Spot Us Reporting: Crowdfunding in Journalism

*disclaimer at the bottom.

So what is Spot Us?: Spot Us is a nonprofit that allows an individual or group to take control of news in their community by sharing the cost (crowdfunding) to commission freelance journalists. The short answer - Spot Us will pioneer "community funded reporting" and will start in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It is very much inspired by Kiva.org and DonorsChoose. In fact, Spot Us developed as an idea while I was helping Jeff Howe work on the crowdfunding chapter of his upcoming book.

Essentially I'm trying to figure out if collective action (ala Clay Shirky), in the form of donations, can be used to create a new business model for journalism, an industry that is in dire need of an adrenaline boost. It is very much an outgrowth of citizen journalism, but postulates that people value their time more than money. In other words: It is far easier for people to participate in investigative journalism by donating money than it is for them to donate their valuable time.

The challenge: We are just starting out but I can already identify one of our biggest challenges. Finding people who value good journalism. Let's take a concrete example.

We have our first pitch: Right now Spot Us is using a wiki to accept pitches and is fundraising with ThePoint as a third party e-commerce solution (this is pre-prototype experimentation to get a proof of concept).

And the very first pitch we received is fantastic. It comes from an experienced journalist (from Wired.com) and would tackle an important topic: that ethanol might be the weak link in California's energy network. You can find details of the pitch here and can even donate to the pitch by clicking the image below.

The writer is asking for well below market value because he "has been wanting to do this story for a long time." In fact, all this story needs is 20 people to donate $10 each or 8 people to donate $25. As I see it: We have an important story, from a qualified writer, willing to do it at a price that could only be described as "a steal." I have no doubt in my mind that there are 20 people out there who would be willing to donate $10 to ensure that this story is reported and told. But how do I find them?

This is the difficulty that any crowdfunding project must face. How do you find and target potential donors?

One site that has come to my attention recently is SocialActions which hopes to produce an API to search across 19 different micro-lending sites (see interview with SocialActions). At a higher level, SocialActions is trying to tackle an incredibly important hurdle: How do volunteers and projects that need volunteers find each other?

Right now each crowdfunding project does its own outreach. Efforts are duplicated and probably done with little or no effect for some. This is where SocialActions can come into play. Helping volunteers find nonprofit organizations that need to crowdsource some of their labor, with the full support of each crowdfunding project - by pooling their collective outreach efforts.

One question I have: How will SocialActions decide who gets to be included in the search? Take StrayForm, a crowdfunding project for the arts. One might not consider them a "social good" - but they certainly need to find people who will volunteer their time.

That question aside: All crowdfunded projects face this delima. They are all built on the assumption that what they hope to produce is worth small donations from interested parties - but they need to find those interested parties.  The second the ethanol pitch was created - I looked it over and realized that it would be of interest to people concerned about the environment, California, ethanol or clean energy. The question is how to get those people to act.

Even Kiva.org faces this problem, although one could argue they've reached critical mass. Kiva relies entirely on organic growth but they are constantly looking for ways to tap into new audiences. Just this morning Kiva announced a new video campaign using Involver's Facebook application and I'm told has already generated over 1000 hits (UPDATE: See comment below on some incredible stats). That's the beginning of organic (ideal) growth. 

The cool long term affect of the Facebook app is the ability to track the power users, and find out who is participating by age, sex and geography. I suspect that the Facebook application will give them new demographics (younger) from what they are traditionally used to seeing via their website. But I guess that's the ticket - finding ways to tap into a wider audience which means there are more people likely to act.

You can find the Kiva.org campaign page on Facebook here:

disclaimer: As promised in the intro post - I will keep discussion about my crowdfunding startup Spot Us to a minimum while guest blogging here at Crowdsourcing. And to ensure that, I have written this blog post first so I can now leave it alone unless it seems absolutely relevant.

Comments

[Tyler Willis]

David,

Thanks for the mention of our campaign for Kiva, I thought you'd like to hear that the campaign has been growing steadily since that first 1000 hits. It's now had almost 40,000 video views and has more than doubled in membership over the last two days.

Thanks again for including Involver -- I hope we can continue to be part of the conversation as people look to tackle the problem of creating engaging, successful marketing campaigns.

Best,
Tyler Willis
Director of Marketing, Involver
tyler@involver.com

[Chirag]

We at Kiva are pleased with how effective the video campaign has been in spreading the word to a socially minded community -- so far it has had over 100,000 video views in less than a week!

This video campaign is a great way for us to continue our mission of alleviating poverty through a grassroots movement.

Regards,
Chirag Shah
chirag@kiva.org

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[Clifton]

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