Crowded Games: Giving Competitions and On-Line Fundraising

With the Crowd @ the Core Gamified giving and funding

by Anna B. Scott, PhD

Bursting at the seams

• Crowdfunding is nothing new • In traditional cultures around the world,

“mutual aid” associations can be found that date back millennia

• However, the crowd need no longer be

affiliated through language, religion, gender, caste, or age grade

• The 21st century mutual aid society is a group of believing strangers

and they are playing to win.

leveraging followers who follow

or, harnessing the distracted mind to better humankind

Crowdfunding 101 • Money aggregation system • Specific subject matter focus • Specific outcome focus • Awards given to donors/funders • Competition to outbid on user side/out score on petitioner’s side

• All or nothing model giving way to minimum amount funded

In all models, peer pressure rules.

A few crowdfunding sites.

Can crowdfunding shift from competition to collaboration and remain a fun game?

What impact will equity shares have on the crowdfunding ecosystem?

Structuring Give-Get

Terms Member/Voter/User Crowd/Community Win/Earn/Gift Funder/Investor Raffle/Vote/Donation Charity/Project Campaign

Confronting the game with the tax code can fix roles

• if the intention is to allow any given

individual an opportunity to “play on all sides,” selecting a tax structure drives the architecture of the platform

• if the goal is to replicate a standard

foundation, online giving eradicates equity for platform founders

• operating through percentages of total won requires that either the projects are so incredible that no one notices the size of the cut

• or total transparency to all “stakeholders” if organized as a not-for-profit

• privately held organizations run the risk of appearing to skim from the social good

• compliance models and organizations are in flux

Schemes • • • • • • • • •

Privately held LLC or S-Corporation Worker held collective Member held collective Not-for-Profit B-Corporation Public Giving Table/Soup Kitchen Sweepstake Raffle Ponzi

Accelerating the money • Careful attention must be paid to collecting money at a rate impossible to pay out without “shuffling” money between accounts/competitions

• Backend architecture more akin to a banking system

• or perhaps an alternative currency

Beware recursive payouts

While recursive scaling is desirable, paying out in a similar fashion will get you hacked by the Feds.

A Mission makes the crowd a community.

______ is a not-for-profit funding mechanism in the service of the greater good.

____ is a social way of collecting money for your project.

____ is a communally held foundation in the service of socially relevant and incredibly inspiring ideas and game-changing projects.

A few examples of giving competitions Shorty Awards (often leveraged by nominees to get donations for a favorite charity)http:// shortyawards.com/about Chase Community Giving https:// www.chase.com/online/Special-Offers/ chasegiving_none.htm Pepsi Refresh (defunct) http://www.ted.com/ initiatives/aws/the_pepsi_refresh_project.html

Has the time arrived to disrupt the crowdfunding economy?

I see you nodding your head.

How will you do it?

How much to get in on it ;->

(c) Anna B. Scott 2012 Vita Vibrare: thinking at a higher frequency www.vitavibrare.com