August 11, 2014 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Women’s Foundation of California last year jettisoned its traditional annual awards dinner, which wasn’t raising much money, in favor of a new awards program aimed at finding like-minded organizations and new potential supporters.
The group introduced the People’s Momentum Award to recognize individuals and groups that work on behalf of women and children, allowing anyone to nominate candidates and vote on winners—as long as they provided an email address.
“We were brainstorming about our email list and came up with the idea to make it a contest, to try out crowdsourcing as a way to draw people in, introduce ourselves, and be introduced,” says Sande Smith, senior director of communications.
About 44,000 people participated in last year’s awards contest, almost all of them new to the Women’s Foundation of California. They nominated 337 groups and voted to give the award, which came with a $10,000 grant sponsored by Wells Fargo, to Alexandria House, a shelter for women and children in Los Angeles.
Ms. Smith says that a year later, the organization is still sending appeals to 84 percent of the email addresses the organization acquired through the contest. At least two dozen of the people on the list made donations and hundreds are staying involved in other ways. Last fall, 350 of the newcomers responded to an action alert, signing a letter thanking a California politician for backing anti-poverty legislation.
The contest, which the group plans to run again this year, was also a success, Ms. Smith says, because it introduced groups working on causes affecting women and children to one another and to new potential supporters.
“The nominee organizations sent notes to their constituents to say, Please vote,” Ms. Smith says. “Our email list grew because the crowdsourcing idea had other people spreading the word for us.”
