“All emotion is involuntary when genuine,” said Mark Twain.

For anyone starting a co-op, this rings true—even more than the first cooperative principle of “voluntary and open membership.”

Co-ops self-organize out of desperation and determination. With emotions running high, and without access to venture capital, co-op organizers romanticize crowdfunding as a digital barn-raiser.

Intuitively, this makes sense: we want to build a beloved community, not tap people out.

In practice, most co-ops struggle with crowdfunding. Very few campaigns lead to what Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart calls “deep acting,” our genuine emotions at work. Instead, organizers fall back on “surface acting,” the kind of behaviour associated with fake smiles and guilt parties. They often strain volunteers, stress supporters, and fail at their goals.

Marketing has skewed our view of crowdfunding by influencing how we think and feel about community.

What does “community” really mean here? Community is collective action with a shared story. We join clubs and co-ops that offer material benefits — things that matter to us on a daily basis—and we stay because of solidarity with our peers and a purpose we can achieve together. The more we act collectively, the more we strengthen these incentives.

Incorporating as a co-op is a long way from building community. There’s a grain of truth to idea that co-ops are the original crowdfunding, yet people experience them in our organizing and campaigns, not the bylaws or business plans we might be tempted to show them.

We can’t extract generosity through crowdfunding—that’s what marketing tries to do in platform capitalism. Instead, we must form relationships rooted in reciprocity.

I learned these lessons last year, when I partnered with Loconomics to grow their membership and crowdfund their platform.

On paper, Loconomics had a beautiful model: a local services co-op owned by the freelancers doing the work. The user-owners get tools for booking clients, a growing marketplace, and a dividend based on the co-op’s performance. But the appeal of joining a co-op needed as much validation as the platform itself.

To research freelancer needs, I interviewed a representative group of a dozen local service providers—some with their own client base, others taking odd jobs on platforms like TaskRabbit. Nobody felt misinformed, much less exploited, with what they get through on-demand service platforms. However, everone craved the feeling of belonging to something bigger. A part-time plumber with a philosophy degree described the ideal as “less a client base, more a partner base”—in other words, a co-op. But, would anyone pay to join one?

People will give endless feedback on ideas, but only commit if they see value. A sure way to make this shift is through opportunities for people to test a prototype and express their emotions.

Emotions on the Internet

For anyone who has run a crowdfunding campaign, mobilizing genuine emotion can sound like difficult, draining work.

After working in dozens of campaigns, I’ve seen a tension play out between crowdfunding and membership. Crowdfunding is a one-off moment of collection action, but when the projects that we care for also take care of us, people come together and stay together.

How might we reinvent crowdfunding campaigns so collective action continues?

It’s tempting to search for answers on the Internet. But before going online, consider the case of a real-life forest:

Neera M. Singh, author of a 2013 forest conservation study in Odisha, India, found a region that challenges the logic of paying individuals to manage resources as market goods. She observed how villagers harvest only what food and wood they need from the forest, and sing songs celebrating its cool breeze, too. Singh concluded that community stewardship sustains thousands of villages because people organize their labor both effectively—forming accountable relationships around their work, and affectively—developing shared identity in the process.

The story of stewardship in Odisha shows another side of crowdfunding and collective action. While starting a project might depend on pooling financial contributions, sustaining it requires emotional investment.

How do emotions look in Internet marketing? Query your favorite search engine for “women laughing alone with salad,” and you’ll see a cliché used to evoke health and happiness.

I suggest taking a look if you haven’t recently—partly because it’s hard not to laugh at the fake emotions, but mainly because a similar caricature shows up in how on-demand service platforms market themselves. TaskRabbit, for example, portrays images of smiling helpers cleaning kitchens while women hold babies. Unlike stock photos, however, we meet TaskRabbit in real life.

Source: TaskRabbit please don’t sue me

Their marketing may be full of clichés, but on-demand service platforms are full of opportunities to become emotionally invested.

Platforms like TaskRabbit leverage our emotional investment to grow their user base. Their user experience is designed to delight us, especially at key moments around transactions. When interacting with a chef, host, or any service provider who loves their job/gig, we enjoy acts of kindness that have little to do with rating systems. But platforms do not support self-organizing. Instead they leverage community activity to increase user engagement, and resist attempts to leave. TaskRabbit charges a $500 finder’s fee to move consumer-provider relationship off of its platform.

This is the norm in platform capitalism: products extract value from transactions for outside investors. The platforms connect us to resources more than they operate as a resource themselves or a place to gather. In this context, our emotions are more like “laughing alone with salad” and less like singing together in Odisha’s forests.

The real issue with emotions lies with the conditions in which they are extracted. Emotions on the Internet can be better understood with Hochschild’s theory of “emotional labor,” which describes how we adapt our emotional expressions in deep and superficial ways to align with workplace rules. While Singh found villagers laboring happily, defying market logic, Hochschild argued more than 30 years ago that emotions get commodified in a capitalist service economy.

Looking at how emotions change over time, however, shows how people become invested. Beth Hoffman, in a 2015 study of worker co-ops, found that embracing emotion ultimately benefits democratic participation. How? As individuals get comfortable expressing themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners. Hoffman quotes someone from Organix Co-op describing the freedom to be sincerely happy:

If something is great, I say so. If I think everyone is working well, I tell people around me that. Here, I’m free to be enthusiastic. I can get pumped up about the co-op, and it’s not nerdy, or sucking up. Hell, there’s no owner to suck up to. I’m the owner! So I’m not sucking up; I can just tell everyone when things are going great!

Emotional labor in co-ops can undo habits formed in extractive contexts, to the point where co-owners feel like their coworkers and workplace are like “family” and “home.” An office worker at Chemical Cooperative says how:

Where I worked before is a lot worse, a lot worse. Because people there were, spending a lot of time protecting themselves in writing and defending their position… It’s not at all like that here. But it takes some getting used the fact that you can be yourself here. Like you can take your shoes off when you get home.

Such transformative, humanizing experiences in co-ops contrast with how we relate to one another through one-off moments in Internet marketing. It’s also the kind of place where emotional investment grows into stewardship.

Barn-raisers for Stewardship

Happily, my partnership with Loconomics concluded with them focusing on community before launching a product.

To see what invitation attracts people most, they swapped their full website for a simple sign-up page. And to learn about user experience, they welcomed service providers and clients to events where they could try the app, volunteer, or become owners. Getting together finally made it possible to experience what a community might feel like—a celebration.

At a minimum, community is a shared feeling of belonging. These feelings well up when people come together, through book clubs and parties, and they evaporate when the organization shuts down, puts up a pay-wall, or simply has a change of heart. Such precariousness is hidden, however, when a platform manages to balance user satisfaction and extraction.

Building community through crowdfunding plays out in a similar way. It starts with a goal of mobilizing contributions from many individuals. With enough incentives and excitement, the possibility of passing a funding threshold triggers collective action. This usually happens only once. And if a project does get funded, any future collective action depends on whoever owns and controls the value created. Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations.

Marketing strategies extract generosity and resources by developing an audience, message, and call-to-action, like guilt parties where people leverage relationships unfairly.

For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-raisers—activities for guests to co-create with their gifts, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again.

A barn-raiser is an organizing strategy for a cooperative alternative that involves people, invitation, and engagement (think P-I-E):

1. Connect with people. Audiences are passive, but people put emotions at the core of cooperation. Learn who might join the effort, and what they’re trying to get done.
2. Make an invitation. Messages are static, but invitations cultivate voluntary and open membership. Define what you want to celebrate, together—in-person and/or online.
3. Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but engagement supports democratic ownership and control. Seek participation more than financial contributions.

By starting small and learning as they go, barn-raisers can “grow the pie” for co-ops. Organizing a crowdfunding campaign can follow the same steps.

This is how a crowdfunding becomes stewardship: raising expectations, embracing the challenge, and sharing the value as community grows.

The post Organize Barn-Raisers, Not Guilt Parties appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This creates an awkward situation for marketing. Tasked with growing revenue for apps and platforms, marketing adds a community layer without sharing ownership or control with users. But for co-ops — and really, any democratic endeavor — shared power is fundamental.

How can co-ops engage users without losing their democratic backbone?

I propose a set of metrics for online platforms to cultivate community power from within, not as a thin layer on top.

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor-activist, gives instructions on how to “run your startup like a cult.” History may be on his side. As neighborly behaviour goes the way of the bowling league, a layer of social interaction on apps and platforms gives them a competitive edge.

Consider the sharing economy platforms that promise a sense of community. They’re among the most profitable, fastest-growing companies. Countless companies are hiring community managers, a new managerial class that even hosts meetups to exchange best practices. Airbnb genuinely believes their home-sharing hosts cultivate a sense of belonging. They’ve recently begun hiring political organizers to grow their community into a movement.

Beneath their community layer, however, these platforms are made up of users, investors, and engineers. Users have no ownership or control to make the platform work for them. But wherever marketing reaches cult-like levels of engagement, users cheerily overlook their lack of power.

As the digital economy grows, the future for users is virtual feudalism. At the same time, I am optimistic about “platform cooperatives” emerging where users can become members and owners.

Cooperatives that organize their membership can buck the trend of powerlessness.

Cooperatives are associations that organize to serve collective needs, especially when markets fail to do so. During wicked recessions, co-ops persevere and prosper.

Grain silos in ancient Mesopotamia and grain elevators in the Midwest are classic co-op examples, insuring members against market volatility and stabilizing commodity prices. Member-owners are the main investors in the co-op, so they make smart, democratic decisions. To continue creating value, they take collective pay cuts before making layoffs. For greater economic gains, they pool resources and form federations.

Although co-ops emerge from market failures, they tend to lose when markets bounce back or new players reach their niche. The most infamous case took place in Austin, TX, where Whole Foods Market took after beloved Wheatsville Food Co-op and grew into a nation-wide behemoth. Wheatsville still exists, however, thanks to its local and loyal members.

Co-op membership is so much more than a customer loyalty card or a paid app subscription.

On the Internet, I certainly believe co-ops need marketing to survive. Like any enterprise, co-ops have to communicate the unique value they offer in the marketplace. Users looking for music or freelancers looking for gigs have little tolerance for crappy apps and platforms. This holds true even for die-hard co-op enthusiasts.

Organizing matters more than marketing, however, because even if co-ops are competitive, they need to achieve their potential as democratic communities.

* * *

Let’s use Pirate Metrics for marketing, and Mutiny Metrics for member organizing

Marketing professionals familiar with Pirate Metrics use them to grow a user base like its their job. To be fair, that is their job. They add a community layer to make users happy, but the objective is the same: growth. Cooperatives are different than startups. Their promise of community ownership and control goes beyond marketing.

By showing the limits of Pirate Metrics, and drawing a lesson from pirate history, I propose a new set of metrics for organizing community.

Pirate Metrics

Back in 2007, Dave McClure introduced Pirate Metrics as a way for startup marketers (AKA “growth hackers”) to get traction with users and keep them engaged. He proposed the acronym AARRR(!):

• Acquisition — users sign up for some product, subscription, etc.
• Activation — they get started on the app or platform
• Retention — they come back
• Referral — they bring others
• Revenue — they generate value for the platform

These metrics are strictly business.

To see how they work, consider Loomio, a New Zealand worker cooperative that built a decision-making platform. They raised over $100k via crowdfunding in 2012, and have grown their user base by applying Pirate Metrics to create a positive user experience, welcome emails to thank-you notes. People love Loomio. I love Loomio. But in terms of marketing, Loomio operates much like any startup.

For startups and co-ops, success depends mainly on operations.

Some of the most democratic operations in history were, in fact, pirate ships — despite their criminal ambitions. In fact, I recently became friends with a lawyer who swears by pirates. He recommended The Invisible Hook: The Law and Economics of Pirate Tolerance. Here’s what I took away from it:

The ever-present “mutiny” element helped pirate ships become both competitive and democratic. On pirate ships, captains only earned 2x the rest of the crew, and could be replaced whenever they displayed cowardice or failed to go after a bounty. Occasionally, pirate ships would form a fleet for collective action against really big bounty. They also had many black crew members who were free men and participated at all levels, from crew to captain. The merchant marine, on the other hand, operated as a slave ship with 6x differences in income and a punitive approach to handling nearly everything. Mercantilism helped build empires, but even good commerce is hardly democracy.

As a metaphor and a moral tale, pirates have a lot more to offer.

Mutiny Metrics

I propose “Mutiny Metrics” as a starting point to build better community with cooperatives, guilds, and commons of all kinds. While marketing is about revenue, a basic necessity for any enterprise, organizing is about community power, a moral high-road.

The MORAL acronym stands for:

• Membership — users become members and get a vote
• Ownership — they contribute equity/investment
• Reciprocity — they practice mutual aid
• Association — they create a structure of belonging
• Leveling — they maintain equality and fairness throughout the platform

These metrics are far from precise or linear, and their application for community engagement is open-ended.

For example, whenever Loomio’s team sees groups use the platform in innovative ways, the team invites them to share insights with others and play it forward with new users. Growing this community of practice can produce beautiful results for meaningful association, full of participation. And as Loomio grows their business in the US, they might get creative sharing ownership through community investment through a Direct Public Offering or better yet, through non-extractive finance. A quick review of Mutiny Metrics can generate many more ideas for better community.

* * *

A few reasons to consider Mutiny Metrics:

First, they focus attention on intention. For getting users and growing revenue, we have Pirate Metrics. Cultivating community power requires a different approach. And instead of prescribing actions, Mutiny Metrics are flexible and adaptive, a natural fit for what MobLab calls open campaigns.

Second, they invite pleasant surprises from community participation.Campaigners at SumOfUs hacked Pirate Metrics for community engagement, but their framework is still a one-to-many model. Mutiny Metrics go beyond user experience design to what we might call member experience co-design.

Finally, these metrics are a work in progress. Try them and see if they help make community participation easier or democracy more possible.

* * *

Danny Spitzberg believes that membership in community is vital for a democratic society — from bowling leagues to, well, whatever voluntary associations work for you.

For more thoughts & resources on this topic, sign up for the Peak Agency email letter or tweet @daspitzberg

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Genetic testing promises to put the ability to decide about our life choices in our hands, as well as help solve crucial health problems by preventing the insurgence of diseases. But what happens when these exams are managed by private companies in a free market? Public communication and marketing have proven to be crucial battlefields on which companies companies need to engage in order to emerge. This issue of JCOM tries to shed some light on the communication and marketing practices used by private companies that sell direct-to-consumer genetic testing, from single genetic mutations to whole genome sequencing.

As Levina and Quinn point out, “these companies radically expand the definition of a patient by claiming all consumers are simply pre-symptomatic patients. Moreover, by placing genomic data on both the marketplace and cyberspace, personal genomic companies seek to create new avenues of research that alter how we define (and access) research agendas and human subjects.”

In her article on the deeper relationship between genomics and communication, Jenny Reardon argues that “the communication problem these companies face runs much deeper. It is a problem that lies at the heart of any genomics: the very understanding of communication and information around which genomics is built. While the value of genomic information for persons has been widely questioned, questions about the very notion of information that undergirds the production of genomic information rarely, if ever, has been broached.“

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