Micropatronage; a gift to me from the world.
On the 31st of December; the iphone chipin widget that I set up on my blog reached its goal; the perfect amount of money for me to purchase an iphone.
It took me a few days to get through the paypal formalities and I finally purchased the iphone late Thursday afternoon. Thursaday night was spent mostly awake syncing contacts: from my Nokia to my laptop to Gmail to my iphone and exploring and discovering various iphone apps. With no discredit to the excitement of the actual iphone and it’s functionality, there is something massively more important to remark on; the micropatronage experience.
I first started my chipin widget in October, inspired by Ross Hill’s lighting talk at Trampoline. Admittedly, my micropatronage campaign began largely as a social experiment, that followed on from a series of jokes relating to me being one of few internet nerds yet to have an iphone.
Given this light hearted approach, and literally just chucking a chipin widget up on my blog, I hadn’t given a huge amount of thought to the actual concept; creating functionality for people to give me money for something I wanted.
As the first couple of contributions came in, a few heads started to turn; which very quickly sped up my thinking about the concept. Many people had concern about my application of micropatronage- for material gain was a common assumption- I felt a lot like I was going in to defend myself on multiple occasions- in face-to-face discussions, blog posts, comments on blog posts etc. However, whilst debate was going on; in the background contributions were slowly trickling in.
I was quite keen to tap into the drivers behind my patrons; what made them want to contribute? Without actually asking this question directly I’ve been able to identify a few different reasons. At the beginning there seemed to be a few people that followed a similar mind-set to me; social-experiment-so-why-not. I know of at least three people who contributed as acknowledgment for my assistance with their resume and providing job seeking advice. Others commented on me as a person and the positive impact I have on them, whilst one or two other people contributed as acknowledgment for the value they had obtained from the content I publish on my blog.
My commitment to the world, as acknowledgement of it bringing me an iphone, is that my impact be positive. The most obvious benefit I see in having an iphone is the connectivity to the internet; the information available on the web is hugely empowering, layering 2.0 on top of that pretty much means endless bounds of possibility.
I will take the feedback of those who contributed to me as positive reinforcement to keep doing what I am doing. Assisting with resume and job seeking advice is something I love and enjoying doing and also where I have expertise; I quite happily open myself up to assist others. Writing my blog is hugely satisfying, every time I write a post I do it with pleasure and so it is with passion and enthusiasm that I will continue to do so; and in a more general sense I’m very conscious of the impact or impression I leave, not just on people but also on the planet, trying always to make it positive.
What I am keen to talk a bit more about here is micropatronage as a way to enable people to do-their-thing and the series of discussions it triggered. An article that stood out for me was one I received from Steve Hopkins, “Investing in Superstars”; two friends had invested a lump sum in their friend, un-knowing what she going to do with it immediately- that information was irrelevant, as she was a successful person who would end up doing something that would make money-essentially they bought shares in her potential earnings.
Even Pepsi have got on board with their recent Refresh Everything campaign; giving away millions in grants each month to fund great ideas.
Ross Hill provided the awesome example of Leah Culver, who sold advertising space on the cover of her Mac Book in order to fund the purchase of it.
More recently I have been involved in discussions with Edward Harran, Ross Hill, Steve Hopkins, Jan Stewart, Suzie Graham & others about micropatronage subscription models; patrons contribute monthly toward an individual – not a tangible product or deadline (like my iphone, the mac book etc).
What I am most excited about is the concept; many people do a micro amount and it makes a massive impact.
The best non-financial application I have seen of this recently is Foursquare. They rely on all of their users to contribute micro amounts of data to the system. Each user is happy to contribute a micro amount (they may even get bonus points for adding new data), the massive result is Foursquare’s index of venues in major cities.
I have challenged myself recently to discover opportunities where I can make micro contributions, both financially and not, the non-financial micro contribution I have made to the planet recently is my commitment not to buy plastic bottles (I haven’t done so since Samantha Bell’s presentation Garbage 2.0 in October). My most recent financial micro contribution was toward the new whiteboard at the Inspire 9 office (a web application development company that offer drop-in desks to the public).
I look forward to seeing more applications of micro-contribution emerge and am most interested in being part of enabling them to happen. I am excited about watching micropatronage support world changers to get out and do their thing.
