Crowdfunded Marketing for Social Enterprises

Have you ever wondered why the most inspiring projects & organizations never seem to have very good advertising? Non profits, social enterprises, even emerging artists & musicians never get the level of promotion that big corporate brands are able to secure, whether on television screens, on city & highway billboards, or even with word of mouth online.

However, these same social enterprises are uniquely positioned to leverage evangelists who would like to help support their cause. Therefore, what if we could create an online crowdfunded marketing service to promote their innovative products and services to a much broader audience?

Using their own money or credits through viewing partner ads, crowds vote with their dollars to fund strategic ads that promote products, companies, and causes that they believe in. Users collaborate to push video and banner campaigns through dynamic Ad serving networks to the front pages of major media outlets online (and eventually offline). Media is only bought if the money is raised, and users see the difference they’ve made through analytics, with an incentive to invest in more campaigns to help build a sustainable culture and economy.

See the attachment for a Value Proposition for a crowdfunded marketing service that aims to solve this problem. The name, LoudSauce, was chosen by a crowd of participants through <a href="http://namethis.com/name_this/projects/1452-crowdfunding-marketing-service-for-social-eco-innovation">namethis.com</a>.

OK, this is a bit harsh, but what do you do and what is your value proposition? Specifically, I think you need to provide a far more precise example.... a social enterprise creates an ad on google adwords. That ad links to an interactive widget (a la chipin) that can be places virally throughout the web... facebook, blogs, etc. Any viewer of the google ad or interactive widget can take an action (i.e. buy a product). So you first lay out the problem... which I think is pretty well done, but needs to be crisper. Then you go into the example which grounds the problem and solution. They you explain the value of the solution. Then you need to tackle two value propositions: (1) To the advertiser (i.e. social enterprise) (2) To the consumer. This is hard since the main value proposition derives from the match between product and consumer... that is up to the social entrepreneur. Finally, there is a critical missing piece. One reason major brands have better advertising is that they have ad agencies that create messages and content (i.e. the interactive widget above). Ideally, you'd want to provide the advertiser with some type of creative... they create their text ad and then some creative resource creates their widget. One other thing I'd like to see is a clear statement of audience... not sure the audience for web 2.0 advertising is really as broad as would be required to place social enterprise advertising on the same footing as corporate product advertising. Also not clear where the revenue for the ad provider comes from. Fees from social enterprises?

Hi David,

Thank you for your feedback, which I will incorporate into the updated submission I will make later this week.  Below are a few brief responses, of which I would be interested to hear what you think.

I completely agree that a clear example will make a huge difference.  I plan to use a Green for All campaign as an example.

Regarding the two different value propositions, which I will flesh our more completely:

1. For Visionary Brands (i.e. social enterprises): Submit your most inspiring Ads and Campaigns, and compete for influential crowd purchased media placement.  Receive reports on awareness & impact. 
   
2. For You (ie. consumer): Put visionary brands and inspiring messages into the homes and boards rooms of America (or X country).  See the difference you make.
   

I agree that the missing piece of leading creatives to create great marketing for social enterprises is critical. However, I believe that we need to focus on getting the user experience right for focusing collective media buying energy, and we will collaborate with other crowdsource content sites (such as http://zooppa.com ) to source the content.  If we are successful in demonstrating the effectiveness of the model with a few buzz worthy campaigns, I am confident that creative talent (and perhaps some agencies) will be interested in designing for future campaigns.  To facilitate, I have built into the process an audit of marketing collatoral, to evaluate the level of need and create a brief that the social enterprise can use to inspire creatives.

Regarding audience: Ok, I will do more research and provide a description of the audiences that I believe there is for this.  One will be national/global and another will be local. 

Regarding revenue: We will be essentially injecting a sizable amount of new citizen investment into the market for online Ad platforms like Google Ad Words (I'll need to provide confidence of a certain quantity). Therefore the Ad networks should essentially be paying us for all the new business we are bringing to them.  Therefore, we plan to approach Google ( & Yahoo, OpenX, etc.) to request a discounted charity rate for media bought through the service (say 20%).  Then that gift back from Google Adwords would be split 50/50 between the company and the user, who gets a free 0.10 on every dollar back in her account to invest in another campaign.

I hope that's helpful and I'll continue working on a updated submission.

Colin

In case anyone missed the original posted attachment, below was the first draft of the value proposition statement (I am working on a second draft):

The LoudSauce Value Proposition:

LoudSauce provides a crowdfunded marketing service for social enterprises to plan targeted campaigns that engage supporters and the larger crowd to amplify the awareness and impact of their products and services.  Individuals wary of general donations also benefit as they are able to choose to fund specific Ads on leading websites, seeing the exact impact they have made, using detailed and dynamic analytics.  LoudSauce mashes up the best practices of MoveOn.org with the leading Google Ad platform to offer a breakthrough marketing tool to social enterprises unlike any before that allows individual supporters to participate directly in effectively promoting a just and sustainable world.

Dear Colin,

Thank you for starting the GSBI application with the value proposition exercise. My name is Sriram, a mentor with the GSBI application mentoring team. My aim is to provide you with feedback and help you as you move along the application process.

While your value proposition is very succinct in presenting what Loudsauce aims to do a little redrafting of your value proposition might be required to exactly state how you differentiate from competing services. May I suggest that you reword the last line mentioning the differentiation to be similar as below:

"Unlike existing services that lack direct participation from contributors, LoudSauce mashes up the best practices of MoveOn.org with the leading Google Ad platform to offer a breakthrough marketing tool to social enterprises that allows individual supporters to participate directly in effectively promoting a just and sustainable world."

This would help highlight what your service or product offering is and why your service is different and preferable to any competing services. Please do think on the above lines and feel free to resubmit the value proposition. When done please proceed to work and submit your target market statement. Other than the above I do not have any further comments. Please feel free to ask any questions.

Best Regards,

Sriram

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