I’ve been calling around to different charities to talk to them about the idea behind Measured Impact.  I want to get an idea of who is interested in working with us and who can handle the type of broad volunteerism that we hope to create with this contest.  Today, I was able to speak with Gary Nice, CEO of the National Canine Cancer Foundation.

Gary is a really nice guy and I was very grateful to be able to spend some time with him on the phone, discussing the idea and the value of twitter and social media.  The National Canine Cancer Foundation (@WeAreTheCure) has a pretty substantial Twitter following.  A lot of people are passionate about the cause.

What is the National Canine Cancer Foundation all about?  Here’s a brief excerpt from their website:

Canine Cancer affects one out of every three dogs. Of those, over half of them will die of cancer. The National Canine Cancer Foundation is asking for your help to fund important research grants that are working towards improving those statistics. Through a major project funded by the National Institute of Health, the mapping of the genome sequence of the dog has been complete. Knowing the mapping of every gene in the dog, gives researchers an advantage not yet achieved in humans. We’re closer to a cure, now’s the time to beat this cancer! If we all work together, WE ARE THE CURE.

Cool huh?

What I got really excited about is that Gary indicated that there is plenty of work for volunteers to participate in.  There are chapters that are launching all across the country that could really use some volunteer assistance.  If you happen to live in an area that doesn’t yet have a chapter, Gary said that there is lots of clerical work that could be done remotely over the computer.  Awesome!

Gary promised to check out the Measured Impact blog and get back to me to let me know what he thinks of the project.  I’m really looking forward to his feedback.  As soon as I hear back, I’ll be sure and provide and update.

To learn more about the Measured Impact initiative check out:

• The Introduction
• Step 1 – What Currency Do You Use To Measure Impact?
• Step 2 – The Lingering Loyalty Question And Determining Influence
• Step 3 – Finding The Right Charity
• Step 4 – Goals, and Prizes, and Titles…Oh My!

Measured Impact is a contest that organizes labor for charity and also measures the strength (loyalty) of the contestants’ social media connections and relationships.  Now for all the fun stuff about the contest:

Our Goals:

It would be great to get a commitment from at least 10 contestants for the Measured Impact contest.  If we got less than 10 or significantly more than 10 I might have to adjust the other goals of the contest accordingly.

When I first visualized this contest, I had a very ambitious goal in mind, but after receiving some valuable feedback, we’re going to keep the goal easily attainable (we can always go higher in coming years).  If you’ve been following the idea up until this point, you may be wondering how we’re going to quantify our results, since we’re actually raising labor as opposed to money.  After giving this a considerable amount of thought, it became obvious that most people would relate to the project more if the results were conveyed in monitary terms.  It’s pretty easy to do that with a simple conversion, but the question remains: “How much is labor worth?”

In the absence of a better model, I decided to price the working hours of our volunteers at minimum wage.  Please don’t take this as an insult.  I know that many people will perform tasks that are worth much more than $7.50 per hour, but we’re just using that figure to quantify our results and give a unified measurement of the time that will be invested by the volunteers.  Using this measurement, the goal for this year is 10,000 hours, or $75,000.00 worth of labor.

The Prizes:

With this first incarnation of Measured Impact, the budget is literally shoe string.  The ultimate goal is to really enable a worthy charity to make an impact on their chosen cause.  Unless a sponsor would like to back the project to offer a nice cash prize or some other item(s), what we’re left with is bragging rights…which brings me to The Titles….

The Titles:

1. The winner of the contest (The person who’s audience/friends/followers contribute the largest percentage to our goal of 10,000 hours of labor) will be named:

The Most Influential Person (or Brand) On Twitter

Contestants must have a twitter account and a significant following on twitter.  You don’t have to be in the Twitter Top 100, though we would love to have some of those people!

There are no rules as to how you want to engage your social media contacts/followers/friends.  Ultimately the winner will be the person who does it the best.  I’m excited to see how they will do it!

2. It was also suggested to me that we measure ReTweets (RT’s).  We will do that around the hashtag #MeasImp.  The person who can generate the most RT’s containing the hashtag #MeasImp will be named:

The Most ReTweeted Person (or Brand) On Twitter*

*For Charity

This post pretty much wraps up the structure of the contest as I’ve envisioned it.  Now it’s time for me to go out and start talking to potential contestants and charities to drum up support for the project.  Those conversations might lead to some revisions here and there.  I’ll definitely keep you updated on my progress.  I’d also love any feedback that you have to share.  Don’t hesitate to contact me!

To learn more check out:

• The Introduction
• Step 1 – What Currency Do You Use To Measure Impact?
• Step 2 – The Lingering Loyalty Question And Determining Influence
• Step 3 – Finding The Right Charity

Measured Impact is a contest that organizes labor for charity and also measures the strength (loyalty) of the contestants’ social media connections/relationships. Which charity? Well that all depends….

First, I just want to say how excited I am about this idea to use labor to measure the impact of our upcoming charitable initiatives and the allegiance (loyalty) of the volunteers.  I really love how this idea fits so well into the wave of volunteerism that is sweeping the country.  People are really amazing.  When faced with the worst economic conditions in decades, they want to go out and give to others in need.  I’m really moved by this nations spirit and generosity.  It says so much about the character of our neighbors.

The only thing I’m a little bit apprehensive about is how potential benefactors (charities) will react to this uniquely structured initiative.  Will they say, “Labor? Just give us money!”?  Or will they recognize the incredible value?  I’ll be finding out shortly!

For the right charity, this is going to be an incredible opportunity to push forward their mission and have their own impact on their specific cause. Finding the right charity is definitely a big piece of this puzzle.  Since participants in the Measured Impact Contest could come from literally all over the United States and have millions of followers/friend/contacts, it’s important that potential charities be able to facilitate volunteers donating their time and effort, no matter what part of America that volunteer lives in.  We’ll also have to make sure that we have an airtight method to track the volunteers time and which contestant they’re volunteering under. (Ideas anyone?)

This is how we’re going to handle selecting the charity.  Participants in the contest will be able to put forth their suggestions for consideration.  There will also be a submission period where the public at large can suggest charities.  I could potentially see this getting out of hand, so if at all possible, I would really appreciate it if you could do some of the leg work and try to verify that the charity that you suggest meets the above criteria (handling volunteers across the USA).  There will then have to be a vetting process where we make sure that the charities put forward are interested in working with us in this endeavor.  The vetting period will obviously vary depending on how many suggestions we receive.  Finally there will be a public vote where anyone can choose their best pick to be the benefactor of the Measured Impact Contest.  Yes the public (that’s you) will pick the charity.  Cool, huh?  Just to be clear, we’re only going to be working with one charity at a time.  With all the contestants promoting a single charity it will keep the playing field level and they’ll really have a chance to flex their influence muscles.

Several months ago when I was still planning this project I did an informal poll of the Twitter Top 100 to see which charities they liked the best.  I got the following responses: (*Disclaimer: I have not vetted these charities yet to see if they’re appropriate partners.  The following Twitter users have not yet agreed to participate as contestants in the Measured Impact Contest.  This information is put forward to get the creative juices flowing).

• @WholeFoods likes the Whole Planet Foundation

• Ryan Penagos (@Agent_M) said he likes the National Canine Cancer Foundation – http://www.wearethecure.org / @wearethecure

• Jason Goldman (@goldman) said he likes @roomtoread

• @JetBlue pointed me to their community page

• Jack Dorsey (@Jack) mentioned that he likes Charity Water
  

What’s your favorite charity?

This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that it’s achievable.  And I’m open to any and all suggestions. So if you have any, please leave them in the comments below! If you like the concept and/or want to be a participant, I’d love to hear from you.

To learn more check out:

• The Introduction
• Step 1 – What Currency Do You Use To Measure Impact?
• Step 2 – The Lingering Loyalty Question And Determining Influence

Measured Impact is a contest that organizes labor for charity and also measures the strength (loyalty) of the contestants’ social media connections/relationships.  Here’s how:

When we all build our own “network” or “tribe” (or whatever hot word you want to use) our networks are actually cross-connected to a certain extent.  This makes me wonder, who are all of these people actually paying attention to?  For instance, I follow 20,000 people on twitter.  It’s literally impossible to read every tweet, or even remember any details about a decent percentage of people that I’m connected with.  The reality is that I only pay attention to a handful of people.  And by pay attention, I mean I actually go to their twitter profile and read their tweets periodically throughout the day (there’s no way that I would be able to pick them out of my twitter stream).  These handful of people actually represents my relationship loyalty on twitter.  Part of what Measured Impact is all about is measuring relationship loyalty on a larger scale.

To illustrate this idea further, let me give you an imaginary example. Imagine that I’m new to twitter, so the first thing I do is go find some people to follow.  For the sake of this example, lets say I decide to follow the top 10 people (with the most followers) on twitter because I happen to be a fan/like them/respect them, etc. So now I’m following: @aplusk, @britneyspears, @TheEllenShow, @cnnbrk, @BarackObama, @Oprah, @twitter, @johncmayer, @RyanSeacrest, and @KimKardashian. Now, lets also say for this imaginary example that all of the above people decide that they want to be participants in the Measured Impact Contest.  Pretty soon they’re all going to be reaching out to their followers to encourage them to volunteer for ________ charity. Assuming I like all the above people and already want to do what they’re telling me to do (volunteer) and I had to choose the person that I’m volunteering under, then I’m actually voting for the relationship that I value the most.  When you decide to volunteer time to a charity under the Measured Impact initiative, you will have to register that time under a contestant.  This will be your effective “vote” for the person that you have the strongest relationship with out of the pool of contestants.

By choosing my favorite contestant and volunteering under their name, the Measured Impact initiative allows me to make a difference by giving my time and energy to a worthy cause instead of money.  The winner is the contestant whose following registers the most hours of service during the volunteer period until the ultimate goal of the contest is met. (The prize will be laid out in an upcoming post.)  How will we choose the charity that we’re going to partner with? Check out the next post (Step 3).

I appreciate any input you have to offer and don’t hesitate to ask questions in the comment section.

To learn more check out:

• The Introduction
• Step 1 – What Currency Do You Use To Measure Impact?

Measured Impact is a contest that organizes labor for charity and also measures the strength and loyalty of the contestants’ social media connections and relationships.  Why labor?  Here’s why:

When thinking about making a difference and generating a measurable impact against society’s problems, many people’s minds automatically jump to monitary denominations.  We’ve been trained to do this through telethons for Jerry’s Kids, PBS, Public Radio, etc.  It’s common to measure a charitable endeavors success by the amount of money that is raised. I have a philosophical problem with this perception though.

Let me explain… From the point of view of someone who wants to get involved and make a difference… If you accept that all people are created equal, then using money to measure the success of a charitable endeavor is a round peg for a square hole.  Wealth or lack thereof varies a lot between different people.  I want to create a contest that will benefit charity but also measure action and loyalty.  That’s what Measured Impact is. It doesn’t make sense to me to give a weighted measurement to more wealthy, or even famous people.  For this contest, I want the scales to be balanced so that every person, with the desire to do so, can actually go out and make a difference…a measurable difference.  This is a very important concept for measuring loyalty, because from a giver’s perspective, the value of the gift is directly related to the abundance that they have of the thing they’re giving.

To solve this riddle I needed to find a currency (or control for my experiment) that we all have in equal measure.  I read Karl Denninger’s Market Ticker Blog a lot.  I don’t agree with all of his politics, but he has a one of a kind way of breaking down financial information and I like that he sticks to the math.  One post in particular stands out in my mind where Karl discusses the value of money and what could be constituted as money.

Money: The product of either growing something, mining something or manufacturing something. “Money” is actual wealth, and comes into being only through creation. Ultimately, all money is traced to the only “free lunch” that exists in this solar system, that is, the power of The Sun, although in many cases (e.g. mining) the activity is in fact discovery of previously-created wealth (by the actions of The Sun) levered through human endeavor.

Karl went on to describe lots of everyday items that could be considered to be money. In fact most of what we buy, own, and touch could be considered money because it has an intrinsic value due to the labor (time) that went in to creating the items and the materials that they are made of. Even though this is an expansion of the basic truth that “Time Is Money” it really got my mental gears spinning, and I suddenly had myself a nice little epiphany.

What if I were to measure impact in effort or even time spent, instead of money? Time is one thing that all humans have an equal amount of. No matter how much money or fame you have, you can’t get extra hours in a day. By making this single change and using labor as a currency instead of actual currency, I could level the playing field for all the players and give everyone an equal opportunity to make an impact. Now I’m really excited!

I still have a few questions about how to measure loyalty and the strength of relationships, but I’ll get to that next (Step 2)

What do you think of this idea?

To learn more check out:

• The Introduction

I was going to say it all started with a conversation, but that’s not totally true.  There are a lot of events and conversations, thoughts and reflections that have made this moment possible.  Yes, this moment is being brought to you by my family’s crisis that left me with a profound appreciation for charity and a desire to give back.  This moment is being brought to you by a revolution in communication. This moment is being brought to you by the rebirth of the internet and a new found social consciousness. But mostly this moment is sponsored by lots and lots of questions.

Questions like: If these social media “gifts” can be called tools, what is their best function? Does the amount of social media connections a person has really indicate anything important? If connections between people are potentially limitless, what is the value of a connection? In the value discussion, does quality really trump quantity? In a sphere of infinite competition for attention, how do you measure loyalty? And can all of these connections and all of this conversation be transferred to anything meaningful offline?

Measured Impact is my social media experiment and my attempt at answering these questions.  My goal is to create a contest to measure your influence in social media in a way that will transcend the number of followers, friends, or connections that you may have, while making a positive impact.  Sound like a cool idea?

I’m taking a scientific approach. No, I’m not an actual scientist, but I do know that an experiment needs a proper control. From what I’ve seen from other attempts to answer this question, the wrong control was used. I need to minimizes the advantage of celebrity in order to have as accurate results as possible.  Let’s face it, celebrities have more money and more friends with money than us average people. So, I want to make a measurable difference in the world, but I need to do it without money being the currency….  Don’t worry, it sounds harder to do this than it actually is.  I think I have it figured out.

Check back soon for an update.

Until then, check out our about page to get more information.