Late last year I spent two weeks organising what I think I would call my first crowdsourcing campaign.
The basic plan was to ask Twitter to donate food and toys to the Auckland City Mission for Christmas. Those people would fill in a quick and simple form, and pull some goods together. Then we would turn up one Saturday and take their goods to the Mission.
Easy, right?
Well, lessons learned. In crowd-anything the emphasis is always on the ‘crowd’. Nothing could happen without that group of awesome people who jump up and offer to help.
While I wasn’t expecting the 1,500 people projects like #nzsecretsanta attract, I was expecting more than the 20 we ended up with.
Three days before collection day, nine people had signed up. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed. But then I realised that there are a myriad of reasons why people wouldn’t, or couldn’t, participate.
So I checked my attitude and adjusted my approach. I reassessed my objective.
My goal was not to spend my entire Saturday running around playing pass-the-parcel. Nor was it to co-ordinate many alternate drop-offs. My objective was to get as much stuff as I could to the Auckland City Mission in time for Christmas. So I made it as easy as possible for people to contribute in any way they could.
If someone was asking if they could drop it off to me on another day, I directed them to the Mission itself. If someone wanted to participate, but could only offer cash – I offered to amalgamate them into the shop I was going to do for my own contribution. Or to make an easy online (and tax deductible) donation straight to the Mission.
That opened the doors a little. Our 9 donors were joined by 7 more signups, plus another half-dozen alternate-givers.
Then I widened my audience. I looked outside Twitter and did something I wouldn’t normally do: I sent an all-employee email asking the people in my office if they would like to help as well.
The first donation filled the box I had set out. When I came into work the next morning there was a good – and incredibly encouraging – pile by my desk.
Pretty much every crowdfunding advice blog, book, or video will tell you it’s important to get as many donations as you can, as early as you can. There is all sorts of audience psychology that feeds into this principle, but it boils down to this: people don’t want to be the only one doing something, they want to see that it’s accepted by others first. When I posted the picture above to Twitter on Friday morning, two more people came on board.
It had the same effect on my workmates. By the end of the day, donations were overflowing behind me. I probably almost got in trouble for the health and safety risk! In fact, the contributions from my colleagues, plus the $100 of groceries I bought funded by miscellaneous donors filled an entire shopping trolley! Even before we began, we were already ahead. The 18 people we had convinced to take part in the original project almost seemed like a bonus!
Which takes me to my final point. Sometimes you don’t need a cast of thousands to achieve the goals of the project. In the end, our campaign was more successful than I ever imagined. From a 10 day campaign, we collected:
- over 240 cans
- 180 dried goods
- 170 toys
We didn’t need a hundred donors – we just needed 40 incredible ones (20 from the day, ~20 from workplace collections). Every donation was sorted, then dropped to the Mission’s distribution centre the next week.
I saw and counted it all. I personally collected a large amount of it. I thanked each and every person, and I was completely humbled by what the power of even a small crowd of passionate supporters could do.
A collage of some of the people and goods collected as part of #TwitterMissionNZ 2013
I didn’t do it by myself. It wouldn’t have been possible without Cate, Anna or Rata – or, of course the amazing donors we managed to reach. We had a good idea, a fantastic cause, an incredible and passionate team, and we found a crowd.
I’m already looking forward to taking the lessons we learned this year and trying to beat it in 2014!
