The Virtual Flash Mob Experiment
I knew David Risher when he was the vice president of marketing at Amazon in the mid-late '90s. I remember the last company all-hands meeting he attended. He stood up on stage while the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, commented on his departure, his voice cracking with emotion. If David knew me, it would only be because there is a folder reserved in his huge brain crammed with scraps of paper etched or scribbled with names and faces of hundreds or thousands of people he would have casually encountered through work.
I emailed him to explain who I was, how I knew him, and what I wanted to do for his organization, Worldreader.org, which donates and delivers Kindle e-readers to areas in developing nations where children have scarce access to books. I told him I was incredibly inspired by the organization and saw it as a perfect fit for the virtual flash mob concept.
He graciously wrote me back within a few hours and gave me the go-ahead to use Worldreader.org to try out this idea. He put me in touch with Susan Moody, the organization's communications director.
Worldreader.org was the perfect pilot organization because:
- It has an immediate impact. You know exactly how your money is being spent and who it is going to.
- It's a trusted organization set up by people I trusted and admired
- The organization was deep into the all-important feedback loop. I would feel the impact of my donation through their efforts. They keep a great blog.
I got my group at work together and we laid out the goals and ground rules to set up our virtual flash mob:
Our Goal: To raise $10,000 in 10 minutes by recruiting 10,000 people to donate $1 each.
- We could devote no extra resources or money to the project
- We could build nothing. Not even by ourselves. We could only use what was currently available, and available for free
- We were going to launch the project in six weeks.
We spent a long time figuring out how we were going to disseminate the communication through free social-media efforts. It was really hard for us to restrain our thinking and not go off on some brainstorming tangent about building applications, paying for ads, etc.
To arrive at a simple idea often requires quite a lot of complex and disciplined thinking.
STEP ONE:
We decided as a first step to set up a virtual flash mob Facebook group page and recruit ambassadors. The ambassadors would be people who were close to each of us--people in our short-list circle who would participate because they supported us as individuals. In turn, these ambassadors would recruit more ambassadors in the same spirit of support. We knew that the principles to this idea were no different than any other online communication: in order to be effective your message must be targeted, relevant, and come from a trustworthy source.
We chose December 7 as the date for the virtual flash mob. On that date, all the ambassadors would be at their virtual posts using Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter to announce that the virtual flash mob was occurring and for everyone to go donate their dollar at that moment.
STEP TWO:
I wrote an announcement message and sent it through email to five trusted friends who were pretty different from each other for any variety of reasons. I let the email sit for a while and then emailed them again to ask them what their reaction was. Were they inspired by the idea? Did they trust it? Did they think it was a scam? Did it feel spammy? All five of them gave me the exact same response: that they thought the idea was cool and they were excited to participate in it because it came from a trusted friend, it's a great idea, and it only costs $1.
STEP THREE:
For a month, I pretty much spammed my social network on a daily basis promoting the event. I wanted to see if broad distribution of the message would build momentum or dilute the whole idea.
I sent out an invite through a Facebook private message to a large number of close friends and trusted colleagues asking them to be ambassadors. I was surprised by the response, or lack there of. I got quite a lot of enthusiastic response from friends and acquaintances in the UK and the east coast of the U.S. I heard almost nothing from my network on the west coast. This was especially surprising since the majority of my contacts on the west coast are affiliated with Amazon.com in one way or another. The Kindle e-reader is an Amazon.com product.
I asked a few very trusted friends what their response was to the Facebook message. Some of them were confused by it. Others remarked that they hadn't read it yet but intended to, even though the message clearly had a time stamp on it. These responses were totally opposite to the responses from people who received the message through email.
Lesson #1: The email inbox still has tremendous value and perhaps is more valuable than social media outlets when relaying important information with a time stamp. Also, email addresses aren't as accessible as social media inboxes, and therefore messages sent to email inboxes may hold higher value to the recipient.
Lesson #2: It was really hard to write a brief message about an organization few had heard of, explain what the new donation concept was, and how it was to be conducted, while also trying to inspire people to get informed and excited about the cause in general.
SET UP FOR FAILURE
So here's the thing: I knew we weren't going to get anywhere near 10,000 people to donate $1 to Worldreader. Sure, there was a "magical thinking" part of my brain whispering that this could be one of those crazy stories where it just takes off and changes the world over night. The goal was hugely ambitious and the rational and realistic part of my brain (as pea-sized as it is) knew we were going to fail to reach it. But I wanted to see in what ways it would fail. I wanted to learn and I wanted to see if I would be surprised.
On the day of the flash mob, the donations started filing in. It was a steady stream, but hardly a flood. I thought we would get a couple hundred donations. I think we got about a hundred. But the surprising thing was that all those people who remained silent on the west coast were the first to donate, and the majority of the donations came through them. The people in the UK and the east coast who were active in the message dissemination phase were not active at all when it came time for the moment of donation. Even some of those who were heavily involved in the ambassador recruiting didn't donate until 1-2 days after the flash mob was officially over.
Here are more lessons:
Lesson #3: You are not the only one asking people for money. It is extremely difficult to rise above the din of proverbial bells and buckets, especially during December.
Lesson #4. It is really hard to break out of your social circle, no matter how big it is. This I think was the most critical lesson learned from this experiment. I could see the names of most of the people who donated (they were asked to donate directly to the Worldreader.org donation page and could choose whether or not to post their names publicly). Most of the people who donated where in my closest inner circle of friends and colleagues. They were doing this to support me, rather than support the cause just for the sake of the cause.
The biggest eye opener seems ridiculously self-evident now that I have seen it in play. But no matter how many people you have in your circle, we really only meet each other through a pretty fixed set of means: through family, school, work, hobbies/sports, and friends.
Lesson #5: "It's all about 'the me.'" During the time we were promoting and announcing the impending flash mob, there was another campaign going around where people were changing their Facebook pictures to a cartoon in remembrance of child abuse awareness. We were asking people to donate just $1, which would create an immediate impact on kids you could see through Worldreader, but I wasn't able to catch the social media fire the way the child-abuse awareness campaign did.
If you are asking people to buy into something that they otherwise would not contemplate in their every day lives, you must give them a way to express themselves. The child abuse awareness gimmick wasn't really about awareness on an individual level, it was about people getting excited to show off their favorite cartoon. Maybe it is easier to raise awareness than it is to raise money. Gaming, badging, and some sort of personal reward must be included if you want to get people invested in something they otherwise wouldn't-- save for pure altruism.
Lesson #6: Know your technical challenges. We were asking people to donate $1 through the Causes facebook application, but it only accepted a minimum of $10 donations. So we had to send messages urgently rerouting people directly to the Worldreader.org donation page. There was only the option to pay through credit card, so a few people got calls from their credit card companies as a $1 purchase sets off a fraud alert.
Lesson #7: Timing is everything. I received feedback from a number of people that they just wanted to "do it already." Maybe you don't need a month to get the word out. Maybe all you need is a day.
Lesson #8: All other lessons learned apply here. Ease of use. Relevance. Personalization. Trust. Convenience. Fascination. All of this comes into play in an instance like this. It is no different than any other online pursuit.
Lesson #9: Pulling off a campaign like this is a lot of hard work. Even without building anything, setting this up was a full time job for a number of weeks. It wasn't a walk in the park.
And how does this story end? Everyone who participated in the flash mob participated in this:
Next Post: I'll explain the concept in detail of the virtual flash mob and how a dedicated site could revolutionize charitable donations in a way that I hope would have a monumental impact.
(If you would like to join the journey toward democratizing charitable donations, please go to my Facebook page and "like" it. Thanks!)
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