Charities start to harness the power of the many

By Marcia Stepanek

updated 6:15 p.m. ET Sept. 10, 2008

On June 24, the nonprofit New York Philharmonic ended its annual concert in Manhattan’s Central Park in a highly untraditional way: it asked concert-goers camped out on the lawn to take a quick moment to text-message their preference for the final musical number as conductor Bramwell Tovey waited on stage. Would it be Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebees? Or an orchestral version of Jimi Hendrix’ Purple Haze? Hendrix proved the more popular choice — 74 percent of those texting chose Hendrix — so the orchestra wasted no time launching into a spirited version of Hendrix’s 1960s-era counter-cultural anthem.

The vote, however, did more than cap a concert. For many people in attendance that night, it signaled a new era of social engagement for the tradition-bound orchestra and underscored what other institutions in today’s cash-pinched charity sector are just beginning to figure out:  “crowdsourcing” —using the Web and online social media to invite mass collaboration — is critical to 21st century advocacy. The rise of social media — from mobile phones to online social networks to digital video-sharing — is forcing many charities to expand and accelerate their use of new Web capabilities to drum up much-needed new converts, dollars and ideas. “We need to engage people we have never really reached before,” says Vince Ford, the Philharmonic’s director of new media. “We need to reinvent the way we build support.”

Call it the engagement imperative. Says Joe Rospars, Barack Obama’s new media expert: “The biggest lesson nonprofits can draw from Barack Obama’s ability to raise more than $100 million online in a faltering economy is that fundraising now flows from engagement — it’s no longer enough to simply believe in the cause. Now it’s critical for people to participate in a cause, and feel like they've had some input, before they decide to help it pay for stuff.

To be sure, some advocacy groups are just starting to invite public collaboration to better engage existing and potential supporters. Some, like the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign, are using the Web to crowdsource social action — in this case, an ongoing boycott of businesses that discriminate against people for their sexual preferences. The HRC is offering a digital “Buying for Equality” guide that lets people see — in real-time and on the fly — which businesses have unfavorable policies. The guide, itself, is also crowdsourced — created, Wikipedia-style, by people who want to share their personal knowledge of those businesses and policies online. A mobile version of the guide, accessible by cellphone, has helped to boost participation in the HRC’s activities, which — in turn, leaders say — has helped to increase membership by more than 10 percent.

Dialing in ‘cause videos’
Another way cause advocates are starting to use the Web to fan engagement and collaboration is through open calls for short, digital "cause videos" — brief, home-made mini-documentaries that people can post on nonprofit sites and link to other video-sharing sites, like YouTube and Vimeo, among others. Manhattan nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, for
example, invites members to make and share short, "cause videos" to advocate for improved bike safety in New York. One of the videos up for a while on the group's site, called Bike Lane Emergency, was sent in by bicyclist Nicholas Whitaker, who made the 2-minute video by attaching his video camera to the handlebars of his bike during a dangerous spin through city streets. Its goal was to show how bike lane safety is not being enforced across
Manhattan and build support for reforms.

Other nonprofits, like the Humane Society of the United States, are using the Web to crowdsource reports of wrongdoing — in this case, news of animal abuse not being covered by the mainstream media. In January, the Humane Society famously drummed up more than a half-million hits to its fundraising Web site after posting a digital video investigation, put together in collaboration with members, reporting the alleged abuse of downed cattle at a California slaughterhouse. The video got some 138,000 hits on YouTube, then was picked up by CNN and led to recall of 145 million pounds of ground beef, the temporary removal of beef from many school lunch menus and eight congressional hearings exploring the possibility of a link between animal cruelty and food safety. Executive Vice President Michael Markarian said the video also helped the nonprofit raise millions of dollars in new and expanded donations.

Sameer Padania, manager of The Hub, the new digital video-sharing site for human rights activists that is an extension of the nonprofit Witness.org, says that increasingly, “People have cameras in cell phones. They’re using social media to capture and share not only the important moments of their lives, things that interest them, but also things that anger them, that relate to social injustice.” Inviting people to share that footage for a cause, he says, can help nonprofits create or become a part of a movement rather than take a more traditional, top-down approach to advocacy.

‘Building a movement’
Still other nonprofits, like Global Voices Online, are giving status quo news organizations a run for their money by crowdsourcing news from around the world, asking international bloggers to send localized dispatches on subjects often overlooked by traditional news networks. Much of the group’s early coverage of the government crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Burma last fall, for example, eventually made it into the mainstream — and helped the nonprofit raise more dollars to keep covering such stories at the same time. In recent months, Global Voices has expanded its mission to organize crowds of concerned citizens around the world to share incidents of government censorship on the site. Says co-founder Ethan Zuckerman: “We’re not simply raising money here; we’re building a movement.”

Change.org The Engagement Imperative Part 1: Crowdsourcing Part 2: Cause Videos COMING UP: Part 3: Mobile Action Part 4: The Cause-Wired-A roundtable?

New media businesses are taking notice, working with some charities to experiment with social media as they also work for a cause. Amnesty International, for example, runs an instant text-messaging program with the U.K.-based mobile telecommunications company, Vodaphone Group Plc. The campaign taps into the widespread use of mobile phones and instant text-messaging in Norway. Since the start of this year, the human rights nonprofit has signed up 25,000 people in Norway to receive “urgent action alerts” twice a month on human rights issues locally and around the world. Each time an alert is issued, a subscriber pays .25 Euros, or about 37 cents. It costs about 75 cents a month to stay on the list, and each time someone responds to an urgent action alert — and about 10,000 do each time — members pay another 37 cents. Amnesty Norway gets about 50 percent of all of instant text-messaging fees, while Vodaphone pockets the rest. This not only generates signatures on Amnesty’s urgent action petitions but also drums up regular income to fund Amnesty’s ongoing programs, to the tune of about 100,000 Euros, or about $150,000 per year. “It’s an example of the mass power of small donations,” says George Irish, a fundraising consultant who worked with Amnesty on the program.

Pop singer Alicia Keys gets it, too. The celebrity has been crowdsourcing cash for an African AIDS nonprofit all summer long, asking audience members attending her concerts to text in donations from the audience. So far, the singer has raised nearly $50,000 for the charity online in real-time, from thousands of $5 donations, texted in by fans from the floor — literally, for a song. Jennifer Singleton, the top fundraising executive for Keep a Child Alive, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based nonprofit that enlisted Keys, says the group has turned increasingly to text-messaging for dollars to offset a steady drop-off in traditional donors and donations: “SMS (text-messaging) is not a new language, but it’s a new language for donations.”

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