Nudges in Action

I noticed that I’ve started a number of streams in previous entries and haven’t provided any follow ups. I’ll try to do a better job of reaching back and touching those threads from now on. Recall my “nudges” post from a few weeks back. I continue to be really interested in this idea and I’ve been trying to figure out ways to use nudges for good causes. My friend Willie and I have been playing around with two different ideas.

The first is to leverage affiliate marketing programs. Affiliate marketing (per Wikipedia) is a web-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. So, in other words, if you put a link for Amazon on your blog and people click on it to make a purchase of something, you can get a small cut of that back from Amazon for the referral.

Many organizations are including affiliate marketing programs to raise money for charity. Wikipedia makes a brief reference to this practice in their entry on Cause Marketing -- Affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular with online retailers many of whom use affiliate marketing to pass donations on to charities, supporters of the charities shop through affiliate links in order to gain commission for the charity. One prominent example of this is The Royal British Legion using a webshop shopping portal to raise funds whilst passing on sales to retailers.

So, building on this idea, I want to build a shopping portal for a charity and include occasional nudges to spur more activity (and hence more commissions) for the charitable organization. I found a willing partner to conduct some initial experiments in the League for Animal Welfare (http://www.lfaw.org/). Our agency has done pro-bono work for them in the past and they are a really good organization (LFAW is locally based, no-kill shelter that places a premium on making good matches between the animals in their care and prospective new pet “parents”.) Willie and I (and hopefully some more folks at our agency) will be creating a beta site for them soon as an inital step. Think of the site as a LFAW-branded shopping portal that would become your homepage when you initially get online. So each time you logged on, you might see a little reminder about the good that the League does and how your use of the portal is doing good for so many dogs and cats that need homes. Those nudges should in turn lead to increased purchases and a small but growing revenue stream for the League. I’ll be sure to post the link when its ready.

The second idea is to build a widget that helps people track their donations online. I tend to make lots of small online donations throughout the year, but during tax season I never seem to be able to track down all those little donations to itemize on my return. The widget (or gadget) behind this idea would be a little desktop tool that you would keep active and then update after each online donation. I’ve created a clickable prototype version of that widget here (definitely just the 1.0 version). I’m not sure if this idea has got legs or not. But if it does, I can imagine a scenario where people download the widget and get occasional nudges that would spur them to even greater philanthropic action. The truth is that most of us are motivated to do good, but its not always top-of-mind to find opportunities to do good. This widget is intended to keep those opportunities top-of-mind (and hopefully solve a meaningful consumer problem at the same time). Feel free to click around on this prototype and let me know if you think there’s an idea here.

A Loving Tribute?

My friends at Bridge Worldwide have apparently been planning my departure for some time. During a recent all-company event, two of our "house" bands battled it out for Bridge Worldwide supremacy.  The group Mystery Head performed the following "tribute" song (Steve Wolf) much to my amusement (and embarrassment). 

It feels good to know you are loved and it makes me even more determined to make the most of the opportunity I'm pursuing. Thanks Mystery Head -- you're the best!

You can take the boy out of the startup…

But you can’t take the startup out of the boy. Over the last several weeks, I can see my interests shifting away from super-large institutions and back towards startup-style organizations. I suspect that this may be a reaction to my fear of losing personal control if I join a larger organization. I don’t want to run the risk of seeing good ideas from me (or my fictional team) getting killed for reasons I’m not privy to. And I like the energy of small, entrepreneurial organizations. I like being part of a nimble organization that can adjust course quickly when conditions change.

At the same time, this brings to light the problem I’ve been working against my whole life. When you’re in a big organization, you have the resources you need but the organization typically lacks the focus and agility needed to act quickly and with full effect. When you’re in a small organization, you can easily get everyone aligned and working as hard as possible towards the goal, but you lack the resources to deliver at the level of scale needed to make a major impact.

One of the places where this seems to be leading me is to think about the venture capital model – the VC model instructs you to create a robust platform, prove out your model and then rapidly scale. I find myself consistently attracted to these kinds of small, but scalable opportunities. Here’s a recent example. My friend Scott shared a link with me from a recent PBS episode dealing with the humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (its long so if you choose to watch it, know what you're getting into). As you might know, the DRC (formerly Zaire) has been going through a civil war for several years but is currently experiencing a period of relative peace. Two aid organizations (Concern and Doctors without Borders) are actively trying to push as much aid as possible into the more remote regions of the DRC during this quiet period. Their problem is that they can’t get the provisions in using trucks because the roads are so bad. Their solution: bicycles. Using a bank of about 70 bikes they can move in about 7 tons of supplies in a few weeks. This is far short of the 40 tons of supplies that they would like to distribute, but it’s a step in the right direction. And beyond the positive impact of getting the supplies in, there is also the additional benefit of job creation -- each bicycle courier is paid to deliver the aid which introduces additional capital into the local economy. Scott’s thought – how can we scale the bicycle solution?

This feels like a great local problem/solution pair with some pretty significant scale opportunities. The bikes can transport enough food/supplies to sustain thousands of people. What happens if we add more bikes? And/or what happens if we port this solution to the next country that needs aid and has terrible logistics infrastructure. What if I offered to start this program for Concern or Doctors without Borders? This would be an opportunity to still have significant control, but also have the opportunity to have a large impact.

I’m not convinced that this bicycle idea is THE idea for me by any stretch, but this is the KIND of idea that I’m finding more interesting than just plugging myself into an existing organization and letting them tell me what they want me to do. I’m not sure if I’m being smart or egotistical (probably both). I’m not swearing off the idea of working for a large organization, but this shift in my thinking feels somewhat concrete. There’s something satisfying about that.