge, or labor - but don't under-estimate the power of cash incentives.
4. Crowds Don't Magically Appear Like Cheshire Cats and They Might Need Some Herding
Yes, I know you can't herd cats and crowds need some guidance. There might be some level of self-organizing but they also require direction and someone to answer questions. Ah, a crowdweaver! Also, crowds don't work in total isolation. Typically these are collaborations between the crowd and individuals guiding them. And sometimes you don't guide, but follow (I think this what Downes was saying about not being able to train seals) In the opera project, this guidance is being done by the music director on the blog and on Twitter.
It is important to break the task into the smallest component. It isn't because people are stupid, but because they are busy! This is what Yochai Benkler refers to as "modularity," and defined as "property of a project that describes the extent to which it can be down into smaller modules that can be independently produce before they are assembled into a whole." Think legos.
6. Remember the 90% is Crap Rule
This is known as Sturgeon's Law. It is important to remember that the benefit of crowdsourcing lies in providinga previously nonexistent outlet for people's talent. Here's the list of all the latest tweets for the Opera project, how many will make it into the final opera? Howe suggests using the crowd to help you filter the crap.
7. What's in for them?
This about making sure that you're giving the crowd what it wants and that is about understanding motivation. People are drawn to participate because some psychological, social, or emotional need is being met. Maybe being able to say that you contributed a line to a professional opera gives you a sense of achievement.
What are your best tips and tricks for crowdsourcing?
Note from Beth: This week I'm trying to understand crowdsourcing and nonprofits, hopefully with a crowd of
other folks. I'm looking for guest posts, ideas, and examples of
nonprofits using crowdsourcing for their programs, fundraising, and
marketing. Some questions I don't know the answers to:
What are the best examples of nonprofits using social media to crowdsource advice, program evaluation, ideas, or other uses?
What are the best practices or techniques for crowdsourcing?
Are there special cautions related to crowdsourcing for nonprofits?
What are the best resources, including blogs, books, and articles?
Please leave me a comment or if you're interested in contributing a post, please fill out this form. Not I'm still interested in guest posts about movement building and transparency.
Guest Post: Interview with Georgina Goodlander: Fill the Gap Flickr Campaign by Debra Askanase, publisher of Community Organizer 2.0
How do you truly involve the general public and ask them to engage, online with art? If you are the Luce Foundation Center for American Art,
you offer the public the ability to become “citizen curators.” The Luce
Foundation Center occupies 20,400 square feet of the Smithsonian
American Art Museum’s space. It is an open study/storage facility
displaying about thirty-three hundred objects from the collection of
the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In essence, it is visible storage
for the museum. The Smithsonian American Art Museum lends work out,
often for 12 months to other institutions, leaving gaps in the display
units. The Luce Foundation Center is responsible for selecting the art
that will fill the gaps.
What is the Luce Foundation Center doing? Crowdsourcing the art selection process, and opening it up to the public. Absolutely brilliant!
The Luce Foundation Center created a Flickr campaign to literally “Fill the Gap” in the gallery case. When there is a need to fill a gap, the Luce Center posts a photo on its Flickr site
of a gallery case that has a “gap” in the art, includes the dimensions
of the gap, and asks the public to search its online catalogue for
ideas. Participants search for pieces on the Luce Center’s website - it has 41,000 cataloged pieces of art on its website - and suggest replacement pieces from the catalogue.
I thought this was such an innovative use of Flickr that I incorporated it into a previous blog post about arts organizations using Flickr creatively. I also contacted Georgina to learn more the campaign’s inspiration, how the Luce Center is utilizing the “Listen, Learn, Adapt”
methodology during the campaign, and any advice she would give other
institutions creating Flickr campaigns. She kindly answered all of the
questions below:
Q. What is the relationship of the Luce Foundation Center to the Smithsonian American Art Museum?
A. The Luce Foundation Center is part of the Smithsonian American
Art Museum, displaying around 3,300 works from its collection. Luce
Foundation Center staff members are responsible for almost all
operations within the Center, including making recommendations for the
artworks that replace those that leave. If an artwork leaves for less
than 12 months, we do not replace it. We simply put up a sign that
tells the visitor where the artwork is (on loan to another museum, on
view elsewhere in the building, or in the conservation center for
treatment). We are storage, after all. However, if an artwork leaves
for more than 12 months we do replace it.
Q. What was the inspiration for Fill The Gap?
A. The last year or so has been very busy, with over 40 paintings
and objects departing long-term for a variety of reasons. As a result,
there are some gaps that we don’t have the time to give the attention
that they deserve, or we have tried to find replacements and have been
unable to come up with anything with which we are happy. The
inspiration for the Flickr “Fill the Gap” project actually came from a talk given by Clay Shirky
at the Smithsonian 2.0 conference in January 2009, in which he talked
about how Flickr is a great tool to facilitate communities. I realized
that this would be the perfect environment for us to solicit the
public’s help in filling some of our long-standing gaps.
Q. What are the objectives of the campaign?
A. Our objective is to have the public select works to fill gaps in
the Luce Foundation Center display, while also revealing a little of
how the museum operates.
Q. What would you consider the biggest successes of the campaign and the biggest disappointments?
A. The biggest success is that we have had participants making
excellent suggestions and that we have successfully filled three gaps
since the project’s inception. The biggest disappointment is that there
aren’t more people joining in, but considering that we are asking
people to invest quite a bit of time and energy, this wasn’t too
surprising.
Q. What have you learned and how will you incorporate those lessons into the campaign as it continues?
A. Our intern Jessica Hass is working on a low-tech version that
will be in the physical museum and will invite visitors to “vote” for
their favorite out of around 20-30 possible replacements. We will then
post the winning (and approved) object to the Flickr site.
Hopefully the project will evolve to offer different types of
participation. Those that don’t have a lot of time might vote for an
object based on a pool selected by us, but those that want to dig
deeper would start from scratch with the entire museum collection to
choose from. I definitely anticipate further modifications to both the
online and on-site versions as we explore different ideas and gather
feedback accordingly. No project is ever static in the Luce Foundation
Center!
Q. Do you have advice for an organization using Flickr as a campaign platform?
A. If you plan to solicit user content and comments, you need to
assign at least one person to monitor and respond to these. People
using social media tools like Flickr expect quick responses!
Georgina Goodlander is the Manager of the Luce Foundation Center at
the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She manages all aspects of the
Luce Foundation Center, from staff, visitor services, and public
programs to interpretation and new media. Georgina and her staff are
pictured in this photo, below.
Tierney Sneeringer, Bridget Callahan, Edward Bray, and Georgina Goodlander
Debra Askanase is a former community organizer and executive
director, and the founder and lead consultant at Community Organizer
2.0, a social media strategy firm for non-profit organizations and
businesses.
Crowdsourcing is
the technique of allowing many people to provide feedback, advice,
knowledge, expertise or ideas for a project or create collective
intelligence for an issue. Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing, defines it as:
The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
What planning questions do you need to raise to effectively incorporate crowdsourcing into nonprofit program development?
How might your organization use crowdsourcing - regardless of the tools?
I have been reading War and Peace, one of the themes of which is that history is created through the individual pursuits of millions of individuals acting in their own interests, and not through the will of leaders and generals. I happen to agree with that, which gives me a different perspective on exercises like this exercise in crowdsourcing. The suggestion is that the wisdom of the crowd can somehow be orchestrated, or led, or managed like a trained seal. I don't think so, and I think that such projects express a misunderstanding of collective intelligence.
I'm not sure if Stephen was talking about this type of seal, but think the metaphor of an army of trained navy seals carrying out a mission in military precision sees a better metaphor. If crowds can't be trained to appear like the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland when needed, can they be facilitated?
This post provides a context for crowdsourcing since Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" in his Wired article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." It also lays out an argument of crowdsourcing for problem solving.
Crowdsourcing is a killer business model, effectively stitching the market research process into the very design of products, minimizing overhead costs, and speeding up the creative phase of problem solving and design. Theories of collective intelligence and crowd wisdom help to explain why crowdsourcing works: broadcasting a challenge online taps far-flung genius in the network and aggregating that talent can, for some types of problems, be just as effective as solving the problem in-house.
What I have argued for a few years now, and what I am trying to make clear in my dissertation, is that crowdsourcing has the potential to work outside of for-profit settings. In fact, it may be a suitable model for solving government problems, supplementing traditional forms of public participation to help government make better decisions with more citizen input.
I agree that crowdsourcing can be used outside of for-profit settings for problem solving. Brabham is focusing on how it can be used to supplement public participation to help government make better decisions. We're also seeing more nonprofits take this approach for fundraising, program development, and social change.
I just wanted to capture a couple of examples that came to me this week, well, through crowdsourcing.
The book I'm working on with Allison Fine includes a chapter on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is the technique of allowing many people to provide feedback, advice, knowledge, expertise or ideas for a project or create collective intelligence for an issue. Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing, defines it as:
The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
The effective use of social media tools is like a double espresso shot to your regular coffee. Nonprofits that have built their network can use social media tools to crowdsource ideas for projects at an amazingly fast pace.
Take the above example of "crowdsourced" birdwatching from Craig Newmark. Using Twitter, a digital camera and software that makes it easy to post photos to twitter and his network, he was able to quickly identify this mystery bird. And, taking this example further, the National Wildlife Federation has created the hashtag #nwf for crowds of Wildlife Watchers to connect.
Crowdsourcing can be done at an organizational level, blended into the way nonprofits create, implement, and evaluate their programs. We've also seen nonprofits use crowdsourcing marketing, fundraising, and activism. It can also be used an individual level, to crowdsource professional development and learning or even advice on making contributions. Shel Israel, author of the book Twitterville, crowdsourced the bulk of research for his book using Twitter.
Crowds can also become unruly mobs, using their collective energy to push back against organizations or companies that aren’t listening. United Breaks Guitars is just one recent case study of crowds being evil.
This week on Beth's Blog, I'd like to invite you to think together with me about crowdsourcing and nonprofits, hopefully with a crowd of other folks. I'm looking for guest posts, ideas, and examples of nonprofits using crowdsourcing for their programs, fundraising, and marketing. Some questions I don't know the answers to:
What are the best examples of nonprofits using social media to crowdsource advice, program evaluation, ideas, or other uses?
What are the best practices or techniques for crowdsourcing?
Are there special cautions related to crowdsourcing for nonprofits?
What are the best resources, including blogs, books, and articles?
Please leave me a comment or if you're interested in contributing a post, please fill out this form. Not I'm still interested in guest posts about movement building and transparency.
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