Charities start to harness the power of the many

An ‘unprecedented’ social trend
Underestimate crowdsourcing for mass support and engagement at your peril, says Jeff Howe, a writer for Wired magazine who coined the term crowdsourcing and just wrote a book by the same name. “Before, people had to be together physically in order to create a group of people who could work together for social change. But with how the Internet is evolving, suddenly, that’s not true anymore. Now we can create a virtual crowd simply by the technology that we keep. We can get together with others simply through our shared interests. We can self-organize now with just a little prompting from others, into close-knit or far-flung groups that are project-oriented, on the fly. This is unprecedented in human history. This is a social trend that is inevitable, and it can be terribly exciting — or terribly threatening — for existing organizations.”

No kidding, say experts and nonprofit leaders. As some are discovering, new types of leadership strategies are going to be required to manage the surge of public input that these new forms of mass engagement are generating. Nonprofit management expert Paul Light, a professor at NYU’s Wagner School, says most advocacy organizations are in for a surprise. “The concept of being donor-driven or community-driven is a new one for many nonprofit leaders more used to calling all the shots,” Light says, and the new mass participation can, and will, start forcing change throughout the organization.

Clay Shirky, NYU professor of new media, agrees. “The key to making crowds your friend is going to depend on how well you engage them to do the work for your cause. Mass collaboration, if managed smartly, can help you build support" for your cause. The smartest organizations harnessing these technologies, he says, will figure out how to use social media in ways that engage whole new communities of supporters to participate with their pocketbooks, as well — "and not just this year, but repeatedly this year, depending on how perpetually they feel they’re being engaged in the cause.”

To be sure, not all nonprofit experimentation with crowdsourcing has gone smoothly so far. Some groups, like the Brooklyn Museum of Art, are still trying to figure out how to boost the engagement of crowds — but without overwhelming already stressed staffers with high levels of extra work just to manage it all.

Crowd curates museum exhibition
Last spring, Shelley Bernstein, the Brooklyn museum’s new manager of information systems, sought to crowdsource an entire art exhibit, and sent out an email asking anyone interested to send in museum-quality photographic images that best fit the theme, Changing Faces of Brooklyn. Bernstein got 389 images. Then, she issued another open call for curators. This time, 3,344 people accepted, and over six weeks, this online “crowd” sorted through the images and tallied their selections, which eventually were whittled down to comprise the museum’s June 27-August 10, 2008 exhibit, Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition.

Entirely Web-sourced and Web-curated, the exhibit represented the first use of crowdsourcing by a nonprofit in this way. “I wanted to try using new media to build our community, expand it, and ask people from the outside to participate in what we do,” Bernstein said. She also was inspired by the 2004 book,” The Wisdom of Crowds,”  which argues that large, diverse groups of people sourced by the Web will make better judgments and smarter decisions than an elite few, no matter how individually brilliant they are.

On one hand, Bernstein said, the crowd chose many of the photographs that professional curators did, proving that mass collaboration can work, to a point. But most importantly, the exercise proved that mass participation also can overwhelm small staffs with “tons of extra work” simply to accommodate all the input into decision-making, Bernstein said. “On one hand, it worked very well raising interest in and knowledge of the museum and involved thousands of people, literally, in one of our projects,” she said. “But the key lesson here is that you need to learn how to manage all of the new input, or it can create all sorts of new headaches that could, if you're not careful, eat up the very resources you’re trying to expand.”

Amen, says Polly Aris Stamatopoulos, the CEO of The Rainmakers Group, a Washington, D.C.-based fundraising consultancy whose clients are mostly small- to mid-sized traditional charities. “It’s almost shocking to note that so many of these tech-savvy organizations who are trying to get better at engaging people still have no clue how to capture the interest they’ve gotten and convert that into solid, on-the-ground fundraising strategies offline,” she says.

But this, too, will come as more nonprofits share the lessons they learn from their crowdsourcing experiments, experts says. "There's no turning back now," says Shirky. Indeed, crowdsourcing to excite new levels of public engagement is an unstoppable, inevitable next step in the evolution of the Internet — an unprecedented and critical opportunity for groups looking to sustain themselves over the long-run. Says NYU’s Paul Light: “The charities that embrace the changes and experiment with them successfully will be the ones that will survive.”

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