May 28, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Epic Change, a charity raising money for a school in Tanzania, is a finalist in one of a mushrooming number of contests that enable Web users to vote for nonprofit groups. But Stacey Monk, its founder, sees a big challenge: the lack of Internet access for would-be voters in Tanzania.
“Many haven’t used the Internet before; most don’t have e-mail accounts; English is a second language,” she writes on the organization’s blog.
Given such obstacles, do Web contests disadvantage charities in places other than the United States and Europe?
Nathaniel Whittemore, who blogs on social entrepreneurship at Change.org, says yes, and he examines some other limitations of online fund-raising contests.
While Mr. Whittemore sees competitions as a positive trend overall, he says they don’t necessarily reward groups that are making the most difference. “To the extent that people are willing to be mobilized because of quality of social impact, there’s a correlation, but by no means is quality a requisite,” he says. “A lot of the young organizations that win contests, frankly, don’t have the history of infrastructure to have collected lots of robust data about their impact, anyway.”
Contests have taken on so much significance, Mr. Whittemore says, because the risks and rewards are more clear-cut than in some other types of fund raising. “If you spend 18 hours a day e-mailing, you’re likely to get more votes than the person who spends 8 hours a day e-mailing.”
He also points out that most contests are not trying to fix the problem of seed money for small, entrepreneurial charities. “Contests are designed to get lots of people to do a specific thing to increase traffic,” writes Mr. Whittemore, which is very different from trying to create a way to get start-up money to good charities.
“Hopefully, contests (and even the next generation of action platforms) are the early indications of a changing social-good-funding ecosystem,” he says, that could also include social capital markets, social stock exchanges, and new forms of relationships between nonprofit groups and businesses.
What are your thoughts regarding online fund-raising contests?
