brown2020

Earlier this week, my company announced Share To Win, an experiment in crowdsourcing philanthropy. It’s not the usual campaign of trying to raise money from a lot of people in small increments over a social network. We are doing it the other way around: We committed to donate $10,000, and we will allocate the money to five charitable organizations serving unmet needs in health, education and the environment. We are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to help identify the recipients of those funds, and then we will write checks at the end of September.

As active developers and users of social media technologies, we can’t imagine how anyone with an idea that depends on the ongoing support of a community of people giving money, time and energy can survive without them. In fact, we don’t believe a cause will be sustainable for long in the modern world without a keen grasp of social media and an ability to use social networking tools to identify and recruit new supporters and to keep them engaged and informed. Social media channels are how ideas spread. Word of mouth facilitated by social media – the viral channel – is the only cost-effective channel to spread ideas.

There is a catch to social media for causes, however. You need two key ingredients for success: A story worth spreading, and a core group of people active in social media who care enough about your story to get the ball rolling. Share To Win was designed to identify and reward causes with these ingredients.

The methodology of Share To Win is quite simple: Sign in at http://3banana.com and post a note answering the question: “Why should people care about our cause?” You don’t need to work for the cause to enter a cause in the competition, but your note must name a beneficiary that is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in good standing. Next, share the link to your note with friends by email, Facebook, and Twitter. Visitors who click the link to your note can sign in with a Google account leave a comment with their thoughts on your cause. We will run a software script to count the comments from unique users starting Sunday, August 23 after 11:59 PM when voting starts, until voting stops on Sunday, September 27 at 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time. The causes with the most comments can win cash donations and some attention.

Tweet the link to the 3banana note about your cause with the hashtag #sharetowin so we can find you. If you don’t know what that means, then share the link to your note with us by email at sharetowin [at] gmail [dot] com, and we will Tweet it for you. If your cause does not use Twitter or Facebook, you can still share the link to your note by email or by posting it on the web. We think you will see that even if you are not using Facebook and Twitter, the people who care about your cause and the people you need to reach with your ideas are using those channels already.

Why did we do it this way? First, we wanted to lower the bar to promoting your cause. We don’t want you to have to do a lot of work, like making a YouTube video, writing an essay, or making a fancy webpage design. ”Writing a Note” implies that it is informal, and you can just jot something down without being perfect. In fact, you can simply cut and paste your mission statement, organization, and website into the note and be done if you want to. On the other hand, the causes who take some time to make sure that their story is thoughtful and compelling are more likely to inspire support. What kind of story will that be? We have no idea, but we will soon find out.

We chose commenting as the method of voting because commenting requires more thought and engagement from supporters than simply voting something up or down with a voting button. We are looking for causes that inspire enough engagement and commitment that supporters are actually willing to leave a comment, hopefully a thoughtful comment and some words of encouragement. We are not asking supporters for any money, so this is purely a measure of moral support. If an idea is engaging enough that people are willing to type some words into their computer to indicate their support, we think that might indicate the kind of support community we are looking for. We’ll see.

Once a cause has a page and link, Share To Win is an opportunity to reach out to supporters and friends without asking for money, just moral support. In social networks, it is pretty unlikely that people will pass on to friends a request for money. Most people consider such requests to be spam. But if all you are asking for is a vote of confidence, and that vote can lead to funding, there are far fewer mental obstacles to passing on a request to more people. On Twitter, it’s just a matter of “Retweeting” the original Tweet with a link to the note describing your cause. On Facebook, your friends can see what you post, give it a thumbs up, and then all of their friends will see the link as well.

The list of comments could turn out to be a great list of supporter testimonials, something that the cause could reuse. In any case, these direct and unfiltered comments from people who care enough to sign-in and vote will be great feedback to any non-profit organization willing to listen. The non-profit world is full of passionate people who care about the causes they serve, but it also can be insular, with a lot of people preaching to those who already believe in the cause. Opening up a direct channel to more people who care, but without the usual filters, could be very instructive to cause leaders.

Once the five causes have been identified at the end of September, we will write checks to the winners. But the real work will have been done by the community of supporters who demonstrated their belief in the winning causes. That same community of supporters hopefully will continue to support and monitor the progress of the causes that they chose. If the methodology works, then it will be repeated, by us and by others seeking to support good causes that demonstrate that they have solid support communities.

Most cause-marketing campaigns you hear about are done by big brands and big companies, but as with a lot of things, the Internet changes everything. Even though we are a startup at a pretty early stage, we are moving fast. We hope more people will try 3banana, an easy way to take notes online or on your phone and selectively share notes on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Putting our money toward some good causes is a lot more fun, interesting, and unpredictable than buying online advertising (sorry, Google). We get to try some new social media ideas, meet new people, and learn some things about how and why ideas spread they way they do. The learning from this experiment will help us grow smarter as a business and will help out some good causes along the way.