Social Actions monthly contest

[Peter Deitz]

Hi all,

-- begin brain dump --

I had an exciting conversation yesterday with Kare Anderson, the woman
who interviewed me for the Moving From Me To We podcast. She's bent on
helping Social Actions make it to the big time.

Her idea: we should be running a monthly contest, with awards behind the
action that recruits the most votes.

This morning, I added a collection of 'my featured action' fields to the
Social Action blog profiles. I'm thinking that we can identify ten
finalist actions at the end of every month, determined by the action URL
that appears on the greatest number of Social Actions blog profiles as
"my featured action web address". Ning has a profile export feature
that will make it easy to determine which action URLs appear on the most
profiles.

We would then contact the campaign initiators of the ten actions that
appear on the most Social Actions profiles, and run a two week voting
contest, in which people make $2+ donations to the actions they like. In
cases where the action is not a fundraiser, we would ask the campaign
initiator to pick a social change organization or project that would
receive the donation.

As for the award, it could be created raffle style (when people vote,
they make a contribution to the award pot). Social Actions in theory
could get a percent of the pot as earned income. Or the award could be
donated by a company, foundation, or group of people with money to
spare. Or some combination of raffle and donation.

In any case, the award would be a cash bounty that gets donated mostly
to the top 3 actions, as determined by the total number of $2+
donations. The award would be distributed much like NetSquared, with
something going to everyone. Ie, top prize: 25%, second prize 15%,
third prize 10%, 4th through 10th 5%, Social Actions 15%.

In Kare's words, the contest would not just drive more activity, people,
and potentially earned-income to Social Actions, it would also provide
bragging rights to the winners and overtime would help identify winning
strategies for creating, implementing, and promoting social change
campaigns that harness social media. (hence, we would return to an
aspect of our original mission).

Let me know what you think... Seems easy enough to implement on a test
basis in September 2008.

--end brain dump--

Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

[Peter Deitz]

PS -- An example of the My Featured Action fields filled in:
http://blog.socialactions.com/profile/PeterDeitz

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

[Ingmar Redel | OneAim.org]

Hi Peter, hi Kare,

very good idea to get more dynamic! :)
A project here in germany make the same.

One note: Please let us think about fake votings before we start. Its
important if money is a part of the contest.

Ingmar

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Ingmar,

My thought on fraudulent voting is:

You can't fake a vote on a profile page -- only the page owner has the
ability to fill out a field on their profile. If people create multiple
profiles using different email addresses, and specify the same featured
action URL, we should be able to identify the fraudulence.

Same with voting, each vote with a $2+ donation would be linked to an
email address / credit card. We could talk to the payment processor
(PayPal, PincGiving, NetworkforGood, or RevolutionMoneyExchange) to help
implement ways to discourage double voting. The fact that people have
to vote with a $2+ should be incentive enough to discourage double voting.

Thanks for your thoughts. Keep them coming...

All the best,
Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

[Peter Deitz]

Anticipating feedback as the west coast wakes up:

It might make sense to keep the contest super simple -- ie the winners
are the ten action URLs that appear the most frequently on Social
Actions profile pages (on the last day of the month). Nothing more,
nothing less. If that's the case, we can figure out how to fill the
award pot -- through direct donations, corporate sponsorship, or
foundation support on a month-to-month basis.

On the first monday of the month, we would announce the winners, and
announce the prize for the following month. We'll probably want to add
a caveat that the same action cannot win more than once in a 6 month
period, or some such thing.

All the best,
Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

[Amy Sample Ward]

i have to say, i like simple :)

especially at this stage, keeping it as clear and simple as possible is really useful for providing space to explain who social actions is, too.  there is going to be more work in the early stages of use just getting adoption that we don't need a contest to be contingent on large scale participation. 

i also have to say, i like contests!

great work kare and peter and everyone!

a

--
Amy Sample Ward
http://amysampleward.org
amyr...@gmail.com
503-780-8578

Dedicated to supporting and educating nonprofits and the progressive social change sector about evolving technologies that cultivate and engage communities.

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Amy,

Thanks for the feedback. Imagine this scenario. Social Actions
announces the time when the votes will be counted. One person hits
twitter at the last minute to ask their friends to change their 'my
featured action' on Social Actions to http://whateverwhatever.com. That
happens. We close the polls, run a script, and then announce the
winners. Someone who spent the whole month recruiting people to feature
his/her action comes in first. The person who hit up twitter to alert
their friends to the contest comes in second. And the bronze goes to a
random action that simply gained a bunch of followers that month because
of its compelling nature. Social Actions hands out three awards and 2
honorable mentions. And then it all starts again.

Joe and I had a quick chat about the monthly contest idea. He's also on
board. We were thinking that it might be possible to tweak Ning under
the hood, and have activity alerts and RSS feeds for each time a person
changes their featured action. Ie, "Amy Sample Ward changed her
featured action to 'Pledge to Digg Related Ways to Take Action when it
launches'.

This status change could automatically get pushed to Facebook, Twitter,
and your blog. The possibilities are endless. The best part... this
contest lifts all of our partners. It draws attention to the actions on
Change.org, Care2, PledgeBank, ThePoint, etc. that Social Actions
community members are excited about. And the winners each month could be
featured as practitioner success stories, something that Tom Watson has
been calling for.

Good to hear you're liking the idea.

All the best,
Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

> amyr...@gmail.com <mailto:amyr...@gmail.com>

[Amy Sample Ward]

thanks for sharing all that, peter.  it really sells me on much more!  i may be all over the web, but i concentrate my activities in certain places and rely on tools to push my activity elsewhere.  so...awesome!

a

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Amy,

We'll let you know as the contest idea evolves. Any thoughts on what
would pass as acceptable awards -- surely a generous gift-card to
support micro-philanthropy campaigns of choice.

What else would make for an appropriate award?

A few thoughts:
- carbon offsets
- connectivity gadgets and subscriptions
- conference fees waived
- fair trade stuff
- professional development (for social change of course)
- funding for independent projects

I'm doing this brainstorm because I imagine the contest will be
approached by various would-be sponsors. It would be good to have a
guideline for the kinds of prizes we would want to offer. This is
shaping up to be a "wheel of philanthropy" type of contest.

All the best,
Peter

> <mailto:amyr...@gmail.com <mailto:amyr...@gmail.com>>

[Amy Sample Ward]

It would probably be beneficial to the winners and to social actions in so far as getting sponsors, to have awards based on the different fields of actions. so, carbon offsets are an option to environmental actions, free gadget to a school or education type action, that kind of thing.

Then you could build up a bank of awards in each category and winners could choose.

a

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Amy,

That's a great idea. We could have different cause area branches of the
contest (down the road).

The nice part of a Social Actions gift-card is that it could be used to
support campaigns on any of the sites that are listed on Social Actions,
representing a pretty wide range of philanthropic opportunities. We'll
probably start there, assuming that campaign initiators use the gift
card to support their own campaigns, and then see what sorts of requests
we get (on the sponsorship and practitioner side of things).

All the best,
Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

Amy Sample Ward wrote:
> It would probably be beneficial to the winners and to social actions
> in so far as getting sponsors, to have awards based on the different
> fields of actions. so, carbon offsets are an option to environmental
> actions, free gadget to a school or education type action, that kind
> of thing.
>
> Then you could build up a bank of awards in each category and winners
> could choose.
>
> a
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Peter Deitz <peter...@gmail.com

[Peter Deitz]

What about the name?

A few ideas:

- Social Actions monthly contest
- Social Actions practitioner challenge
- Social Actions honor roll
- Social Actions top five
- Social Actions success stories
- Social Actions my featured action challenge

Peter

Peter Deitz
Social Actions
http://www.socialactions.com
718-766-5367

Join the conversation:
http://blog.socialactions.com

Amy Sample Ward wrote:
> It would probably be beneficial to the winners and to social actions
> in so far as getting sponsors, to have awards based on the different
> fields of actions. so, carbon offsets are an option to environmental
> actions, free gadget to a school or education type action, that kind
> of thing.
>
> Then you could build up a bank of awards in each category and winners
> could choose.
>
> a
>
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Peter Deitz <peter...@gmail.com

[Amy Sample Ward]

featured action challenge

or social actions featured action challenge

a

[Peter Deitz]

Hi Amy,

'Challenge' is a hot word these days, isn't it? let's go with featured
action challenge, as you suggest. do others agree?

BTW, thanks for the retweet of the super widget and Web 2.0 Conference news.

In case people missed it (from twitter):

*peterdeitz <http://twitter.com/peterdeitz>* I just got word that Social
Actions is headed to the Web 2.0 Conference in NYC! We've been given a
free booth in the nonprofit pavilion.

Peter

[Amy Sample Ward]

challenge is a good word that people seem to be responding to well.  it isn't negative so much, as exciting (help us with this challenge, let's win the challenge, etc.).  i think it is an appropriate word choice for social actions and the world of social change, too :)

woohoo for the super widget!

a

[Ingmar Redel | OneAim.org]

Hi Kare, hi Peter,

the german website, which gives money (sponsored) to a best voted social
project and take money from the online people additional, is called:

"netzwirken"
www.netzwirken.net

In English it could be translated in "netact" or "webact". If you would
like to contact the people behind, its Jochen, a lovely guy and his
email is:

Jochen Holtrup | netzwirken <j...@netzwirken.net>

All the best,
Ingmar

Kare Anderson wrote:
> Hi savvy team
>
> What is the name of it??:

>> A project here in germany make the same.
>

> kare

> Kare Anderson
> Say it Better Center, LLC
> 415.331.6336 ~ Ka...@SayitBetter.com <mailto:Ka...@SayitBetter.com>
> http://www.sayitbetter.com
> http://www.movingfrommetowe.com
> http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better
> http://www.linkedin/in/sayitbetter
>

--
Ingmar Redel

OneAim.org - move the world
World Dialog Foundation

House of Democracy and Human Rights
Greifswalder Str. 4
10405 Berlin
Germany

i...@oneaim.org

twitter. oneaim
skype. ingmar_redel
jabber. ingmar...@jabber.org