AGC Conversational Case Studies: A special sauce for contest success?

This post was written by Allison Fine on behalf of the Case Foundation:

For this third and final Conversational Case Study on America’s Giving Challenge from Beth Kanter and I, we wil pose a question rather than answer one: Is there a “special sauce” for successful participation in online fundraising contests?

Any good sauce is always a combination of ingredients, never just one thing. So is successful social fundraising. Based on our assessment and review of winning efforts in other contests, it seems clear that some of the key ingredients include:

Personal Appeals

People naturally respond more frequently to personal appeals from family and friends. Personal solicitations to existing donors and friends through multiple channels were rated as the most effective methods for fundraising by Challenge participants. Thirty-five percent rated messaging to friends through Facebook as most effective; 32 percent rated personal email to friends, family and colleagues as effective or most effective; and 25% rated email to existing organizational donor base as effective or most effective.

Thankfulness

Many of the winners cited the importance of thanking donors profusely throughout the contest. Food for People not only made personal appeals to their donors but also went to great effort thanking their donors knowing that a well-thanked donor is likely to help solicit their own friends for the cause.

Transparency

Creating public spaces to share information about who is doing what is also a very effective strategy. The Overseas China Education Fund maintained and shared a wiki about who was asked to do what.

Spreading Out the Work

One of the most powerful attributes of social media is the ability of large numbers of people to coordinate their actions as part of a larger event. This type of grassroots activism can be enormously effective for contests or any type of cause-based movement.

Some like Atlas Corps recruited 150 “Campaign Captains” before the contest started. These Captains agreed to get between 5-10 of their friends to give to Atlas Corps during the contest. One of the Captains was so excited about the contest that he made a challenge to his friends that if 100 of his friends donated to Atlas Corps he would go on a 30-mile bike ride in his underwear. His friends responded and he lived up to his promise. Take a look at the bottom and see for yourself!

Other organizations broke their efforts down into bite size pieces for their volunteers by creating templates to use to send messages to their friends, post and comment on blogs, and create their own videos. Here is a template page for the Challenge created by GlobeMed for its supporters.

A Picture is Worth a 1,000 Donors

Most of the winners, including our first Conversational Case Study organization Darius Goes West, chronicled their efforts by video. Students involved in GlobeMed made a series of videos and posted them on YouTube.

Face-to-Face Can’t be Forgotten

Brick and mortar methods still reign as a highly important aspect of online giving campaigns. Five Star worked with their local Chamber of Commerce gathering to set up a laptop and how to give in-person donations.

Contests are important to this concoction because they provide a framework for engaging the community, an urgent deadline for action and, in best cases (such as the Giving Challenge), matching funds for the winners. But in the end, we wonder if there is some other unique quality or combination of these ingredients that makes each person or groups efforts “special” and successful, that turns some combination of activities into a community of energetic people actively engaged in supporting a friend or a cause.

Our questions to our readers, doers, champions and participants, are these:

  • In your experience does a concoction, some blend of activities and tasks, exist, that makes some groups or people more successful than others in fundraising contests? And if so, what are they?
  • Under what circumstances does some combination of activities work best?
  • Is there a tool or action you think might work well in the future that you’d like to test next time (e.g. a geo-location service like Foursquare?)
  • Are we trying too hard to be prescriptive in discussing sauces, and should we just let people create their own recipes?

Guest blogger Allison Fine is a writer and activist dedicated to understanding and enhancing efforts to use new, social media tools for social change.

The painful acknowledgment of coming up short

“So, what do we do next?” According to reports, that is the response Bill Gates offered upon learning that the Gates Foundation‘s $700 million polio effort had fallen short of stopping the disease from spreading throughout Africa. Indeed, instead of putting a once-and-for-all stop to the disease, an outbreak had struck and was spreading through some of the very countries targeted for eradication. At the moment I read his response, I felt his pain. Imagine putting up such a significant sum from the goodness of your heart, committing your time, the talent of people you admire and respect and putting yourself out there in a really big way to meet a really big challenge and then … learning it didn’t exactly work the way you’d planned for and the way you passionately hoped it would.

When I say I get this, I really get this. On a dramatically smaller scale, at the Case Foundation we’ve had to face our own hard moments when reality has set in and you realize that the big opportunity you were chasing is looking more like a really big challenge that is hard to overcome. Things don’t materialize as envisioned, and you fall short of your mark. It’s easy to feel discouraged or even embarrassed. You can’t help but worry about what people will think, or the price you might pay in the court of public opinion.

We experienced this recently, as we had to re-think our involvement in the PlayPumps initiative, which brings clean drinking water to rural African villages. When we were first introduced to the technology, we believed both the technology and the business model for its deployment had enormous potential and jumped in with both feet to help create PlayPumps International-U.S. as a US-based fundraising and marketing organization to support the initiative. As we’ve noted in the past, we’re proud of the successes the initiative has had – PlayPumps are now bringing play opportunities and improved access to safe water in hundreds of communities and schools in Africa. In addition, these efforts have helped spark a number of new play-related technologies now being offered by various organizations and the initiative has highlighted the important role that social entrepreneurship can play in global development. However, we also acknowledge that the organization has fallen short of the aggressive goals that were developed at the outset, and all involved have learned many lessons.

As I noted last fall, we learned that doing work on the ground in Africa is hard and humbling work, even more so than anticipated. We learned that PlayPumps perform best in certain community settings, such as at large primary schools, but they are not necessarily the right solution for other communities. And more broadly, we learned that however creative PlayPumps might be, they really are just one element in a larger portfolio of possible solutions that can be tailored to meet the safe water needs of specific rural communities. In addition, while there have been successes in implementing the PlayPumps technology, and we believe in the entrepreneurial approach of the PlayPumps model, a combination of factors made execution of the original model we envisioned when creating PlayPumps International-U.S. a significant challenge.

Of course, there really is only one appropriate response when things aren’t humming along as planned, and it is the same response Bill Gates offered, “So, what do we do next?” Because just like in business ventures, personal undertakings and public sector initiatives, things often go wrong. The unexpected happens. Reality doesn’t always play out like the business plan calls for. Look at any great business today and chances are their road to success was fraught with potholes – low moments that required fresh, new thinking and important course corrections. As a nation, I think we’ve learned that progress comes through trial and error, and much of what we enjoy today is because somebody somewhere was willing to blaze new ground.

In the case of PlayPumps, there were essentially three options. One was to stay the course, ignore the emerging realities, and stubbornly continue on a path that the growing evidence was suggesting was unwise. A second would be to pull the plug on the effort, and conclude that the time and capital was better invested elsewhere. And the third was to take a step back and regroup, and undertake efforts to go forward in a new and more effective way. For PlayPumps International-U.S., the third path was the right one. The belief that clean water was one of the great issues of our time hadn’t changed – but there were likely better ways to advance the initiative. In May 2009, the board of PlayPumps International-U.S. brought in a new CEO to identify a new path forward. Under his leadership, in October of last year, the organization announced a grant of funds and technology to Water For People, which now offers PlayPumps as part of a larger portfolio of solutions from which rural African communities can choose. At the same time, we announced an investment by the Case Foundation in Water For People to help the organization accelerate and expand its efforts in Africa. For nearly 20 years, Water For People has pioneered innovative approaches to safe water supply, empowering communities and utilizing local entrepreneurs for sustainable operations and maintenance, and we truly believe that their approach represents a step forward for the PlayPumps technology.

It sometimes feels like philanthropic efforts are held to a different standard than in the private or public sectors. All too often there is less tolerance for mistakes, which leads many organizations to become risk-adverse. And when mistakes are made, the tendency is to sweep them under the carpet – thus depriving the sector of important lessons learned. But in reality, the very nature of innovation requires that we try new things and take risks. Sometimes they will work, other times they won’t – but in all cases, we should learn from our experiences and strive to do even better in the future. Of course we would have liked PlayPumps to have achieved the reach and impact to date that we originally envisioned – it’s much more fun to talk about successes than disappointments. The bottom line is that hundreds of African communities now have greater access to clean water and the revised efforts working with Water for People will further improve its availability. Together with other sector efforts and replication of the concept, we do believe African communities will be better served and the interventions more sustainable because of the important course corrections we’ve put in place. Might we have to revisit the strategy again and adapt along the way? Maybe. Turns out innovating is hard work anywhere and anytime. In the developing world even more so. But if the philanthropic sector is transparent about mistakes and lessons along the way, and adapts as the situation calls for, hopefully we’ll all end up a little wiser and a little closer to solutions that can more effectively address the daunting challenges of our day.