Who benefits most from crowdfunding?

Last year, there was considerable buzz around the idea of crowdfunding; however, it has yet to hit the mainstream in the UK.

A US initiative called Crowdrise has had recent publicity thanks to ‘The Mozilla Firefox Challenge’, which has apparently ‘proved’ that crowdsourcing works. The competition-style idea used 12 celebrities head-to-head and raised over $680m.

While this is great (that $680m would probably still be sitting in pockets and back accounts without this competition), it got me wondering about who really benefits from crowdfunding.

Big name celebrity and brands undoubtedly had a hand in the competition’s success, but would a similar idea created by an individual or smaller charity have worked? Would the level of success be the same or would success be felt in other ways? For example, would smaller projects be better for creating an affinity between the donor and the cause, perhaps leading to longer term support?

The obvious benefit of getting big names involved is that you immediately have improved promotional opportunities (e.g. through marketing materials, celebrity Twitter/Facebook account audiences). But is this enough? Some celebrities were offering benefits for donating such as tickets to one of their shows. With this in mind, were people giving because they liked the celebrity, wanted something in return or wanted to give to a good cause?

This model of crowdfunding is still new and definitely has some room for improvement, and could significantly change the way charities raise money. This has particular significance at the moment considering the changing ways donors are giving to charity.

When hashtags backfire…

We all enjoy an entertaining hashtag. The way they can unite thousands of people who have never met to talk about a single subject is one of the reasons we love social media. But what happens if a hashtag you started as part of a campaign has unexpected responses?

Well, it seems McDonalds have just had experience with that. The hashtag #McDstories, that started out as an interesting way to share what goes in to the making of the food we all hate to love (don’t even try to deny it!), quickly got hijacked by Twitter users for less than *ahem* savoury stories of McDonalds #fails. According to McDonalds, their other hashtag #MeetTheFarmers received mainly positive comments.

To some extent, brands such as this are particularly susceptible to criticism like this, even when trying to do a good thing. Following the general rule that people are more likely to complain about something rather than give praise, McDonalds is probably no stranger to these sorts of messages – it was just unfortunate that the latest round came off the back of one of their own hashtags.

And the worst thing? Even after reading the horror story tweets, I still fancy a Big Mac for dinner.

The good news is that not all hashtags provoke the same response. The #hardandfast campaign from The British Heart Foundation proved a huge hit, fighting it’s way up the trending topics list for all the right reasons. People are still tweeting about it too! Just to note though, not all tweets using the hashtag are related to the campaign and I can’t be responsible for any links you may find intriguingly vague!

YouTube sees upload record

We’ve all done it. A friend recommends a YouTube video, we watch it. Then, something magical happens – we spend a good two hours mindlessly clicking and watching related videos, and end up watching fluff about UFO conspiracies. The good news is that you’re not alone, and there are people who will support you. The bad news is that there will continue to be no shortage of videos we can watch on ‘that you tube’.

Yesterday, YouTube announced that around one hour of video is uploaded every second, amounting to around a decade worth of content uploaded every day.

Crumbs.

Rates of adoption for Tablets and e-readers continue to rise

An interesting statistic from Mashable: apparently almost 30% of US adults own a tablet or e-reader.

This got me thinking about content. There’s no doubt about it, handheld devices are changing the way we consume various types of content from music, videos, and games all the way through to websites, books and magazines.

So, presumably, we should start thinking about the content we produce and the most appropriate way to distribute it, taking into consideration how it will be consumed. For example, if you produce a charity newsletter, would it be worth producing a Kindle version for your readers? Barriers to entry to new technologies like this are incredibly low, so shifting focus of resources to producing such content could be worth while.

Until next week,

Ash

Tags: beautiful bytes, crowdfunding, hashtag, mobile content, tablet devices, YouTube