Abstract
Social media have swiftly become an invaluable tool for small-scale nonprofits in Nepal to obtain publicity and funding, frequently via crowd voting contests and crowdfunding drives. Social media have also enabled ideas and methods overlooked by traditional development grantors and institutions to be directly promoted to individual and institutional donors previously out of reach. Crowd voting and crowdfunding have made it possible for people to have a greater share and say in development projects they heretofore were rarely consulted on. Social media driven crowdsourcing campaigns for initiatives such as urban vegetable parks, rural hospitals, cooperative schools and children’s art museums allow a broader swathe of the public to participate in development and its communication. In addition, on the ground efforts are revealed to be extremely important in obtaining votes and when carried out alongside online social media based campaigning activities have netted nonprofits grant awards ranging from $ 2,500 to 300,000. Despite geographic, economic, technical and linguistic barriers faced by residents of Nepal to widespread participation in crowd voting and crowdfunding, a significant number of recently established small-scale nonprofits have altered the way development projects in the country are promoted, funded and participated in.
Crowdsourcing and the Ground-up, Participatory Approach
Howe coined the term ‘crowdsourcing’ in Wired in 2006. According to Brabham (2013), crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model which leverages cyber-communities’ collective intelligence for goals publicized by an industry, government or nonprofit/volunteer crowdsourcing organization. It is unique in blending top-down organizational objectives with a bottom-up, open, creative process.
Crowdsourcing has been studied as it relates to disaster management (Heinzelman, Waters & United States Institute of Peace 2010), geographic research (Sui, Elwood & Goodchild 2013), speech processing (Levow, Meng, Parent & Suendermann 2013) and many other fields. Crowdfunding’s influence on journalism has been investigated (Aitamurto 2011), as has its impact on start-ups (Cain 2011), nonprofits (Thorpe 2014) and scientific research (Wheat, Wang, Byrnes & Ranganathan 2012). There is a lack of scholarship, especially with regard to development work, on crowd voting; Kirkels and Post (2013) have studied it as a method of identifying top entrepreneurs, but there is no literature on crowd voting campaigns for nonprofit initiatives.
Crowdsourcing is premised on the idea that a vast, volunteer team is more effective at mobilizing and problem-solving than a sole, hired expert or small group. Crowdsourcing thrives in the Web 2.0 1 environment, where the internet’s information searching and sharing features are paired with people who are personally involved in, and interact and collaborate with each other in ‘complex, far-flung social and technological networks’ (Lievrouw 2011, p. 178). It employs a bottom-up, participatory approach in that projects, at every stage, utilize the resources, ideas, skills, and manpower of a community that has a personal stake in the outcome. Crowdsourcing and the participatory approach promote what Surowiecki terms ‘the wisdom of crowds’ (2004) and what Shirky (2008) describes as ‘mass amateurization’, both of which have risen in prominence in contemporary life.
The participatory approach when applied to development challenges the top-down, dominant paradigm of modernization-as-development, aiming to reverse its ‘trickle down’ approach and build a more home-grown, grassroots-based, less economically determinist mode of development. Internet technology has helped popularize the participatory approach to communication, as it facilitates a conversational, horizontal communication mode, in contrast to the one-sided, top-lectures-bottom method inherent in modernization theory. This mode of communication stresses ‘the basic right of all people to be heard, to speak for themselves and not be represented or reworded by another party’ (McPhail 2009, p. 27). Bottom-up, participatory communication in the context of social change initiatives denotes the ‘sharing of knowledge aimed at reaching a consensus for action that takes into account the interests, needs and capacities of all concerned’ (Servaes 2008, p. 15). It allows those most directly affected by social change initiatives the right and ability to engage in a conversation where they have a voice in shaping them. Crowdsourcing and the ground-up, participatory approach make up the theoretical basis of this research.
Research Method and Question
From November 2010 to January 2011, as part of my research project on the internet use of small-scale Nepal-based Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) I conducted qualitative, semi-structured interviews with 70 respondents from 45 small NGOs in the Kathmandu Valley. During April and November 2013, for related research on street art and grassroots environmental movements in Kathmandu, I conducted qualitative, unstructured interviews with 19 respondents representing 13 additional grassroots organizations. Organizations were identified through searches on Google and Facebook; respondents were contacted via email and Facebook message. This article on crowdsourcing uses and updates some of the findings. It asks: How are small-scale nonprofits in Nepal using social media to run crowd voting and funding campaigns, how effective are these campaigns and what makes them effective?
‘Donate Your 2 Min Each Day’
[Online voting for social change initiatives] is the real people’s movement. It is a movement that will take democracy into government offices, private businesses and NGOs. The revolution, however, will not be achieved through the use of violence or bandhs [wide-scale shutdowns of transporation, industry and educational institutions], but through pragmatic action where citizens hold organisations accountable and compel them to stay true to their mandates and deliver on their promises.—Duncan Maru and Bibhav Acharya, The Nepali Times, 19 October 2012.
Pushpa Basnet, a 29 year old Nepali social worker, won CNN’s Hero of the Year award in December 2012 by amassing the most e-votes on CNN’s website. I interviewed Basnet on 29 November 2010 and learned how crucial social media were for building her publicity and support base. Her organization, Early Childhood Development Centre (ECDC), was founded in 2005 with Basnet’s own savings and personal contributions from friends. ECDC houses and educates children of prison inmates. With an office in a medium-size building that also houses many of the children and a miniscule amount of staff, ECDC exhibits little resemblance to large international organizations like The Asia Foundation or comparatively sizeable national nonprofits such as National Trust for Nature Conservation (NTNC).
In contrast to the traditional format of awards programmes, the CNN Hero of the Year title is determined by crowd voting via Facebook or email accounts, and promoted on CNN’s television channel and website, as well as on social media platforms. Crowd voting requires only a small time commitment. As Basnet repeatedly describes it on her Facebook page, the process of voting online for these crowd sourced campaigns is much less bureaucratic and restrictive than offline voting (as well as a way to support your country): ‘To vote we don’t need citizenship, passport, identity cards but your time so please do vote for Nepal’ (2 November 2012).
Basnet was elected on September 20th as one the Top 10 CNN Heroes 2012, from a pool of 24 first round nominees. She and a group of enthusiastic supporters had been harnessing her already very active Facebook and Twitter accounts to achieve the nomination, which came with a $ 50,000 grant. Now, fresh from that victory, they urged supporters to keep voting for Basnet to become CNN Hero of the Year, starting with a much shared announcement on Basnet’s Facebook page, excerpted here: Please vote daily to help us continue our work towards ensuring that ‘No child grows up behind prison walls’. Social media have done wonders globally. We will try our best to ensure that the platform we have received is used responsibly and respectfully. We hope to get people talking about the issue globally and raise awareness, as we recognize that this not Nepal’s problem alone. So, please remember that by voting, you are not only supporting ECDC, but also helping voice the need for the protection of children growing up in prisons all around the world. Please go to
A growing team of supporters relentlessly reminded Facebook friends and Twitter followers to vote and vote again. Starting September 20th, Basnet and supporters posted and tweeted variations of this message at least once a day: ‘We can vote 10 times a day. So please take some seconds from your busy schedule and vote for our cause. Please spread the news as much as you can’. The repetition of the request to vote 10 (or more) times daily was key in engaging people to make these individually small but significant when combined efforts that helped Basnet win.
Messages on Facebook and Twitter from many different people echoing the call to vote boost the ethos (credibility, as understood by Aristotle (Aristotle and Kennedy 1991)) of the campaign. Instructions on how to vote have been Facebooked, Tweeted and YouTubed, in English and Nepali. Furthermore, supporters created at least five other Facebook pages to promote Basnet for this campaign. On these pages, supporters again post variations of the call to vote, like this one, which explains how to increase the voting quota: You can vote from both your email and Facebook every day. Which means a person can cast at least 20 votes per day. If a person has more than one email ids, he can still cast 10 more votes. So let’s try our best and for sure we will be successful in our mission. She is our pride. Let’s encourage everybody to cast their votes (ECDC, 3 November 2012).
Further boosting Basnet’s credibility, the official Facebook page of the CNN Heroes programme,
Another significant factor in motivating supporters to vote multiple times is the construction of the call to vote. Voting for Basnet, supporters emphasize, is also voting for Nepal; in the words of Ganesh Prasad Bhatta on the Facebook page Let’s Vote Pushpa Basnet, CNN Hero Nominee, At Least 10 Times a Day: This is the golden opportunity to introduce Nepal worldwide and support her great contribution towards those kids. Please do vote for her. I already voted her 10 times this morning. I am gonna vote her each day until the voting deadline. Once again congratulation to Pushpa Basnet and gud luck for this opportunity (24 September 2012).
Additionally, voting for Basnet is viewed as voting for her cause, which is more than a personal or national issue. Informing others semi-publicly via social media that one voted is a way to announce support for taking good care of children growing up in prison with their mothers. A popular banner image from CNN’s profile of Basnet on its website that supporters circulated on Facebook and Twitter pairs a photograph of Basnet with a quotation from one of her interviews on CNN and the directive to ‘vote now’.
Many were compelled to share this image because it appealingly presents a simple yet powerful message that many would be proud to display and few would object to, especially in the semi-public space of the online social network.
People promoted Basnet to become CNN Hero of the Year in part because they desire to be a visible part of her noble endeavour. Those requested, be they friends, colleagues, family or other contacts of the requestor, even if they do not become long-term, deep supporters, may also vote out of concern that not voting, visible in the absence of an update on Facebook, would be taken as an indication they do not care about children in prisons, do not want Basnet to win, and, if they are Nepali or have ties to Nepal, do not want to improve the stature of the country by helping a Nepali win a prestigious international award. Another motivation to vote is the desire not to be seen as lazy and self-involved. Appeals to vote make reference to the ‘busy schedule’ of the prospective voter, assuring them that voting only takes ‘seconds’; not voting or even not voting enough, in such circumstances implicitly gives non-voters/low-voters an unfavourable impression among their voting/high-voting peers.
On CNN’s webpage for its Heroes programme,
Like Basnet and ECDC, a growing number of Nepalis and small-scale Nepali NGOs are winning grants by accumulating online votes in competitions that use Facebook ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ as votes, or accounts on the social network site (SNS) as voter registration. Emerging nonprofits such as Sarvodaya Nepal, Help Nepal Network, Nyaya Health, Ganga Ghar and Grassroots Movement in Nepal have obtained funding via Chase Community Giving’s annual Facebook ‘like’ competition. Crowdfunding and crowd voting platforms such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Start Some Good and GOOD Maker have been utilized by individuals and small-scale nonprofits to fund a variety of initiatives in Nepal, including a feature film, an international art festival, a community garden, a public transport mapping application and neighbourhood documentary screenings.
One ‘like’ Equals One Vote
How was this possible in a country where in 2012, only 18 per cent of the population had internet access (three times as many as in 2002) and electricity was supplied to areas hooked up to the grid for only 6–16 hours a day, depending on the season? A September 2012 YouTube video demonstrates the importance of penetrating offline environments globally to generate and boost online support. In Appeal for Vote for Help Nepal Network Bharat B. Rawal shows how people anywhere in the world can use social media to support community level initiatives in Nepal.
Nepal-based Crowd Voting/Funding Campaigns and Their Web-based Platforms
Nepali Nonprofits’ Crowd Voting/Funding Targets and Outcomes
Three neighbourhoods are involved in this offline to online to offline journey of support. Two Nepalis in London videotaped themselves requesting a woman they encountered on the street to vote for the Help Nepal Network on Chase Community Giving’s contest. In the video they explain the campaign to her and, holding an iPad, request her to vote on the spot. By voting, the Londoner has briefly entered and made an impact on the social media neighbourhood of the Help Nepal Network. In turn, the funds granted the Network based on its many votes, impact the rural neighbourhoods of Nepal that will benefit from the Network’s educational and medical projects.
Neighbourhoods in urban Nepal were also canvassed for online votes in the campaigns for Pushpa Basnet as CNN Hero and Sattya Media Arts Collective to win a grant for Bato ko Cinema (‘Street Cinema’). Members of Sattya traversed Kathmandu neighbourhoods with laptops and smartphones, soliciting e-votes on the spot as they explained their project to locally subtitle and screen documentaries for free in public spaces of Kathmandu Valley. Campaigners for Basnet put up posters streetside and distributed leaflets with voting instructions door to door.
On the ground ‘get out the online vote’ activities by supporters in and out of Nepal were key in boosting online voting to high enough levels for these initiatives to win grant funding.
These campaigns have demonstrated that social media are effective for individuals working on grassroots campaigns in Nepal to spread awareness and obtain e-votes and donations for the following reasons: Supporters feel part of a cause by helping its progenitor(s) spread awareness about it, and can share in successes such as awards, positive media portrayals of the cause, its progenitor, and supporters, and other positive public recognition. Support for a local cause and its progenitor(s) can be seen as support for the nation and its global reputation. Support for a local cause can at the same time be seen as support for the cause all over the world, not just the area and nation where its progenitor(s) address(es) it. Not helping spread awareness about a cause (by sharing links to vote and/or donate, as well as voting and/or donating) is implicitly seen as not caring about the cause, its founder and supporters, and even opposing it. The public and semi-public nature of social media encourage information and opinion sharing. Spreading awareness about a cause accomplishes both. Supporting a cause by voting for and/or donating to it online becomes a kind of civic duty among social media users with some connection to the cause, its progenitor, and/or its supporters. Not showing support by awareness spreading, voting, and/or donating can be viewed as shirking this duty. Despite linguistic, environmental, and technical challenges, spreading awareness and e-voting using social media are inexpensive, swift, and easy in comparison to applying for grants.
61,953 Likes = $ 100,000
This strategy of carrying out offline campaigning for online votes on behalf of social causes was pioneered in Nepal in 2009 by Sarvodaya Nepal, which won a $ 100,000 grant from Chase Community Giving for obtaining 61,953 Facebook likes, the equivalent of a winning number of votes. A major voting bloc was Kathmandu school children, who learned about the campaign when volunteers from Sarvodaya Nepal visited their schools. Sarvodaya Nepal volunteers also set up a booth at a Kathmandu information and communication technology (ICT) convention and an employee made an appeal for e-votes at a US conference for non-resident Nepalis (NRNs).
The odds against Sarvodaya Nepal succeeding in the 2009 Chase Community Giving Programme were steep. The Sarvodaya movement, with low publicity and reach outside of Sri Lanka, is not well known among Nepalis. Sarvodaya Nepal is even smaller than its partner organization Sarvodaya USA. Despite Facebook’s popularity among middle and upper class students and professionals in urban Nepal, in 2009 it had little reach to other Nepalis (primarily because of limited internet access in rural areas). Finally, in 2009 Nepalis were largely unfamiliar with charity contests of this nature. However, by 2009, after two revolutions that culminated in huge demonstrations in the capital (1990 and 2006), Nepalis had grown accustomed to organizing en masse to rally around a cause. Also in 2006 Nepalis used a short message service (SMS) voting method to assist an ethnic Nepali police officer in India, Prasant Tamang, win Indian Idol, a television music competition where viewers participate in deciding the winning amateur pop singer. Crowd voting and funding via social media rely on the kind of enthusiastic and well organized campaigning Nepalis had been primed for during the past couple decades of political turbulence.
Shisir Khanal, founder of Sarvodaya Nepal and Teach for Nepal (interviewed on 10 December 2010), asserts that social media raise the transparency of nonprofits’ work and sees the web in general and social media in particular as ‘the tool in which I communicate with my donor base’ that helps ‘get access to people where it would not be possible through a traditional mailing campaign’. When Khanal found out about the Chase Community Giving Programme, he really wanted Sarvodaya to win. The unrestricted funding package, meaning the money could be put toward any of Sarvodaya’s causes, strongly encouraged him to put effort into this competition. At the time he was sourcing for capital to construct a new schoolhouse for Jyotidaya Cooperative School, south of Kathmandu. ‘I had this strong feeling that if we were able to capitalize on the growing young Facebook users in Nepal it was definitely possible to win’ Khanal explained.
Although the contest was on social media, Khanal’s campaign involved on the ground work much more. Khanal begun by visiting Kathmandu private schools: I presented the whole Sarvodaya model and the school, what we would do … and said … we need your help …. One person would have 200 or 300 friends easily, so even if we tap into 10 percent of our network that’s a fairly large thing. Because … when we started the campaign we were 500 on the list with 200 votes and the first one already had 5,000 votes. So I said ‘Just look at you, you have 300 friends, so just tap into 30 friends, 10 per cent’. And if we collectively do 30 in the room, that’s a fairly large number. They were amazing, they started helping out … we borrowed laptops from friends and set up booths in all the schools, so students could come, vote whenever possible. Oftentimes we went to classrooms and wrote instructions on the blackboards about how people could vote.
The campaign got a major boost by attracting attendees at a computer expo in the capital: We talked to a few people, found contacts, and then we were able to get a free booth …. They also had free Wi-Fi there. We borrowed our friends’ laptops … we had 10. As people passed we would ask them to vote and talk about what we were trying to do. Fortunately the ICT thing attracted thousands and thousands of people and that literally pushed us into the top 10 in a three-day weekend.
Online efforts were also important in gaining e-votes for Sarvodaya. Khanal’s nephew was acquainted with Umesh Shrestha, who authors the Nepali language blog Mysansar, which is popular among in-country and diaspora Nepalis. After Khanal connected with him, Shrestha blogged in support of the campaign.
And it was around the time World Cup was happening and Argentina had lost. Argentina is very popular in Nepal, so the blog title was: ‘Even though Argentina lost you can help Nepal win’. That was a very clever title and attracted lots of attention. That actually really helped us reach many people around the world. And then I started getting messages through his blog, ‘I’m in London, I’m helping the effort’, ‘I’m in DC, I’m helping you’. And [from] a lot of people in the Middle East.
Crowdsourcing campaigns where streets, classrooms, conventions and other real world domains are scoured on foot for people—including those who have never used social media before—willing to use social media to vote for, donate to or spread awareness about a worthy cause are significantly more effective than those that restrict supporter recruitment to cyberspace.
Social Media and Alternative, Less Restrictive Models for Development Philanthropy and Volunteerism
Khanal strongly supports the use of social media for fundraising, especially as it allows nonprofits to receive money with fewer restrictions, so they are not stuck in grant cycles where operational funding is so urgently required that small nonprofits find themselves writing proposals tailored to wishes of international NGOs (INGOs) and development institutions, having been persuaded away from their original missions. Khanal finds a downside of development practice in its restrictive grant-based funding model. He feels fundraising through social media helps small nonprofits like Sarvodaya Nepal flourish with their integrity intact. Critiquing the relationship between small nonprofits and large international organizations, Khanal notes: When the money comes through INGOs, they already have a set project. They want to use money for x or y purpose, and that purpose might not necessarily further the mission of community-based organizations [CBOs]. INGOs bring more money to CBOs, rather than UN or other bilateral organizations. The government does not contribute that much to NGOs. So NGOs are very much reliant on INGOs for funding. Probably there are only a few Nepal-based organizations that raise money locally and sustain themselves. There has to be some way of getting more foreign funding, and that is where you have to have ways of getting funds, which largely comes through INGO grants. And if you want to get a grant then you have to comply with INGO policies, INGO’s ways of working. That restricts a lot in terms of [an NGO’s] mission.
Nabin Dangol, communications officer at Loo Niva Child Concern (interviewed on 9 December 2010), finds working with big international organizations difficult due to their strict aim of carrying out programmes that contribute to the UN Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). Dangol explains that these INGOs do not engage in innovative project design. This leads to hardships for small nonprofits that wish to counter old paradigms in development and design projects with a specific, targeted focus.
Dangol asserts that big INGOs do not give small nonprofits adequate chance to contribute their own ideas to programmes because they think these groups do not have sufficient personnel and resources for development success. Dangol remarks that grant stipulations ‘always have the benchmark of (the grantee organization) having certain transactions in the current year. The (grantee’s) audit report must be something-something dollars’. Insistence among many grantors that recipient organizations already be significantly well-funded and have a proven track record of funnelling sizeable donations to deliver projects restricts nonprofits that qualify for grants to those already well-established and high-budgeted enough to afford a large staff, attractive salaries and a large stock of equipment. Grantseekers working with a small budget therefore find it much more difficult to be seen as suitable development actors.
In linking grantmaking to operating budgets and financial transaction size, grantors promote an elitist mindset among nonprofits. In this elitist, big is beautiful culture, mega-budget nonprofits monopolize grants, thereby dominating grant-funded development work. Small-scale nonprofits and the communities they serve survive on peacemeal funding dripping down from the upperclass, multinational nonprofits, after a large portion of the grant is used for arguably inflated salaries and questionably necessary overhead costs (jeeps, chauffeurs, building rent, fancy equipment, five star hotel workshops and trips abroad). This encourages a number of nonprofits to look for other funding mechanisms via crowdsourcing.
Development elitism extends to causes addressed by nonprofits, under potent state and grantor influence. Causes deemed ‘worthier’ because of political influence are privileged, motivating many nonprofits to change their missions to match grantors’ ‘causes du jour’. Dhiraj Pokhrel, communications officer for human rights NGO Advocacy Forum (interviewed on 26 November 2010), describes powerful international grantor influence on development programming as neocolonialism, critiquing a notable Danish development organization for promoting environmental education projects in the Nepali countryside at the expense of technical and agricultural training he feels is more urgent. Khanal, critiquing the mainstream development funding paradigm monopolized by grant applications and short-term project funding cycles, provides an example of a small-scale nonprofit working on water rights which changed its mission to HIV/AIDS prevention upon discovering that grant funds for organizations focusing on HIV/AIDS were plentiful, but there was little donor interest in water rights. Biso Bajracharya, director of SathSath (interviewed on 30 November 2010), found addressing rights and welfare of street children neglected by foreign donor organizations in Nepal. When the donor community did get involved in street children’s welfare, their preference was for channelling funds for short-term initiatives mainly focused on HIV/AIDS through a sizeable, established, well-connected NGO that primarily serves child workers.
These grantors failed to adopt the comprehensive, less dependency-oriented approach SathSath encourages, where the focus is not on uncovering the prevalence and spread of a disease among street kids, but in reducing the number of street kids in the country by concentrating on altering the situations that lead kids to a life on the street. As Amtzis writes, Treatment or alleviation of social ills is by far a more popularly practiced approach in development than prevention or reduction, with symptoms of underdevelopment addressed at the neglect of root causes; welfare has traditionally been more politically expedient to advocate for and carry out than rights, because rights-based development is correctly seen as more disruptive (and threatening) to the power imbalance of an elitist society, takes much longer, and is more difficult to carry out successfully. (2012, p. 113)
Nevertheless, social media are of key assistance in allowing nonprofits tackling challenging social issues that struggle to attract mainstream institutional donor support, like advocating for street children, to access alternative funding sources that allow much more leeway on methods, causes and operating budgets. Moreover, social media make it easier for local nonprofits to obtain donations from organizational and individual funders who are not able to take frequent (or any) trips to their project sites and offices. In SathSath’s case, Street Kids International, which SathSath connected with online and only visits Nepal annually, provides the bulk of funding.
A nonprofit’s location, stakeholders or small size could cause it to receive little to no direct funding from sizeable national and international nonprofits or development institutions, and national and local governments. Therefore, nonprofits increasingly establish a presence on SNSs to ‘initiate and maintain connections with distant supporters, gaining funding through how they present their ideas, goals and progress’ using social media applications, and ‘how they carry out projects on the ground’ (Amtzis 2012, p. 114). Social media need to be used skilfully and not perfunctorily in order to benefit nonprofits. It is not enough for a nonprofit to have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for it to obtain funding. Content—and to a lesser degree design—of nonprofits’ SNS profiles and linked videos, and update frequency, as well as the conduct of staff, volunteers and supporters over social media channels, are instrumental in spurring support for ongoing or proposed projects. Proof of positive performance, transparency and accountability revealed in videos and photos of activities, ‘clearly articulated visions’, methods, and results, and ‘detailed, accurate, up-to-date financial records’, proposals, and reports accessible from a nonprofit’s social media presence are instrumental in garnering donor commitments (p. 114).
Khanal feels strongly that social media bridge a number of gaps among nonprofits, grantors, and community members, increasing mutual trust and transparency in development activities. He elaborates, ‘We could share with everyone, even people in the community, how the funds are being raised, how much effort it requires to get money …’. He is working on a project that uses social media for academic cooperation with educational institutions in the Global North, so that those students can learn about rural life in Nepal and Nepali village schools can get distance education. Khanal also hopes to set up social media-supported hubs in rural areas, where different village communities from all over the country discuss development successes and setbacks.
Other respondents have similar ideas to integrate social media into community development. Sudip Aryal, founder of Nepal Rural Information Technology Development Society (NRIDS, interviewed 1 December 2010), envisions rural Community Information Centers (CICs), and Luna Shrestha Thakur, founder of ChangeFusion Nepal (interviewed 14 December 2010) plans Youth Resource Centers (YRCs) for village communities. At YRCs, mentors can guide future social entrepreneurs, who will debate and discuss methods to best serve their home communities that are environmentally friendly and profitable. Thakur enthuses about social media’s ability to assist ChangeFusion’s community members, remarking that it connects ‘young Nepali people with ideas’ to potential supporters. ‘You can get so much help free of cost. There are so many people willing to help you if you communicate with them, reach out to them … and I have got help from people that I have never met’, she adds. Bajracharya similarly praises Facebook for allowing him to easily update SathSath’s information, find out if messages he posts reach a specific audience and obtain responses immediately.
Khanal, along with Ojash Shrestha, founder of Ganga Ghar (interviewed on 16 November 2010), and Arun Singh Basnet, local coordinator of Help Nepal Network (interviewed on 12 December 2010), see social media as an effective means of reaching out to the NRN community, a relatively untapped source of support. Nonprofits have since connected with the Nepali diaspora through Walk for Nepal. Founded in 2011 by the global Nepali youth group Nepal ko Yuwa to organize annual walkathons in cities worldwide that mobilize Nepalis, friends of Nepal, and affiliated organizations to volunteer and fundraise, Walk for Nepal on their online profile states that: [The initiative] aims to tap the collective potential of the fast growing population of Nepalis in the US and around the world to make meaningful contributions to Nepal …. The donors can choose exactly which of the various participating organizations they want to contribute to. They may also choose to contribute to the Walk for Nepal fund, which is distributed to participating charities through on-line voting. All participating NGOs and individuals are welcome to raise funds through Walk for Nepal for their causes or for Walk for Nepal-listed projects. (‘About Us,’ n.d.)
Enthusiasm for Walk for Nepal, which raised $ 35,000 in 2012, is reflected in and enhanced by social media, where textual, slideshow and video calls for participation and sponsorship by walkers have proliferated. Participants in the Boston branch of the walk are encouraged to register via Facebook Connect, which links Facebook profiles to websites.
As in e-voting campaigns such as CNN Heroes and Chase Community Giving, SNS extensions like Facebook Connect have become an important element of walkathons and other crowdfunding drives.
Despite their utility in boosting an emerging nonprofit’s reach and netting it funders and proponents, social media should not be seen as a cure-all for the marketing challenges faced by small-scale non-profits and should complement rather than replace time-tested fund and awareness raising strategies that continue to work well. Social media users, however active online and offline, cannot help Nepali nonprofits ameliorate all the problems they tackle, but social media fuelled crowdsourcing is making a significant and positive difference in the daily lives of many Nepalis—a significant portion of whom are not engaged on any level with the numerous mega-budget NGOs operating in the country—and has become the backbone of a growing number of nonprofits, particularly the newly established.
Assessing Nonprofits’ Promotion of Social Media Use
While critics of online social activism such as Morozov (2011) and Gladwell (2010) term this activity slacktivism or clicktivism and argue that it does not produce meaningful results, online crowd voting and crowdfunding contests have netted initiatives funds by awarding their ability to motivate people to click, share, and click and share again, demonstrating their support. It is hard to make a case that these funds, won through a torrent of slacktivist mouse clicks, are not meaningful to the organizations, communities and people who benefit from these winning initiatives. Schools, children’s homes and clinics have been built and staffed, art and film festivals have been held, community gardens have been paid for, among other activities, using the spoils of slacktivism. Morozov (2011) makes a convincing case that the power of social media fuelled political activism has been overhyped as an authoritarianism fighting tool by a Cold War obsessed West. However, small-scale social improvement initiatives have been able, through skillful social media use, to obtain volunteers, tap into funding and net other forms of support they previously had been unable to access through traditional fund and awareness raising channels.
Morozov (2011) cautions against putting faith in technology in general and the internet and its ever updating slew of applications in particular to solve social problems. He criticizes cyber-utopianism, ‘a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside’ (p. xiii). This study does not claim that crowdsourcing social media users for ideas and funding to benefit Nepal are an all-encompassing solution to the country’s myriad ailments. However, it does argue that crowd voting and fundraising has enabled and will continue to enable many individuals’ and small-scale nonprofits’ initiatives to obtain support that may have otherwise been unreachable, and that these pioneering initiatives are addressing areas, groups and issues marginalized by or otherwise left out of the mainstream development industry in significant ways. GalliGalli’s MaiDalal (‘My Broker’) wiki has demystified numerous procedures involved in navigating government bureaucracy, from applying for a passport to purchasing land. The film Highway (2012) has portrayed how political party-called bandhs obstruct the lives of ordinary people. The Nepal Children’s Art Museum, opening in May 2014, will be the country’s first art museum and art resource centre for children and youth.
Cyber voting and crowdfunding for social initiatives is not and is not intended to be a substitute for long-stalled offline democratic processes in Nepal. But it is a way in which a democratic activity can take place without the corruption and power-brokering, and the harassment and property destruction people are used to from the country’s political leadership. If a group of people living in Nepal come up with an idea that would improve the quality of life in their country, city or neighbourhood, such as eco-parks by and for the urban public, they know, as it stands, that proposing it to their local parliamentarian would not get it off the ground. Yet proposing this idea on a platform geared to publicizing, evaluating and supporting these kinds of initiatives via online votes or donations, could.
GOOD Maker, Kickstarter, and similar platforms that enable online votes, sharing and donations facilitated by social media platforms will not guarantee this idea gets the support it needs to be put into practice, but they provide opportunities to enact small-scale neighbourhood improvement initiatives that public servants and politicians simply do not provide. Online gathering spaces enable these initiatives to gather volunteer support on the ground. The mud bricks used to construct the pizza oven for Hariyo Chowk (‘Green Public Square’), a flagship project of Sattya Media Arts Collective, were made and transported by volunteers, many of whom connected with the organizing team through their Facebook group. That doesn’t change the fact that online gathering spaces can be used by hate groups to do social harm. However, the way Sattya and similar initiatives are using SNS groups and crowdsourcing platforms has helped them put their proposals into practice.
Had Sattya opted to carry out street protests to petition the government to build a public eco-park or hold free screenings of documentaries on neighbourhood streets, Hariyo Chowk and Bato ko Cinema would not have come to fruition. That is not to say that street protests have no place in Kathmandu civic life; without street protests, absolute monarchy would likely still be in place and a civil war may not have ended. Rather, street protests are not a workable means to gain support for an initiative like a community managed park-cum-vegetable garden. Online voting, like street protest, is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each social initiative launched needs to be examined in its context to determine its best means for gaining support. Since mainstream development grantors do not tend to fund projects like Hariyo Chowk, especially if the project’s organizing team is unestablished, as Sattya was at the time, crowdfunding was rightly determined to be the preferred strategy.
That US corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and Google (which owns YouTube) no doubt obtain public relations benefits from their roles in assisting initiatives to receive online votes, funding and publicity is a concern. However, initiatives need to work with the internet as it is structured if they want to get the most they can out of it when engaging in crowdsourcing, and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are currently the social media tools most frequently used for online publicity, fundraising and voting campaigns. Facebook identities, as well as email addresses (where Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo are the most popular email services), are used as voting credentials online. Certainly, as Facebook helps popularize campaigns to support initiatives for social good, these campaigns indirectly help popularize Facebook. This situation is at present unavoidable, given the dominance of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter online as communication portals, similar to the way that Visa and Mastercard dominate the credit card market, Amazon dominates online book sales, Ebay dominates online auctions, Paypal dominates online payments and the US dollar dominates global finance. When groups of people get together online, they may use Facebook groups; when they meet offline, they may patronize a private establishment too, perhaps a multinational coffee shop chain or a local business. However, it is in most groups’ best interests to use the most popular social networking hubs as meeting spots when they gather online.
It thus becomes important not to view Facebook specifically and solely as a force for social good, any more than Google or Wikipedia is specifically and solely viewed as a force for knowledge or Amazon is seen specifically and solely as a force for literacy. Yet we can say that in its role in assisting people to vote for initiatives aimed at improving social conditions, Facebook contributes to social good. Similarly, Facebook contributes to social bad in its role in allowing groups that promote racist, homophobic, sexist and other negative causes to congregate on their servers. Amazon contributes to literacy by allowing people without access to bookstores to purchase books, yet it also has negative effects on literacy (and local economies) when it puts local bookstores out of business. People working to help social good initiatives achieve success must engage with the internet as it is, which means identifying and using the platforms that are best suited to provide the most opportunity to solicit the greatest number of votes, the strongest publicity and other support. These popular platforms should continuously be characterized and evaluated on a case by case basis, examining the individuals, groups and institutions they are affecting and how they are affecting them, nothing more and nothing less.
That is not to say that social media technology or technology in general, is neutral, just because it can have positive effects in some contexts and negative effects in others. Rather, technologies need to undergo constant scrutiny when they are designed and when they are used, their positive, negative and neutral qualities measured for each and every situation under analysis. In the case of the small-scale nonprofits’ initiatives examined in this article, social media technologies in general, and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube specifically have played positive roles.
Why Social Media and Cause Marketing Click
Public policy activist Anil Chitrakar sees social media as a means to help pro-social social movements motivate and mobilize an apathetic, cynical public to reclaim their civil society from self-serving and divisive political parties and bring needed change to the country. Speaking in October 2011 to promote the civil society initiative Nepal Unites, he asserts: [W]hen the number of ‘likes’ go from zero to say, 6,000, 7,000 very quickly, then you know that people are buying into that idea. And so then the media takes notice of that, and helps spread that message as well. It’s the perception that something is happening. … [W]hen Nepalis are stuck they look for some platform, and usually there [isn’t one], so they end up in a negative platform. But if we could offer people a positive platform, and if they have that choice … most people will chose the positive platform. (2011).
For those seeking support, be it for non-traditional social change projects, such as sponsoring or joining street artists to paint public murals reflecting regional heritage over political party commissioned graffiti or alternative approaches to rural education and health care, such as PHASE’s tele-medicine centres and Shisir Khanal’s Teach for Nepal programme, social media-assisted crowdsourcing has become especially helpful. Hariyo Chowk began by planting the locally untried, novel idea of community managed eco-parks in the minds of Kathmandu residents, encouraging them to help make it a reality through efforts in the virtual and real neighbourhood—donating through and sharing links to the Kickstarter page and YouTube video on Facebook and Twitter, and volunteering making bricks and planting vegetables at the physical site. Similarly, nonprofits seeking support in the form of local volunteerism and philanthropy, rather than foreign grants and sponsorships, are benefiting greatly from crowdsourcing on social media. Environmentalist groups Kathmandu Cycle City 2020, Green Soldiers, We Are The One (WATO) and Clean Up Nepal have locally recruited volunteers and sponsors for bicycle rallies, tree planting and clean-up campaigns using video sharing and SNSs.
Social media also make it easier for project stakeholders to interact with and directly promote their accomplishments to supporters. Child stakeholders at educational nonprofit Shree Mangal Dvip (SMD) create content for the organization’s Facebook group and use it to converse with classmates, alumnae, staff and donors. Collaborations with other nonprofits are showcased, such as when students designed and painted a public mural for Sattya’s Kolor Kathmandu project to produce 75 street murals representing each of Nepal’s 75 districts.
Furthermore, urgent aid requests can be quickly addressed with minimal bureaucracy. A student-written piece about SMD school’s security guard needing medical treatment was credited by Pema Norbu and Tashi Sherpa, alumnae who became staff members (interviewed on 27 November 2010), for spurring immediate donations for the treatment.
Notably, due to the nation’s deep reliance on international donations to keep its economy running, Advocacy Forum’s social media-funnelled petitions to international organizations and foreign governments can moderately influence the national government, which cannot risk its funding being suspended. As Pokhrel notes, ‘The state is deaf and dumb, but donor dependent …. The international community has limitations, but given the position of Nepal, because it can’t sustain on its own, it runs on the mercy of donors … international advocacy is helping us a lot’. Governments that depend on international trade are also influenced to some degree by social media-fuelled petitions. When Nepali chemistry teacher Dorjee Gurung was jailed in May 2013 after two of his students at an international school in Qatar complained to their parents about a comment he allegedly made to them (which he denies) that insulted Islam, a petition on Change.org which reached 14,023 e-signatures helped secure his release. Gurung then returned to Nepal and founded his own nonprofit to improve education in the country’s rural areas. A collaborative crowdfunding campaign with GalliGalli on StartSomeGood.com netted Gurung’s Education is Freedom initiative $ 37,534 on 1 July 2013.
Crowd voting and crowdfunding campaigns that engage social media platforms appeal to supporters on the strength of their ideas, rather than the operating budget or political connections of their leaders. The idea of making local and international documentaries accessible to everyday people in Kathmandu neighbourhoods proved its appeal to residents of these neighbourhoods and social media neighbourhood dwellers when the Bato ko Cinema initiative obtained a grant to fund its series of streetside screenings by amassing more online votes than any of the competing social improvement initiatives featured on GOOD Maker’s website and publicized on its Twitter and Facebook pages. In an environment where political leaders have not made efforts to fight against injustices such as the children of inmates having to grow up in prison or trees on city streets being chopped for the sake of the lucrative lumber trade, small scale initiatives that require at minimum a few minutes of time spent on social media in support, and that inspire longer commitments, are invigorating the nonprofit sector, boosting its transparency, freshening its ideas and methods, and increasing the popularity of local fund and awareness raising and volunteerism.
Despite acute electricity shortage 2 , low speed, and technical, linguistic, geographic and financial barriers to utilization, social media users in Nepal have very effectively engaged the communication opportunities the technology affords to build the support necessary for a significant number of community development initiatives they champion. They have gained operational funding from donations made via crowdfunding sites and e-voting fuelled grants, spreading awareness about these campaigns and campaigning methods via social media and on foot. Campaigns where social media are used to vote and demonstrate how to vote, link to donation portals, and share persuasive, compelling information supporting the initiative have obtained strong virtual and real world support.
Successful crowd voting and funding campaigns using social media shared a number of features.
Transparency was made a priority with detailed information provided on funding sources, funds raised and how funds would be/have been used to address the cause.
The cause was personal to its progenitor(s), but also addressed an important issue that others could relate to and understand the need for.
The plan to address the cause was practical, specific and neither overly simplistic nor complex.
Offline campaigning was used to obtain online support. Campaigners sought out supporters offline, motivating them to go online, sign up for or into a Facebook account and use it to vote.
Clear, bilingual instructions were provided on how to spread awareness about and support the cause.
There were frequent updates on campaign progress as well as calls to vote/donate/share information.
Campaigners produced and disseminated en masse a combination of appealing and persuasive textual, image and video messages.
Enough supporters possessed a combination of at least a moderate amount of technical and linguistic skills, knowledge of awards to campaign for and media resources to incorporate.
Social media have enabled nonprofits with internet access but limited operational funds to rapidly, economically and easily develop an online presence that can be leveraged to obtain crucial project support. However, building and managing a social media presence still requires a certain amount of skill. Moreover, SNSs require frequent updates to make a nonprofit’s profile more attractive and visible to other users. These factors can cause some difficulty to users without the recommended time and skill to cultivate a vibrant social media presence. Despite this, users frequently are supported in building, maintaining and updating their social media presence by a circle of volunteers in-country and abroad.
Nevertheless, smaller, less technology savvy nonprofits continue to operate at a disadvantage to large I/NGOs when they enter cyberspace because they lack enough IT equipment and staff to commit to putting together and maintaining an ‘informative, up-to-date, accurate and dynamic’ online presence (Amtzis 2012, p. 93). Still, from social media use small-scale Nepali nonprofits obtain exposure and access to a supporter community heretofore unreachable to them; sharing photographic, video and textual material explaining and showcasing causes and ideas to address social issues, project progress and positive impact helps build the emerging nonprofit’s reputation, knowledge and budget.
Social media driven campaigns have swiftly and decisively become a very effective method for grassroots nonprofits to raise awareness about and gain funding for their innovative initiatives to bring about social good in their communities. In a country with underdeveloped but rapidly expanding telecommunication resources, social media have been remarkably successful in engaging ground-up, participatory communication for awareness raising that leads to funding, volunteerism and other support for social causes.