Motivate Me!

It's pretty tough to get people motivated enough to actually do something these days.

We are dealing with increasingly savvy audiences, with more options, and less time to commit significant effort, to actively contribute to good causes.

Good online/offline campaigns rely on strong organizing, clear message, and recognizable outcomes. In addition, a successful campaign needs an inspirational way to motivate people to participate and engage. So how do we begin this process?

We know that community generated activity builds stronger bonds with a brand or campaign - having a hand in the creation of something makes people more likely to invest in its ongoing success. A community of actively engaged individuals are also much more likely to participate in collaborative myth creation, spread your message by word of mouth, and act as ambassadors, or brand evangelists.

How do we get peoples attention and motivate them to actively do something to participate in a good cause?

The following is a handful of ways commonly used to motivate us to engage with campaigns:

Boo! Arrgh! Use fear to scare people into action
Fear is often used to motivate engagement - particularly around issues of safety, health and your responsibilities to your loved ones.

Nice Booty Reward and incentivize through prizes or material gain
Pay to engage - prizes don't necessarily have to be cash value - they can be things that your target audience will value.

Game On Encourage competition
Engage that latent competitive drive: award points, challenge people to compete for a high score. Chore Wars is a great example of using a points system to get people more engaged in doing unappealing household chores. (I have long envisioned a challenge that pits homes/dorms/companies monitoring their energy consumption against each other in a game of conservation. Anyone want to build it with me??)

Stroke that Ego Spotlight talent and reward effort with praise and profile
We all like to get praised. And increasingly, online recognition can be turned into power and opportunity. If members of your community are participating for recognition, make sure there are good opportunities for them to build profile and portfolio.

Fun is Good(!) Make it more fun to do good stuff
Why not helping people feel good about doing good. It is important to be respectful of sensitive issues, but it is also important to let people enjoy themselves.

A great example of fun at work is RockCorps - a day of service working for a good cause, performed with friends, that earns you a concert ticket to an exclusive show. This is a winning model for engagement - By giving young people a way to feel like they are doing a good deed by hanging out with friends, and get rewarded for a day of service. The new initiative from Disney - Give Day Get a Disney Day - follows a similar model.

Power Hungry Offer opportunities to lead and organize
A recent McKinsey Quarterly survey has found that as companies tighten their belts and reduce fiscal rewards, employees can be motivated, sometime more effectively, by offering greater leadership opportunities, praise and direct attention. In online and offline organizing, the opportunity to lead a house party, or run a local event can be a great motivator.

We're all Dumb and Lazy Make the default option the best one
Make the lazy option the best option. Nudge highlights the little things we can do to change peoples behavior for the better. Instead of asking people to decide to opt IN, make your preferred option a decision to opt OUT and watch how many more people commit.

In Sympathy Put your audience in the shoes of those in need
Build empathy with your audience, tell emotional stories that people can relate to.

The Velvet Rope Get a glimpse behind the curtain
Nothing builds demand like limited supply. Exclusivity, VIP, invite only. Does anyone still need a Google Wave invitation?

Edutainment Teach through storytelling
Participant Media is a production company that makes great movies. Most people know them for their multi award winning films like the Soloist or the Kite Runner. Less people are aware of the huge social undertakings that go on behind the scenes of every film. Each one of their films becomes a vehicle to educate and engage the broader cinema going public in a range of issues explored through their stories. Eg. The Soloist launched a mental healthcampaign. By using popular cinema to tell well crafted and engaging stories, they are able to educate a broader audience of engaged individuals.

We're all in This Together Feel part of something bigger than yourself
Provide ways for people to collaborate and own a little piece of a bigger whole. Initiatives like seti or carrot mob rely on people working together to create something as a community. When there is a shared sense of ownership and responsibility for success - be it a community like The High Line, open source software, or a collaborative story - we rely on each others singular strengths to support the cohesion of the whole.

Good campaigning, advertising and engagement will use a combination of these techniques to entice, incentivize and engage people to participate.

Obviously, the core of a good social media campaign is based in a deep understanding and affinity with the issues at hand, the message, and the action required. Knowing the issue, the message, and the actionable ask will determine the most appropriate way to engage an audience to participate.

What other techniques are used to engage people in issues?
What are some other good examples of campaigns that use a combination of these techniques?

Originally published on EchoDitto.com on December 03 2009

Extreme Neighborliness

Local communities are organizing to become stronger together. Described by Allison Arieff as “Extreme Neighborliness” - a concept “so old-fashioned as to seem innovative” - this movement is gaining power as scalable local initiatives are applied to the social web.

Carrotmob.org from San Francisco, and WannaStartaCommune? from LA are leading the way in community organizing for local economic, social and environmental benefit.


So Easy
Carrotmob uses the power of the crowd to effect sustainable change through local shopping. By harnessing an action that people are doing anyway – grocery shopping - and organizes in a way that uses the power of the group to demand sustainable action. One customer, buying one carton of milk, may not be able to influence their local retailer, but 500 customers, buying 500 cartons of milk, have a combined buying power that would make any local store pay attention.

At no extra financial or logistical cost, customers are secure that their purchases are working for local sustainable good. Carrotmog explains it well: Carrotmob simply asks people to coordinate and plan the purchases they are already making. This model is not threatening, not expensive, not time-consuming, not uncomfortable, not “radical,” not confusing, and not negative. It’s the perfect level of involvement for most people.


How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? is providing tools for small groups of neighbors to organize the sharing of local resources to save money, time and energy. They provide a downloadable pdf http://www.wannastartacommune.com/store/cart.php?m=view guide that gives instructions for Getting Started, What's in a Commune, a Resource-sharing Guide, Potluck & Workshop Planning Tools, Simple Organizational Documents and Technology Tips to help you manage and grow your commune.



They too harness the assets available at a small community’s disposal when they work together – Linked back yards or disused land? Room for a vege patch. Limited car parking? Try car sharing. Combined energy usage? Solar or wind power becomes a viable option for a group of housing. Varied work schedules? Potential for shared child minding. These assets are already in the community. All it takes is to come together in an organized way to take advantage of them.

win + win = WIN
Carrotmob challenges businesses to compete for consumer loyalty. As a result, these stores get a ready made fan base willing to support them. Though they pledge a percentage of their profit to sustainable improvements, they increase their customer base and increase total sales. By implementing sustainable improvements to their stores, they will also reap the reward of long term cost savings from increased energy efficiency.

Carrotmob can put rewards in place that will make environmental responsibility the most profitable choice. Companies will do what we want, not because of negative pressure, or morality, or a boycott, or a petition…there are enough sticks out there. We need a big juicy carrot. They will do what we say because they won’t be able to resist the profits.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? challenges neighbors to pool their talents, assets and expenses to find sustainable and communal solutions.

Scalable
Carrotmob have big plans. They are using the power of the local to effect small changes in family owned businesses. The power of their movement now is firmly rooted in a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood engagement. With a little organization, they see potential to move up from local grocery stores, to big shiny corporations. As the consumer communities they create grow larger, the more power they wield.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? needs to be based in smaller local groups. As a community grows, and the less personal contact you have with each other, the less likely you are to go out of your way to compromise or help someone out. Working in groups based around culdesacs or apartment blocks defines a community and connects them with a strong bond of locality. That said, the suburban commune concept is infinitely scalable as communities form block by block, apartment complex by apartment complex.



Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Using the power of the group requires an organizer. Someone who is willing to lead and schedule and mediate. As demonstrated by these two initiatives, there are an increasing number of people out there willing to teach you the tools to organize. To enable you to harness the power of your local groups and challenge communities to effect change. In the words of Carrotmob – to “do it with the carrot not the stick”.

(PS. thanks to Will for the heads up on Carrotmob. x)

Collaborative Innovation Economy

In the fairly grim Archinect industry survey released today, President of the Boston Society of Architects, Diane Georgopulis, is quoted saying: "architects at some level are kind of the canaries in the mine. When development dries up, architects are probably the first people to know."


As economic canaries, architects are now at the coalface of the changing economy. The survey goes on to detail the doom and gloom of thousands of design professionals, the fear and concern about job losses, and paints a fairly scary picture for both professionals and students in an industry suffering huge losses and a bleak outlook. However, like most news dealing with the economy these days, it attempts to finish on a high note – suggesting opportunities for re-skilling, building networks, focusing on what’s important, diversifying – and in an industry with a tradition for collaborative and competition based work this should put them in an ideal position to take advantage of the new style of crowd sourced, collaborative work towards innovation.

Competitions have become a common and democratic way to generate innovative ideas for modern building and city design. In Australia, the most recognizable architectural landmarks are the result of international competition and collaboration. In 1912, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony were awarded the winning entry to design the new Australian capital. In 1957 (out of 233 entries from 32 countries) Danish architect Jørn Utzon was announced as the winner of the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. More recently, in 1997, London based LAB Architecture Studio (partnering with Bates Smart) beat 177 local and international entries to win the competition to design Federation Square.

As the recent Bompas & Parr Jelly Banquet Auction demonstrates – architects will compete for just about anything!


In the last few years, with the evolution of more intuitive web based mass collaboration, innovation competitions have become a cheap and wildly successful means of generating massive numbers of innovative ideas from a global pool of cross industry talent.

Thanks to the success of mass collaboration projects - see Wikipedia, Human Genome Project, Pandora - and innovation competitions - see Goldcorp Challenge, Netflix, Nokia, Android, IPhone - and demonstrated by the mass media uptake of texts like Here Comes Everybody, Wikinomics, and the crowd written book We are Stronger than Me, innovation collaborations and competitions are seen as a new driving force for creative action.

A great use of these competitions has been for catalysts for social enterprise and innovation. For example:

Picnic green challenge: One bright idea can make a big difference. The entrant with the best idea for a greenhouse-gas-reducing product or service wins €500,000, expert coaching and a starting list of customers!



The X Prize is a forum hosting innovation prizes:



The Google Lunar X PRIZE – a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.

Insurance Automotive X PRIZE - invites teams from around the world to focus on a single goal: design viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy... This will be a race for the ages, with major publicity and $10 million waiting for the champions… and perhaps our future hanging in the balance.

Changemakers: is building the world's first global online "open source" community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions. Changemakers begins by providing an overarching intellectual framework for collaborative competitions that bring together individual social change initiatives into a more powerful whole.

The are currently running competitions in re-imagining media, designing for better health, and collaborating with Nike to run a competition to promote and engage women in sport.



Increasingly, as a lack of full time job security forces professionals to rethink how they work, collaborative research and competitions become a more valuable means of both embedding oneself in a learning network, and distinguishing oneself from the crowd.

As the projects above demonstrate, there is some serious capital investment behind these ventures – so as we all pull together to stay afloat in these uncertain times, a new collaborative social innovation economy is emerging. And that’s good news for architects and good news for all of us.

Musical Therapy

Robert Burton wrote in the 17th century in his classic work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness, especially melancholia. Perhaps that’s why, in these uncertain times, more and more people are turning to song and dance on the web to connect and combat the anxiety of the economic downturn. For your own dose of web enabled musical medicine check out:



Beyonce’s Single Ladies has sparked a dance craze not seen since Soulja Boy (here in a meeting of dance memes with the inmates of CPDRC), with almost 30.000 Youtube uploads at last count. Like Daft Hands before it, as more and more people reinterpret the routine, the challenge to distinguish is becoming harder/faster/weirder!


Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off

Top Secret Dance Off turns this throwdown challenge into a team game where you and your team members compete in filmed challenges to show off your mad interpretive dance skills. You can play with your friends anywhere in the world with group events and parties to come.


In the UK, Lucky Voice, the new Karaoke venture from Martha Lane Fox (the brains behind lastminute.com) is revolutionizing a good night in with a web enabled microphone device that allows you to set up your own karaoke bar in the comfort of your own lounge.


Auditorium is one of the most delightful ways I have found to get a little musical magic in my life. It’s an incredibly beautiful, classical themed, interactive puzzle that uses directional paddles to fill audio bars with light and music. Spend hours hypnotically manipulating light and music and just try to keep the smile off your face.

Take that (economic) depression!