The IT Nerd

You’ve likely heard of crowdsourcing. As it stands, crowdsourcing has been used to raise funds to do everything from get products to market, to help to provide the funds to elect politicians. But now there’s a new use for crowdsourcing – social activism. The need for crowdsourced social activism is clear. People spend lots of money getting officials elected. Then when those people need politicians to make change, people spend next to nothing. Resorting instead to simply signing petitions online or at the grocery store. Meanwhile companies across the U.S. are spending over $3 billion dollars to influence politicians. That’s not a level playing field.

Enter Amplifyd which is a social activism startup based in Berkeley California and headed by Scott Blankenship that helps crowd-source political lobbying for people, communities and causes by having activists call and lobby local, regional or national representatives on your behalf. You can purchase any number of calls from the campaigns listed on the site. For each call bought, someone will call and lobby the elected official of the person that bought the call. Each call will be $6.50-$7.50 (the final rate will be determined at time of launch) and you can buy as many calls as you want. Part of that money will go to the non-profit that’s organizing the campaign, part of it will go to Amplifyd, and part will go to the caller.

Each call is recorded and the buyer has a window in which they can flag the call. This helps ensure that callers are actually doing their job and not cheating the system. If a call gets flagged, the call will get put back into the queue and the caller will not get paid (up to $3.50 per call) for that call. Each campaign on the site is managed by non-profit activist organizations and the majority of the purchase cost can go to supporting their activities as an organization. For every call completed, the non-profit managing the campaign will make a base rate. This means activists groups will be able to generate passive income for their organization. It’s a great way for organizations to mobilize their community around their cause and provides an additional revenue stream to finance their activities. Each campaign will also support a contest for the highest call buyers so there will be additional rewards for people who purchase the most calls. Contests will be completely managed by the campaigners, so it could be a prize with a value of $1 to any amount.

To make crowdsourced lobbying as effective as possible, there’s a cutting edge calling system that will make it easy for people to make effective calls from the site. It is designed so buyer data will automatically match up with representative data for Senate, Congress, State Upper and State Lower reps. For example, if the campaign is for California Senate and you purchase a call, Amplifyd, will automatically find your local state senate legislator and the caller will make the call on your behalf to that person.

Amplifyd begins levelling the playing field on June 3rd. If you want to find out more prior to the launch, check out these links on social media:

Facebook: http://facebook.com/amplifydvoices

Twitter: http://twitter.com/amplifyddotcom

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXOT_Lpzh_ourcuk0bC2rEQ

Google +: http://plus.google.com/u/0/117804314803163590271

LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/company/amplifyd

Instagram: http://instagram.com/amplifyd1

Indiegogo: http://indiegogo.com/projects/amplifyd-crowdsourced-lobbying-for-the-people/

Or, check out this video:

This entry was posted on April 28, 2014 at 8:41 am and is filed under Products with tags Amplifyd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.