Tag Archive for 'competitions'

Great reads from around the web on January 25th

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I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of January 25th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

  • TakingITGlobal and Nabuur Launch New Action Guide on Online Volunteering | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – "TakingITGlobal (TIG), an organization that operates the world’s most popular online community for young leaders, and Nabuur, an online volunteering platform that links Neighbours (online volunteers) with Villages (local communities) in Africa, Asia and Latin America, announced today the release of a new Action Guide on Online Volunteering available for download on the TIG website." Check it out!
  • Chase Community Giving Contest Ends With Yet More Controversy – Beth's Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change – Beth Kanter has an excellent post chronicling and compiling many posts and resources, as well as commentary and criticism surrounding the Chase Community Giving contest that just finished. "This contest was the culmination of a two-part "vote for me" cause marketing strategy that started in November and has been rife with controversy. In some ways, it comes as no surprise that the race to the finish line ended with more allegations of dubious behavior by contest participants and those watching them compete. It's left some nonprofit professionals wondering whether these types of contests are a good idea." I strongly agree with Hildy Gottleib's comment at the end of the post and urge you to read both the post and the discussion in the comments.
  • Online Fundraiser's Checklist – "FREE DOWNLOAD: The Online Fundraiser's Checklist. How Do You Ensure Fundraising Success This Year? Take advantage of Network for Good's handy new eGuide, The Online Fundraiser's Checklist, to ensure you don't miss a thing."
  • 3 Powerful Social Good Trends in 2010 – Ben Rattray, the founder and CEO of Change.org, has a great piece on Mashable showcasing the three trends he sees coming in 2010 for the social change sector. "2009 saw a proliferation of online charity events, competitions, and “friendraisers” that spilled across Twitter (Twitter) and Facebook (Facebook) and filled email inboxes everywhere with more requests for money than any Nigerian prince could ever hope to make. And while it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing — anytime someone gives money to feed the hungry instead of buying another digital potato seed in Farmville, global karma rises, if even just by a little — this focus on using the web as an ever-more elaborate means of getting people to fork over cash misses the much bigger opportunities just over the horizon."
  • Try These Dynamic Digital Storytelling Platforms | Community Organizer 2.0 – "Nonprofit organizations can tell the best stories. Stories about the impact that a nonprofit has on people’s lives can engage, recruit and solidify donors and members. As ImpactMax writes so beautifully, tying individual stories to overall contextual problems and societal issues can really change policies. Anecdotely, I see a lot of blogs and Flickr photo streams, some YouTube and Vimeo use. Why limit yourself? There are so many other tools and platforms that are exciting, innovative, incredibly engaging, and beautiful. Here are my top digital storytelling platforms and tools for your nonprofit to try out in 2010."
Published on January 25, 2010 by Amy Sample Ward. 0 Comments

Great reads from around the web on January 15th

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I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of January 15th). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

  • Digital Media and Learning Competition: Applications now open! | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org – "The 3rd Digital Media and Learning Competition, from the MacArthur Foundation, is now accepting applications. In partnering with the White House, National Lab Day, and videogame makers Sony and EA, the Digital media and Learning Competitions has prizes up to $200,000 and is open to all kinds of innovative projects (including games) that make use of digital media for education and social change. Submissions close January 22, 2010."
  • » Your Mobile Giving by State – Wendy Harman at the American Red Cross has posted a map and data about the funds donated via texting "Haiti" to 90999 to support the victims in the Haiti earthquake crisis. It's really interesting as far as mobile fundraising, but also just that the ARC are able to gather, analyze and share data like this in close to real time. Thanks for all that you are doing, ARC!
  • 7 Things I learned From #Beth53 Fundraiser and PoST Class – Beth's Blog: How Nonprofit Organizations Can Use Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change – Beth shares some great lessons from the fundraising campaign she recently ran for her birthday. "This post harvests what I learned and what I still don't know about the birthday campaign strategy and measurement as well as guest teaching a graduate school class." My favorite lesson? 5.) Design for People To Self Organize!
  • After Copenhagen: Turning Activism Into Impact – Online Fundraising, Advocacy, and Social Media – frogloop – There's a great guest post up today from Michael Silberman on the Frogloop blog: "Going to the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen (COP15) was the closest I've come to a good strong punch in the gut — the type that makes you question much of what you once believed to be true. But it was also one of the best wake-up calls I could have asked for.

    …That means setting aside our shiny online tools and tactics long enough to ensure that we're using them to deliver real impact."

  • 1 vote can equal $1 million « Nonprofit Communications: Duck Call Blog – "Today is the first day people can vote in the final round of the Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook. Between now and January 22, people who add the application can vote up to five times for five individual charities. Much has been written criticizing the contest and the initial selection of 100 charities who already received $25,000 and are now vying for the grand prize of $1,000,000. But, despite the controversy in the first round of results, I think there are some positive lessons that can be learned for nonprofits of all sizes."
Published on January 15, 2010 by Amy Sample Ward. 3 Comments

Social Innovation Camp at MPS09

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I’m capturing notes at the MyPublicServices event from PatientOpinion.  Use the tag #MPS09 to follow conversations and highlights from others at the event. This session is: Ideas, people and cold hard cash: why the way we make stuff happen is broken and how to fix it, from Anna Maybank at Social Innovation Camp.

Social Innovation Camp: the story so far.  Started with an idea two years ago that the web is important because it helps people organize for themselves and impacts how we make things work; but in order to make that happen you have to bring people together who are interested in making it real.  We are all about moving ideas into something that might work and do so by running competitions and weekend-long prototyping events.  Think about 5 things: what’s the problem, what technology you’ll use, design sustainability, how will people come to use it and how will you distribute it.  Award a prize to those that show most potential.  Have run 3 competitions so far with over 300 ideas submitted.

Note: the “I” in the following is my capture of Anna speaking.

What We’ve Learnt

1. From cliques to talent scouts

A great idea is nothing unless you have people to get it off the ground, and those people may be anyone with certain attributes:

  • people who can bring an insight
  • practical optimists, can see things being different in the future (have to go find them)

We need to move away from “social entrepreneurs” and “socail innovation” towards “solve problems” and “make stuff” so that it’s more accessible.  It took us a while to learn this!  The first competition we had a slick website and everything else and had barely any submissions.  So, we went to talk people about it.  We brought people together around the same kind of idea and the buzz in the room was incredible, people realized they didn’t have to just complain about something but about making things the way you want.  So, we learned from that and now are conversation driven.  Our competitions are talent scouted: we go out and talk to as many people as possible, run workshops and trainings and get people to think about what they might solve and then submit.  I think we pay a lot of lip service to “user centered design” and so on, but sometimes we are talking about many different worlds colliding and a number of them are very problem focused and then solution focused groups.  So, when you have top-down definition of what you’re interested in and then bottom up creation it doesn’t work.  Create a “tentacle-based” approach.

2. From paperwork to relationships

That’s a lot of work. Is it worth it to go talk to all of those people and so on?  What we are doing when we talent scout isn’t just about creating a pool of projects but about starting relationships.  Normal application processes are very good for people who are good at writing or following a system.  But, are proposal based approaches good for finding people who are going to start new things?  Instead, you start to build relationships with individuals – find interesting people and working with them in incremental ways and build trust. And then find people to support and fund; particularly important when funding entirely new things.  It’s hard for those people to say what their impact will be when it’s something so new, so it’s hard as a support organization to believe in the project.  But, as a support organization that knows you are an interesting implementer of good stuff, it’s easier to make the decision to support them.  We do this through scouting and in the weekends as they are high pressure and fund and collaborative so you can really, really see how people work.  I think the world works like this anyway, we just don’t admit it.  What we should be doing is appreciating that and design systems that take into consideration the ways humans work.  This is how the investment world works: based on relationships and trust.

3. From advisors to connectors

What’s next?  What do you need other than money?  We asked our prototype projects what else they need. The answer was they need advice.  Organizations that are trying to support people to do new things know this.  What I’m suggesting is 2 things: first, giving all the advice yourself is not efficient or entirely valuable, so you should grow a community around the ideas where they connect; and second, the advice you need as a radically new group/project is very different as there aren’t models or examples, so the only way these projects will work is by changing behavior… How comfortable we are with meeting people offline we only know online, how we share personal data, etc.  These changes will have to happen in order for these projects to work.  Rather than having standard business advice but a place where they can experiment.  The way we move from advisors to connectors is that at the weekends where we get the great ideas, we go out and try to find people who can help them and bring them there.  Building an audience around the 6 ideas for the weekend.  If you come to a weekend, you come out with a training experience.

4. From grants to venturing

How do we change the different ways we distribute money?  Not about finding people to give it to or the decision process, but the different financial instruments we could use.  Early stage ideas need early stage risk capital and there’s a gap in providing that.  Something to show that a really good radical idea has a good chance.  We also have to find new sustainable ways to fund projects. Fundraise, grant, spend – it’s not efficient.  Finally, a lot of new ideas, the newness is the business model.  It needs a different way to be funded.  Need finance that’s responsive to business models that aren’t charities or companies.

What might that look like?

What if we ran a larger SICamp process that formed small teams around packaged ideas and take teams of 2-3 people and choose 10 groups and each a 15,000 stipend wherein they come and work in a shared space for 3 months.  Set targets and help to accelerate project development and build community.  At the end of the 3 months we have a demo day with possible funders and we we take a finders fee and also pay-back for the 15,000 starter grant.  Potentially creating a sustainable way of starting projects and recycling your capital.  It already exists in projects like Y Combinator.  We think it would be interesting to start a Y Combinator for social projects here in the UK.

I don’t think that’s the answer to everything.  You have to design your support process around the people you are working with.  What can we do with groups like Kiva?  What if we used that system to find projects to fund?  Or what about KickStarter’s model with pledging/small contributions/crowdsourcing?  What if we applied that to the NHS?  4ip is already doing some of this stuff, too, and it’s really interesting.

This talk was inspired by lots of conversations with people who are looking for support for an idea AND interesting people and organizations looking for projects to support.  There has to be an opportunity there!

Published on November 26, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 2 Comments

Ideablob says “Goodbye”

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For the last week, there’s been a rich discussion about Causes and the way that it abruptly, without much notice, left MySpace (deleting all of the related content, connections, communications, etc.).

(To dive into the conversations about Causes, visit my earlier post, or posts by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Ivan Boothe, Beth Kanter, and Joe Solomon.)

The most important parts of the conversation around Causes do not actually focus on Causes, specifically. The ideas and issues do focus, though, on the emphasis that nonprofits and individual supporting causes, campaigns and specific groups online have put on free, social media, 3rd party tools.  The Causes event makes many of the inherent risks in such emphasis or dependency on the tools very clear, like:

  • No access to data – whether it’s email addresses of supporters, actions taken, or anything else
  • Little influence in development – some tools and developers have put the users first in development decisions but most do not, so the features that could help your organization may never be created
  • Unbalanced “strategies” – organizations have fallen victim to the “all eggs in the same basket” trap
  • Unbalanced “diversity” – by focusing on just one platform, organizations limit the audiences they connect with

ideablobclose

And then yesterday, another tool that’s been used by many changemakers and social innovation groups has dropped off: Ideablob:

Goodbye!  Due to the recent chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of our parent corporation, Advanta, we are unfortunately no longer continuing ideablob and bloblive. If you have any questions please contact hello@ideablob.com.

Like with the sudden shut-down of Causes, Ideablob did not alert registered users (as I’m one of them), and there’s nothing in the Twitter stream.  The only thing to come out is the above message that now redirects from any page you try to visit.

The Ideablob closure is different than Causes as the purpose of the platform, the utility and functaionality it offered, the relationship of users to the platform, etcc  And, Causes left MySpace (an application within a platform) to focus on only Facebook (another platform where it was an application within).  Ideablob was a platform aimed at innovators, entrepreneurs, and changemakers where competitions awarded cash awards and provided spaces for people or groups to showcase their ideas and projects.  Their description on the MySpace profile says:

ideablob.com® is a website for entrepreneurs, small businesses, and idea people to congregate and submit business ideas with the chance of winning $10,000 towards growing their ideas*.

ideablob.com allows users to post business ideas. Whether these ideas are inventions, business concepts, or non-profit / social entrepreneurial, they are all welcome at ideablob.com. It doesn’t take much; no complicated business plans, just 700 characters to describe a compelling business concept… sort of like an elevator pitch.

Blobbers (as we call users of the site) browse, give advice, comment, and vote on each others’ ideas. The person with the most votes at the end of each month wins $10,000*. It’s pretty cool and it’s a fast growing community of really bright entrepreneurs. What’s more is that we have guest advisors, leading industry experts, come on the site and give professional advice to those who are interested.

If this sounds interesting to you, just come by ideablob.com

The message from Ideablob makes it clear that the shut-down has come from the bankruptcy of the parent organization.  But, the “why” is never as important in these conversations as the “what does this mean?”

So, what do you think this means? Have you participated in an Ideablob competition – were you alerted to this change?  How will it effect the work you’ve done so far?  How will it change your use of competition platforms or social media generally?

I would love to hear your ideas!

Published on November 13, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 8 Comments

Vote for Next Great Nonprofit Tagline

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Vote here for the 2009 Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Awards.

Voting will:

  • Sharpen your understanding of what works and what doesn’t communications-wise.
  • Inform and inspire your foundation’s messaging.
  • Give you the chance to register for the free 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Report, with 2,500 tagline examples.

The 60 tagline finalists have been culled from over 1,700 entries in 13 categories, including grantmaking. Now it’s *your* turn to select the best.

Please share this invitation with your grantees! They’ll benefit in the same ways you do.

VOTE Now! Polls close midnight, Wednesday, September 30th.

About the Nonprofit Tagline Awards

The annual Tagline Awards are back from Nancy Schwartz and the Getting Attention blog.  Your nonprofit or foundation could be one of this year’s Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Award winners!

A strong tagline does double-duty — working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base. It’s one of your most effective marketing tools, but the 2008 GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations don’t have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly.

I’m trying to change that with this annual award program, highlighting the best in nonprofit taglines.

For more information, visit this FAQ.

Published on September 17, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 0 Comments

Creating a Compendium of Competitions for Change

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Originally posted on the 4Change blog, here.

The June #4Change chat topic focused on Challenges/Competitions for Social Change. Early on in that online chat, the request emerged for a compendium or other list of “all” the Challenges and Competitions focused on social benefit. Such an overview would let those interested in participating or facilitating a competition review the full landscape of options, characteristics of each, and so on.

So, to answer that call, the #4Change crew has started building the compendium and now it’s your turn to chip in! Here’s the link to see what we have so far.

Please contribute to the Competitions for Change Compendium!  Simply click here to add to the resource!

Published on July 2, 2009 by Amy Sample Ward. 0 Comments