Lean and keen: MxM and Good for Nothing kick off action for famine aid

With a huge amount of brilliant ideas already up on Good by Ideas our first step was to try and sort these into groups: money-raising ideas we could build; story-telling ideas to raise awareness; and a range of 'other' ideas, from personal fund-raising projects to ideas with particular partner requirements.

Sadly, distressing images of malnourished children in parts of Africa have been too common a part of the visual language of aid in recent years and it seems that on their own these are just not enough to fuel donations of a large enough magnitude. Combine this with the dearth of journalists able to report on the ground because it is too dangerous and you have a serious gap in the narrative for driving donations.

 

With this challenge in mind, we dedicated last night to working up a couple of the fund-raising ideas and working on an overall strategy to start telling the story.

 

Here are the results of our work.

 

With so many great ideas on Good by Ideas and some fantastic offers of help from friends, we don't want to limit ourselves to building just one of the ideas suggested. Couldn't we find a way to start lots of these initiatives under one umbrella campaign? 

 

We've come up with the idea of the 50 day countdown: a website that exists for 50 days only and acts as the shop front for a number of different fund-raising projects for East Africa. Every day we'll feature a different one - some of them will be collective challenges like the ideas explored below, others could be personal challenges like the fat planner who is offering to live on aid rations for one year (we love this!). 

 

Through this site, we aim not only to showcase the activities of those raising money to support famine relief efforts, but also to tell the stories of those affected in East Africa. We've got a few ideas of how we could do this, but if you can think of any, let us know.

 

Over the course of this week, MxM are going to build the infrastructure for this shop front. We would also like to build one of  the below the fund-raising projects to kick it off to a flying start. You can help us by building another money-raising idea or by taking on a personal challenge to raise money which we can feature on the site. Get in touch if you'd like to help. 

 

A hack of the Follow Friday habit on Twitter. By #FFing people you are committing yourself, and challenging them, to a day of no eating on the next Friday (or alternatively a specified Friday). Committed people will then go for a day without eating, and by documenting their experiences through tweets, photos, blog posts etc, tell us what is it like to be hungry and not be able to eat. This could be done every Friday while the campaign is live.

 

The strength of the idea lies in the ease with which people can actually do something, while producing a lot of stories off the back of peoples' activity. Paul, Dan and Anjali worked up a flow for a website that hosts stories of people taking part and allows them to challenge their friends to get involved. Messaging friends on Twitter through the service could automatically contain a link to donate money.

 

1. Take a photo of a number in the street (sign, graffiti, house number etc) 

2. hashtag the image #giveagram #10 

3. donate the cash matching the number by Paypal

4. Be a part of lovely pummel-vision type film

 

A relatively easy one for MxM to take on as we could hack our SXSW page to provide a feed of all the Give a Gram photos. Photos could be disseminated from Instagram through Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Posterous etc. Pictures hashtagged with #giveagram on Twitter would trigger an automatic @ tweet from the Give a Gram account with a link to donate. We feel this idea would appeal to the many visual, creative types in our network and also has the potential to create a number of shareable objects to help disseminate the campaign further.

 

 

Appealing to the playful nature of a team-based swear jar, we liked the idea of creating a platform where company teams could compete to raise more money through the medium of swear-laden tweets.  

 

Swear words would carry varying fiscal weight; eg bitch might be a 50p fine, whereas c**t would be a £2 penalty. At the end of your month, the service would automatically invoice you, and your team for your swear-induced charitable donation. 

 

Once signed-up you could return to the swear-jar site to check your personal debt, as well your team's swear-position on the leaderboard. We felt that inverting team competition, slightly, to jovially encourage team members to swear in order to raise more money for #famineaid retained a very playful message which would act as a mechanism for sharing.

 

 

This idea came up in various guises, but essentially it's a Ponzi scheme for good:

 

We build an app that costs the user one pound.

 

The user then has the option to share the app with friends using a unique identifier.

 

Each time a friend buys the app off the back of your share, the app registers that you have helped to raise more money and a counter increases, showing that your donation has raised more money.

 

We really liked this idea but we felt that an app might be too difficult to build in a short space of time. But we could make a web app. We focused on tangible ways to visualise the effect of the donations raised collectively by your network. These would be shareable so that you could show off how much you'd managed to raise and encourage others to up their game to keep up. It also taps into a more positive slant on the crisis by showing the collective impact that even a group of small donations can have.

 

From here we moved on to thinking about other reasons people might want to take part - could we make it more fun? Inspired by the Loveland project in Detroit where people can 'inchvest' in virtual land, we wondered if we could encourage people to buy virtual lunches, the larger the donation the bigger your lunch, from ham sandwich to a full on banquet. Lunches could be cumulatively mapped onto the map of the drought zone to show a visual representation of collective donating power.

Are there other collective projects that people could donate to take part in? A virtual Chinese whispers? A digital version of the game exquisite corpse? Answers on a postcard to Good by Ideas, a team of makers might just get them built.