FT says we know
Article published in the Financial Times, online version below:
Charities should be crowdsourcing time and talent
By Iain Scott, managing director of Base Creative, a web design and digital marketing agency
Published: September 24 2009 11:44 | Last updated: September 24 2009
Controlling costs and raising funds are a concern for every charity. However, online technology allows people to donate their time and expertise to charities.
“Crowdsourcing” enables large numbers of people to complete small pieces of a big task online. Innovations in this area can provide charities with a new range of skills as well as saving time, money and staff, if embraced ambitiously and imaginatively.
Crowdsourcing asks a group of individuals to carry out sections of a task that a computerised system either doesn’t have the technology to achieve or requires creativity it does not possess.
The shortness of the task (around 30 minutes) is key as it keeps people focused and allows them to help in their free time in manageable chunks. It works particularly well at a time when people have less money to donate.
Big blue chips have become skilled at cultivating online communities, including Nokia’s Beta Labs, which encourages users to develop and share mobile applications, and Vodafone’s Betavine website to encourage development on multiple platforms. But these are specialist areas: crowdsourcing is about accessibility.
Making crowdsourcing work requires two parts – the task and the technology. Both need to be perfected to make business tasks divisible into small pieces and easily reassembled at the end.
For example, using flash surveys – creating a snapshot of data based on a large sample – a charity’s supporters could go for a half-hour walk on a given day and count the number of an endangered species of butterfly seen.
Inputting this data together with postcode and environment type would build a population map overnight, and be repeatable to provide trend data. Replacing “butterflies” with anything else can provide many charities with valuable data.
Quick turnaround projects such as this are rarely possible and would give specialist charities valuable data which is otherwise difficult to gain. Since many small or medium-sized charities don’t have the technological infrastructure needed for complex crowdsourcing techniques, companies such as Cambrian House can provide the tools to crowdsource tasks.
Equally, free internet media tools such as Flickr and YouTube allow charities to crowdsource media help with no set-up costs.
Many people with a computer will be familiar with the basic “tweaking” of photos on a computer. Perhaps a worker in Malawi has found an internet café and uploaded 200 photographs. The task could be to vote for the top 10, then balance brightness and contrast and remove red-eye etc of one of them.
These can then be posted back to a media sharing site, saving many hours of repetitive work. Similarly, imagine what could be done with videos posted to YouTube.
If charities have libraries of information to curate and protect, such as authors’ trusts, why not put them in digital form for safekeeping and to raise awareness? If volunteers could scan in the pages of a book, software could be written presenting the image of a page, a text entry box to transcribe into, and once submitted it can be reassembled into the right order by the software.
The investment in the software would easily be offset by the saving of getting this task “donated” rather than performed in-house. Automatic checks and balances such as getting each page entered by two people can also keep errors to a minimum.
If these examples represent too much initial commitment, charities can try the technique out via a third party.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk pays users for completing small tasks, and they can donate that payment to a charity. Charities can then see just how powerful crowdsourcing could be if time were invested to make it part of their culture.
Crowdsourcing will enable charities to access new supporters quickly and efficiently. They can be of any age and from anywhere, with no hindering taxes or exchanges rates.
However, this group will also need a different kind of support to cash donors or traditional volunteers. They will need to know that their task is relevant to the charity’s aim, and that their “part” is significant.
These concerns mean no organisation should approach crowdsourcing without a well-considered plan. All the same, it can reduce the burden of staffing, encourage involvement and mobilise large tasks rapidly. The sector cannot afford to ignore this opportunity.
Iain Scott has worked with a number of charities to help them with their online strategy.