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.