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Chaordix is always interested in pioneering uses of crowdsourcing, so we were excited to talk with Veer Gidwaney about the Humanity Calls project. HumanityCalls.org is a fundraising tournament website designed to bring together nonprofits, companies, and individuals focused on addressing global causes such as the environment, health, education, poverty and human rights. Veer was a co-founder and Director of this innovative use of crowdfunding.
In line with Earth Day 2010, Humanity Calls ran a two-month tournament to encourage support of environment-focused non-profits based on their worthiness as determined by the crowd. Ebay seeded the donation pool with $50,000 from their Ebay Green Team initiative. The donation pool was split among over 45 non-profits, with the top recipient receiving almost $10,000.
Non-profits could register for free and anyone could cast a vote for a non-profit just by logging in. Additional votes were earned by making donations and inviting others to participate. The tournament ran for two months and in that relatively short time had over 39,000 votes cast and managed to attract an additional $25,000 in individual donations to augment the seed pool.
Humanity Calls is a volunteer effort of 50 people (based out of Alberta) and Veer said they encouraged volunteers to take on roles that they were passionate about and leveraged their skill sets to make the best use of their volunteer crowd.
Veer said their aim was to deliver an easy way for non-profits and NGOs to benefit from crowdsourcing without having to do it on their own. They took inspiration from other programs such as Pepsi Refresh and Chase, but with a focus on making it micro, nimble and repeatable. He stressed that different crowdfunding and crowd philanthropy sites appeal to different people, so it’s important to have a variety.
Participating non-profits were encouraged to get out their votes from their supporters using social media – and it seemed to work – Humanity Calls had almost 200,000 visits during the month of June alone.
In the “what worked well” category, Veer thought the fact that they were able to quickly get 120 non-profit organizations involved without significant outreach, that they received a very positive response from all participants, and that they successfully made it easy for individuals to make a contribution were all signs that the model works.
Moving forward, he believes the approach could be improved by providing more information about the non-profits involved, essentially a short education element about each non-profit, so people might vote for a non-profit they were not familiar with before coming to the site. Similarly, he thinks that providing tools to allow participants to compare non-profits would be helpful in driving that same result.
Looking to the future, Humanity Call’s vision is to run a number of these types of tournaments with different non-profit focus, always with a large brand as the sponsor. Veer sees sites like Indigogo really picking up, the fact that its cheaper to start companies especially on the web, and that its easier for people to fund what they are passionate about as indications that many more efforts like Humanity Calls will spring up in the future. He advises individuals wanting to learn more about crowdfunding to look at the types of projects you want to fund, and the different means of funding available to you, such as Kiva, GrameenBank and MicroPlace.
Without a doubt, pioneering projects like Humanity Calls are blazing a path for new initiatives and with each project we learn more about best practices for tapping the crowd. What are your thoughts about how crowdfunding for non-profits organizations might be improved?
