As you probably noticed if you are a facebook friend of mine, Invisible Children was doing everything we could this past week to get your vote in an online competition to win $1 million. And was it EVER dramatic.
This past week, we pulled together a group of volunteers (sometimes numbering over 100) in our office to reach out and ask the general public to vote for us to win. We worked 18 hour days, even on Saturday and Martin Luther King day. We called, we emailed, we texted, we snail mailed, we faxed out press releases, we did interviews on the news and radio, and then we did it all over again. All across the country, our most committed volunteers started calling us asking how they could set up call centers in their homes to get more votes too. It was incredible.
This week-long competition was not without its moments of drama. Initially, Invisible Children and TWLOHA (To Write Love on Her Arms) were battling back and forth to hold onto the first place spot. We expected this. TWLOHA and IC both have a strong presence in youth culture and this was obviously the age group that would be voting the most on Facebook. However, the difference between the two groups was that Invisible Children had club chapters at thousands of schools across America. We discovered that as soon as we activated all these clubs asking them to find votes, that we gained an increasing pace in getting votes. Hmmm, maybe the press coverage didn't hurt too.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laren-poole/help-invisible-children-g_b_428792.html
(Additional press included The Washington Post, CNN Tech, Fox 5 News San Diego, The San Diego Union Tribune, and 91X radio)
So, amid the fury of phone calls, helping loved ones create facebook accounts for the very first time, and the press, we missed the fact that another group, Isha, was climbing in the rankings for votes. All of a sudden, we saw that they were collecting votes three times faster than we could. "Who is Isha?" we all started googling. The answers we found were interesting.
-They provided inner transformation and personal growth? http://www.ishafoundation.org/
-They were mystic? http://www.midnightswiththemystic.com/isha-foundation.html
-They were a cult? http://guruphiliac.lefora.com/2009/03/17/sadhguru-and-the-isha-foundation/
-They were a yoga foundation that charges $1,800 to hear their speaker at conferences? http://www.ishafoundation.org/component/option,com_program/program_id,3119/task,details/
And who was voting for them? Well according to Facebook, people with names like Sdfj Dfsjlfkddjf or Gdfg Kcjbvkljvb. And they had never had any previous activity. Or facebook friends. Or any other info about them on their account. They were gaining votes at an almost, umm... mechanical rate. And we were starting to feel a lot like Avatars, defending ourselves against the machines.
This article seems to agree that votes were looking funky: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/22/fraud-in-facebookchase-co_n_433928.html
I was crying. I was praying. I was barely sleeping. I asked God to please send the money to those who needed it most. And mostly, I was just working my phone and facebook to hunt down more votes for us. No matter WHAT type of votes we had to overcome, I was going to give it my all. In the last hours of competion, our 10,000 vote lead was slimming down to 6,000, then 4,500, then 2,000. Could we hold onto first place? And then the miracle tweets started pouring in. Katy Perry tweeted us. Then Rick Warren. Then, most surprising of all, TWLOHA publicly tweeted their support for us and asked their supporters to use their remaining votes to support us. And no matter what, we just kept calling. And calling. And calling. And then when it couldn't come fast enough, 9:00 pm hit. And we won! Barely. we had 123,990, Isha had 122,742 votes (a margin of just over 1,200 votes. If Isha had kept their pace for 30 more minutes, we would have lost).
So, we screamed. And danced to "A Milli" by Lil Wayne. And cried. And hugged. And Jason reminded us that this money was not OURS. It was God's and we need to invest and multiply it in a way that would make Him proud. And then we drank pink champaign on ice (an incredible gift from someone who wanted us to RELAX)... because if ever there was a time that we deserved to celebrate, this was the night.
The quote that will live forever in our history: "If they was using robots, and we still beat them, what does that make US????" -Zach Barrows
Congratulations on Invisible Children's efforts and winning the grand prize in the Facebook Chase Community Giving competition. I'm sure your organization will put the money to great use and I look forward to seeing all the good that comes from it.
ReplyDeleteThere were many wonderful organizations involved in this competition and I hope you would agree that wih five million in grant dollars on the line, I trust that Chase and Facebook did their due dilligence to ensure that all the organizations involved are reputable charities.
I came across your blog and read the HP article you reference because I have a Google Alert set to receive updates on Isha Foundation, an organization I have personally and professionally been involved with for the last year or so. I was a voter, not an Avatar (loved the movie though) and I have not written a response to the article because so many already have. But after reading your blog, it just saddened me to see that someone representing a great organization like IC would make such insinuations and negative innuendos about another organization also working to make this world a better place for children. What ever happened to good sportsmanship?
In your third paragraph, you talk about all the efforts that took place from your office and through your volunteer network. Your description could be used to describe exactly what happened with Isha's campaign for the prize. If you take a little more time and really research this organization, you will see that Isha Foundation was established over 25 years ago and has a very large presence internationally and extremely large presence in India. Where IC's volunteers are in the hundreds, Isha's are in the hundreds of thousands (again, major kudos to IC volunteers!) This competition was a testament to what passion and the power of community and the Internet can do in rallying troops for a cause as seen with both these and many of the other organizations in the competition.
Personally, when it comes to reputation, I would trust the World Economic Forum over a website called "Guruphillac Forum". Although I've never heard of Guruphillac Forum, the World Economic Forum thinks enough of the Isha Founder's reputation to invite him to speak at their annual conference in Davos for the last four years.
One of my colleagues/friends was involved professionally with Invisible Children in their start-up days and she always spoke so highly of the founders and their passion for changing this world. This is the same description I would use for the founder of Isha Foundation and all the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide that support it. I only hope that the founders and execs at IC recognize other organizations that share a passion for changing this world and avoid making negative inferences and inaccurate statements. I hope the views on your personal blog are not representative of your organizations.
Again, congratulations and I look forward to seeing all the great and always creative work that will come from Invisible Children with the funds.
Hello Annonymous,
ReplyDeleteVery articulate response and of course we are all wrestling with the mixed feelings of aggression that were stirred up when charities were pitted against each other in a competition. I fought for votes because I personally know and love people who were directly affected by the terrors of Joseph Kony and I feel a deep responsibility to defend my friends who have been taken advantage of so much in the past.
That being said, I still have my doubts about the validity of certain votes that appeared for Isha. If these votes were caused by some sort of spambot it seems that it was an unfair approach. If there were cheating methods used in this, I view this as a robbery from other non-profits. Cheating to win this money would be a version of stealing from the poorest people in the world. And of course I would be upset about that! Again, I doubt if I will ever know for sure the origins of voters like Sdfj Dfsjlfkddjf or Gdfg Kcjbvkljv (and hundreds of other similar names I saw like that voting) but I DO have my doubts, as would most people looking in.