Stuff to Make Your Life Easier (SMYLE): GeniusRocket for design

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2008-11-10 12:42:00 UTC
Topics:

When it comes to small nonprofts, great design is hard to come by. Most nonprofit marketing materials look, well, somewhere between amateur and downright ugly. And while its important not to always judge a book by its cover, the fact of the matter is that its not always easy to inspire confidence in your ability to create change if you're main face to the world is unprofessional.

GeniusRocket is a tool that allows you to attract creative talent to your project by creating an "assignment," giving it a dollar value, and letting designers come to you. I've watched for the last few weeks as Social Actions has been in the hunt for a new logo. They created a GeniusRocket project, offered up $500 to the winning design, and sat back as almost 300 designers entered just under 500 submissions. After that, they invited their community to vote.

With just $500 and a couple weeks, they've gone from:

to:

That's a huge, huge improvement in my book and demonstrates one more creative way that social entrepreneurs are tapping into the power of the internet to harness diverse and distributed talent.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Obama: Good for green investors?
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (1)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.