Consider Crowdsourcing as an Alternative Fundraising Technique

Online charity contests, such as Pepsi’s Refresh Project or Chase’s Community Giving initiatives, are crowdsourcing the answers to which causes they should support. Donors have even used crowdsourcing to work out where to direct their own donations. But within a cause such as yours, what could you discern from the sound of the crowd? How donations get used? Ways to save money?

In order to crowdsource you need two things: a crowd and the means by which to register its ideas and votes. One thing most charities have is access to a crowd. It’s always good to start close to home, so begin by asking staff colleagues, and then move on to volunteers, service users, your supporter database and eventually your organization’s wider circle of friends via social media.

Then you need the means to capture everyone's thoughts. A number of online solutions have emerged in recent times. Take a look at IdeaStorm; participants can create new ideas and/or vote on existing ones. Similarly, Google Moderator does the same kind of thing and was used to track the 4.7 million votes and ideas cast in one week for the Obama transition plan in 2009. These tools provide some facilities for analysis and ranking of ideas according to their popularity, which is an advantage over using, say, Twitter, where you’d have to read through the responses.

Robin Fisk is a senior charity technology specialist at Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit software provider Advanced Solutions International (ASI).