My Five Favorite Crowdsourcing Projects

 It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of crowdfunding, and that I think it's one of the most impressive outcomes we've realized from the explosive growth of social networking. In fact, I've blogged about crowdfunding multiple times (more than I'd realized):

•  Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Crowdfunding: Fundraising with a Social Twist
• Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 2 of 3)
• Repost from IBM Social Business Insights blog: Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to rasie money (Part 3 of 3) 
• Great Innovations — Crowdfunding with Innovocracy 
• La Strada Verso Olympia — A Crowdfunding Project That's Come to Life
• How Social Networking Won an Election and Paid for Cancer Treatment

 The creativity, vision, audacity and sheer magic that it takes to bring a dream to life inspires and humbles me. And I'm not the only one.

•  Kickstarter, one of the more well-known crowdfunding platform states, "Since our launch in 2009, 5.6 million people have pledged $967 million, funding 55,000 creative projects."
• Indiegogo, another popular platform says it has, "... raised millions of dollars for thousands of campaigns worldwide."

So far I've helped finance (on a small scale) a high school classmate's book of essays, a documentary about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and California sea otter livestreaming.  I love the updates and excitement of helping to bring someone's creative vision to life.

So my favorite five projects this week:

• Hello Ruby -  A children’s book that teaches programming fundamentals through stories and kid-friendly activities and targeted toward 4 to 7 year old girls.
   
 

• The Butter Churn - A lovely project from a friend of mine who wants to bring a locally-sourced grocery store to her rural Illinois hometown of 800 people, where the nearest fresh food is 10 miles away.
  

• The Lovemark - An actual, physical architectural structure which will be constructed out of thousands of love cube building blocks.
• UpSense - An invisible, ergonomic, and intuitive keyboard which enables touch typing and Braille typing on the touch screen itself.
  

• Cat Town Cafe - A cat cafe in Oakland, California, based on the extremely popular cat cafes in Japan, where cat lovers can go to have a drink and play with adoptable cats.

What an amazing way to connect with other like-minded people, and help them build their dreams. Do you have a favorite crowdfunding project?

Three Incredible Infographics

Infographics are amazing. They are a fast and easy way to convey a large amount of information quickly and succinctly, as you can see by this, you guessed it, an infographic explaining infographics. Which by the way, useful as it is, I'm not including it as one of my three incredible infographics because it's not new.

Created by Customer Magnetism, an award winning Digital Marketing Agency.

I wrote a blog post last year, Infographics: The Graphic Visual Explosion, and if anything, I'd say infographics have become even more popular in the last nine months.

Here are three of the most incredible infographics I've seen pass through my feeds this week, and I can't help but share the wealth; something most social media practitioners seem almost supernaturally compelled to do. (Hmmm, I think there's a blog post here.... every time I see an amazing article, image or infographic I immediately start mentally crafting my tweet or Facebook post about it.)

I can't decide which of these is my favorite, so I'd love to hear which one you like the best.

This first one, designed by Marketo, which shows us some of the numbers associated with cat and bacon searches, is utterly brilliant. Social Media Today has a great article, Why Marketing That Includes Cats and Bacon Is the Cat’s Meow, that actually suggests some ways you can integrate these popular cat and bacon memes into your small business marketing plan.

The second one, created by eBay Deals, illustrates 16 examples of viral philanthropy, via crowdfunding sites such as indiegogo.com, giveforward.com and gofundme.com, and even reddit, for the victims of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, victims of large-scale shootings, and others who have pulled some heartstrings.

This is a screenshot of the top of a very long and narrow infographic.Click on the link above to see it all.

The final one in my trifecta of favorites is Every Second on the Internet, a brilliant and interactive infographic from designly.com showing, in real-time visuals, how much data is streaming through the Internet every single second. You have to see it in action — this still shot doesn't begin to do it justice.

This also is just a screenshot of a tiny part of the entire piece. Click on the link aboveto see it all.

This is just the beginning, and we'll continue to see great strides in function and creativity. Infographics do not translate well to mobile, nor are the majority of them, including these, accessible in their current form to people with visual disabilities.

La Strada Verso Olympia — A Crowdfunding Project That's Come to Life

In 2012 I wrote a three-part series on crowdsourcing for the IBM Social Business Insights blog:

Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money.  (Part 1 of 3)  (Part 2 of 3)  (Part 3 of 3)

I enjoyed researching and writing it, and have been following various crowdfunding projects (and even funding a few).

In Part 1, I reviewed Kickstarter, a US-centric platform. In Part 2, I took a look at ulule, used mostly in Europe, and brought to my attention by an IBM Italy colleague, Nicola Palmarini (@nipalm).

While working on an IBM project in Nettuna, Italy, Nicola met and was inspired by a woman named Eleonora, and decided to crowdfund a personal project on ulule to help Eleonora travel from Nettuno to Paris to attend the concert of The Pooh, her favorite band, at the Olympia.

The way to Olympia: A documentary on barriers between dreams and reality is a wonderful documentary about dreams, disabilities, and accessible travel. The project received 109% of funding, and the documentary is complete and will premiere on Wednesday, April 24, as you can see by the screening invitation below (click on the image to enlarge it).

Translated, the invitation reads:
The road to Olympia
A film (fully funded from the web) by Claudia Di Lascia, Michele Bizzi, Federico Monti
Wednesday, April 24, 2013-12:00
At La Casa del Cinema a Villa Borghese/ Deluxe Room
Largo Marcello Mastroianni 1-Rome
Presented By: Professor Gioa Di Cristofaro Longo, Cultural Anthropology, University "La Sapienza", Rome
Authors and protagonists will be present on stage
The film will be followed by refreshments.

Congratulations to all involved with this labor of love, and maybe I'll have some photos of the screening to share next week. :-)

Follow @olympiafilm on Twitter.

How Social Networking Won an Election and Paid for Cancer Treatment

I've always loved TIME magazine. It's well-designed — lots of action shots, catchy headlines, and insightful and informative articles. Now I follow TIME on Facebook and on Twitter, so I don't always read the hard copy that shows up at my house every week. I do try though. I've been taking it in the car — grabbing a few minutes while I'm waiting for my daughter at school or an appointment.

The December 3 issue — yes, the one with the colorful fruits and vegetables on the covers supporting an article on What to Eat Now by the well-known Dr. Oz — had two articles that grabbed my attention.  Unfortunately, neither article is available online unless you're a subscriber, but they both very matter-of-factly focused on how fast and how much social networking is changing our world. I mean I know this — I'm passionate about it and do it every day — but to see it in black and white next to world news, the AIDs epidemic in South Africa, and an article about the fiscal cliff.... I was immediately pulled in.

The first article, Friend Request. How the Obama campaign connected with young voters appeared in the Nation section: fair enough. If you've read some of the campaign post-mortems that I've read, you've seen that it wasn't the much-publicized Latino vote or female vote that swung the election for President Obama, but the youth vote — voters under 29. And it turns out that over half of the voters in that age group targeted in swing states didn't have landline phones, making the traditional last minute phone calls impossible.

Instead, the Obama campaign, a social-savvy team from day 1, built a Facebook application. (Are you thinking, "Of course they did!"? With the perfect vision hindsight gives us, I don't know why I was surprised.) It was rolled out to the more than one million Obama backers signed up. This app, like all Facebook apps, gave the campaign permission to look at the subscribers' Facebook friends. And communicating with this highly-valued, hard-to-reach target audience was made even easier because who do you trust more than your friends? Not some political campaign or advertiser. More than 5 million contacts were reached by the 600,000 Obama supporters who agreed to share messages. And so the campaign was won.

And the final word from TIME Magazine?
"In 2008, Twitter was a sideshow, and Facebook had about one-sixth its current reach in the U.S. By 2016, this sort of campaign-driven sharing over social networks is almost certain to be the norm. Tell your friends."

The second social-networking article that caught my eye was in the Health section, and titled, Crowdfunding a Cure. The sick are getting strangers to pay their medical bills. A quick glance at the sidebar shows you this headline: How This Cancer patient Raised $144,000.

I've been fascinated with the growth and potential of crowdfunding this year; writing a three-part series on the IBM Social Business Insights blog (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Instead of people raising money from their social circles for projects such as books, gadgets, CDs, or documentaries, crowdfunding sites such as GoFundMe and GiveForward enable patients and their families to raise thousands of dollars for medical treatments such as surgeries and cancer treatments that would otherwise be out of their reach.

We're on the cusp of the most amazingly creative period in human history. Hyperbole? I don't think so. Worldwide collaboration, powered by social networking platforms, will give everyone a voice. Gender, age, ethnicity, language, location, education, ability — none of this will matter. Innovative companies like IBM will continue to pioneer enterprise-level collaboration platforms, enabling the worldwide, mobile, collaborative, inclusive workforce*. And consumer networking platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter and Kickstarter and GoFundMe and tumblr will continue to enable the collaboration and crowdsourcing that can help build a better world, for all of us.

Now truly, doesn't that just make your day? :-)

*Full disclosure — I am an IBM employee, and totally amazed by the forward-thinking creativity that goes on at my company every single day.
"Vote Button On Mobile Screen" image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Financial health" image courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
"Social Network" image courtesy of  cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights blog: Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 3 of 3)

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 3 of 3)  was originally published on June 29, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content. 
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Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 3 of 3) 

Part 1 and Part 2 of this Crowdfunding blog series look at some successful crowdfunding platforms for creative projects in the United States and the rest of the world. Part 3 looks at two additional crowdfunding uses: microlending and charitable causes.

Crowdfunding for microlending

Investopedia defines microfinance as: A type of banking service that is provided to unemployed or low-income individuals or groups who would otherwise have no other means of gaining financial services. Ultimately, the goal of microfinance is to give low income people an opportunity to become self-sufficient by providing a means of saving money, borrowing money and insurance.
Microfinancing is based on the old adage, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Crowdfunding has simplified microfinancing by using social networking to more easily connect the lenders and the borrowers.

One of the most well known crowdfunding microlenders on the scene, Kiva, summarizes its purpose as: “We are a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.”

And their statistics are impressive. As recently reported by MicroCapital.org, “Kiva has released its annual report for 2011 indicating that its loans to microfinance institutions increased from USD 71 million in 2010 to USD 89.5 million in 2011. The number of individual lenders who fund these loans increased from approximately 371,000 in 2010 to 457,000 in 2011. Kiva reported 26 new field partners who joined its network in 2011.”

MicroCapital.org also states, “Since its inception in 2005, Kiva has loaned a total of USD 313 million, which came from approximately 765,000 lenders and was disbursed via field partners to 782,000 borrowers.  The average loan repayment rate is reported to be 98.9 percent.”

As with the other crowdfunding ventures, if the full amount, in this case a loan, isn’t fully funded, it does not happen. I’m helping finance two separate entrepreneurs with Kiva, and it’s a gratifying experience that I’ll continue funding. My first loan was part of a total $3,000 loan to a woman in Armenia, who wanted to purchase cows and develop her business, which will help her get more income and cover her family’s daily costs, plus one day start her own family.  She has paid back 34% of this loan on a 24 month payback schedule.

The amount I have invested in Kiva is small, but I enjoy getting updates on the two entrepreneurs I’m helping.

Crowdfunding for charitable causes

Although crowdfunding for creative projects is fun and exciting, crowdfunding for charitable causes is near and dear to my heart. As a concept, it’s been around longer than the other variations of crowdfunding. Organizations such as Lymphoma & Leukemia’s Team in Training (TNT) and Avon Walk for Breast Cancer create fundraising pages on their websites for their participants, who turn to their social networks to raise money for these charities. TNT, for instance, has raised over $1.2 billion to fund lifesaving cancer research.

Other sites such as Just Giving, a British fundraising website, enable charities to create fundraising pages on the Just Giving site, instead of having to host their own pages and handle the donation taking and distribution of funds.  Using Just Giving’s website, 21 million people have helped raise £1 billion for charity since its inception in 2000.

Summary

I’ve shared a few examples of crowdfunding, but you can see it’s clearly a growing trend. I’m always a little shocked by those who think that social networking is a fad that will fade away in the next two or three years. It’s clearly a paradigm shift in our communications with each other, and will continue to evolve as our mobile devices become faster and even more ubiquitous.

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 2 of 3)

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 2 of 3)  was originally published on June 22, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content. 

In  part 1 of this series, I reviewed the concept of crowdfunding, and why the growth of social networking has made crowdfunding easy, possible, and popular. I also reviewed Kickstart, which is the most popular of these types of project-funding platforms.

Only US residents can create projects in Kickstarter, though anyone in the world can help fund one. For entrepreneurs in the rest of the world, the leading crowdfunding site is Ulule, run by a team from Paris. It’s smaller than Kickstarter, but has a broader set of project categories including:

• Film and video
• Music
• Comics
• Games
• Photography
• Stage
• Solidarity
• Technologeek
• Journalism
• Design
• Sports
• Travel
• Books
• Fashion
• Green
• Childhood
• Craftsmanship
• Fine Arts
• Politics

Ulule also explains to potential project owners about the reward system, recommending a tiered system that increases in value as the donation increases in value, and that gives donors rewards closely linked to the project — such as an invitation to screenings of the movie created, a recording of the concert being financed, or a postcard of the mountain to be climbed.

To assist in crowdfunding, for creative project owners, Ulule has a primer available that describes the need for trust, and about the existence of the three circles of crowdfunding:

• Friends and family
• Friends and acquaintances of friends & family
• Everyone else

Three circles of crowdfunding

Project creators must start in the first circle, or inner circle, and work their way outward, gaining trust and attention as they work through their networks. (Plus, they can’t publish on the site until they have at least five supporters.) The third network is the one with the largest amount of available funds, and the most difficult to crack.

An IBM colleague of mine from Italy, Nicola Palmarini (@nipalm on Twitter), first brought my attention to Ulule when he posted a personal project called The way to l'Olympia: A documentary on barriers between dreams and reality – a wonderful documentary about dreams, disabilities, and accessible travel. His project received 109% of funding and is in its final stages.

About his experience, Nicola said, When I started the project I didn’t have a single cent in my pocket to make it happen. So I just said myself ‘Is there any other way? No? So let’s try.’ This was a first of a kind – I’ve never done such a thing before. And it worked out. We are now finalizing the documentary of bringing Eleonora, a mobility-impaired friend from Nettuno (a small village near Rome), to attend the concert of her favorite band in Paris. She had never crossed the Italian border or flown in a plane before.”

Nicola is willing to share the lessons he learned from his experience:

• You need a good idea to move people to help you.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate; if you can use multimedia even better, but never leave your funders alone. 
• When you set the funding amount, be very careful, it’s a double-edged sword. If you set it too high, then maybe you’ll not be able to reach the goal, that is, all your efforts will be in vain. If you set it too low, then you’ll have to explain that you reached the target but you need more money anyway and ask people for more funding. Not easy at all, trust me. 
• Build an outer circle strategy; start from your closest friend and then enlarge the list in ring 
• The kickoff is all you need to boost immediately and raise the temperature of your fundraising from day one. 
• Now it's your time, good luck!  

Ulule, like Kickstarter, takes a 5% commission on fully funded projects. It’s currently available in English, French, Portuguese, Spanish (beta), Italian (beta), and German (beta).

Stay tuned for the third and final part of this series, where I delve into crowdfunding for microlending and philanthropy.

 

Great Innovations — Crowdfunding with Innovocracy

I'm a huge fan of crowdfunding, and recently wrote a 3-part series on the IBM Social Business Insights blog that I'm in the process of reposting here on my blog (Part 1). But I'm so impressed with this crowdfunding site, innovacracy.org, and at least one of the projects on it, that I wanted to give it a special shout out.

According to the website, the idea behind Innovocracy is bridging the gap between ideas and reality in academic research:

"Both pure and applied research often reveal potential products and services that can have a positive impact on society. But taking that research and developing it into working prototypes or demonstrating a proof of concept can be challenging. In the academic environment finding the funds to build out and test ideas with commercial applications is often a challenge. Yet finding those funds can unlock the potential of the millions of dollars and thousands of hours spent on research programs. Innovocracy was created to bridge the gap between powerful ideas and beneficial applications of those ideas. We offer a funding source that connects people who want to support innovation in academic research and those innovators found on campuses around the world."

The innovation that really caught my attention is the Web-Based Volunteer Support Network for Blind and Low Vision People.

Screenshot of VizWiz in action.
The captioning reads: iPhone: Double tap the screen to take a photo.
Double tap again to post card and start asking question.

The basic concept is a wonderful example of crowdsourcing at its best. VizWiz is an iPhone application that blind people can use to answer visual questions in their everyday lives. Users simply take a picture and speak a question they’d like to know about it, and their questions are answered by people out on the web, usually in under a minute and all for free.

It was released to the Apple® App Store a little over a year ago, and has been a booming success with more than 5,000 users asking over 50,000 questions. So successful in fact with both users and potential volunteers that the current setup is unsustainable and the creator, Jeffrey Bigham, PhD, from the University of Rochester, is looking for $5,500 by September 14th to expand the service by creating a web site hub and answering center.

 Crowdfunding sites are an amazing way of enabling via small amounts of one-on-one funding creativity and ingenuity that might otherwise not see the light of day. Check this one out and make a difference in someone's life.

Note: In researching this blog post, I found a few additional articles about VizWiz that might be of interest:  

• VizWhiz–Take a Picture, Speak a Question, and Get an Answer
  Smartphone cameras bring independence to blind people 
• VizWiz website

Repost from IBM Social Business Insights: Crowdfunding: Fundraising with a Social Twist

Earlier this year I started blogging for the IBM Social Business Insights blog as part of a team of IBM Redbook Thought Leaders. I'll be reposting those blog posts here on my personal blog. Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 1 of 3)  was originally published on June 12, 2012, and is owned by IBM.
I recommend checking out the IBM Social Business Insights blog for some compelling and though-provoking content. 

Crowdfunding: Harnessing the power of social networking to raise money (Part 1 of 3)

By Holly Nielsen, Social Media Manager and Webmaster, Human Ability and Accessibility

I’m fascinated with the power and reach of social networking. Every day I find something new – another clever idea of capitalizing on the power of all of these connected people who are online daily making new connections, sharing content, collaborating… It truly is a new world of interacting with others, and in many ways makes our huge world of seven billion residents feel a little smaller and much friendlier.

One of the social networking areas that’s captured my attention recently is crowdfunding, an offshoot of crowdsourcing. Oxford Dictionaries even has an official definition of crowdfunding:

The practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.

Crowdfunding is being used successfully by many types of people and groups for a broad range of projects and causes including creative projects, entrepreneurial products or technologies, artists, bands, or independent filmmakers seeking support, humanitarian aid, political campaigns, charities, and microlending.

Crowdfunding creative projects

I’m fascinated with three-year old Kickstarter – a platform that enables potential entrepreneurs with a creative idea to float the idea within the Kickstarter community to see if the people like the idea enough to fund it; lowering the barrier to entry dramatically. When you think about it, what an inexpensive (as in free) means to do market research and build your customer base, in one fell swoop.

The Kickstarter project funding categories are broad and range from art, to food, to publishing, technology, and theater. The average project is raising under $10,000, but take a look at the Most Funded page for a list of successfully funded projects and how much they received (one of them was 15,454% funded for a total of $77,271 pledged!) 

Only 44% of the projects meet their financing goal, and a project that doesn’t meet its goal receives no money — that is, if the project doesn’t meet its funding goal, the supporters get their money back, so it’s a no-risk funding situation. But if you look at Kickstarter’s FAQs, it does talk about accountability, and do not take responsibility for the project creator completing the project after the money is handed over. It’s up to the donor to check out the project and creator thoroughly. The FAQ points out that “Because projects are usually funded by the friends, fans, and communities around its creator, there are powerful social forces that keep creators accountable.”

According to the website, more than $200 million for 20,000 projects has been raised. Kickstarter takes a cut, 5%, but only if the project is fully funded. In contrast to traditional venture capital funding, the project owners keep 100% ownership of their work.

Like all truly integrated social networking applications, Kickstarter is tied into all of the major social media channels, giving the project owners an easy way to promote their projects through their online and offline communities.

So what do investors get for their most popular pledge of $25 or average pledge of $70? There’s no tax write-off or ownership of the project, but the project creators offer rewards, related to the project itself. According to Kickstarter, here are the four most popular types of rewards with examples:

• Copies of the item: The album, the DVD, a print from the show. These items should be priced what they would cost in a retail environment.
• Creative collaborations: A backer appears as a hero in the comic, everyone gets painted into the mural, two backers do the handclaps for track 3.
• Creative experiences: A visit to the set, a phone call from the author, dinner with the cast, a concert in your backyard.
• Creative mementos: Polaroids sent from location, thanks in the credits, meaningful tokens that tell a story.

Projects with creative and tangible products are the most likely ones to get funded.

Stay tuned for part 2 to find out about how non-US residents can crowdfund their creative projects.