Introducing #FamineFriday

The coalition of projects affiliated with the 50/50 campaign has raised nearly £25k (that’s around $39k in USD), which is an amazing achievement.

True, we’re nowhere near the £1m mark at this stage but we still believe there is the potential to raise lots more money, and our plan was to learn and iterate towards this. There is an extraordinary coalition of (almost) 50 little experiments created and run independently by individuals and teams. Fundamentally, we are trying to understand how distributed teams of Internet-empowered people can take the initiative in terms of fundraising instead of relying exclusively on traditional institutions. We’ve all been trying to work out how to leverage networks and new models of digital engagement to raise money for famine relief

So, now is the time to review what we’ve learnt and pivot: to correct our course and to optimise what we’ve got. 

Let’s start by sharing what we think we’ve learnt.

The idea of doing all this in public was to engage you and your brain, and network, in the project - so please chip in. There is currently no deadline or end date, as there is currently no end date to the famine, but clearly we’d all like to accelerate the rate of donations!

The first thing we think we’ve learnt is that 50/50 is currently mostly reaching 50 overlapping networks of people who work in digital and advertising. There are definitely exceptions - for example BBH NY’s Good Shirts project - who have reached beyond this echo chamber. It’s no surprise that they’re doing so brilliantly - the rest of us are mainly (don’t want to upset anyone here!) reaching the same pool of people again and again and again. We’ve probably cleaned out our friends and immediate networks already! We need to push this outside the echo chamber. Good Shirts shows the value of a high-profile collaboration with a powerful online brand like Threadless (and BBH has an enormous network of its own as well). But there are probably other ways to tackle the problem.

Which brings us to the second big lesson we’ve learnt: a platform of 50 projects is too much for ‘real people’ (as opposed to digitalz and ad-folks, who are excited for different reasons). This means we may have the wrong website. It was probably the right one for getting a bunch of people together to collaborate, but it’s not right for real people - and so we’ll be changing that in some new releases. Again, please let us know what you think.

Another way of dealing with this particular problem, we think, is to stop thinking of 50 projects and start to break it down and package it up.

And so we’re going to focus on some of the projects that look - at this stage - like the best bets for making the most money.

• The Good Shirts Project by BBH NY - it’s doing brilliantly and it’s well-supported. We just need more people to buy these really awesome shirts. I hope I don’t ruin the surprise for anyone who might be close to me - but I’ve done a lot of Christmas shopping on this site. These shirts make awesome prezzies!
• The #Phone2Food Project by Moonshot in LA - because of the the extraordinarily value of individual donations. And because we know every business and every home will have at least one phone to recycle. But what we’ve learnt from this one is that you have to make it personal and take it directly into the office, or to the school Parent’s Association or wherever. So, we’re getting a poster made that people can download and stick up at work or in the canteen, and we need people to come forward to become the collectors - that would be an awesome way to ‘give’ and support the famine relief effort. Let us know if you’d like to take this project into the real world - your office, your sports club, your local library...  
• The projects where you can give simply by buying Christmas gifts - like Africashback or The Mill’s Posterity Project (launching soon). We’ve discussed helping Mike Overthrow to optimise Africashback by creating a bookmarklet and designing him a new page. We all have the dull-ness that is known as Christmas shopping coming up, so a Christmas and pay-day focused pushes (end of the month November & December) around all of the shopping/gift apps (‘Buy Tunes, Feed Africa’, ‘Plumpton Mornings’, ‘Good Shirts’) feels like a good place to put some effort.  

This doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be promoting the others, and to do that we want to launch #FamineFridays to run every Friday from now (today) until Christmas. We hope this will create a rhythm and crystallise a moment, and a specific ask or mission - for example:

“Today’s #FamineFriday mission: sign in to http://swearjar.cc/ and send someone you love a sweary message inviting them to join you in raising £££ for #faminerelief” 

We want to take this approach to ask people every Friday to target individuals they know from outside the echo chamber to get involved in something fun, or to mail their wealthiest friends with the Six Minutes Project, or The Pound Store Project etc... Fridays can become a good focus for inviting people individually, and giving them some #FF love in return. So, again, please help with this - and let’s start today. We all have a bit of time to f*** about on a Friday... please consider donating some of that to #FamineFriday between now and Christmas, err, starting now!

Another way we want to package up what we’ve got is to work out a way of promoting the brilliant food-based projects throughout what is traditionally a time of excess.

The hero project here is undoubtedly The Fat Planner, but with each of these awesome projects (The Good Belly Project, Let’s Not Do Lunch, InstaEarth, Tips For Change, Today I Eat For Africa) we are thinking of ways either to make them replicable at a local level or perhaps to see if there is a way to bundle them together and make ‘Food’ a more focused sub-strand of the overall initiative. Your ideas on this will also be most welcome!

The other big thing we’ve learnt is that doing things in this highly-distributed way, in everyone’s spare time, is also very challenging. It’s very different to working 8+ hour days on a client’s business. All of us took on this huge challenge because we thought it was really important, and nothing’s changed there. In general, we’ve learnt that it is more difficult than we thought, and that we can’t always rely on the crowd or get things done quickly in as coordinated way as you would on a piece of client business. And we don’t have budget or lavish paid media supporting the marketing. None of this matters, but it just makes things slower than I think we’d all like. On the other hand, because people have donated their time to get this far it’s been virtually free. 

So there you go. We’re still optimistic and we know it will take a bit of a push and some more time, but that’s fine. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the need to keep going. The famine ain’t getting less catastrophic, and big media are still ignoring it ON THE WHOLE in favour of the Occupy movement, Bunga Bunga parties and collapsonomics. The definition of social justice seems a little ‘domestically oriented’ right now, so it’s right and arguably it’s our duty - all of us, as humans - to keep banging on about it. 

Will you please help us?

Help us spread the word today as we introduce #FamineFriday. And we’re having this discussion about ‘what next’ in public because we want to learn - so dive in with feedback and ideas. I’m sorry if we don’t get to respond to everyone individually.