New funding mechanisms for the P2P movement(s)

Though addressed to the ‘progressive movement’ in general, these comments apply to p2p efforts as well. Our p2p friend Suresh Fernando is involved as well, see below.

If you like what you read below, please help crowdfund that project here.

Excerpted from Joe Brewer:

“If we are to build our capacity for the long haul, we must discover the funding models that will carry us into this new paradigm. I have some early experience in this arena through a successful crowdfunding campaign I ran last fall to create the Progressive Strategy Handbook. It is the first of its kind, a crowd-funded, open source project designed to engage progressives in ongoing dialogue about strategies for the movement.

And now I am excited to partner with Suresh Fernando, co-founder of OpenKollab, to take this work to the next level. We have just launched another crowdfunding campaign, How We’ll Fund 21st Century Social Movements, with the goal of creating a How-To-Guide on the use of crowdsourcing to increase engagement and collaboration through micro-financing methods.

We have started to see what the new funding models will look like. The most promising of them are built on the themes of interactivity, engagement and empowerment. We are discovering that the most powerful funding models are also community organizing models. They turn the traditional approach to engagement on its head. While most organizations today seek to engage with their constituents in order to raise money, the most successful are raising money as a side effect of ongoing engagement and participation.

The Obama Campaign exemplified this in 2008. Small donations flowed in month after month as the number of volunteers increased. Fundraising was built on a model of community engagement that sustained itself by keeping participation high. The campaign leveraged the power of social media to enable volunteers to organize themselves into local clusters, which amplified this effect over time.

So the key to funding the progressive movement is to focus on collaboration and participation, while leveraging the power of social media for helping crowds to organize themselves and become the primary driver of the movement. Our strategy handbook is demonstrating how this works right now. It was funded through a network of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. And now it represents an emerging conversation that weaves across this digital landscape and touches down in local communities across the country.”

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