social giving
altruism when everyone else can see
This article was originally published on Medium on 5/21/2019.
A few days back, the Human Life Protection Act was passed by Alabama lawmakers, effectively banning abortions in the state and completely criminalizing all parties involved. I woke up to hundreds of Instagram stories about it, and I clicked through everything from donation links, to instructions to call my Congress representatives, to art, to corporate like campaigns. People were undoubtedly moved by this event, and took to social media to express their frustration with the legislators who made HB-314 a grim reality.
This, of course, isn’t an isolated event. The Notre Dame cathedral fire, Cyclone Fani, and the election of President Donald Trump all inspired similar sentiments among a demographic becoming increasingly engaged with the world’s events. While some may call them keyboard warriors and scoff at the thought of making an impact by hitting “like” or posting an Instagram story about the news, these tiny acts of engagement are adding up. An example is the campaign by women’s health startup Hers, donating a dollar per like to women’s reproductive rights groups on their most recent post. They reached their $10K goal within hours, and have recently multiplied their fundraising target by 15 times, donating up to $150K.
People love when they’re able to feel good, or make an impact, without a ton of effort. It’s a lot easier to convince someone to hit a like, or Venmo a dollar to a charity, than to get up and physically protest, or donate some large sum of money. People are already doing this sort of online mini-benevolence behavior. Ever seen a Facebook birthday donations post? People are able to rack up hundreds of dollars on those, simply by getting a lot of people to give a little bit and feel the serotonin rush induced by simultaneously giving a present and a donation with the same card charge. There’s also sharing Instagram protest art, as opposed to making a sign and picketing outside in the streets.
The point is, these small online acts of good give people the same satisfaction, and often make the same accumulated public impact, as doing the same thing in person or to a bigger extent. Let’s call this micro-giving/protest-art-sharing/campaign-donating/corporate-donation-post-liking behavior mini-good.
For a product to be successful in the mini-good space, it needs to enable two main things. Firstly, some small, frictionless act of good that the user has direct control over (i.e. they know where their contribution is going, and can decide on it themselves). Secondly, easy shareability. There should be a way for users to let everyone else know just how good and giving and benevolent they are, since charity isn’t always the most selfless act, whether we admit that or not. Side note — I like to think of socially-motivated good-doing as a form of individual brand building, motivated by a desire to be seen by others as “a good guy” or “a nice girl”, similar to why companies do CSR campaigns. Not completely for the benefit it brings to society, but also not completely for the vanity.
The reason why I write about this vertical is that I don’t think there are any companies doing the two things it takes to be something people will use every time there’s a tumultuous political event or devastating natural disaster. Sure, there are platforms like Goodworld that try to make it happen, but it isn’t very popular, probably because there’s set-up involved and because commenting on someone else’s post doesn’t give users the same spotlight they’d get from an individual post or story on their own profile. Users’ current behavior in the mini-good space can be categorized into three groups — sharing, giving, and supporting.
Sharing is what we’ve been doing for ages. We see something online that we think is shocking, or surprising, and we post it on our own pages. In mini-good, this content takes the form of sharing news articles, fact sheets, and posts from social organizations. There’s not much space for a startup to disrupt here, since people are unlikely to move from the big three social media (FB, Twitter, and Instagram) to post stuff.
Where the opportunity for a company to come along and make things easier lies is in the giving and supporting functions. Giving is donating money, items, or time, and supporting is contributing to an existing campaign by some organization (think “we’ll donate $1 for each like” or “repost and we’ll plant a tree”). I think that a platform or feature which neatly separates these on social media, distinguishing them from regular social actions, will be quite successful.
Why hasn’t anybody hopped onto this mini-good concept yet? Big platforms already have some small features built into place, like the previously mentioned Facebook birthday donation campaigns and AmazonSmile. However, I think the most successful feature will be one that’s clearly distinguishable from regular activity on the platform. An act of good must be plainly conspicuous, in order to feed the potentially self-serving motives behind peoples’ acts.
Don’t get me wrong — people are inherently, probably good, and do these things because they care, but there’s no denying that a lot of us also want our friends and family to know just how good we are. When these posts are highlighted, or visually distinct from regular posts, the feel-good sense is heightened, making the social giving process even more effective. When people feel really good, they’re likely to return to using that feature.
To conclude, it’s not clear whether current platforms need to be augmented or a new supplementary product needs to be developed in order to enable frictionless, but socially satisfactory acts of good online. What I do know, however, is that this is a market need that is only going to grow deeper as the world becomes more opinionated.