Last month, my company sponsored a “crowdsourcing philanthropy” experiment in which we offered to donate money to causes based on their ability to rally supporters online. Our premise with the Share To Win challenge was that a cause needs two ingredients to be successful in the modern world: An idea worth spreading, and a core group of passionate people to light a fire online.

A recent Harvard study found that just 10% Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content on the popular and fast growing microblogging service. The numbers must be even more skewed when it comes to the much more involved act of traditional blogging. If you have an important idea that you want to spread, and especially if you are a non-profit cause that relies on the generosity of others to back your idea, you are going to need to have some of those Internet extroverts on your side.

The methodology of our challenge was straightforward: Anyone could nominate a cause by creating a note on 3banana.com describing why people should support their cause, and then share that note through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The five causes that attracted the most endorsements – as measured by unique visitors who left a comment – would win our donations, a total of $10,000. The challenge would give champions an excuse to spread the word about their cause, but without asking for money – which tends to reduce the virality of any idea online.

To encourage participation, we reduced the barriers to posting content online down to a minimum. The first tactic was simply positioning: Asking users to share a note was less formal and less work than authoring a complete article for a blog or website. The second tactic was to further reduce the actual effort required. Users could sign in with their existing Google account, and then type their idea freeform into an input field atop a notes page, without worrying about titles and categories. Press save, and you have created a private but sharable webpage with full functionality for threaded discussions. We were soliciting raw input of thoughts and ideas with as few barriers as possible.

Then we worked on increasing the fluidity of sharing these freeform notes with Facebook and Twitter. We just launched Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth integration with 3banana Notes, enabling direct connections to those services so that users could share notes a with just a couple quick clicks. As a business, 3banana justified the cost of sponsoring the project as a “Beta That Gives Back”, creating an incentive to use the new sharing functions and giving the money we might have otherwise spent on traditional testing methods to some good nonprofit causes.

What Happened?

Over 50 causes were nominated for share to win. Some organizations nominated themselves, and some were nominated by one of their passionate supporters. We also asked our friends and family to nominate causes and to spread the word. The first big surprise was how the social media platforms we had taken for granted for some time now were still quite new and fresh to many people at non-profits. We found many causes to be extremely eager to figure it out, while other causes felt they needed to call a board meeting before even posting a note about their mission on Twitter.

Among the causes who were nominated, over 20 of them took Share To Win as a real opportunity to spread their message to supporters through Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and email. We had suggested at the beginning of Share To win that causes should consider the prize money as a token of appreciation, while the real benefit of the campaign would be to create an opportunity to reach out to more people and to galvanize support on social media channels without asking for any money, because we were putting up the cash if they could show they had supporters.

The top two contenders couldn’t have been more different on the surface. Grand prize winner SENS Foundation supports research in regenerative medicine and seeks to end aging. Runner up Los Angeles Habilitation House helps veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury get back on their feet. Underneath the surface, however, these two causes both are based on powerful ideas and both are championed by passionate supporters. Each cause was able to find over 2000 people who supported them enough to sign up for an online service they had never heard of, login and post their endorsement message. Remembering the Harvard study showing that most people don’t make the leap to generate content online, 2000 content generating supporters represents a much big number behind the scenes.

We also gave prizes to the top contenders in the fields of education, environment, and health, each of which gathered hundreds of passionate supporters to comment online: Art in All of Us helps kids express and share their experiences, their passions, and their dreams with peers around the world through art. Their vision inspired supporters from 80 countries to endorse them in Share To Win. Disaster Accountability Project recognizes that the number of climate-related disasters is bound to rise. Hurricane Katrina proved that we need better ways of responding to disasters, and DAP advocates grass roots monitoring and information sharing. The HeartMath Institute sees stress as one of the most important frontiers in healthcare and their research aims to help us better measure, understand and manage this driver of so much illness.

For some of the smaller causes, even though they did not have the numbers to win a top prize, they still found a way to bring together and galvanize dozens of supporters. These people felt part of a support community, and in the future will be even less inhibited to speak out online, to Tweet, and to tell a friend on Facebook. One of these causes is Friends of Kibera, a new non-profit started by students at Notre Dame to help people in Kibera, a very poor area in Kenya. Another was a group called Magical Bridge, raising money for new and better parks for kids. These causes and dozens of others were highly diverse in their missions but very similar in their ability to use social media to rouse the passion of supporters for very clear ideas that mattered to their respective communities.

What did we learn?

The final tallies of supporters were very nonlinear. The more support a cause received, the more rapidly the cause spread. Even though 3banana is an open and free service, and there were no barriers to signing up and commenting, we found surprisingly little abuse of the process, which we were able to validate by cross referencing the results of multiple methods of counting unique users.

It was very motivating to read comments from hundreds of people about why they supported their cause. On of the biggest fears that large donors sometimes have about helping small non-profit causes is that they will find themselves alone, and what started as an act of generosity will become a guilt-ridden dependency. When you see that a cause has hundreds of supporters willing to take the initiative to endorse the cause publicly online, it creates a lot of confidence that the cause has both an idea worth spreading and a critical mass of passionate support that will sustain the group through the inevitable ups and downs of any worthwhile mission.

Based on what we learned from a whole bunch of new users, we are refining both our note-taking applications and our methods for sharing notes. Then we may do something like Share To Win again, perhaps with partners who share our passion for using social media and mobile technology for good causes. Next time around, we will focus more on mobile information capture and sharing: We hope to make the engagement in the cause even more personal, allowing users to snap photos and to link them to locations, products, or events to connect with their cause.

If you want to be notified when we launch the next Share To Win challenge, simply start a free notebook at 3banana.com, create a note about your cause and about yourself, and use the share function to send us link to your note at sharetowin @ gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter at @brown2020. We will keep you posted!

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.