What would you do online to support a cause?

I believed 30 people of those interviewed would select a non-profit to receive funding from our WTIM beta campaign. I didn’t know how many people I was going to interview for that to happen I just figured that from three four hour attempts I would be able to talk with enough people asking them to vote for charity and give them a 3"x1.5" card with the text “Working Together to Make a Difference in Your Community — WeThinkItMatters.com” that 30 people would vote for a non-profit to get funding from the campaign sponsor.

In reality, I spoke to 30 people in person on the streets over 12 hours, 40 people took the card and 1 person voted.

In reality online I had “real” traffic from 73 visitors I would have hoped to see taking action, but only 5 voted.

So what did I learn, don’t assume it will be easy to speak with anyone. I thought I would just find a busy street corner and work the intersection. But I found it surprising hard to get people to give me any time. Most would say no thank you as soon as I asked “would you be willing to select a charity”.

Right away I could sense they thought I was asking them to give money for something. I tried to change my approach so that it did not seem I was asking for their money, just a vote, but most times was shut down from the start of contact.

I get it though; we are bombarded by people, organizations, and businesses asking for our money all day long. So I was trying not to take it personal, but still had periods of feeling sad about how it was going.

How could I convey a WeThinkItMatters campaign is not asking you for a donation, we’re asking you to select a charity to receive funding from the campaign sponsorship. And as a bonus during the process of choosing a non-profit in the campaign to receive funding, you are also entered to win cash prizes for your personal favorite non-profit and you.

Portland had a storm which brought with it 13 inches of snow, which later turned to ice. 60 miles north in Toledo WA where I live we had about 8 inches. So my plans to have the interview process done and report done by the Jan 16th got canceled.

When there was still about 5 inches of slush on the roads I headed to Portland for my last trip related to this hypothesis. A great opportunity presented itself to me, I was asked to present at 1 Million Cups Portland.

These meeting quite often had 20 people show up, with the snow still on side roads in Portland I knew there wouldn’t be as many people as usual, but I would at least have the attention of those there and not be interrupting them on the streets since they came to listen to me.

I figured since it is a custom of 1 Million Cups to ask the presenting entrepreneur after the talk what is one thing everyone there could do to help was, I would ask them to vote for a non-profit in the beta campaign, and share it.

8 people braved the snow covered streets to attend the 1M Cups meeting. And I faced my fears of public speaking. My presentation wasn’t awful, but I did have some brain farts and drips of sweat coming down my head.

The Q/A section of the meeting was great. Much less stressful for me to answer questions and I got some awesome insights and feedback from the audience.

I learned I still had work to do in making our business model clear and how the process of voting created the funding. But even after I explained WTIM wasn’t asking you for a donation, the funds have already been put up, what we are asking you is, who to give it to. Still none from the meeting voted.

Over the 4 weeks period of this experiment there was 5 votes total that came in from the interview process. And these by a large percentage came from the people I had a previous connection with.

In all I really only talked with 30 people total over the 3 attempts to share in Portland. Like I mentioned most just politely said no thank you as soon as I started my pitch, some just took the card to be nice or in hopes I would go away, some listened and shared about things they were doing online to support causes now.

And about 20 took the card saying that they would vote, but only 1 or 2 took action.

Mr. Berk asked I share a traffic report. WeThinkItMatters.com had 3,483 unique visits, 2,272 from referral, 1,180 direct type, and 31 from search. On inspection to see where all this referral traffic was coming from, most was Ukraine and Russian sites.

The top 3 referrals were ukrsmeta.ua (260 visits), proxtrail.ru(130 visits), avtokor-23.ru(55 visits). “If you can share with me in the comments what these sites are about and where WeThinkItMatters is mentioned in them there will be a reward!”

Traffic that I would have hoped to see more conversions from was m.facebook.com (41 visits), 1millioncups.com (12 visits), wtim.co (20 visits). What was keeping these people from taking action?

Top 20 viewed pages

Web-page______________________________________________ Visits

WeThinkItMatters.com/ _________________________________3,172

what-matters-to-you.html ________________________________182

bridgeworksnwbeta.html _________________________________84

member-owned-media.html _______________________________60

become-a-partner.html ___________________________________60

become-a-owner.html ____________________________________55

/news/wtim-beta-testing-jobs _____________________________51

news/world-impacting-career-opportunities ________________47

news/a-quest-to-help-the-world-1-cause-at-a-time ___________41

bridgeworksnwbeta-homelessness-transitionalyouth.html ____41

sdg3.html _______________________________________________38

sdg2.html _______________________________________________36

bridgeworksnwbeta-homelessness-bridgetown.html __________33

sdg5.html _______________________________________________32

sdg4.html _______________________________________________29

bridgeworksnwbeta-homelessness-sharevancouverwa.html ___28

help-wanted-wtim-beta-testing-jobs.html ___________________28

sdg1.html _______________________________________________27

sdg12.html ______________________________________________27

sdg7.html _______________________________________________26

From my research and others research, people were saying they are doing things like signing petitions, taking surveys, donating and sharing about causes online. So why weren’t more people when presented an opportunity to select a charity to receive funding just by voting for it, taking the action?

Well from some of the feedback I got at 1 Million Cups Portland it was still not clear to others what WeThinkItMatters is about and how it works. So even after I thought this last update to the MVP made it much more user friendly and easy to understand, I realize I still need to make the messaging more clear.

I will have an opportunity to work on that since I will be giving a 1 minute pitch at OEN PubTalk: PitchFest! on February 8th. This is practice for the Oregon Angel Conference I am applying to present at.

My next steps are to integrate the feedback I got into the WeThinkItMatters homepage and beta campaign and find out if that inspires action when people visit.

Also I will be doing an email outreach campaign to those that have already voted in the beta campaign asking them to share it, and find out if any are interested in becoming advocates for the beta campaign.

Interested in hearing what I had to say at 1 Million Cups Portland, Please have a listen to a little of my journey in entrepreneurship.

If you found out you could raise money for causes you care about with just the tap of your finger, would you? WeThinkItMatters.com