Fight Club

Actor Edward Norton today officially launched Crowdrise, a new social media site and for-profit social enterprise that aims to transform the supporters of good causes into their most ardent fundraisers.

The site is the latest entry into what has become a crowded online field for charity fundraising. But uniquely, it offers its most active users "points" for their engagement. For every dollar raised for a cause earns users a Crowdrise point, which can be used to win prizes donated by top brands, such as laptops and iPods from Apple or windbreakers from North Face.

Crowdrise [its motto is if you don't give back, no one will like you] was developed by the 40-year-old star of movies including The Illusionist and Fight Club to give people and organizations "a new way to set up fundraising pages without having to spend great sums" (or having to buy fundraising software). "People use Twitter or Facebook because it's a way to share their personal narrative," Norton said in an interview. "We wanted to give people a chance to also share what they care about in the world, a platform to say, 'These are the causes I care about; I am volunteering. Sponsor me.'"

Each fundraising campaign that is created on the platform sets a fundraising goal and tracks progress in real-time. Once a campaign is created, the "host" then asks for donations using Facebook, Twitter and email to activate his or her social networks into donating any amount, of any size. Each campaign also offers non-members and non-supporters the chance to join the cause and help to fundraise for it using their own social networks.

The site originated out of Norton's Massai Marathon, an effort he kicked off last year to protect wildlife in Kenya and Tanzania, and which raised $1.2 million in less than eight weeks, mostly from small donations. "We want to convert social networking from just being social into substantive, productive communication with action," Norton told The Wall Street Journal earlier this week. "Instead of telling the world what you're eating for breakfast, you can use social networking to do something that's meaningful."

It's not the first celebrity fundraising-site-for-good: actor Kevin Bacon launched sixdegrees.org some years ago to offer people a new way to leverage celebrity-power for their causes. It's also not the first fundraising site to let anyone create campaigns and leverage their social networks for donations. [Think GlobalGiving, among others.] But Norton's site uniquely offers participants incentives in the form of points and prizes. The first round of prizes will be awarded July 31.

"Technology has allowed for a kind of engagement between people with a public life and the people who are interested in them, which is entirely new and potentially very powerful," Norton said. Organizations already signed up to use the site for fundraising include Oceana, City Year, the Alzheimer's Association, Paul Farmer's Partners in Health, and Malaria No More.

Norton is no celebrity-come-lately when it comes to social advocacy. His father, an environmentalist with the Nature Conservancy, was an attorney for the Wilderness Society when Norton was a boy; his grandfather was an early advocate for affordable housing and set up the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation in Manhattan to help the poor. Norton, himself, is on the board of that foundation and has been working quietly for years on environmental and anti-poverty issues. (In 2006, Norton founded Enterprise Community Partners, Inc.'s Solar Neighbors Program, which negotiated an agreement with BP Solar to provide solar-power technology to low-income homeowners in Los Angeles, helping dozens of families to cut their energy bills by more than half. Each time a celebrity or public figure buys a home solar system, BP donates a full system to a family. so far, the company has donated nearly 75 systems.)

A spokesperson for Crowdrise said Norton set up the site as a for-profit social enterprise, in part to insure its sustainability over time and to encourage other social businesses. "The things that seem monumental or monolithic are the ones that you have to take on, Norton told me in a 2007 interview for Contribute Magazine. "Sometimes, even just the act of beginning something is the integral first step because a good idea has a tendency to snowball."

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photograph: Courtesy Contribute Magazine)

Collective wisdom

Like this photograph? Join the crowd. It is the top choice of some 3,344 people who answered an open call by the Brooklyn Museum of Art to curate 389 crowd-sourced photographs that best fit the theme, "The Changing Face of Brooklyn." (This photo was shot in 1979 by Marcia Bricker Halperin from a street in Brooklyn, through the front window of the legendary, long-gone Dubrow's Cafeteria.)

Halperin's photograph—the reflection of a Checker cab on Dubrow's window that appears to mingle with the patrons seated inside—joins nine others in the Top 10 "cut of the crowd" that comprise the museum's show, Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition. Entirely Web-sourced and Web-curated, the exhibit represents the first use of "crowd-sourcing" by a nonprofit in this way. The museum's goal: to build community, woo potential donors, and raise awareness of its work.

Organizer Shelley Bernstein, BMA's dynamic new manager of information systems, was inspired by the 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds. In it, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki offered the world a simple but profound idea: a large, diverse group of people will make better judgments and smarter decisions than an elite few—no matter how individually brilliant.

Bernstein set out to test that theory in the context of visual art. First, she displayed the images anonymously on the museum's Web site, where anyone interested was invited to log on and rank them, one by one, on a sliding scale from "least effective" to "most effective" in fitting the theme. After a six-week rating period, Bernstein posted the top 20 percent of the images selected—78 photographs in total—on the site and they were pared down further by the crowd. Finally, Bernstein grouped them on the site into various lists, including "Most Discussed" and "Top 10 Compared."

"I wanted to build our community, expand it, and ask it to participate in what we do in some way," she says—critical for engaging new, cause-wired donors and patrons in advocacy today. Bernstein said she was "amazed" that many people who identified themselves as novices selected some of the same photographs as did the experts. (To hear more about what worked and what didn't in Bernstein's experiment, click here for the podcast of a June 28 discussion, which included Surowiecki and fellow crowdsourcing expert Jeff Howe.)

Here's another Top 10 photograph from Click! Called Just Girls, it was shot by photographer Donna Aceto last year at Coney Island:


For more on the wisdom of crowds, click on the video below, in which Howe talks about his new book, Crowdsourcing. It goes on sale next week in bookstores around the country:



Watch this site for more on the lessons of Click! I'll be moderating a September 23 panel on Web 2.0 technology and nonprofits that will include Bernstein and a discussion of her experiment at the Harvard Business School Club of New York's Social Enterprise Summit.

In the four years since Surowiecki's book, the phrases, "the hive mind" and "crowd-sourcing" have entered the lexicon: those inventing the next, "2.0" version of the Web are testing ways that companies, educators, and social change advocates can tap into their thousands of new and expanding social networks—on demand—for better ideas, more money, and greater influence.

Palm-readers

Here's one of the latest Web sites to tap into the wisdom of crowds: Predictify. It asks users to guess the future, based on the idea that crowds are smarter than individuals. If, say, 1,733 people out of 2,000 think Delaware Senator Joe Biden will become Barack Obama's running mate, odds are it will happen, right? (There are now more than 4,600 people on the site who are competing to win a $5,500 pot for guessing the right answer.)

So far, the site has correctly predicted the outcome of nearly every playoff football game. It's also been fairly accurate guessing which films do best at the box office. Wired crowds also do pretty well guessing the fate of politicians: more than 6,000 people accurately predicted that Barack Obama would become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee—months before it happened.

Companies, nonprofits, and political strategists are taking notice. General Motors Corp. and Paramount Pictures, for example, are sponsoring customized questions on the site, apparently frustrated by their own missed efforts to spot trends and "read" the mindset of Web-wired consumers. Stanford University graduate and cofounder Mike Agnich says some politicians and advocacy groups are using the site to hone their cause-marketing strategies.

Questions on the site range from the silly to the scientific. Will Australian Celebrity Chef Gordon Ramsey utter more than 80 profanities in any original episode of his cooking show, "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares" by September 1, 2008? (176 predictions so far). Will life be found on Mars before July 15?

But there is more here than meets the eye: over time, Agnich says, Predictify will be able to identify some of the best natural prognosticators in cyberspace—and then hire them out to paying clients looking for help with their hunches and market strategies.

Clever. For more on Predictify, take a look at Robert Scoble's interview with Agnich on Fast Company TV.

(Photograph of crystal ball by Ben Dan Hawks on Zooomr)

Change Games

In his 2004 book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," New Yorker columnist James Suroweicki offered the world a simple but profound idea: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few—no matter how brilliant—and are, therefore, much better at problem-solving, innovation, and even predicting the future.

In the four years since Suroweicki's book, the phrases, "the hive mind" and "crowd-sourcing" have entered the lexicon: those inventing the next, "2.0" version of the Web are testing ways that companies, educators, and social change advocates can tap into their thousands of new and expanding social networks—on demand—for better ideas, more money, and greater influence.

Facebook's popular Causes application is already demonstrating what a cause-wired group of colleagues in multiple social networks can do if they share a common goal, like Pave My Street, Elect John Doe, Save the Whales. (Since it debuted a year ago, Causes has some 12 million users supporting more than 80,000 nonprofit causes worldwide.)

Barack Obama's campaign is tapping its "hive mind" of supporters to drum up new bucks and ideas. (OhBoyObama, reports ReadWriteWeb, is an "outsourced think tank." The site asks people to submit policy ideas for a vote by the "crowd" that logs in.)

And at this week's 5th annual Games for Change conference in Manhattan, about 350 video game designers, educators, and change advocates are meeting to create, debate, and demo new types of "cause" games. Suzanne Seggerman, Ben Stokes, and Barry Joseph founded the emerging "games-for-change" movement to enliven public debate and tap players' vast array of social networks for solutions.

Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City , launched yesterday, explores New Orleans' stubborn housing crisis. Created almost entirely by students at Brooklyn's Canarsie High School with Global Kids, a New York City urban youth nonprofit, the game aims to "draw attention to residents' continuing fight for housing in 2008." Players follow the fictional character, Vivica Water, and relive her battle during the 2005 storm to save neighbors from rising floodwaters. (See sketch, below, from an early set design; note the watermark.)


ICED: I Can End Deportation, by the human rights nonprofit Breakthrough, lets players "walk in the shoes" of five teens facing deportation, including Marc of Haiti, who is seeking political asylum; Suki of Japan, who is living in New York on a student visa, and Anna, from Poland, who "thinks she's a (U.S.) citizen." The goal: to show players "how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights."

But after the role-playing ends, do games like ICED and Tempest really have the power to solve anything?

Designers say that's probably why the most popular (and promising) games stress collaborative problem-solving for the real world. World Without Oil, for example, a year-old game from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has so far logged 60,000 visitors and 1,800 players from 12 countries who prefer to speak up and share their own views about how an oil shock might impact their real-life jobs, housing, mobility, and relationships—a "play it before you really live it" experience, Seggerman says. Peacemaker, a game about the Middle East conflict, lets players take on the role of either the Israeli or the Palestinian leader (or both, ideally), so as to better understand the kinds of decisions either one of them might be forced to make. UNICEF's Ayiti: The Cost of Life, out this month, transforms poverty into a type of strategy game that asks players to "manage a family of five over four years and keep them healthy and alive, educated and out of debt," says co-creator Barry Joseph of Global Kids. It's tough: winning isn't easy without innovative, collaborative problem-solving.

And what do players think? Are they having fun yet? In a recent survey of ICED players, a majority said they liked the adventure of evading immigration police and then having to maneuver themselves out of a detention pen. But a like-sized majority of players said they also "felt a little manipulated" because the game seemed "a little one-sided" and overtly political, says Shelley Pasnik, director of the Center for Children and Technology, which evaluated the game. "Games like ICED represent a good start," Pasnik says, but game content will need to evolve to represent more varied viewpoints and trigger more offline activism.

Viva the evolution. Says MIT professor Henry Jenkins, an expert in youth media and an enthusiastic supporter of crowd-sourcing social change: "We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality."

What do you think?

For more on this week's Games for Change festival , see the video below: