Sign In
PREV
SHARE
Email Confirmation
Charity Prize Fight
by Dalia Fahmy
Jun 12 2008
Jun 12 2008
Prize philanthropy may not be the answer to the world's problems, but its growing use is helping focus more attention and resources on their behalf.
Family foundations are on the rise. Who's giving—and who's missing? Read More
The Changemakers chatboards buzzed. Hundreds of contestants from 29 countries had gathered online to compete for $5,000 cash prizes and the potential for millions more. Fans logged in around the clock to cheer their favorites and vote for a winner.
"Simply mind-blowing," raved one fan from India about one of the entries. "Long live Joyce!" wrote another from Uganda, referring to a different entry.
It sounds like an American Idol knock-off, but the goal here wasn't to crown another pop star. The organizers at Changemakers, a philanthropic foundation, wanted ideas on how to improve poor people's access to health care. In the end, the winning entries included a plan for creating a computer network that allows medical specialists to help rural doctors treat chronic diseases and a model for setting up family-counseling clinics in shopping malls.
Welcome to the latest craze in philanthropy: competitions. Trying to shake up the traditionally exclusive and opaque process of grant-making, benefactors ranging from the Rockefeller Foundation to Virgin's Sir Richard Branson are funding public contests aimed at solving the world's ills. While these competitions sometimes fall short of generating viable solutions to the problems they seek to address, they're drawing plenty of publicity, money, and ideas to causes that usually draw resigned sighs.
"Can I tell you that more children are being fed somewhere, or health has improved [directly] because of a Changemakers competition? No," says Nancy Barrand, a senior program officer at the $10 billion Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sponsored the Changemakers health-care competition and is considering entrants for $5 million in grants. "But if you believe that change comes from making more people aware of a problem and bringing more resources to bear on that problem, then I think Changemakers does have an impact."
In many ways, publicity is the most valuable by-product offered by competitions—not only for the causes and the foundations that champion them, but also on those laboring away in the trenches to help solve them.
Diane Flannery, the co-director of the Semel Institute at U.C.L.A. who won one of the prizes in the Changemakers health-care competition for her proposal for accessible family counseling, says the contest gave her team a whole new level of exposure, putting her in touch with many potential funders and collaborators.
"We got called by people at U.C.L.A. who didn't even know what we were doing and were interested in our work," recalls Flannery, who says she was initially skeptical about philanthropic competitions.
Competitions to spur innovation and do social good aren't new—Charles Lindbergh's 1927 transatlantic flight was famously the result of a $25,000 competition that helped spur the growth of commercial air travel—but the sheer range and number of competitions being put together is.
"Simply mind-blowing," raved one fan from India about one of the entries. "Long live Joyce!" wrote another from Uganda, referring to a different entry.
It sounds like an American Idol knock-off, but the goal here wasn't to crown another pop star. The organizers at Changemakers, a philanthropic foundation, wanted ideas on how to improve poor people's access to health care. In the end, the winning entries included a plan for creating a computer network that allows medical specialists to help rural doctors treat chronic diseases and a model for setting up family-counseling clinics in shopping malls.
Welcome to the latest craze in philanthropy: competitions. Trying to shake up the traditionally exclusive and opaque process of grant-making, benefactors ranging from the Rockefeller Foundation to Virgin's Sir Richard Branson are funding public contests aimed at solving the world's ills. While these competitions sometimes fall short of generating viable solutions to the problems they seek to address, they're drawing plenty of publicity, money, and ideas to causes that usually draw resigned sighs.
"Can I tell you that more children are being fed somewhere, or health has improved [directly] because of a Changemakers competition? No," says Nancy Barrand, a senior program officer at the $10 billion Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which sponsored the Changemakers health-care competition and is considering entrants for $5 million in grants. "But if you believe that change comes from making more people aware of a problem and bringing more resources to bear on that problem, then I think Changemakers does have an impact."
In many ways, publicity is the most valuable by-product offered by competitions—not only for the causes and the foundations that champion them, but also on those laboring away in the trenches to help solve them.
Diane Flannery, the co-director of the Semel Institute at U.C.L.A. who won one of the prizes in the Changemakers health-care competition for her proposal for accessible family counseling, says the contest gave her team a whole new level of exposure, putting her in touch with many potential funders and collaborators.
"We got called by people at U.C.L.A. who didn't even know what we were doing and were interested in our work," recalls Flannery, who says she was initially skeptical about philanthropic competitions.
Competitions to spur innovation and do social good aren't new—Charles Lindbergh's 1927 transatlantic flight was famously the result of a $25,000 competition that helped spur the growth of commercial air travel—but the sheer range and number of competitions being put together is.
Changemakers, a subsidiary of Ashoka International, one of the pioneers of social entrepreneurship, runs its competitions online and poses broad challenges, such as the one seeking to improve health care access. It offers small cash prizes and then gets sponsors to promise larger grants to selected participants. Similarly, the Rockefeller Foundation hosts online competitions for prizes of around $20,000 to help solve a wide range of social ills on the popular "crowdsourcing" website InnoCentive.
Other competitions are more specific or more ambitious: Sir Richard Branson is offering $25 million to whomever comes up with a "commercially viable design" to reduce global warming (a spokeswoman for Virgin U.S.A. says "hundreds" of entries have been submitted already, but a winner has not yet been chosen). And the X Prize Foundation, which jump-started the current vogue for prize philanthropy in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the builders of a personal spacecraft to help develop the commercial spaceflight industry, is now offering a $30 million prize for whomever can send a robot to the moon and get images and data back to Earth, and a $10 million prize for a production-ready car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas.
A primary benefit of these competitions is the amount of money they can bring to bear on a problem or issue, beyond the actual prize money being awarded.
"Competitions are very good for shifting the expense of research and development to a broad-based marketplace, and away from a single investor," says Lucy Bernholz, a well-known philanthropy consultant who writes the popular blog "Philanthropy 2173."
As an example, Tom Vander Ark, president of the X Prize Foundation, estimates that contestants in the X Prize's spaceflight competition collectively spent $100 million in their attempt to win the $10 million prize. And if the private spacecraft industry blossoms as a result, tens of millions more in investment could follow.
Money also comes from companies that sponsor the actual prizes in exchange for naming rights. Auto insurer Progressive is funding the $10 million prize behind the X Prize's contest to develop an extremely fuel-efficient car, for instance. And the company plans to spend millions more on promoting the event, says Progressive's director of special projects, Brian Silva. For a company with an annual advertising budget of $300 million, that's a small price to pay for such publicity, which has included a kickoff announcement at the New York International Auto Show by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
As U.C.L.A.'s Flannery says of her experience with prize philanthropy, "At first I thought it would just be easier to write a grant and get it over with, but the payoff here is much more than that."
Other competitions are more specific or more ambitious: Sir Richard Branson is offering $25 million to whomever comes up with a "commercially viable design" to reduce global warming (a spokeswoman for Virgin U.S.A. says "hundreds" of entries have been submitted already, but a winner has not yet been chosen). And the X Prize Foundation, which jump-started the current vogue for prize philanthropy in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the builders of a personal spacecraft to help develop the commercial spaceflight industry, is now offering a $30 million prize for whomever can send a robot to the moon and get images and data back to Earth, and a $10 million prize for a production-ready car that can travel 100 miles on a single gallon of gas.
A primary benefit of these competitions is the amount of money they can bring to bear on a problem or issue, beyond the actual prize money being awarded.
"Competitions are very good for shifting the expense of research and development to a broad-based marketplace, and away from a single investor," says Lucy Bernholz, a well-known philanthropy consultant who writes the popular blog "Philanthropy 2173."
As an example, Tom Vander Ark, president of the X Prize Foundation, estimates that contestants in the X Prize's spaceflight competition collectively spent $100 million in their attempt to win the $10 million prize. And if the private spacecraft industry blossoms as a result, tens of millions more in investment could follow.
Money also comes from companies that sponsor the actual prizes in exchange for naming rights. Auto insurer Progressive is funding the $10 million prize behind the X Prize's contest to develop an extremely fuel-efficient car, for instance. And the company plans to spend millions more on promoting the event, says Progressive's director of special projects, Brian Silva. For a company with an annual advertising budget of $300 million, that's a small price to pay for such publicity, which has included a kickoff announcement at the New York International Auto Show by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
As U.C.L.A.'s Flannery says of her experience with prize philanthropy, "At first I thought it would just be easier to write a grant and get it over with, but the payoff here is much more than that."
Mobile
| Read All