Not so echoey.

Jan 19, ’12 10:57 AM

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has a very interesting piece this week about a new study from a researcher at Facebook named Eytan Bakshy. It turns out a lot of our ideas about the “echo chamber effect” on the web– or at least on Facebook– might not be true.

The echo chamber idea, propagate by folks like Eli Pariser and Manjoo himself, was that rather than encouraging exposure to new ideas, the web actually enabled us to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals, leaving us all comfy inside an intellectual bubble of our own devising. Instead of challenging us, the internet makes it feel like our opinions are much more widely held than they really are.

According to this new study by Facebook’s Eytan Bakshy, this bit of received wisdom might not be so. By gaming Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm (which determines which posts users see) and splitting his test sample into two groups,

…Bakshy could answer some important questions about how we navigate news online. Are people more likely to share information because their friends pass it along? And if we are more likely to share stories we see others post, what kinds of friends get us to reshare more often—close friends, or people we don’t interact with very often? Finally, the experiment allowed Bakshy to see how “novel information”—that is, information that you wouldn’t have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook—travels through the network. This is important to our understanding of echo chambers. If an algorithm like EdgeRank favors information that you’d have seen anyway, it would make Facebook an echo chamber of your own beliefs. But if EdgeRank pushes novel information through the network, Facebook becomes a beneficial source of news rather than just a reflection of your own small world.

That’s exactly what Bakshy found.

The study does indicate that we’re more likely to share information from our closest contacts, but we also share information from the weak links in our networks, and that’s how new information spreads through the network. This makes intuitive sense to me, and gibes with my experience of using Facebook.

Sure, there’s an echo-chamber effect, and I often find my close friends sharing the same articles and YouTube videos. But Facebook also allows for sharing with the looser connections in my network. Take this video I shared on Facebook earlier this week:

Hello from ant1mat3rie on Vimeo.

Among my Facebook friends who liked or commented on it were:

  • My cousin in Anchorage
  • Two nonprofit communications colleagues
  • An old friend from college now teaching in Texas
  • A nonprofit communications professional I met at a training a couple years ago

That simple act of sharing crossed several social networks, and when my cousin in Alaska shared it on her Facebook page, it crossed over to a whole new network. Now, what I shared was just a funny video, not the kind of hard news or political opinion that people worry about with the “echo chamber” effect (and in fact Bakshy is planning followup research to explore this kind of sharing), but it’s encouraging nonetheless.

It also points to another problem with the direction social networks are moving in with things like “frictionless sharing,” where apps from media companies like the Washington Post automatically publish everything a user reads on their site to his or her Facebook stream. I’m much more likely to click on a link from someone I’m less close to if I think they’ve put some thought into it before posting– that they’ve curated the information they’re sharing, rather than out-sourcing the job to some automated script. That’s less true of links posted by my close friends, because, well, I’m close to them.

But that only increases the echo effect, and decreases the chances for interesting content to spread across social networks. It’s one more way Facebook is making itself more attractive to its corporate partners at the expense of its ability to share novel, interesting content with people who wouldn’t otherwise have seen it.

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Antisocial behavior.

Dec 14, ’11 11:49 AM

Recent developments have left me frustrated with social media. Setting up a Facebook campaign for a client, I was struck by how the walls of Mr. Zuckerburg’s garden keep getting higher and higher. A nonprofit’s page, for example, can no longer mention individuals in its status updates, and as of a couple of months ago, it can no longer e-mail individual members.
The new UI that Twitter announced last week will, among other things, make direct messages less prominent. What these changes have in common is that they seem designed to increase revenue at the expense of fostering actual connection between people.

The promise of Facebook (and LinkedIn, and Google Plus, were anyone to join it) is in the way it replicates our real world networks in a digital space that makes it easier to share with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. But I’m beginning to think the trade-offs involved in this plotting of “the social graph” might not be worth it– and maybe even that the premise itself is flawed.

Over the weekend I got around to reading a blog post that crystalized a lot of this for me: The Social Graph is Neither, by Maciej Cegłowski, the developer of Pinboard.

The first half of the post tackles the idea that you can graph the complexity of our human relationships with the kind of orderly structure of nodes and edges that computers like:

And then there’s the question of how to describe the more complicated relationships that human beings have. Maybe my friend Bill is a little abrasive if he starts drinking, but wonderful with kids – how do I mark that? Dawn and I go out sometimes to kvetch over coffee, but I can’t really tell if she and I would stay friends if we didn’t work together. I’d like to be better friends with Pat. Alex is my AA sponsor. Just how many kinds of edges are in this thing?

There’s a flattening that happens whenever you try to represent something from the real world in a digital medium. Sometimes that flattening isn’t terribly noticeable, or important, but when it wipes out some key emotional detail– when the graph just isn’t up to the task– we feel it.

Even more damning is Cegłowski’s take on what “social” means for the companies who have created the most popular social networks:

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

Ouch. Now, nonprofits aren’t responsible for fixing the problems that Cegłowski has identified with social networks as they exist today. But they do need to understand their limitations and the tradeoffs we’re making when we use them.

Maybe a system built around companies that are in business to collect, share and monetize their users won’t ever allow the kind of real connections with supporters and donors that nonprofits need to make. Maybe we’d be better off using more direct tools like e-mail to forge those connections until someone comes up with another model that works better for its users than the companies who run the networks.

The next time we’re wondering why it’s difficult to turn Facebook fans into donors, maybe we should consider whether there’s something missing because of Facebook itself– some critical piece of your brand that just doesn’t translate through a system geared towards selling ads.

Maybe a clearer understanding of how social networks are broken can help us use the tools available to us– and create the authentic connections we’re all striving for– more wisely.

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The shape of stories.

Oct 11, ’11 2:30 PM

Jason Kottke recently posted this video of Kurt Vonnegut giving a lecture on the shape of stories. It’s a great introduction to how to think about one of the most important aspects of storytelling: the arc of the narrative.

In Vonnegut’s (unique, to say the least) telling, stories can be plotted as a change in the circumstances of a person’s life (the “good fortune/ ill fortune axis”) over time (the “beginning/ end” axis). Using this idea, he diagrams a few simple curves that explains a great many stories that we tell each other, from “boy meets girl” to “Cinderella,” though as he takes pains to point out, “boy meets girl,” for example, needn’t involve a boy, or a girl– it’s just a convenient shorthand for describing a particular kind of human experience.

There’s an important lesson in here for nonprofit storytellers about the mental frames that our audiences bring to the stories we tell them. Our listeners have heard many stories over their lives, and in order to make sense of a new story, it helps to try and fit it into one of a few templates that they carry around in their heads (for more on this, see TV Tropes’ summary of the Seven Basic Plots).

They’re going to do this whether you like it or not, so you might as well think about which common plot your story resembles, and make sure that the moral content of the story you’re telling matches up with what you want them to take away from it.

Are the ugly stepsisters to your Cinderella plainly identified as the societal problems you’re trying to solve? Is it clear that the “man in hole” you’ve described got out with the help of your organization? By taking the time to think through what simple plot your story resembles, you’ll be able to build a narrative that’s more emotionally resonant and more memorable.

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The building blocks of stories.

Sep 13, ’11 8:56 AM

In between welcoming a new baby to the world and traveling to my sister’s wedding last month, I was lucky enough to get to spend a little time at the SPIN Academy, where I presented a new workshop on Storytelling. In pulling together the deck for that presentation, I came across a number of different ways of thinking about how to build an effective story. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing some of the best of these ideas from master storytellers, along with some of the implications of their thinking for nonprofits.

The simplest version of what makes an effective story comes from This American Life‘s Ira Glass:

In Ira’s framework, stories are made up of a narrative (a basic sequence of events) and a moment of reflection, when you tell your audience why you thought the story was worth telling in the first place. Ira is talking specifically about stories for broadcast, but I think there’s some important implications for nonprofit storytelling in what he has to say.

Narrative is the most basic building block of a story, and it is an incredibly powerful one. In the chain of events we relate in an anecdote, we pull our listeners in, engaging their desire to hear what happens next. There are powerful reasons for this engagement, going all the way back to our origins as a species, when we created myths to make sense of the natural world, and our origins as individuals, related to how are brains develop.

In the narrative form itself we’re holding up a mirror to the way we perceive the world. Each “thing” in a story– each event, piece of dialog, description of a person or place– gets woven into a larger whole, and we assign some meaning to that whole. Human brains work the same way, with our senses feeding data to our brains, which assemble all the sights, sounds and smells into a coherent narrative of what’s happening around us. Storytellers are doing that work for their audience, and humans have a natural affinity for the form. That’s why stories are so much more compelling to us that reams of data and statistics.

As important as a compelling narrative is for a good story, the moment of reflection is even more important for nonprofit stories. This is where an organization’s values are transmitted, and you should be clear about what values you want to communicate even before you pick a story to tell. When you’re clear whether your story is really about justice, or community, or human rights, it makes it easier to pick the right details to include in your narrative. It sets your audience up for the moment of reflection where you make the point of your story explicit.

Are you clear about the values your stories are conveying? And are you making sure to include a moment of reflection in every story you tell about your organization’s work?

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What we talk about when we talk about message discipline.

Jul 5, ’11 11:41 AM

I’m of two minds about this video of British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband answering (and I use the term loosely) some questions about the recent one-day strike by public employees in Great Britain.

On one hand, this is message discipline run amuck– you can stay on message and get your point across without using the exact same words over and over again, as Miliband does here to comedic effect. When you see the whole interview, as in this clip, he comes across as programmed, pedantic, and insincere– certainly not the impression he and his team wanted to convey. Reporter Damon Green has a great response explaining what this kind of message discipline feels like from the other side of the camera.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Miliband knows exactly what he wants to say about the strike, which implies the kind of forethought that is a prerequisite for effective messaging. And in Miliband’s defense, this was a pool interview, and his answers were never meant to be seen strung together like this. By using the same words over and over again, he ensured that whatever snippet the BBC, ITV or Sky News chose to show, their viewers would all get the same answer. That’s smart, and gives him control over his message in a format where the clip shown is often chosen precisely because it’s where the interviewee went off message.

So: points for forethought and discipline, demerits for sounding programmed. Next time, Miliband should try to vary the phrases he uses, offer more direct responses to the questions posed, and try for more natural sounding transitions back to his talking points. That’s what truly effective message discipline looks like.

(via Kevin Drum)

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Lucky number thirteen.

May 18, ’11 9:52 AM

It gives me great pleasure to report that applications for the thirteenth (!) annual SPIN Academy are now open, and are due by June 17. This four day residential training retreat for nonprofit communications professionals takes place every year in Northern California, and it’s a great resource for individuals looking to build their skills or their network of colleagues around the country working on similar issues and facing the same challenges. It’s also a lot of fun.

At last year’s event, we were lucky enough to have Chris Jordan, a multimedia producer, filmmaker and photographer on site to document what the SPIN Academy is all about. Here’s the video he produced for us:

The SPIN Academy has always been a special place where learning about strategic communications, storytelling and message development is combined with workshops like Op Ed writing, spokesperson skills, social media and other tactical skills that progressive communicators need to change hearts and minds on their issues. This year’s event is expanding into new areas like branding, brand messages and internal communications. The SPIN Academy continues to grow and change along with its participants and the shifting media environment.

It’s the passion our participants bring to the event that makes it worth all the time and hard work that goes into producing the SPIN Academy each year. You won’t meet a smarter, more dedicated group of individuals from a huge diversity of backgrounds coming together to learn something new and have their ideas challenged. It makes for four days of intensive learning, fascinating conversations, and new colleagues– and friends.

Our participants also benefit from the combined wisdom of dozens of Bay Area communications professionals who give generously of their time and experience because they care about they care about the field-building mission of the SPIN Academy (and because it never hurts to get out of the office for a little while to enjoy the rustic charms of Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County). We couldn’t do this even without them, and we’re deeply grateful for their support.

This year’s even represents a homecoming of sorts for me. My colleague Holly Minch and I have set up a fiscally sponsored project at Community Initiatives to house the SPIN Academy, and we’ll be managing it going forward with the help of an advisory committee made up of some of our colleagues who’ve been involved with the Academy over the years. Holly was actually present at the creation of the SPIN Academy, so this is indeed lucky number thirteen for her. I’m a relative newcomer to the event, but it was still the first thing I worked on when I joined the SPIN Project– and the field of nonprofit communications– back in 2002. Which means that I’ve been doing this work for a decade now. Time, as they say, flies.

If you know someone who could benefit from attending the SPIN Academy, if you’ve never been yourself and want to know what all the fuss is about, or if you’re a communications professional interested in supporting the Academy as a presenter or consultant, check out the info page, or just drop me a line.

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The art of the blog post.

May 12, ’11 12:50 PM

Tim Carmody had a great guest blog post last week on Kottke.org about what a great blogger Jason Kottke is. Sure, it’s a little meta, but I think Carmody hits on something really important about what makes for a good blog (and good social media generally):

But really, if I had to pick my favorite thing I love about Kottke.org, it’s the structure.

The structure of a Kottke post is totally elemental:

  • Title
  • Link
  • Pull (blockquote, picture, video)
  • Response
  • Reader comments (optional)

And that’s it. It’s the five basic units that blogs were built on, distilled to their essence. And titles and comments are important, but Jason’s done without them both. They’re paratext. The real core is link, pull, response.

…

These are also the elements that help establish bloggers’ identity as readers in conversation with other readers: I have seen something that I feel strongly enough to think and write about, and what would make me happiest is if you look at it, then think and write about it too.

For me, this is the key point about social media that I find myself trying to convey over and over again to my clients. If you want to do it right, social media has to be about playing nicely with others. It doesn’t always have to be about something someone else has written, said, or done– but it does a lot of the time.

If you’re unhappy with the response (or lack thereof) you’re getting to your blog posts, it might not be because the post is uninteresting. It might just be because you’re not taking the time to respond to others.

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The hard work of building community online.

Apr 20, ’11 12:13 PM

As more and more of my clients take the plunge into using social media as a serious outreach strategy, the question of control is invariably one of the first to come up. Foundations and nonprofits are used to deciding how and when they share information with their constituents, and moving from a broadcast model to two-way communications can be daunting. What if people write something inappropriate on our Facebook page? What if people attack us in the comments section of a blog post? There’s no question that social media involves allowing the kind of honest and open interaction with people who care about your work that can often be uncomfortable. But it doesn’t mean you have to just accept the discomfort. Actively shaping the kind of online community you want– whether on your Facebook page, in the comment section of your organizational blog, or in an online forum on your website– is a key part of managing your brand today.

And few people know more about the business of building online community that Matt Haughey (or mathowie to his friends online– a rather large group). Haughey was one of the original programmers of Blogger, and later the creative director of Creative Commons, but his real claim to fame is as the founder of Metafilter, an eleven-year old online community with more than 50,000 active members. What sets Metafilter apart from the Diggs and the 4Chans of the world is the consistently high quality of the discussion, whether on the main site (where users share posts featuring “the best of the web”) or the advice sub-site, Ask Metafilter, where users can get thoughtful answers to questions ranging from who the best stereo repairman in San Francisco is to where to find interesting visualizations of the internet– two queries that Metafilter users have answered for me in the past. And all of this activity– thousands of postings a day– is refereed by a staff of only four moderators.

A supportive, self-regulating community of that size doesn’t happen by accident, and Haughey shared some thoughts about what goes into making it a reality in a talk he gave at last month’s South by Southwest conference. A few of his points seemed broadly applicable to the online work of many nonprofits, so I thought I’d share them here.

Lesson 1. Be your best community participant

A successful online community requires the active participation of the people who are running it– this is most definitely not a “set it and forget it” activity. That means making sure you’re responding to the community. You need to stay engaged with the conversation by thanking people where thanks are due, challenging points with which you disagree, and generally modeling the kind of behavior that you want to see in your community– a task that only becomes more important as the number of people engaged in the conversation increases. Making sure you have the support you need from colleagues to monitor and respond to what’s being shared with you is critical to maintaining a healthy online community.

Lesson 2. Don’t be overprotective

Your natural inclination when running any kind of online community will be to clamp down when the conversation is headed in a direction that makes you uncomfortable– and that goes double for organizations that need to protect carefully nurtured brands. Haughey’s advice is to resist this temptation, and give the community room to question, explore and engage with difficult topics– that’s what makes them a place users want to be a part of. Rather than deleting comments as a first resort, cultivate relationships with community members who can help you maintain the kind of atmosphere you want, and consider formalizing their role as moderators. This kind of self-policing community is far more vibrant– and ultimately easier to maintain– than a tightly controlled one.

Lesson 3. Set goals

Another key point from Haughey’s talk is the importance of setting goals for your online community. What does success look like? Is it a Facebook page liked by 1,000 people? Blog posts that attract hundreds of comments? Or a community that can be moved to action with a tweet? Whatever your goals are, there are metrics you can use as indicators of success, and data you can mine from your web analytics to help find the patterns that indicate what’s working, and what’s not. Being strategic about building community online is not only possible, it’s vital to getting it right.

All of which leads to a final point I took from Haughey’s presentation, though it’s one he doesn’t make explicitly: the business of building community online is hard work. More than half of his talk is devoted to the backend tools that he and his fellow moderators use to manage the massive amounts of information being shared on their community– automated scripts that help highlight the good and flag what needs correcting. Yet it’s complicated, time-consuming work, even for someone with these tools, and eleven years of experience.

It’s worth it, though. Whether you view success as the creation of a thoughtful,vibrant community, as Haughey does, and especially if it’s in the service of a larger goal: creating an engaged, active network of supporters of your work by fostering authentic dialogue.

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What makes a good communications training?

Apr 5, ’11 2:22 PM

The Hewlett Foundation recently commissioned a study of the communications they’ve conducted for their grantees over the past six years to find out whether it was effective. I won’t keep you in suspense: it was. Beyond this top-line finding, there are some more interesting ideas about how to improve communications training for nonprofits. Even more interesting than that– at least for me– is why this kind of training is judged so positively by the grantees who benefit from it.

The study, called What Nonprofits Say, was conducted by Williams Group, and asked participants in Hewlett-sponsored trainings going back to 2005 to rate their experience in different ways, from the topics they found most useful to the improvements in their personal skills or their organizations’ communications work. Full disclosure: I helped organize two of the training conferences included in it when I was the Director of the SPIN Project, and also served as a presenter and coach at them.

So it was gratifying to see that the training was regarded so highly, with participants rating the topics covered and the quality of the presenters as among the most useful aspects of the training for them. For those of you familiar with Spitfire Strategies’ Smart Chart and the training lineups they put together, this finding will come as no surprise to you.

The study also finds that training by itself isn’t enough to transform the communications work of an organization– leadership that buys into the idea of communications and the resources to get the work done are also critically important. Certainly these are things that most people who have organized this kind of communications training have suspected, but it’s nice to have some empirical support for those hunches. Likewise, the study found that organizations experiencing a period of positive transition– new leaders, new funding or starting a new project– got the most out of the training.

The study’s third key finding, about ways to improve training outcomes, contains some important confirmation of ideas that have informed the design of these training: participants need to be ready for the trainings, and have the resources to use what they learn; inviting teams rather than individuals allows for deeper thinking about how to apply the lessons of the training; follow-up, in the form of coaching and follow-on training, is key to cementing the gains from the training; and integrating communications with program work is vital to the long-term effectiveness of the work. For more on this, see Communications Network Executive Director Bruce Trachtenberg’s guest post at Donor’s Forum, as well as the webinar about the study that the Network sponsored. The study itself also contains some very useful pre- and post-training questionnaires for Foundation staff to use in evaluating the readiness of their grantees for training and how well they are applying what they learned.

The entire study does a great job of codifying best practices in designing a communications skills-building course, and should be required reading for anyone thinking about doing this kind of training for nonprofits. As to the question of why this kind of training is so well regarded by participants, I think the study only starts to hint at a key reason. In addition to the quality of the workshops and the engaging presenters, I believe the format of these trainings lend themselves particularly well to creating transformative experiences for the participants.

These trainings bring together a diverse group of nonprofit professionals to think and talk about the deep strategy that guides their work, and the values that undergird it. Away from the minute-to-minute pressure of the office for a few days, they have the space to think broadly about why they do the work in the first place, and how to convince others why it’s so important. It doesn’t hurt that many of the trainings studied took place in a retreat setting in Northern California. In short, when done right, these trainings are relaxing, fun, and intellectually stimulating. What’s not to like?

It’s no coincidence that those are some of the same words our participants use over and over to describe the annual SPIN Academy, which takes place each summer in Marin, and which I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of for almost a decade now. We’re currently planning the thirteenth (!) annual event for this August. We’ll be opening applications in the next month or so. Please drop me a line if you’d like to be notified when they go live.

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Crowd-funding cause advertising.

Feb 25, ’11 1:03 PM

A guide to Tokyo art galleries. An iPhone case that doubles as a tripod mount. And an ad for “The Story of Stuff” during A&E’s Hoarders. What do these three things have in common? More than you might think.

Each is representative of a new trend in social media: crowdsourced funding of projects that allows individuals to put their money where their mouth is on ideas they find compelling. Using a service called Kickstarter, or a newly launched site intended specifically for funding cause-based ads called LoudSauce, an individual sets up project, detailing the amount of money they need to realize their vision and a deadline for raising it. They’re then responsible for publicizing the project in order to get people to kick in small amounts (typically incentivized with some product or service on Kickstarter) to try and reach the goal. Kickstarter users pay via their Amazon.com account, which acts as a sort of escrow service– no one pays unless the project is fully funded (LoudSauce just completed a limited Alpha phase of projects, and will likely do something similar with its projects).

ArtSpace Tokyo, the guide mentioned above, is a great example of the kind of projects that have proved successful on Kickstarter. Developed by a Tokyo-based writer/ designer/ web-guy named Craig Mod, it took a book he had written several years before that had fallen out of print and promoted the project to his extensive network of contacts in the design and publishing world. In the end, he was able to raise $24,000 in 30 days– enough to fund the reprint of the book and provide seed capital for Mod’s experiments with book publishing on the iPad. Mode took the time to write up an excellent case study of the project, detailing his thinking on setting the contribution levels, developing the marketing strategy, and even the breakdown of the timing and amount of the contributions he received– invaluable information for anyone hoping to crowdfund a project. The makers of the Glif, the aforementioned iPhone case, likewise provide a fascinating case study of two designers going from idea to finished product– via 3D Printing, overseas manufacturers, and some saavy marketing to niche bloggers– in just five months.

The third example above, “The Story of Stuff” promo on Hoarders, is even more exciting for nonprofits. As one of the first two projects on LoudSauce, they raised more than $3,000 to reach an estimated 2 million viewers of the program. I had a chance to talk to Chrstina Samala, Director of Online Media & Strategy at the Story of Stuff Project about their experience. Here’s what she had to say:

As an experiment, it was a real success for us. I met Colin and Christie [the co-founders of LoudSauce] socially, and the idea of doing an ad for “Story of Stuff” as part of the LoudSauce Alpha came up. We ended up promoting it exclusively to our personal networks– we have a big e-mail list for “Story of Stuff,” but we wanted to see if we could tap a new base of supporters who migth not otherwise donate. It turns out we could, and we would definitely do it again.

So, what lessons can nonprofits interested in trying something like this learn from these examples?

1. You’ve got to have a plan. Outreach is the key to crowdsourced funding. If the right people don’t hear about your project, they can’t support it. Being strategic about e-mail correspondence, social media and outreach to bloggers who might be interested in the topic can make or break a project (Mod’s case study, in particular, does a great job of explaining his experience with this aspect of the project). As a nonprofit you probably have a pretty good list of people who care about your work, but that’s not enough, because

2. You should try to reach beyond the choir. The beauty of these projects, as with much of social media, is the way they can expand the base of support for your cause. It’s far more useful to bring in a new donor who’s interested in a project– and who might be converted to a long-term donor to your organization– than to get a long-term donor to earmark dollars they might have given anyway to a specific project. Which brings us to

3. Incentivize the interaction. Nonprofits have a leg up in the crowdsourced funding game, in that they have a built-in base of supporters who care about their issues. But they’re also at a disadvantage, in that the payoff for the supporter is less clear– there’s no book or iPhone case waiting at the end of a successful project, and that kind of physical token of a supporters’ vote of confidence in an idea is an important incentive. LoudSauce has worked around this by including supporters’ social media avatars on the ads themselves, but why not take this a step further and produce a small-format poster of a crowdfunded ad that you can send to supporters, for example?

Ads are one of those communications vehicles that nonprofits often think they simply can’t afford. But what if I told you that there was a way of funding them that would bring in new funding for the ads themselves from new supporters who had never heard of your organization before? That’s the promise of crowdfunded ads for good causes, and one I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the coming months.

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