Growing Needs, Limited Resources: 3 Reasons Crowdsourcing is Of An Age to Best Serve Nonprofits

Posted on March 14, 2013 by | 1 Comment

4285422258_926b869b36_oHere’s an interesting piece of information:

For eight years in a row, the majority of nonprofits surveyed by Guidestar reported an increase in demand for their services. At the same time, the Nonprofit Finance Fund reported that a weak economy was impacting nearly every nonprofit’s operations. 

Nonprofits, in spite of being an employer of nearly 10% of America’s workforce, often have to face daunting challenges in order to deliver the quality of services that the public requires. And although the practice of crowdsourcing is far from new, it has now acquired a maturity that empowers nonprofits that use it with a new instrument of efficiency in the face of these challenges. Why?

1.    We are in a digital age

The United States has reached nearly 80% internet penetration in its population and all of the crowdsourcing processes are available online: voting, suggestions, information sharing, feedback, etc.

2.    Micro-everything is now practical

Micro-giving, micro-financing, micro-volunteering. Chunking up the work and assigning it to a remote task force is now not only possible, it is practical. A lot of the smaller tasks that the crowd would like to assist with is possible from a desk and in the small chunks of the day that would otherwise be unoccupied.

3.    Transparency is the expectation

Whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, the public wants to believe that they have a clear view of what’s going on in an organization. They want to be able to have insights and they want to be able to access that information at any time. Because of digital maturity and the ubiquity of the practice, the audience is ready to engage at all times.

For these reasons and many more, crowdsourcing is now uniquely suited to serve the nonprofit sector. We hope you’ll join our complimentary webinar on the subject and we’ll take some time to explore how Cerebral Palsy Alliance (in specific) is innovating and improving with the help of the crowd. Register here.

How can the crowd serve your non-profit? How do you think crowdsourcing will continue to evolve?

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First Kickstarter Film to Win an Academy Award

Posted on March 12, 2013 by | Leave a comment

inocente-1In the vital and exciting mood of SXSW and the invigorating artistic spirit that thrives there, I’d like to share the film that won best documentary short subject: Inocente. It was one of the first films whose successful Kickstarter campaign led to an Academy Award.

The film opens with a shot of the film’s subject, Inocente, her boldly illustrated eyes that have been highlighted with make-up and paint and they lead with a short introduction from the artist we will spend the rest of the movie with:

Dear people of the world… I’m not just a girl, I’m a girl who likes to jump in puddles and likes flowers. Just because I’m homeless doesn’t mean that I don’t have a life.

The film shares the story of Inocente a homeless youth in San Diego as she creates art for a gallery show sponsored by A.R.T.S. (an art workshop for at risk youth). Now, admittedly, with subject matter like that there’s no way that the heart strings were going to remain un-tugged, but it is an uncommon film in that with such difficult themes, the film is never sensational or dramatic, but is instead intimate and personal and feels very authentic. It is not surprising to me that it scooped an Oscar.

Granted, the Kickstarter campaign asked for a modest sum of money to type up the loose ends of filming (creating HDCam tapes, Digibeta tapes, Blu-rays, and DVDs in the correct formats for TV and community film screenings) and was therefore not a film that covered every expense with crowdfunding, but perhaps with its success that might be something that we see in the future. It was also partially a product of Shine Global, which is “a 501(c)3 non-profit film production company dedicated to making films and other media aimed at raising awareness, inspiring action, and promoting change” making it particularly well-suited for Kickstarter. The filmmakers themselves are seasoned in the business (and have previously been nominated for awards), so it’s not so much an underdog story as much as it is a story about the changing collaborative process in the world of indie film.

I think anyone who watches the film will be glad that they succeeded. You can rent or download the film on iTunes.

What other things make the Inocente film a great candidate for a crowd venture? How is the face of independent film shifting with these new possibilities?

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Join Us at SXSW

Posted on March 7, 2013 by | Leave a comment

4170925840_7b633bc68a_oIdeaScale is looking forward to traveling to SXSW tomorrow. We’re going to be in town and available to answer questions about our solution, best practices, and crowdsourcing trends.

SXSW is an interesting event – it brings together a wealth of industries and their leaders and somehow knits them together through the language of digital technology and engagement.

And somehow, they manage to make a business world and what could be characterized as a bunch of nerds and well… they make us look cool…

…because it’s hard to get on the agenda without being revolutionary or at least highly innovative. Generally the conversation is not celebrating the work of a single person, but instead the work of a movement.

There are lots of things that we’re excited to see at SXSW, but we’ve listed a few of the events that we’re particularly interested in attending.

Why Public Policy Should Matter To Your Start Up
Friday, March 8, 3:30 p.m.
Senator Moran will discuss the policy challenges startups face and how the startup community can engage with policy makers to enable innovation and help economic growth.

The Learn to Code Movement:
Friday, March 8, 5 p.m.
By 2018, there will be more than 1.4 million job openings in the IT sector.

DIY: How Crowdsourcing Has Saved Independent Film
Saturday, March 9, 2 p.m.
Today, filmmakers have the unprecedented ability to harness their greatest resource – their communities.

Al Gore on the Future
Saturday, March 9, 3:30 p.m.
This year, he plans to shake things up again by exposing the six critical drivers of global change explored in his new book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.

Best Practices for Outsourcing & Integration
Sunday, March 10, 11 a.m.
Hold a discussion covering the benefits of using outsourced resources and how to improve going forward

Shut Up & Take My Money: LEGO Does Crowdsourcing
Monday, March 11, 3:30 p.m.
LEGO CUUSOO allowed acute demand to emerge overnight, and when it did, production resources in the traditional manufacturing company remained fixed and finite.

Curation + Crowdsourcing + Creation = Love
Monday, March 11, 12:30 p.m.
The ModCloth Story of customer collaboration.

Crowdfunding: A Catalyst for Local Economic Growth
Monday, March 11, 5 p.m.
At a time when funding from local, state, and federal governments is spread thin and credit is increasingly harder to come by, crowdfunding has demonstrated that collective and collaborative efforts of individuals can fuel significant change within America’s communities.

If you are interested in joining us for discussions or a chat over a margarita, please email me at Jessica.day@ideascale.com. We’ve got a list of good spots to visit (both SXSW-scenes and off-the-beaten-path locations).

What are you looking forward to at SXSW? What do you think will continue to power innovation in the interactive world?

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Emojis are Now in the Library of Congress

Posted on March 5, 2013 by | 1 Comment

whale_largeThe Library of Congress has now included a crowdsourced and crowdfunded project, the results of which are called Emoji Dick. Originally launched as a publishing project on Kickstarter, Emoji Dick sought funds to translate Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoji Icons using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce. It worked in two stages:

1)     Every sentence was translated three times for five cents each

2)     Every sentence had the translations voted on for two cents a vote to identify the best one.

It took just over 1,000 hours to convert Melville’s classic and now Benenson, the New Yorker that originally dreamed up the idea, is selling the real world publication for as much as $200 (for the hardcover). Quite a price tag for something that cost just over $3,500 in Kickstarter funds to create with the help of 800 other people! The quotes that Benenson is using to promote the book are interesting (and amusing) choices, ranging between:

“…[Emoji Dick] highlights the innovative ways in which the labor pool of bored internet users is being tapped to complete complex tasks.”

-Telegraph UK

OR

“That’s astoundingly useless.”

-Alex M, BoingBoing.net Commenter

Because Emoji Dick really does highlight both of these facets in the field of crowdsourcing: the vastness of possibilities presented by a working and engaged crowd… as well as the apparent frivolity that those efforts are often directed toward.

In any case, it will be interesting to track what fruits Benenson reaps from this novelty project and what other books might follow Emoij Dick into the Library of Congress.

Also – for a laugh, you can find a list of Emoji book titles here.

What other emoji works would you like to see? What’s the most frivolous crowdsourced task ever assigned in your opinion?

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Rewarding Great Behavior

Posted on February 28, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Tesla1IdeaScale had a great time speaking in New York yesterday and we couldn’t be happier to be in such a great group of crowdsourcing fanatics. We’re hearing a lot of great stories and getting some good feedback, so stay tuned for some tip sheets and summaries that we’ll get queued up for the coming weeks.

In addition to our talk yesterday, we also got to show the crowd some of the new rewards badges that we’ve been working on that incentivize preferred community behavior. And now that we’ve pulled back the curtain, we’re glad to introduce some of our new badges (with more to come).

Meet:

The Striker :

The community member who has had the most amount of ideas moved out of the submission stage.

The Engager:

The community member who has generated the most amount of total activity with their submission (votes up/down, comments, comment votes, shares, etc.)

The Cat Herder:

Awarded to the moderator who has generated the most amount of moderator activity: approving ideas/comments, moving ideas through the idea lifecycle

The Tesla:

The community member who has the most number of ideas moved to completion.

Each of these identities was designed to incentivize key behavior that is central to the success of a vibrant crowdsourcing community. For more insight into what to consider when you’re launching a great crowdsourcing community, read the white paper here.

What did you enjoy best about Crowdopolis? What else should you consider before you launch your community?

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Crowdfunding Moon Travel

Posted on February 26, 2013 by | Leave a comment

97214206_c2b5560990_oSpace exploration has never felt as accessible as it does now and part of that impression is due to the empowerment the crowd now feels. Things that formerly seemed out of reach are now possible, because no one is responsible for achieving them alone. Even, apparently, the penetrating the boundaries of space seem within our grasp.

The latest of these ambitious undertakings is the company, Golden Spike, which would like to achieve a privately coordinated and manned mission to the moon by 2020. The team is almost entirely assembled of former space scientists and seasoned astronauts and they’re looking for public support in a few ways. The company mission may be stated vaguely, but Golden Spike is definitely looking for innovative interaction with a broad audience:

“Golden Spike will further transform human lunar exploration by making these missions participatory expeditions that involve the general public in ways that create exciting new ways to monetize human space exploration.”

Hmmm… “monetize, how?” I wonder.

Additionally, one of its latest efforts for both publicity and backing, is an IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign. Rewards number from general recognition to the ability to nominate a potential explorer from any nation or sending a message to the moon. The most coveted reward? An all expense trip paid to the 2020 launch. You can see why armchair space explorers would relish the opportunity to support this initiative. However, with 60 days left in their campaign, and almost 235k left to raise, one wonders if they’ll succeed in this mission.

Finally, for an extra bit of fun, check out this infographic that outlines the Golden Spike mission to the moon.

How else will the crowd empower private companies to dream bigger? How else are we crowdsourcing space exploration?

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Nonprofits and Crowdsourcing: It’s All About Innovation and Efficiency

Posted on February 21, 2013 by | Leave a comment

cerebral-palsy-alliance-thumbJoin IdeaScale and Cerebral Palsy Alliance in this complimentary webinar as they discuss the opportunities of adopting a crowdsourcing solution in the nonprofit industry.

In the age of curtailed funding and recession spending, it is important to innovate in every area, crowdsourcing presents a number of opportunities to nonprofits looking for ways to improve efficiency and increase savings. Crowdsourcing is an opportunity to:

-Pool collective data
-Innovate based on suggestion
-Generate content
-Manage micro-volunteering
-Crowdfund

In this webinar, IdeaScale will present industry research about how crowdsourcing might present opportunities for efficiency and savings. Robyn Cummins will talk about how Cerebral Palsy Alliance used crowdsourcing to bring their organization forward.

Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
1:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. PST

For more information about Cerebral Palsy Alliance, please visit here.
For more information about IdeaScale, please visit our site.

Speakers:

Jessica Day, Director of Innovation Analysis, IdeaScale
Robyn Cummins, Knowledge Brokerage and World Cerebral Palsy Day Project Manager, Cerebral Palsy Alliance

Register here for this complimentary webinar.

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A Little Crowdsourcing, A Little Romance

Posted on February 14, 2013 by | Leave a comment

2264628230_5191d80c52_zIt’s Valentine’s Day and today everyone will likely (no matter how they feel about it) be bombarded with messages of romance and anti-romance. And there are quite a few stories of how romance is being informed by the will of the crowd.

Pop star Jason Mraz wrote the song “The Woman I Love” but held off on making a video until he got some feedback from his fans. He posted the question “What does ‘The Woman I Love’ mean to you?” Responses were tagged with #MrazingTheVideo and ten tweets guided the eventual video’s direction. The result is here.

Or maybe you need some romantic advice. Certainly there are plenty of forums that could help you out. There was also a 14-page document created by Harvard students in 2011 entitled “The How to Guide for Romantic Relationships at Harvard.” The guide is not always the most sophisticated (and, at times, is downright offensive), but also includes interesting or sincere asides out of nowhere. That’s the allure of crowdsourcing, I suppose, where advice like “Pray together to the altar of Budweiser” exists alongside “Although technology tempts us to deal with problems via texting and over the internet, remember that relationships are between people and try to deal with problems in person.”

LifeHacker suggests turning to a task-master service called AirTasker to get your last minute Valentine’s errands out of the way. Maybe you need someone to run and deliver your flowers or make sure that someone TiVO’s your honey’s favorite show. It’s not a bad idea. We’re all busy, sometimes other people can help us get our romantic errands run.

And, if you’re not sure how to set the mood, last Year, Scott Kleinberg of the Chicago Tribune asked his Twitter followers to collaborate and create the perfect Spotify love songs list.  The result was 14 tracks of saccharine satisfaction.

What other ways is the crowd collaborating for this traditionally one-to-one holiday? How are you celebrating?

 

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Crowdfunding: the best way to fund your small business venture

Posted on February 12, 2013 by | Leave a comment

448825808_a68c5651ff_oThis post is a guest written by Andrew Jackson of Oak View Law Group. Here Jackson outlines an overview of crowdfunding and how it might be leveraged by entrepreneurs.

Most employees, have a secret dream of starting a small business of their own. When a person starts a small business, it means that he is his own boss (but that doesn’t mean it’s easy). Initiating one’s own business means hard work and long work days. Moreover, funding a small business could be equally distressing – an issue that potential entrepreneurs have been struggling with for years. A majority of banks and other financial institutions do not fund small businesses without a considerable track record. Private equity is also not obtainable by almost 99.9% of all businesses. This leaves business proprietors with no other option but to ask for help from friends and relatives, seek private loans, or use retirement and savings accounts to support their businesses. However, lately, budding entrepreneurs have found a new mode of funding for small amounts of money, usually known as crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding: An overview

Crowd funding or crowd financing is described as the collective effort, concentration and trust by individuals who connect and pool their cash and other resources collectively, normally through the internet, in order to support initiatives taken by other individuals or organizations. The need for drowdfunding comes from numerous sources: citizen journalism, disaster relief, performers asking for support from fans, political campaigns, or new software development. However, in order to do this, project leaders must master some time management techniques, social expertise and a bit of talent.

How crowdfunding functions

Instead of obtaining a business loan from a bank or any other financial institution with all the harassments and years of loan payments, one now simply sidesteps this process with crowdfunding. In order to help small start-ups, a lot of new businesses have emerged, offering online platforms to help industrialists fund business ideas. Nevertheless, every crowdfunding platform has its individual rules and necessities. Some of them won’t allow you to raise funds for common use in your business, but may let you use their platform to raise money for a new promotion campaign or for a fresh product launch.

Regulation D of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) rules restricts the total number of investors or the number of non-accredited investors before a business is necessitated to enroll and notify the SEC (an extremely costly and time consuming procedure). Some online platforms have been attempting to get around the SEC’s regulations by receiving payment on your behalf, collecting the money and providing direct loans or investments to projects or businesses. Whereas the online site basically handles the entire work here, the donor might receive a significant portion of quarterly earnings or a fraction of the future income of the appealer.

On the horizon

Recently, a letter was sent by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to the head of the SEC, requesting new regulations for small businesses employing crowdfunding for increasing equity capital. The SEC has been asked by the Congressmen to consider allocating small businesses with the facility to collect up to $100,000 on average, using a highest $100 investment per individual. The whole idea is to get the SEC to loosen up its rules concerning equity investment (laws implemented in order to protect inexperienced investors from losing life savings to deceitful companies) under the excuse that a majority of the investors could run the risk of losing $100. The SEC most recently repliedwith an apparently positive review (though no firm decision). Time will tell, but it would certainly bring in a range of funding opportunities for small businesses all over the nation.

By Andrew Jackson, financial counselor associated with Oak View Law Group, APC now for over 4 years. He analyses people’s financial situations and advises on different debt relief options. He also helps people manage their budgets through free counseling. Jackson has covered numerous topics, including the Waterfall approach to debt free ™ living, debt snowball vs debt avalanche, and much more.

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Crowdsourced Street Performance: Street Jelly Reviewed

Posted on February 7, 2013 by | 1 Comment

8136094598_f4aace5f84_hThe following is a guest post by Aaron Samuels, a Seattle musician and Street Jelly member. We profiled Street Jelly a few months ago as an example of the crowdsourced street performer experience. Want to hear a live musician playing for you? Sign on to Street Jelly where the music and performance experience is always authentic and immediate. Samuels, a StreetJelly regular, was eager to share his experience.

As I write this, a young man who goes by the handle “Pointer” is playing a song of inspiration in a southern Californian basement (his parents’). We are joined by a Jellyfish in Toronto who goes by “ImageAndFamily”. Several other people have come and gone for this broadcast, including “SadieNorkin” a former student of the School of Rock here in Seattle, now studying at (and broadcasting from) Berklee in Boston. Her broadcast just an hour or so earlier had the usual Jellyfish in virtual attendance, including a newer member named “Aleksandar” from Serbia, and, hailing from Nashville, Tennessee, Street Jelly creator Frank “Frankie” Podlaha.

A “Jellyfish” is a Street Jelly junkie – one of the spontaneous descriptors to develop via chat in this virtual community. “Jellyfly” is another. A Jellyfly is anyone who views but does not participate in the real-time chat feature of the site. It’s amazing to watch as a new language, moreover an entire culture, rises up around this new phenomenon. The Jellyfish already have inside jokes including a standing request for a rendition of Prince’s “Purple Rain” – it’s Street Jelly’s Freebird-esque obligatory request song…although, there is plenty of Skynyrd to be had as needed, via Jellyfish “CliftonPrinty” down in Missouri.

Yes, I am a Jellyfish. So much so that I am constantly proselytizing for new Jellyfish. When someone is performing on Street Jelly whom I consider to be worth watching and listening to, I immediately update my Facebook status with a link to their performance, and then individually link in Facebook chat to all of my friends to let them know what’s going on. If you “Like” the Street Jelly Facebook page, you will get alerts whenever someone is performing. Also, when you’re on the site, you can “Favorite” an artist and receive instant email updates about when they are broadcasting and about their scheduled performances. Anybody anywhere in the world with access to the internet and the proper Flash protocol can sign in at any time and watch, for example, “JayroGonzalez”, a Latin American musician now living in Dublin, playing a classical guitar bossa nova rendition of “Just The Way You Are” by Billy Joel. And if you’re not a Jellyfly, you can even request a song or two.

The Street Jelly experience has something for everyone. It’s fun to just sign on and play, or just pop by and watch a song or two. But if you become a member, you can schedule a performance or broadcast any time of day on a whim. You can also purchase tokens to give to performers. When a performer accrues enough tokens, the money gets transferred to their paypal account. I myself have made over $150 on here in just three months of random performances. And heck – I was gonna just sit around in my living room playing my guitar ANYWAY, now I’m doing so to a rapidly expanding international audience of friends and getting paid for it. And it’s never too late to broadcast. I signed on and played a concert for someone in Guam the other night. It’s earlier there, apparently.

And that, as Samuels might point out, makes StreetJelly an inheritor of one of the original forms of artist crowdfunding (pennies into a hat on a street corner) – StreetJelly has just brought the experience online. Will be interested to see what is next from SJ.

For more information about Aaron Samuels:


Samuels’ StreetJelly profile: http://www.streetjelly.com/maestro

Samuels’ Website: http://www.aaroncadamsamuels.com/

For more on StreetJelly, visit http://www.streetjelly.com/. 

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