Reflecting on 50/50...what next?
Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about how the 50/50 campaign is going.
Both Tim and Andrew have recently posted some great reflections on where we’re at and what we’ve learnt from doing this. On Wednesday evening, a bunch of the people who have been involved in running 50/50 projects came over to our office to talk about what’s working, what’s not (erm…PR?) and what we can do better.
So what did we come up with?
Let’s start with the good part…
As Andrew said in his post:
50/50 was borne out of a feeling that we had something to give to charities beyond hard cash, something unique, something they needed.
The most powerful thing we could offer was to set in motion the creativity and expertise of our network. And in that respect, it’s been a success.
The diverse ideas that have come out of this collaboration, no doubt spurred on by some friendly inter-agency competition, have been hugely inspiring to see. And, as Heidi pointed out on Wednesday, we shouldn’t under-estimate the value we can provide by simply raising awareness of the issue amongst a new audience. 50/50 has generated a network of engaged, motivated people with great potential for future action to support good causes.
And it’s all been done at high speed, without costing UNICEF a penny. Although our ultimate goal is to raise money for the cause, the benefit of the campaign isn’t just about the cold, hard cash that comes out at the end of it.
What are the things that make projects successful?
There are so many different ways of cutting this, and the simple fact is, if there was a silver bullet we wouldn’t need to do this in the first place. Looking at the projects which are raising the most money, we can get some insight into what makes them work:
- Asking for a donation before participation, as the excellent Grow has - designers are asked to contribute €30 before they can design an apple for the orchard
- Incorporating a physical or offline element into a project - whether that’s about getting actual stuff in return for your donation, like Good Shirts, or a physical manifestation of the project which brings it into peoples’ environment much more viscerally, as 12,000,000 people has done with their art installation
- Building donation mechanics into existing behaviour patterns - Let’s not do Lunch inverts corporate boozy lunch habits by asking for a donation instead
- Social by nature - by being simple, intuitive, playful and shareable - the SwearJar is a fucking brilliant example of this
- The personal mission - the Fat Planner spearheaded this and he was also the only project to bring home the realities of the famine through his experiences
- Target a specific audience through direct asks - Grow asks each designer who participates to invite 2 more, and we hope ChainFunder will work through a similar one to one pass it on approach
- Restricted choice - one of the problems with the overall campaign is that 50/50 is a makers site not a donors site. People who land on the homepage are overwhelmed by the number of projects they could support. But once you’ve committed to supporting a project, choice is more of a pleasure - which poster to buy or which celebrity to tweet.
What’s next for 50/50
Our primary goal remains the same, we’ll continue to optimise, iterate on and scale the projects which have the most potential to raise lots of funds. There are plans in the works for a Christmas giving campaign (more on that next week), as well as some more projects still to launch.
We all agree that the emotional connection to the reality of the famine is missing. As Justin said in his comment on Andrew’s post, maybe what we need is to find 50 new ways to connect people to what is happening and break through the apathy and distractions of the world around us. This is something we want to work on - both by sharing real stories from the ground and by giving more projects a physical presence that confronts people.
Lastly, we want to explore how we can gather and share the learning from 50/50. Part of this will be through speaking to people who have run projects, donated, or just tweeted about the campaign, as well as mining the data on donations received. A large part of the value of 50/50 is as a rapid (and free) prototyping platform for new ideas and approaches to fundraising. It's about learning through making, and it's messy - some things will work, some will fail. How can we make the most of that? Should we run a conference or make a book about what we've learnt from the campaign? How about auctioning off the project ideas or just committing to open sourcing them all?
We’d love to hear more about what you think we can do with 50/50 in future in the comments.