We just had a great question come through on our user forum. Here it is:
Credibility?
I begin to wonder about the credibility of this site when I see the exact same question being asked by different organizations? "A witty thank you letter…", "My staff only has 30 minutes…" what is going on here?
What's going on is that for nonprofits, we've created a "Challenge Template Library" to get them started using Sparked. This library features about 50 different templates across categories like social media, web development, fundraising, and translation.
Here's a screenshot of the landing page:
And here's a screenshot of an open template in the Marketing & Promotion category:
So, you see why many of the nonprofits post the same challenge. We encourage the nonprofits to customize these templates as much as possible – not only because it's more interesting for microvolutneers, but because they'll get more answers, higher quality, and more customized results. You'll see the "Create Your Own" option at the top, where the nonprofit writes a totally custom challenge.
We launched the Template Library about a month after our beta rollout after receiving a bunch of feedback from nonprofits that went something like this:
"We love that we can ask microvolunteers for help. It's a tremendous resource. But we're having trouble figuring out how to ask for help."
We realized that Sparked is a fundamentally new way to ask for and receive help. Nonprofits (and the rest of us) are not used to chunking up work in ways that can be usefully presented to a group of people for action. So, we wrote these challenge templates to give nonprofits a jump start.
The results have been interesting:
- Most nonprofits use at least one challenge template when they first login. It's their introduction to microvolunteering.
- We've been able to wrap a whole lot of best practices into these templates. This gives nonprofits an extra boost. Not only are they getting work done by microvolunteers, they're learning about what they should be doing in areas like social media and mobile phones.
For example, a nonprofit may not have known that it's a best social media practice to research and develop a list of bloggers in their field. Through the challenge template, they both learn about the best practice and then get microvolunteers to jumpstart the list. It's a great combo.
- On the downside, there are a fair number of similar challenges in the system. As the comment above implies – it doesn't feel right, from the microvolunteer perspective, to see the same challenge more than once.
I've got a couple of thoughts about this problem.
a) Sometimes, there is a real value in the same challenge being done multiple times for different nonprofits. A logo design, for example, can be repeated ad-infinitum and will always deliver value.
b) But, there is also value being lost by repeating challenges. In the blogger list challenge, for example, it'd be great if we could combine all of data into a centralized place, so that this kind of challenge would be an exercise in building on top of previous work, rather than starting from scratch. I'm highly interested in figuring out a solution here – but the technical and user experience challenges here are complex. If you have any, I'd love to hear your ideas about how to do this simply – and in such a way that doesn't confuse first time nonprofits and users.
So, there you have it. That's a long winded answer to the question about repeating challenges. Hope that helps to clarify – and open to any thoughts/feedback/critique that you've got.
Thanks,
Ben
) but rather they designed a web page specifically for use off the iPhone or iPod Touch Safari browser. They also provide a podcast series available at the iTunes store. Click the "Nonprofits & iPhone" category to see all
