Consider crowdsourcing as an alternative fundraising technique
Howard Lake | 4 May 2011 | Blogs
At the risk of stating the obvious, your organisation can only achieve its objectives with the support — financial and otherwise — of its supporters. You ask them, and they respond to the need. That’s the way it’s worked ever since the first not-for-profits started fundraising. But what if you were to ask them to help shape your organisation’s strategy as well? What if you opened up a debate on how to spend their donations?
We’ve all heard of donor fatigue — whenever supporters hear from you, it’s because more money is required. Even though the Internet has helped change that (online updates about funded projects help keep information flowing), there is still a sense that it’s accompanied by the begging bowl. Imagine the effect of getting your supporters to decide which projects they would like to fund. It would certainly take some of the guesswork out of fundraising, as there would be natural ownership and support of the idea among those who suggested it.
In recent years, a new way of consulting the masses has emerged: crowdsourcing. It’s a way of outsourcing something, such as a decision or a solution, to a crowd through an open call for its participation. By crowdsourcing opinions, you can spot an emerging consensus. By crowdsourcing ideas, you may find extraordinary solutions and innovations from ordinary people. Recent high-profile examples of crowdsourcing include BP, the British Government, and President Barack Obama as he took office.
Crowdsourcing differs from traditional surveys in that, apart from the initial call for participation there are no other boundaries. So, you encourage thinking outside of the box. What’s more, surveys are often constructed with an end in mind, whereas crowdsourcing can reveal answers to questions you hadn’t even considered.
Online charity contests, such as Pepsi’s Refresh Project or Chase’s Community Giving Initiatives, are crowdsourcing the answers to which causes they should support. Donors have even used crowdsourcing to work out where to direct their own donations. But within a cause such as yours, what could you discern from the sound of the crowd? How donations get used? Ways to save money?
In order to crowdsource you need two things: a crowd and the means by which to register its ideas and votes. One thing most charities have is access to a crowd. It’s always good to start close to home, so begin by asking staff colleagues, and then move on to volunteers, service users, your supporter database and eventually your organisation’s wider circle of friends via social media.
Then you need the means to capture everyone’s thoughts. A number of online solutions have emerged in recent times. Take a look at IdeaStorm; participants can create new ideas and/or vote on existing ones. Similarly, Google Moderator does the same kind of thing and was used to track the 4.7 million votes and ideas cast in one week for the Obama transition plan in 2009. These tools provide some facilities for analysis and ranking of ideas according to their popularity, which is an advantage over using, say, Twitter, where you’d have to read through the responses.
Niroo Rad is CEO and Managing Director of ASI Europe
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.