The End of Slacktivism
How many times have you read something in the news and said, “Gah, the world is so unfair” or “Fuck! Trump is such a giant dickhead.” or “OMG that baby panda rolling in snow is the most adorbs thing I’ve seen in like…ever.”
So often we read the news and we’re overcome with emotion — anger awe, inspiration, joy, rage. The problem is that 99% of the time we do nothing. We really want to do something. But we’re human, and human nature pushes us down the path of least resistance.
Alas, we mash the button that is directly in front of us — the Facebook like button and call it a day. Deep down we know it’s not enough. A feeling of slacktivist guilt washes over us, but “hey,” we think to ourselves, “it’s better than nothing.” So we click on the next story in our newsfeed and the lingering feeling of guilt slowly dissipates as we distract ourselves with more pandas.
What if this wasn’t our only option.
What if Facebook eradicated slacktivism?
I think Facebook could do this with a single feature.
Let’s call it the Give button.
The idea behind Give is simple. Imagine if every time you read a news story that inspired you, angered you, or made you say “awww” you could contribute $1 to a charitable cause associated with the topic of the article simply by clicking Give.
Instead of merely ‘liking’ a news story to show our support for a cause, the Give button would make the news actionable. It would transform us from being passive observers of the news to active participants.
How the Give Button Works
Through natural language processing, Facebook would scan every news article for meaning and sentiment and link that article with the non-profit whose quality score (mission + efficacy) most aligns with the message of the news story.
So for instance, let’s say you’re reading an article in the NYT about an unarmed black teen getting shot by the police. Facebook’s natural language processing would be able to understand what the article is about and connect it to the most appropriate non-profit. Then, with one click of the Give button you would be able to contribute $1 to the ACLU.
Or maybe you’re reading an article about the extinction of rhinos due to poaching or you’re reading about the human rights abuses in our criminal justice system. Instead of feeling helpless and being bummed out about how messed up the world is, you can instantly voice your opinion by giving $1 to World Wildlife Fund and another $1 to the Innocence Project.
One can easily imagine a world where we all create an annual giving budget on Facebook and commit to giving $10 or $20 a month. We enter our credit card info a single time when we set it up and then we’re billed monthly and never have to pull out our credit card again. Over the course of the year we choose when and where we contribute based on what is inspiring us in the moment.
By exponentially reducing the friction of online giving, Facebook has the ability to make philanthropy part of our daily routines.
With Facebook’s scale, the numbers would add up quickly. Facebook users click the like button 6 billion times a day. If a scant 3 percent of those likes converted to $1 Gives, it would generate $180M a day for non-profits around the globe. In two weeks Facebook would process more money than Kickstarter, GiveForward, Indiegogo, GoFundme, and Kiva process in a year, combined.
Overnight, the Give button would transform Facebook into the largest charitable giving platform the world has ever seen.
Shifting the Paradigm from Defense to Offense
Under the current model of charitable giving most of us don’t give purposefully. In other words,
When it comes to charitable giving, we tend to play defense rather than offense.
I know I am a culprit of this form of mindless giving. I might give $25 to a friend running a marathon for charity and another $50 for a cousin’s Kickstarter campaign. But there is no intention or thought behind it. I give primarily because I care about the person asking, not because I care about the cause.
The Give button shifts this paradigm by turning every news story into an opportunity to flex our philanthropic muscles for the causes we care about.
It gives us the opportunity to play offense rather than defense. Everything is tracked and measured in a dashboard and we can see over time what causes we care about most and the impact we’ve made over the years.
This new model of giving would democratize philanthropy, serving as the gateway drug for millennials to start giving small amounts throughout our lifetimes. The low-lift nature (donations as small as $1), the reduction in friction (give directly from the newsfeed with one click), and the elimination of the non-profit discovery problem (when you care about a cause but don’t know the best non-profit to give to) would empower an entire generation to give forward starting today rather than waiting until we are older and wealthier to give back.
Is the Future of Philanthropy on Social Media?
Facebook should focus on how to fundamentally change the next generation’s entire relationship with philanthropy, a complete redesign of the existing model for charitable giving.
So what are the chances we actually see a Give button on Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat in the future? I think it’s feasible that we could see a something like this from any one of these platforms, but I think Facebook would be the most likely in large part because Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be a force for good in the world and he already Social Good Team at the company this past fall to make it happen.
In my opinion, an obvious place for the Social Good team to start would be with online giving through Facebook. The challenge, of course, and where it would get tricky, is that they would have to do this without killing the golden goose — that is they can’t clutter up the newsfeed with so many hard asks (i.e. donation appeals) that people get turned off from using Facebook altogether.
There aren’t many existing models (i.e. crowdfunding, etc) that can solve for this golden goose problem. As I see it, the best way is to eliminate the hard ask altogether, and this is exactly what the Give button would do. It would be a win for consumers, a win for non-profits and a win for Facebook.
Final Thoughts
In December Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan promised to give 99% of their Facebook stock away during their lifetimes. Zuckerberg has stated:
With a generation of younger folks who have thrived on the success of their companies, there is a big opportunity for many of us to give back earlier in our lifetime and see the impact of our philanthropic efforts.
I personally think what Zuckerberg is doing is incredible. Just as Zuckerberg was inspired by Bill Gates to become a philanthropist, Zuckerberg is inspiring the next generation by leading with his actions.
But I don’t think we need to be billionaires in order to be philanthropists. The next step for Zuckerberg and Facebook should be to go beyond inspiration and shift towards empowerment. I would love to see a future where everyone can be (and is expected to be) a mini-Zuckerberg. Here’s to hoping that one day Facebook might make this a reality.
Boring Nerd Stuff: Further Readings, Assumptions, and Unintended Consequences
Further Reading
As I was researching for the post, I found out there is actually a c company already working on pretty much this exact problem. It’s called Public Good. They are creating a “take action” button that can be put anywhere on the web to make the news actionable. Check it out here.
Assumptions
I make a lot of assumptions in this post that would have to be true in order for the Give button to be successful. Below are three of the major ones. I would love to get people’s feedback to help me better understand me blindspots. Are any of my assumptions way off base? What else am I missing?
1. Facebook can create generosity where generosity does not yet exist
I believe that far and away the biggest challenge for Facebook is getting users to fundamentally change their attitudes and behaviors around philanthropy.
That said I do think behavior change is possible and I think the key lies in creating strong community norms.
Community norms are the unspoken rules that guide our actions in a particular community. So, for instance, if Joe visits a website and he feels everyone on the site is doing X, Joe is going to do X as well. Humans have a need to fit in, to conform. We don’t want to stray from the norms and this applies to the world of giving as well. As Wharton professor, Adam Grant points out in his book Give and Take,
“If a group develops a norm for giving, members will uphold the norm and give even if they are inclined to be takers or matchers elsewhere.”
Here’s a real world of example of how a perceived community norm can create behavior change in the world of philanthropy.
At GiveForward, we used to offer donors the opportunity to cover the transactions fees by checking a box on the checkout page. If they checked the box, then 100% of the donation would go to the cause. If they didn’t check it, the fees would instead be deducted from their donation. When the box was defaulted to unchecked, only around 50% of donors chose to opt-in and cover the fees.
One day we decided to test what would happen if we pre-checked the box. The results were fascinating. When the box was checked an astounding 95% of people chose to cover the fees. Only 5% of donors unchecked it.
By pre-checking the box, we had established a community norm for covering the fees. Once we had established this community norm, almost no one chose to stray from it.
The moral of the story is that default setting are powerful in creating community norms.
And if there is one company in the world that’s really good at using default settings to create community norms it’s probably Facebook.
Facebook has proven time and time again that it can radically change our daily behaviors. Take birthdays for example. Before Facebook, did you ever wish your mom’s cousin-in-law a happy birthday or even know when his birthday was?
No. Of course not. Because that would be insane.
But when Facebook began prioritizing birthdays in its user interface by creating a notification pop up every morning alerting us to our friends’ birthdays, we all followed their cue. Facebook created a community norm around wishing everyone in our network a happy birthday and now it’s something we all do.
2. Facebook is willing to blow up the ‘like’ button to make this happen
The Facebook like button is a beast. It gets clicked 2.2 trillion times a year and generates billions in profits for Facebook.
As I started doing research for this post, I wondered if Facebook would be willing to mess with their most important button. But as it turns out the answer is yes and Facebook is already one step ahead. Over the past few months Facebook has started replacing the like button with a wider variety of “reactions” essentially five different emojis like sadness, anger, love, etc that are more nuanced than the all encompassing like button. Facebook had been beta testing the new feature in Spain and Ireland and a few other countries. As everyone has seen in the last couple of weeks, they rolled it out worldwide. It’s not a far leap to think that they could now add Give to the reactions feature set.
3. Facebook would design the ‘Give’ Feature around Millennials
If Facebook is going to fundamentally change our relationship with charitable giving, I believe the best place to start is with millennials for a number of reasons.
- Millennials get their news from Facebook.
88% of Millennials get news from Facebook and 44% read news on Facebook at least several times a day.
2. Millennials already engage with news on social media more actively than any other age group.
60% of Millennials say they regularly “like” a posted news story, headline, or link. In other words, Millennials already like the shit out of the news. It wouldn’t be a huge behavior change from clicking like to clicking Give.
3. Millennials have grown up with the expectation that everything should be instantaneous.
4. A new cohort of millennials is coming of age every year with very few preconceived ideas around charitable giving.
In other words, Facebook has a clean slate to shape the minds of the future rather than try to change the minds of an older generation set in their ways.
5. Millennials are about to experience a massive wealth transfer and Facebook will want to get ahead of the curve on this one.
6. Current millennial giving is anemic. There is nowhere to go but up.
This point could obviously cut both ways and I appreciate the counterargument that Millennials would actually be the worst group to start with.
My assumptions are that millennials don’t give at high rates because (a) we don’t feel like we have enough money to give; (b) we don’t know which charities to give to (it’s a discovery problem); (c) we’re lazy and don’t want to leave Facebook; and (d) we need to see our impact and we feel more fulfilled by volunteering than giving money. If these assumptions are true, the Give button would solve for most of them (maybe not d, but certainly a,b, and c).
On the other hand, if these assumptions are wrong and the reality is that millennials don’t give simply because we’re not yet at the generativity stage of psychosocial development where giving back becomes a focal point of our lives, well then all this goes out the window.
In this scenario, Give could still work as a feature, but the power users might be in their late 30s and 40s rather than Millennials age 24–34.
Final note
If something like the Give button were ever to be implemented, what would the ripple effect look like? I’m curious to hear people’s opinions. How would stakeholders like non-profits, journalists, advertisers, politicians etc, be affected both positively and negatively?
Thank you to Josh Elman, Dan Ratner, Professor Adam Grant and Reb Rebele for reading early drafts of this post.
