Humanity Calling: Gaming Online Contests

Another week, another contest. At least, that's what it feels like sometimes in the world of social entrepreneurship. But with an experimental model built around more complex game dynamics, the eBay-sponsored Humanity Calls competition is striving to prove that online giving contests can be more interesting, filling, and fun for nonprofits than skeptics might otherwise believe.

At its core, Humanity Calls is a giving competition, in which supporters of nonprofits can allocate votes to their favorite organizations, with the top voted organizations winning cash prizes. But from that base, HC has done a number of interesting things.

First, the way an organization gets votes is far more game-driven than other voting competitions. Other events mostly follow the one user (i.e. one email address), one vote principle, with some varying it by allowing any registered voter to vote once per day. The upside of this model is its simplicity. The downside is that is tends to inspire fake email registration.

Humanity Calls has a more complicated method through which users can accrue votes. Every participant starts with one vote, but when they donate or share the competition through social media, they get more. A donor who donates $10 to the winner's pool gets ten new votes. A $10 donation to a specific organization results in five new votes. And every time a new voter registers after clicking a link that you shared via Facebook, Twitter or email, you also get an additional vote.

The winner's pool is another interesting addition to the mix. Like a poker tournament, every time a new person puts money in, it increases the total amount in the pool. The full pool will be split between the top 30 vote-getters. eBay put in $50,000 to seed the pool but presumably the organizers are hoping that the pool increases, particularly at the end when the competition gets more fierce.

One of the organizations that opted to participate is San Francisco-based nonprofit design firm Catapult Design, who build technology for the developing world. They decided to join because the contest seemed new and novel, and because it didn't embrace a "winner take all" approach that could be a waste of their time and the time of their supporters.

As a supporter (so far of Catapult and probably of others as I get more votes) in this contest, I have to say that the game dynamics do make me feel like I have more agency to influence the outcome than something like Pepsi Refresh. I like that small donations to organizations I care about serve a double purpose, and I like that I have an explicit and clear way to leverage my networks. Most of all I like the fact that I actually like the experience of the contest -- no small wonder considering my normal position on online giving contests.

In a way, this contest better mirrors the way nonprofit support networks are actually structured, with a tier of close supporters willing to use their networks and influence to help find resources, and a more peripheral network of people who may help once in a while but aren't die hard. Seen through that lens, other contests actually artificially make support networks homogeneous.

Of course there is a risk that the contest can be "bought" (although because the winnings are distributed, there is less incentive for a big swoop in donation), and it doesn't address the general voter fatigue that many feel towards these things.

Still, there is something more interesting about this contest than others to me. I'm glad it's not driven by a corporation's marketing department (instead it's being run as an independent group) and I'm interested to see if they can actually make it work as a regular recurring tournament.

Photo: humanitycalls.org screenshot