I’m growing very tired of all the nonsense being touted as “social enterprise.” While I think the concept of social enterprise has promise, this budding sector is getting overpopulated with garbage that commodifies poverty and homelessness in order to present and sell it to a disengaged, educated, young, liberal demographic that is in no way a part of curing social ailments. The poster-child for jump-the-shark social enterprise is a company called The Extraordinaries. While this so called “micro-volunteering” company has won praise from fellow social enterprise Social Earth, which provides this nauseating piece on the value of The Extraordinaries, to me The Extraordinaries is at best an ineffectual company hopefully slated for extinction.
The Extraordinaries developed an iPhone app that enables users to “volunteer” from their phones. The pitch is that we (liberal elite smartphone owners) are too busy to volunteer (because we are the liberal elite) but have five minutes here and there to mess around on our phones. So why not use those five minutes to complete a micro-volunteering opportunity from our phone?
Answer: Because micro-volunteering is stupid.
The only thing The Extraordinaries have been able to get their users to do is tag photos for online archives maintained by museums like the Smithsonian. This is all fine and good, but hardly worth much praise, or investment, and clearly not a game changer, like was claimed by the Huffington Post. What has me so in a tizzy about this company is their claim that they are a “Social Enterprise” focused on both providing social value and earning profits. Frankly, I see them achieving neither.
We have serious problems as a country and a planet. One in five children in the United States lives in poverty. What can you do about that with your mobile phone? Not a darn thing. Efforts like the Extraordinaries create an illusion of social engagement that I argue is actually a threat to people like us who work on social issues in a serious way. We do need help in the social sector. We need better talent, we need more resources. The Extraordinaries’ product is not social value, rather what they peddle is the falsehood that people who do not do anything for anyone can absolve themselves of that shame by clicking buttons on their smart phones.
I am not a surgeon. There is no iPhone app that makes me feel like I am one, and that is a good thing. If someone does not volunteer, is not engaged in their community, why should we sell them a placebo application to make them believe otherwise?
Ridiculous.
(Photo by beextra.org)
David Henderson is the founder of 
Hi David,
I'm a co-founder at SocialEarth and we appreciate the call out here (though not in the most positive light!).
Just wanted to quickly comment on our reasoning behind publishing a story about The Extraordinaries. First, we never directly labeled or implied that this organization is a Social Enterprise. We did a story about them because we think their intent is, at the end of the day, good. While they may not be directly solving the most pressing issues in the world, they are enabling 'elite smartphone users' in to give back in a way that they perhaps would not have been able to before.
Is this the definition of volunteerism? Of course not; but it is a new idea that may work for a small percent of our population who don't necessarily have the time to volunteer. And of course it's not equivalent to spending three hours a week at a food shelter feeding orphaned children but then again, no one is is arguing that it is. It's just a new idea that our team supports, much like we support the work of Ashoka, Acumen Fund and Cinepop.
Cheers,
Naiomi
Here, here! Innovation and impact are not same thing but we Americans love shiny new things so much that the social sector is being overwhelmed with purposeless novelty. I'm all for experimentation and risk-taking toward the goal of social value creation. At the same time, too much attention is being paid to the perceived potential of ventures, especially in reaching donors and supporters, rather than the ability to address a substantial human need.
Thanks everyone for taking time out of your day to offer a critique of our work. We welcome and appreciate the input and feedback.
There are a few points we would like to make.
(1) The field of crowdsourcing is still in its infancy and so is our company. We're just getting started.
(2) We're already providing value to organizations via image tagging — the first of many tasks to be offered on our platform. For museums, cataloging images is a real need. It costs money to hire curators. Brooklyn museum helped to pioneer this space a few years ago (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/ta….. the Steve Project took it one step further with their project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve.museum), and even Google has taken advantage of image tagging in their own form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_image_labeler... For organizations, making thousands of images searchable provides a tangible benefit to staff, the public, and more. But there exists no system to facilitate image tagging for organizations that don’t have a software development budget, until The Extraordinaries.
But image tagging does much more than deliver an archived photo database. Image tagging (and other tasks in our system) strengthen relationships with supporters.. Keeping even the most devoted supporters engaged is a touch point that organizations work hard to achieve through email blasts, Facebook messages, tweets, and maybe even direct mail.With our platform, supporters do actual work for something they are passionate about, and feel closer to the organization’s mission in the process. For some organizations (like museums and libraries), it’s one of the first opportunities to *get information back* from patrons… please read the Steve Project research for how much value this channel creates.
(3) We're just beginning to explore possibilities that others have proven in the marketplace.
For science, NASA used an early form of micro-volunteering in 2000 with the Clickworkers program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickworkers), Galaxy Zoo took that process one step further (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_zoo), and the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology has had several amazing advancements for bird research using this method (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/NetCommunity/Page…...
For graphics, iStockPhoto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istockphoto) and http://www.99designs.com has saved nonprofit organizations tens of thousands of dollars in design costs.
The list goes on. In summary, we’re not the first to prove that crowdsourcing works, nor the last. But we’re the first to make it easily available to organizations.
[continued...]
(4) This is not a replacement for traditional volunteering, it's another way to give back, and we're already proving it. For example, each year about 1.1 million people in the United States have heart attacks, and almost half of them die (http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/He….. An organization called First Aid Corps came to The Extraordinaries and built a mission that asks people to help build a mapped database of public heart defibrillators (shock pads). With our system, people can snap a photo of a defibrillator in an airport, government building, or other public place, record the GPS location of the device, and beam it to the map. So far, with only a limited number of users, we've had over two-dozen defibrillators submitted through our system. See for yourself (http://app.beextra.org/activityfeed/show/orgid/….. scroll down to where it says, "mapped a defibrillator" in one of the lines and click the orange arrow.
(5) What we’re replacing here is actually idle entertainment. We spent nine-billion hours in 2003 playing solitaire (http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/no….. 1800 hours watching television in 2008 (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobi….. and 74% of Americans *did not* volunteer in 2008 (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm). The Extraordinaries is working to make it meaningful, for someone to do actual work for an organization, cause, or community they care about, in a few minutes of spare time. See for yourself: http://app.beextra.org/activityfeed/show. And for a great read on how our so-called “cognitive surplus” can be applied to good causes, see Clay Shirky’s piece: http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/0…..
(6) True, one in five children in the United States *does* lives in poverty. What can you do about that with your mobile phone? At the moment, you can help Christel House deliver messages of encouragement to underprivileged students. That's a start.
Down the road:
– You might be able review and critique the resume of a parent of one of those kids looking to find a job, while you're waiting for a latte in Starbucks.
– You might be able to help map food resources using your camera and GPS and ensure that assets reach their destinations, on your way home from work.
– You might be able to help a distributed phone-banking service make a few phone calls to identify kids in need, while on your lunch break.
– You might be able translate brochures into other languages from organizations looking to service those impoverished communities.
The possibilities are endless if you can dream them. And, The Extraordinaries is nearly finished with the first iteration of our platform that will enable you to start making some of those dreams a reality. Come see how: http://www.BeExtra.org
Thanks for taking time to read our response.
Sincerely,
Jacob Colker
Co-Founder and CEO
The Extraordinaries
Jacob@beextra.org
I could not agree more. This kind of stuff makes me nuts. As does adding a dollar onto my grocery bill to support the most recent sexy cause. I know some of that stuff is good for awareness, but in the end, I think it just makes people feel good about doing things that are completely convenient to them, without every actually effecting change. Glad you're post got picked up on Chronicle of Philanthropy's daily digest!
Thank you for this. I thought I was the only one asking the hard questions about The Extraordinaries! An exchange about on the ARNOVA online group in Feb. 2009 spoke volumes about this organization — they don't believe in volunteer screening, supervision or support, offer no ideas on how to ensure quality of volunteer work, and offer no procedures for ensuring volunteer and client safety. Their idea of involving volunteers is all about "free labor" and various other old-paradigms of volunteering, as well as "no traditional volunteer management necessary" — apparently that stuff just gets in the way. When asked tough questions about ensuring quality for nonprofits, keeping their time investment low to involve such large numbers of online volunteers, etc., Jacob Colker could not answer. Despite repeated requests for him to talk to volunteer managers — the people who will have to develop opportunities for these microvolunteers and supervise their work — in order learn about what nonprofits *really* need, he won't show up on groups like CYBERVPM, UKVPMS, OZVPM, etc. and offer opportunities for collaboration. Why not collaborate with organizations that involve volunteers, learn why organizations involve volunteers (it is NOT all about free labor), learn why volunteers return to help again and again, etc.? In the end, that could give the intelligence necessary to make this program worthwhile. Instead, it's going to flounder as it wonders where all the opportunities are for its legions of "micro-volunteers." I've been advocating for the involvement of online volunteers since 1994, but I've NEVER talked about abandoning volunteer management quality controls, or making volunteer involvement more important than whatever a nonprofit is trying to achieve. Here's my blog on the subject of crowd-source volunteering, from back in March: http://blogs.forumer.com/jcravens/&thisy=2009...
Thanks for your comment Jayne. I think you get it exactly right both here and back on your post on crowd-sourcing from March that a lot has to go in to making volunteer crowd-sourcing work. Indeed, if a micro-volunteering effort is to be successful, it first is going to have to stem from true non-profit needs, and the volunteer efforts themselves must be appropriately tasked and managed. Volunteers can be a great benefit to an organization, but a poorly planned volunteer effort can be more trouble than it is worth. Perhaps there is promise in the concept of micro-volunteering, but certainly not in its current incarnation as executed by The Extraordinaries.
Hi David: Robert here from VolunteerMatch. This is a thought-provoking post. On the one hand, the promise of an app that not only helps volunteers discover opportunities but also serves as a platform for completing a variety of tasks is truly huge. We should give props to Jacob, Ben, and everyone at The Extraordinaries for continuing the evolution of the Web as a place to go to make a difference. On the other hand, I agree that we need more than a "Mechanical Turk for Nonprofits" to address the serious social issues in our communities. HuffPo's breathy exclamations aside, it takes effort, insight, and serious collaboration to become a game-changer. But it also takes time. We need to give The Extraordinaries a chance to become the truly remarkable service everyone says it is. (BTW: Major hat tip to Jayne Cravens for her earlier post deconstructing the perils and promise of micro-volunteering. It's a good reminder for both entrepreneurs and social enterprise reporters about the necessity of wading into the deep background that gives shape to the social sector as it now stands.)
Robert, thanks for adding your thoughts to this discussion. When I first heard about The Extraordinaries I was certainly intrigued by the concept, and hopeful of its promise. I think Jayne, as you point out, says it best that volunteering is not simply about free-labor, and that micro-volunteering, like traditional volunteering, must be carefully planned out to ensure there is actually value added to a cause or organization. I'm very open to the idea of The Extraordinaries adding real social value. I welcome any intervention that is part of the solution to addressing serious issues. As of today, The Extraordinaries simply is not such a solution. That said, if it is possible for them to be successful, so long as success is defined in terms of social outcomes, I truly wish them the best. Does VolunteerMarch have any plans to undertake a micro-volunteering effort? I'm willing to consider that my discomfort with what the Extraordinaries is doing has more to do with execution, than concept.
[...] interventions and whether much-hyped new platforms such as The Extraordinaries might actually do damage to the sector by emphasizing the easy over the impactful. David’s main concern is these micro [...]
[...] Henderson, chief executive of Idealistics, criticizes microvolunteering: “Efforts like the Extraordinaries create an illusion of social engagement that [...]