What Do These People Have in Common?
- Pierre Omidyar – Founder of eBay
- Craig Newmark - He has a list, maybe you’ve heard of it.
- Tim O’Reilly – O’Reilly Media
- Ellen Miller – Sunlight Foundation
- Peter Buffet – American Music Composer
- Jimmy Wales – Founder of Wikipedia
- Alexis Ohanian – Co-founder of Reddit
- Alberto Ibargüen – President of the Knight Foundation
They have all donated to the Spot.Us pitch that hopes to send reporter Lindsey Hoshaw to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Through their help, and 89 other engaged community members we have raised $4,610 or 76 percent of our 6k goal.
We are still taking in lessons from all of this. It is by far the fastest and most money Spot.Us has raised, so we have a lot to ponder. There are a few kernel of ideas/lessons which I’ll share with you here. Update: Bill Mitchell from Poynter called me this morning and I shared much of this with him.
1. The NY Times Lends Credibility.
Chance are, you’ve heard of the New York Times. Most people still haven’t heard of Spot.Us. We are an unknown and I’ve had phone and email conversations with individual donors who are trying to get a sense of whether or not they trust us. That is a fair concern to somebody who is going to donate. That the NY Times is involved in this Spot.Us (who is spot.us?) pitch, validates the seriousness of our efforts.
The NY Times doesn’t lend their name to anyone. Spot.Us was in New York and had a meeting with them to earn that trust. We don’t intend to jeopardize that.
Furthermore: The NY Times helped spread the word. Public Editor Clark Hoyt wrote a great piece about the NY Times looking into foundations and relationships with nonprofits highlighting this current Spot.Us effort. Our normal conversion rate of visitors to donors is around 1%. For every 100 people that visit our site, we might expect 1 to donate (in truth it is under 1%). This weekend, after the NY Times article came out – we experienced a 10% conversation rate.
Why?
I suspect it is because they were coming from the NY Times article and the visitors were NY Times readers looking for a way to support the organization.
2. Influential Thought Leaders
The list above of folks that donated is just a small sample of the amazing people that donated to this Spot.Us pitch. In technology we call them “early adopters,” perhaps in other markets we refer to them as influentials. No matter what you call them: People trust other people. When Tim O’Reilly tweeted his donation it was followed by several other donations. The same with Pierre Omidyar. These are highly respected people who keep their fingers in various pulses. Their public donation signaled something to others – that this pitch was for real and had forward momentum.
3. A National Story.
Spot.Us is still dedicated to local reporting. That is where I believe journalism is going to get hit the most and as long as democracy takes place at a local level we will need local journalism. We fudged it a bit on this story because of the opportunities it presented. I suspect if this were about the Great San Francisco Garbage Patch it might not have attracted as much attention. I still believe somebody could take our code, organize a national or international version of Spot.Us and have lots of success. For now, I want to focus on the local and will expand by region, not by scope.
There is probably a TON more to learn.
For now – we must go onward and upward. There is TONS of important and meaningful journalism to support. We also still need to raise another $1,300 for Lindsey.
More to come.
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