33. Can we learn from traditional donation crowdfunding? - Taipei 2023

[Music] hello uh I'm really happy to be here uh I feel like I will probably not have that many answers but at least I would like to State some questions that I believe might be interesting for the debate about funding common uh Goods so first of all I'll be also sharing some some uh some things that are connected to my previous career I don't know if you know that but it's my second time in taipe and I was here for the first time um in relation to Animal Protection work this is an article from from that time uh we were working uh with cage 3x then um and working on the introduction of first cagefree X in care for uh tape it is relevant to what I what I'll be speaking about um so um I was involved in uh animal protection work for many years uh nowadays I'm both uh involved with octant and Gollum Foundation team but I'm also running a crowdfunding platform that is actually one of the biggest crowdfunding Platforms in the world even though you probably haven't heard of it uh because it's solely polish it's just that crowdfunding is really big in Poland when most people think about crowdfunding uh they mostly think of Kickstarter so it might be surprising for you that it's actually not the biggest crowdfunding platform in the world because the biggest one is actually G find me and maybe this should already tell you something about what I want to say people are actually uh go fund me I don't know if you I don't know if you know this uh this website um especially here because it's mostly us it's us-based now also also growing in Europe but GoFundMe is only about individual fundraisers for people who need help uh or for some personal projects it's only donations based no Financial incentives for you to give when in Kickstarter you're are mostly getting something out of supporting a project in GoFundMe you're you're just helping another person and um so it might be surprising but actually gofund Me grew faster and is now bigger than the kickstarter which I find extremely interesting in terms of uh motivating people and what actually makes uh people take um I I I feel that what um what one of the most important uh things that people were crowdfunding in Poland uh in the in the last years was actually the war effort in Ukraine so all those tiny like Poland is relatively big in this region but even those tiny countries like Estonia Lithuania were collecting massive amounts of money to support Ukraine uh trying to to fund even military great equipment just because they wanted Ukraine to win this war so badly and and in all those countries in the regions region um you could see really huge increase of the amounts of money donated and all those people again they were not getting anything in return they just wanted to give money to increase the chances of ukrainians to win the war no tokens no free t-shirts nothing like that so I think of often when you when you want to incentivize people into giving it might be good to actually start with a question why people give and in this traditional fundraising and crowdfunding that has like hundreds of years of History uh like this original philanthropy we kind of already know the answer to this question first of all giving makes people happy so when we say that you cannot buy happiness in a way it's not true because there is already research showing that if you give money um out of your own will to projects that you support you're getting much higher increase of happiness than if you got a rise in your job of the same amount so we can actually uh buy and sell happiness and it's through philanthropy it's through giving to causes that we deeply care about uh which also means that if you are engaged in this like um in any type of either public goods uh work or NGO or anything that benefits the society and the world you are also in the business of selling happiness and Isn't that cool and also most most of the uh most of the people engaged in fundraising know that the main reason um like if you want to if you want to speak with with big donors the the main reason people actually give to causes to causes they care about is that they want to be a part of the world that you create and that's it in most cases They Don't Really uh there's even an interesting um like in Poland we have a similar platform to patreon patreon might be probably more um uh more interesting to you more known to you than than our platform patronite uh but patronite that's based in Poland Works in exactly the same manner and they found out that most people don't take the freebies that they get by donating more to to various artists so again they just want to support our artists they want those artists to keep on creating doing the good stuff they are not there for the free stuff um and I I thought that um as I said it's not like I feel like I have a lot of answers on incentive on incentivizing people into into giving to public goods but I wanted to share some of the information I feel like I have through being more engaged in um animal Charities or uh or crowdfunding because what I can see is that web three space is very big on incentives on trying to uh you know let's make Doos cooler by giving out stuff let's do some airdrops let's let's give out some nfts and I think my first instinct is we should be extremely careful about this so for example one one thing that I that we were able to check and test on our own website uh again this is like a huge crowdfunding platform with hundreds of new um fund risers starting daily that for the benefit of our users we actually need to REM remove this kind of Kickstarter option uh because when people were using it they were less likely to collect the whole amount of money it basically means that um if you for example if you're create if you're creating a fundis because you are sick like you you need some surgery or someone in in your family needs needs one um you are more likely to collect the whole sum by just asking people for donations and not giving anything in return and whenever people were adding those like freebies uh for for donations they were actually collecting less money this might be very counterintuitive but I think when you when you think deeper about this there is something something interesting there so often um when NOS try to attract donations they also try to give something back t-shirts are a good example of that but if I persuaded you to support my NGO because you believe in the cause that we are working working on you are already willing to donate if I tell you that I can accept the same amount of money and give you a t-shirt in return I kind of turned you into like shopping mode not like philanthropic mode but shopping mode now you're thinking do I need another t-shirt do I like this t-shirt and apparently you're even less likely to give me your money because if you don't like the T-shirt you're not taking you're not giving the money but you're also not giving the money without taking the T-shirt because you feel like a loser other people are getting the t-shirt for the same amount of money why should should you give and not get anything in return so what we saw on like hundreds of thousands of examples was that actual fin actual incentives made people less likely to donate uh which is kind of crazy but also maybe tell something something actually good and interesting about Humanity I think two other questions that I would also consider again thinking about about financial incentives is are you attracting the right crowd and my again my intuition tells me and this is also something that I based on actual conversations with people who seem like they're interested in in such stuff as uh as common common goods is that I think the this this space here actually has a very good um it might be a very good introduction to people who had nothing to do with web 3 before and it has this potential of actually sh showing this kind of better side of web 3 for the world that mostly see it as like Crypt Bros and don't even want to touch it with the stick uh so I I feel that um and again there is um there is a lot of research if you are interested in any uh in any of it just please talk to me about it later later on um but there is some research supporting this um area this idea that we should actually try to make people do things Al also for the right reason there is there is this research for example connected to uh climate change that um if you get people to save uh safe energy by um making them buy stuff you might actually make them a bit more materialistic and in the long run you're actually not making them conserve energy whatsoever so I I I just believe that there is some uh there is there are some things here to be careful about and to think about more carefully and maybe the good question is also why do we always assume that incentives are best that humans are strongly uh the that incentive always the best way to move humans so let's start with a question are you here and I'm not speaking only about this event but rather about this technological space basically for the money and if you are please put your hand up and of course of course okay there's one person there and I know I I I know it it might be hard to put your hand up here in this in this situation because people might judge you um I I'm totally aware of that um H sorry I but um I I believe that the reason we believe that everybody else is motivated by money is that there is interesting research showing our B IIs uh in terms of the way we look at at other people and uh This research was was um here people were trying to um evaluate what motivates people at work and you know we basically go to work to earn money there is no doubt about it that's that's like the main reason we're there but still whenever the researchers were were asking individual persons what mostly motivates them in their work they were G giv giving such reasons as you know I want to grow uh I want to receive some recognition it's my passion um you know I'm I'm motivated by by meaning and so so they could see that it's it's not like that money didn't matter it's that there was like lots of other reasons why why people were working in um certain space in certain uh position or in certain company we can definitely see this huge shift of people actually wanting to work uh in companies that have this positive impact in the world so this is something that really matters to people but whenever they asked employees what do you think other people are motivated by they actually mentioned much money much more often than when they were thinking about this themselves so apparently there is this is there is this inherent bias when when we think that it's just you know we are angels we're only here for the right reasons uh but everybody else just wants the money so my my feeling is that um the the fact that we always assume that it's only money that will incentivize people to do things kind of comes from this um clash between how much we understand ourselves and how much Insight we have into the thoughts and you know uh dreams of other people and you know apparently we are as a Humanity we're generally much better than we think I also I I have to say that I also sometimes wonder if one of the problem that's already kind of visible in web 3 space is that there's already too much money here and this is also something that I I have observed in NGO space um in po the NGO that I started was uh focusing on farmed animals farmed animals are the animals that people mostly consume they don't keep them at homes which means that they are also not that likely to donate to help us save them in any way there were no you um EU programs to um to support us there were no government grants uh we could only depend on individual donations of small donors at the same time at at least in Poland you could see that for example women's rights movement and LGBT movement had a lot of like external support either from Norway or from European union and or entities like this the problems the problem started when Poland started having right government a right-wing government then you could see that all those organizations uh that were dependent on big money from Big foundations and uh International donors like European Union because before that they did not learn how to actually communicate very effectively with the public and the right-wing government cut the funding uh to them it was a disaster for some time they had to learn how to communicate with people uh from scratch uh and I I kind of feel that when when I when I look at the way the web 3 space communicates with outside public it doesn't look as if this space actually wanted someone to understand and for me it almost looks like those NOS that are getting too much funding like you kind of depend on the grant money on the donor money so we so it it makes NGS really effective in communicating with the donors and and have like zero experience and almost zero attempts with communicating with regular people and I think in the long run it's actually harming the space it's super important to really learn how to communicate with the public how how to communicate with the with the mainstream to be able to progress so what motivates people to give first of all it's really emotions uh and I think it's again it's it's it's not so bad um we are formed both of reason and emotions and there is nothing bad with um um acknowledging that emotions also play play a role in in what we do uh we need to learn to tell compelling stories we need to acknowledge that people actually want to be part of something bigger than themselves and we have to do things that people actually care about but also learn how to explain to them why they should care uh we spent sometimes years or at least months thinking about why our project matters we cannot assume that people will instantly just get it we have to learn how to explain it better and again I wanted to give you some some example of from from again my my my pre previous work because making people care about farmed animals isn't always easy as I said those are animals that people tend to eat so they have all the reasons to not care about them because caring about them is costly so what activists actually noticed is that sometimes you can make people care by showing people other people who care about animals uh kind of introducing almost like a human translator of emotions and and this is what influenced a lot of visual storytelling in this in this space um I'm not saying that this will be the answer to the web three I just wanted to give it as an example of creative thinking on how to make people move and I strongly believe that incentives look easy and sometime every now and then they might be a good answer to problems but I also believe that there is much more interesting field of those human emotions and striving for purpose that this space haven't explored yet and we should definitely do much more about this thank you and this is my contact if you want to discuss [Music] more