It’s hard to dispute that voting platforms have quickly become one of the most popular tools in the cause marketing playbook. As with any new marketing method, these platforms have been a lightning rod for criticism. This week alone, I’ve had several healthy debates with thought leaders in the CSR and Social Innovation space about their value for communities:

“They waste precious, limited charity resources”,

“They tick off the donor list”,

“They celebrate popularity, not good ideas”,

“etc…”

Yesterday morning, I was up at 5AM to attend the Year 2 Aviva Community Fund winner’s event. After another year overseeing Canada’s most successful social media and cause marketing platform, I felt inspired to share a bit more of an insiders view of how these competitions work, and why they are an extremely good thing for causes when used strategically. I have no doubt, there’ll be plenty of disagreement regarding my point of view, as I already hear it on a daily basis. I look forward to some healthy discussion.

“only a few ideas win, everyone else loses”

As someone who curates competitions and sits on the board of a charity, I’ll be the first to say that the allure of a big pot of money is seductive. You’ll be hard pressed to find an organization or school that’s overfunded, so inevitably some organizations are disappointed or angry  when they don’t win.

But to look at these competitions with the singular view that the prize is the only outcome is extremely short sighted. Well designed cause marketing platforms are marketing assets that can leveraged by both sides of the equation. Some organizations are disappointed by the outcome, while others recognize the opportunity that is presented to them the whole way through.

These programs are about marketing, and that marketing is symbiotic. Yes, brands like Aviva and Pepsi win by associating themselves with causes. But charities also win trough promoting their needs through national platforms. Having spoken to many, many, many organizations who have participated in these types of programs, far more ideas get funded than the ones announced. Smart causes use these marketing platforms as a way to bring their needs to national attention. They organize themselves to “win”, whether they get funding through the program or not, by using these programs to educate interested individuals about their needs.

Most importantly, they build a new and expanded audience, which in and of itself is an asset asset.

“they’re just a popularity contest”

Voting, and especially social media voting in a cause marketing platform, is a popularity contest. That popularity brings people to a branded site which creates exposure to the contest organizer. The formula is pretty standard there. Ultimately, a degree of any competition has to do with the ability to rally support – be it a student council vote, or voting in the AMEX Member’s Project. Inherently there’s a hope that a democratic process like voting yields a valid outcome.

The way that I view the Aviva Community Fund is in two phases – the marketing phase, and the cause phase. The marketing phase (up to selecting the finalists) is 100% participant chosen, and 100% the result of an idea’s ability to rally voters. The cause side (judging) narrows the finalist ideas to the winners using detailed criteria designed to identify the most deserving projects with the biggest impact. I reiterate, we find the best idea from a sub-set selected based on popularity. The most deserving ideas get funding.

One final thing to remember. If there’s issue with the popularity contest, we can’t forget that the dollars for programs like this come directly from the marketing budget and not a CSR budget. The result is money (which would normally go to advertising) being directed to causes.

I sure can tolerate a popularity contest if it means $1,000,000 goes to deserving ideas.

“they take a lot of work to enter”

The rationale that these competitions are a distraction is an uninformed rationale for why these platforms are bad.

First, from a pure mechanics perspective, user experience practitioners design these competitions to be as easy to use as possible. For example, in designing our idea submission forms, we deliberately made our forms as simple as possible with the recognition that good ideas come from anywhere. That means our submission process needs to be as easy for a major not for profit to complete as it is for a grade 2 student. To enter the first round of our competition, we’re talking maybe 15 minutes. Add in voting, creating a few images, and shooting a video, maybe 2 hours? The mechanics alone are a negligible distraction.

In the case of the community fund, we also built in a philosophy of progressive disclosure into our submission process, which basically means that the further you progress into the competition, the more we ask you. We needed to balance the needed for judges to evaluate an idea with the amount of effort required to enter the competition, and we didn’t want people to go through the effort of developing complex budgets until they saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

“they’re a distraction to the focus”

Aside from the mechanics, what people are probably really upset about is the effort it takeout to collect come up with ideas, market the idea, and collect votes.

On the ideas creation, I would say it’s the role of charities and community leaders to come up with new and innovative projects to help people. If anything (and I’ve been told this), we’re giving organizations a reason to think about how they can help serve their communities better. I think that’s a pretty positive outcome.

On the marketing side, perhaps one of the best outcomes of these programs is their ability to act as an educational tool. On one hand, we embed marketing education in all of our program design to help causes capture as large an audience as possible. On the other hand, idea creators and supporters are learning about how to market their charities in the age of digital media. I know from first hand conversations that participation in the Aviva Community Fund, for example, has taught a number of organizations about how to use social media.

On the votes point, see my next section.

“we’re draining our database”

If you have issues with these programs creating a distraction, perhaps you should reframe your thinking a little. Maybe a distraction is exactly what these organizations need in order to realize the level of commitment, passion, and interest out there by people who don’t have the means or desire to respond to the one tired message in the marketplace, “Donate now”.

While some people struggle with the burden of the vote, I actually think it’s refreshing to hear charities ask for help in a way other than from my pocket. Voting competitions allow charities to tell a different story, and to get people to act in a different way. Since there is less commitment in giving a vote than a dollar, I think (and have heard) that these voting platforms allow smart organizations to collect new donors as opposed to disenfranchise them. And meanwhile, any smart marketer knows to segment their database.

Voting platforms are an opportunity, and an option

Maximizing the potential of voting-based cause marketing platforms is hard work. I doubt anyone, including this year’s amazing Aviva Community Fund winners, would disagree. But to criticize them without assessing why they exist or what their potential is can be a really short sighted perspective. While it’s easy to make sweeping generalizations, if you actually take the time to analyze how some communities take advantage of these opportunities, you’ll see that they benefit as much as the brand putting on the competition.

And of course, if I still haven’t convinced you, just don’t enter. But I promise you, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Organizations are increasingly turning to open innovation platforms as their source of innovation.

Open innovation platforms (or crowdsourcing platforms) are a way to involve consumers in the process of innovation. Here at IC, we have built examples pretty amazing open innovation platforms – the Aviva Community fund and the MIT Ideas Challenge that are helping prove the case. You can also check out Open Innovators for dozens of other examples of programs that work. As our fearless leader Idris Mootee recently wrote in his article What you don’t know about Crowdsourcing and why they often fail, it’s not a silver bullet for innovation. But when used in a defined way as part of the research and development process, they can be quite successful.

Solving the worlds problems one 2×2 at a time

A lot of organizations struggle to wrap their heads around open innovation platforms because they toil with their purpose in the innovation cycle – what is the role of the platform within the innovation pipeline. With that in mind, I’ve spent a bit of time sketching an organizational principal for open innovation platforms. Obviously an organization can choose to involve external parties at any point in the innovation process – but the emphasis of this thinking is focused on what would be classically viewed as research through development (as opposed to the commercialization).

Do you have a problem? X AXIS
The first decision criteria is “Is there a defined problem”.

On one side of the equation, many organizations are submitting or asking explicit questions to the audience for solving – they have a defined problem to be solved. For example, Innovation Exchange solicits “Challenges” (specific problems to solve) from major corporations. I call this “innovation inspired by the business” – the key driver of creativity is based off of a fundamental business-side need or problem.

On the other side, some organizations just want good ideas that align with their brands – they have undefined problems and look to the crowd to both explicitly state challenges and opportunities. In short, they hope the crowd both provides both self identifies the problem and articulates a solution to the problem. An example of this would be the over-mentioned “my Starbucks ideas”. I call this “inspired by invention”, as it often manifests itself through the creative ingenuity of the crowd. It could just as easily be called “Innovation inspired by needs”.

When can the crowd play? Y AXIS
The second decision criteria is “When do you involve the crowd”?

On one side of the equation, organizations involve external participants early in the innovation process. Involving customers early results in raw, often messy ideas that may or not reflect any possible reality. I think of this as a platform for actively soliciting feedback for “opportunity collection” because there tend to be a lot of undefined directions that can be pursued or that can inspire lateral thinking.

On the other side, organizations can involve participants late in the innovation process. At this point, organizations are often looking for full concepts, designs, or solutions that represent a full solution to a problem. Examples of this would be Google’s Lunar Prize, where the criteria for winning is to “successfully land a privately funded craft on the lunar surface and survive long enough to complete the mission goals of roaming about the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending a defined data package, called a “Mooncast”, back to Earth.”. This is an example of “solution collection” – getting many external participants to come up with multiple, well articulated solutions.

The quadrants of organization-led open innovation platforms

Based on this model for understanding open innovation platforms, there are four primary opportunities for organizations to use open innovation platforms to drive the innovation process internally.

Defined Problem + Early Involvement = Crowdstorming. Articulating a specific problem to consumers and asking for many raw responses. This is pretty much like a massive brainstorm, and works as a way to stock the innovation pipeline early. Output: Lots of raw solutions to a specific problem with varying quality. Example: Fiat Mio

Undefined Problem + Early Involvement = Researching. Ask consumers to come up with solutions to undefined problems. The real value here is the articulation of previously unknown or unmet needs, collected through the initial articulation of customer problems used as a rationale for the solution. Output: Explanation or justification of previously unarticulated consumer challenges or needs with a small number of solutions of varying quality. Example: Dell Idea Storm

Defined Problem + Late Involvement = Prototyping. When you involve the consumer at this point, you’re really asking for a specific designed solution to a problem. Depending on how late in the innovation process they are involved, the output can be anything from concept sketches to fully-functioning prototypes. Output: Depending on how late the challenge is put to the crowd, and how defined the solution must be, expect a small number of solutions. Example: Supdaroo or one of my favorite sites, threadless.

Undefined Problem + Late Involvement = Adopting. Some organizations choose to build idea orphanages, allowing external participants to submit fully thought-out and conceptualized product concepts that may or may not align with their interests. Would-be inventors can submit their concepts with the hope of the organization moving on their idea. Output: Well thought out ideas that may or may not be relevant to the organization. Example: Lego Design By Me

Yes, no maybe so?

Obviously open innovation platforms differ in terms of where they play in an organization’s innovation cycle. In practice, each of the quadrants of the open innovation platform classification isn’t mutually exclusive. But in terms of understanding where their value lies, I think it’s a good starting point.

So what do you think? Agree with the classification? Have any recommendations on how to make it better? Have any great examples of crowdsourcing applications that I’ve missed? Join the comment thread and let me know. Also, if you’re interested in Open Innovation and the Virtuous Cycle, be sure to read Henry Chesbrough’s epic book Open Innovation.

Last year however, American Apparel teamed up with Lookbook.nu, an online site where everyday people can upload their “look”- people vote, you gain style credit, and your photo can end up on Lookbook’s homepage. In a sort of online contest, American Apparel and Lookbook asked the site’s members to submit styles featuring American Apparel clothing and the winning “looks” would be featured in a book available free in stores an online to customers.

After sifting through entries, the company chose 132 looks from 77 Lookbook members. The irony? All the winning looks are more tasteful, subdued, and less sexy than their usual adds. When asked why the change in direction, The American Apparel Press Team responded, “Maybe this is better categorized as a resource than as an ad. What we liked about it is that it’s 77 people who each have their own sense of style showing how they like to wear American Apparel. Our photographers and designers see the garments in one way and sometimes the customers and fans see it a totally different way. The book has both. That’s a big reason why we’re giving it away at the stores and we hope people take it and get inspired or interested in pieces they wouldn’t have considered before.”

Interestingly enough, the brand has also started to use the looks in their adds and they say that they will continue to use crowdsourcing as a means to engage customers. So for now American Apparel has a new look and I guess its true what they say- the people have spoken.

To see the Lookbook in its entirety visit the American Apparel site.