Marketing veteran Cindy Gallop and software developer Wendell Davis are on a quest to make the world a better place, with a crowdsourcing project to motivate people to do big things by taking small bites. Their theory: Small, good intentions can bring about great leaps.
Gallop is the former global marketing chief and U.S. chairman for the BBH marketing behemoth that ran campaigns for Levi's, Axe Body Spray and other brands. She's joining with former Splice and Zooomr CEO Davis (pictured) to accomplish this lofty task one piece at a time. They'll encourage corporations to work with the customers they seek, as the community tackles a user-generated database of large and small causes.
Their unlaunched site, IfWeRantheWorld.com, should succeed in giving online activism some sorely-needed teeth. Rather than raising awareness, the site is set up to convert intent into action, to get things done. As a side effect, it could reinvent advertising as a transparent interaction between corporations and individuals.
"The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action," said Gallop, who founded the company with Davis two years ago after digital guru Esther Dyson introduced them. Gallop says current do-gooder networks make it too hard to find achievable, concrete tasks that fit one's skill set, time and budget -- and that offer instant gratification.
"For a large amount of the world, doing good is fundamentally very, very boring," explained Gallop. "If you go to the homepage of something like DoSomething.org, or any one of the many [like it], there is an instant yawn factor -– 'I know this is really good stuff, I should be doing it, but I'm half asleep already."
"There is no Google of action," she added.
IfWeRantheWorld.com breaks even the largest goodwill projects ("feed Darfur") down into discrete tasks, which it distributes to members through a commercially supported, socially networked environment. When people have the urge to act on something that irritates them about the world, they can actually do something. Their plan (more below) not only impressed us, but also Dyson, who said it will create "a liquidity of goodness." Former Google executive Katie Jacobs Stanton, who joined the Obama administration as "director of citizen participation," heard about the plan from Gallop at the TED conference last month.
Here's how it works. A simple, Google-like search box on the site will greet first-time visitors with the partially-completed sentence, "If I ran the world I would...." Their entries join a database of action platforms, which platform originators and community members break down into discrete tasks -- irreducible atoms of action. Members complete these tasks, assign them to friends, offer kudos for jobs well done and offer advice to various action platforms. Completed tasks and kudos appear on your profile page, which lists everything you've done -- a little different for most people than everything you say you support.
"I deplore Facebook causes," said Gallop. "I absolutely don't deplore the people behind them and what they're trying to do, but all too often, they allow people to affiliate -– not to act, but to affiliate." She and Davis believe their site's reality-based user profiles will lead to merit-based online dating, real reputation building and other phenomena not found on other social networks. On IfWeRantheWorld, it's not enough to claim that your awareness has been raised -- you'll have to prove it.
An example of an action platform would be something like "plant a garden to feed the local homeless." One person might secure the site, another might convince a local nursery to donate seeds, someone else might know a graphic designer with the time and inclination to create promotional leaflets, another participant could print those, while volunteers plant, harvest and distribute crops -- and so on. These tasks appear will in a zoomable timeline with photos, videos and blog-style updates, putting each step into context so individuals can see the effect they've had.
There's no shortage of sites dedicated to online activism, but this one lets individuals contribute time, ingenuity and other resources with greater efficiency, while exerting a sliding level of control. Davis and Gallop studied World of Warcraft to create a structure in which a rotating cast of leaders might direct a given project at different stages -- the same way WOW teams self-organize around different people, depending on how their areas of expertise stack up to the task at hand.
Many in the digital generation will prefer this to writing a check, dropping it in the mail and assuming someone somewhere has put it to good use.
Davis and Gallop hope to make money on this humanitarian enterprise -- and why not? Corporations will participate in the system for an annual fee ($200 to $10,000, depending on their size), in order to build action platforms or encourage their employees to help out with certain platforms.
Commercially, the site's special sauce is an ability to match corporations and causes. If Coca-Cola wants to target 18- to 25-year old males, it could use the site to determine which action platforms that demographic supports, and lend financial or employee support. This would let it interact with a targeted audience in a positive way, with relative transparency — no greenwashing allowed.
Or, they could offer product giveaways as task completion incentives that double as a marketing technique. "Coca-Cola's Consumer Social Responsibility agenda is 'bring fresh water to the world,'" explained Gallop. "Coca-Cola might say, 'for this period of time, we're going to reward everybody working on this agenda above a certain level activity with Coca-Cola points.' The cause wins, because it galvanizes action, people win because they get something of value for doing something they were doing anyway, and the brand wins, because you're bringing people into the brand franchise."
If We Ran the World would let corporations demonstrate verifiable social responsibility while reaching a public that has grown increasingly resistant to traditional strains of marketing. "It's really about bringing individuals and businesses together on a completely level playing field," said Gallop, "where both are judged by one thing and one thing only, which is, 'What are you doing?'" Gallop calls this "action branding," and says it will work as well for corporations that want to improve their reputations as it will for individuals looking to define themselves and impress potential mates.
Rarely — if ever — has an idea managed so neatly to fuse the do-gooder instinct that appears when an individual is frustrated by a disagreeable reality, companies' corporate social-responsibility and marketing budgets, and worthy causes.
Soon, we'll find out if it works. Gallop and Davis explained the site to me at length, showing off several well-thought-out wireframe mock-ups. They're seeking individuals and corporations willing to fund the site's launch in return for charter member status.
Once they've funded the site's launch, Gallop and Davis say they'll use web 2.0 to propagate it: A Twitter account (@IWRTW) will let people participate without ever going to the main site, SMS messages will assign tasks to friends and monitor action platforms, a Facebook widget will display members' profile information and contain a fully-functional version of the main IWRTW site and mobile apps (for iPhone, Android and others) will encapsulate the site while adding a local component. If you have an extra 45 minutes to spare, you might shake your phone for a list of micro-actions in your immediate area.
The founders of If We Ran the World have each found success in their previous ventures. If this action-oriented, accountable, commercially viable operation gets off the ground, it's not hard to see how it could make the world a quantifiably better place.
See Also:
- LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning
- Warner and Others Muted on YouTube
- Do-Gooders Gather Tech Museum Awards
- Who Wants To Be Obama's Chief Technology Officer?
(Photo: Eliot Van Buskirk)
