126 replies to this topic

[Florin]

I suggest mentioning only the MF and Imminst since few people seem interested in voting for the other charities. Using direct links to the voting page could be helpful. I estimate that the MF and Imminst will need about 1,500 votes to win.

[Da55id]

I'll send out a mass PM tonight. It will be the last mass message to members about this contest. We will have to work the facebook angle tomorrow and Friday.

Hi - Since this morning, I have been unable to determine how many votes any of the competitors have including Imminst and ourselves. Is this happening to you? If so, it's either a bug, or a deliberate effort to generate unusual game theory dynamics. I'm not sure I want to send out the rest of our mailing list into a black hole when we could use it instead to request direct donations (ie to avoid mailing list fatigue...) Thoughts?

Next year, we (the anti-aging community) should huddle in August to create a swat team/Keiretsu to stand by and hit the ground running if a legitimate (non-silly judging like Amex) contest happens again. It appears the group associate with Falun did a wonderful job of "cross pollinating" each other.

Thanks,
Dave

[Mind]

Amazing how hard it is to get 1,000 votes for anti-aging and longevity considering how passionate and large the world following is. We easily contacted over 10,000 people to vote for Imminst, yet we will have to cross our fingers for a big vote push in the final 24 hours. Last I checked we had 300 votes. MF had around 750.

I think the numbers have been taken out on purpose by Chase, so that momentum would continue to the end. Otherwise no one with less than 1,000 votes would make any effort in the final 2 or 3 days.

[Da55id]

Amazing how hard it is to get 1,000 votes for anti-aging and longevity considering how passionate and large the world following is. We easily contacted over 10,000 people to vote for Imminst, yet we will have to cross our fingers for a big vote push in the final 24 hours. Last I checked we had 300 votes. MF had around 750.

I think the numbers have been taken out on purpose by Chase, so that momentum would continue to the end. Otherwise no one with less than 1,000 votes would make any effort in the final 2 or 3 days.

I think you are right about the momentum thing. It seems terrible IMO that these companies would use the cheese of cash prizes as a way to drive charities to deliver up to them new members/fans to these corporate colossii (Chase and Facebook) - nothing like free labor (and yes, I see the irony Mprize-wise). For my part I think our community would be better served by not having to depend on the kindness of disinterested corporate strangers. Also, your point about large numbers of supporters...there's core supporters and then there are well wishers and bystanders. I think our mutual experience has shown that the ratio is around 1:100. I'm not complaining, it just is what it is. It takes tons of ore to find a diamond :-)

[Mind]

Yes, from this contest experience it does seem to be 1:100 ratio. Anyway, that does seem to be the vote turnout vs. those contacted.

[Florin]

Another reason why most life extension supporters aren't voting might be that they need to be bombarded with mass emails in order to get most of them to do anything as the 3banana contest demonstrated. So, I'd suggest "spamming" the hell out of them. Really!

Edited by Florin Clapa, 11 December 2009 - 12:07 AM.

[Mind]

I am "spamming" all my friends.

[brokenportal]

Time is running out, get your votes in now, and send messages out to ask your contact lists to vote now if you havent already.

[Gerald W. Gaston]

Round 1 of the Chase Community Giving has been extended! It will end at 11:59PM ET tonight though.

There is still time to rally members here, and your friends on Facebook and such. With it being the weekend, perhaps a lot of people are just catching up on forum posts, personal emails, etc. and now could be the best time to get their attention!

[Florin]

Today would be a good day for Imminst to send another mass email!

[b0gger]

How much votes have we got? I'm not sure where to look.

[brokenportal]

Today would be a good day for Imminst to send another mass email!

I agree, we dont want to fatigue our mailing list, but we dont want to miss out on $25k because we were afraid to ask supporters to help us get $25k, a $25k that would be crucial and help go a long ways. If we are going to make this happen people have to expect that work like some simple voting has to be put in, and I think they do. I think true supporters probably appreciate the emails. Ill send another out today unless there are any objections. We'll want to be wary of spacing these out now. Probably not run another one for at least 3 months, if not more.

Florin, if your around right now, send me a suggestion on what to send out. If somebody else wants to make a suggestion on what to send then let me know. It would be good to know what the numbers are too. If Imminst is sitting at around 400 votes, and MF is sitting at around 900 then we should probably trim the message down to get them to vote for just MF for the sake of simplicity to try to drive the votes from this mass message up, or at the least lets trim it down to asking for votes for MF first, and Imminst second.

[Florin]

Today would be a good day for Imminst to send another mass email!

I agree, we dont want to fatigue our mailing list, but we dont want to miss out on $25k because we were afraid to ask supporters to help us get $25k, a $25k that would be crucial and help go a long ways. If we are going to make this happen people have to expect that work like some simple voting has to be put in, and I think they do. I think true supporters probably appreciate the emails. Ill send another out today unless there are any objections. We'll want to be wary of spacing these out now. Probably not run another one for at least 3 months, if not more.

Florin, if your around right now, send me a suggestion on what to send out. If somebody else wants to make a suggestion on what to send then let me know. It would be good to know what the numbers are too. If Imminst is sitting at around 400 votes, and MF is sitting at around 900 then we should probably trim the message down to get them to vote for just MF for the sake of simplicity to try to drive the votes from this mass message up, or at the least lets trim it down to asking for votes for MF first, and Imminst second.

I largely agree with your analysis. However, I'm not sure that it would be a good idea to space emails every three months, but that's a minor issue at the moment.

Since no one has access to the vote totals, you'll have to assume that MF is in the lead and Imminst is trailing. The vote totals are likely to be close to what you've mentioned. So, I agree that it would be a good idea to mention the MF first and Imminst second in any mass email that's sent. Also, make sure you link directly to the voting pages and ask supporters to invite their friends to vote and post on their Facebook Walls using the link buttons located below the comments section of the voting pages.

It would also be nice if the MF sent a mass email.

Edited by Florin Clapa, 12 December 2009 - 11:03 PM.

[brokenportal]

Can you write it up? Then Ill send it. Im just not in a frame of mind where I could analyze how to word it best. Ive got a lot on my mind this weekend and all these things seem to be competing for my brain waves at the same time.

About three months, what I mean is, if we have another event like this, or something where we would want to send out a few mass messages then we might want to wait until the previous round of mass emails isnt still fresh on their minds, to keep them from becoming immune to the messages and auto ignoring them. Maybe that wouldnt be 3 months, maybe it would be 1 or 2. Im not sure. We would all have to discuss it and get some feedback I suppose.

[Florin]

Can you write it up? Then Ill send it. Im just not in a frame of mind where I could analyze how to word it best. Ive got a lot on my mind this weekend and all these things seem to be competing for my brain waves at the same time.

Here's my version:

It's still not too late to vote for the Methuselah Foundation and the Immortality Institute in the Chase Community Giving charity contest. Chase has extended voting for another day, but hurry; voting ends today at 11:59:59 PM ET. That's only a few hours away! Please click on the links listed below and vote. Remember that $25,000 is on the line for each organization that is work to save YOUR life. Aren't a few clicks worth it?

Vote for the Methuselah Foundation at http://apps.facebook...arities/1038621.
Vote for the Immortality Institute at http://apps.facebook...arities/1304580.

After you vote, please use some of the links under the comments section (i.e., "Tweet this," "Post to Wall," and "Invite a Friends") to get your friends to vote!

About three months, what I mean is, if we have another event like this, or something where we would want to send out a few mass messages then we might want to wait until the previous round of mass emails isnt still fresh on their minds, to keep them from becoming immune to the messages and auto ignoring them. Maybe that wouldnt be 3 months, maybe it would be 1 or 2. Im not sure. We would all have to discuss it and get some feedback I suppose.

Doesn't that depend on when these kinds of contests start? For example, if another contest were to start a week from today, wouldn't you be forced to send mass emails again?

Edited by Florin Clapa, 13 December 2009 - 12:35 AM.

[brokenportal]

We can win this everybody, we are only as far away from winning this as the size of our determination to live.

I sent out the bulk email now. It said its going out to about 5,200 people. Not sure why its not going out to all, or atleast more of them.

Doesn't that depend on when these kinds of contests start? For example, if another contest were to start a week from today, wouldn't you be forced to send mass emails again?

Dont these contests go on all the time? At this time I would tentatively lean toward waiting for at least 2 months to potentially start promoting another one of these, but of course we would all have to discuss that. However, I would love to do them every day if we could, if we knew it wouldnt stress our volunteer hours and resources.

I guess one thing we could do is create a poll to see what people think about these mass emails, if they appreciate the action, if they are overwhelmed by them or not, if they tend to ignore them when they get them more often, etc... If we get positive results, maybe we could do these as often as they come along.

Cyberbrain has that idea to build a ready list of voters for things like this. I think we should work it in to our take action list. But that wont be ready for probably 6 months to a year and a half from now. We are also going to work to build our facebook numbers for things like this. We have some work for that underway already. 5,000 facebook fans would go a long ways in contests like these. We could message that with out much of any limit for sure.

Another thing along these lines is, why dont we hold one of these? We could offer say, $5,000 top prize, $1,000 second prize, $500 third prize and 5 $100 placings or something like that to organizations that get the most votes here at imminst. It would drive our membership up. We could offer it to causes that work with diseases, and other longevity related organizations. 10,000 or more additional registered users and members who are already in to this kind of stuff, and already have experience with this kind of stuff, and have clout with these things and all that would go a long long ways.

[brokenportal]

Keep sending out invites to vote. The deadline has been extended by Chase and Facebook until midnight tonight, saturday. We are close to having enough votes. Your bulletins and invites could be the ones that put us over the top. This $25k is big.

[Mind]

When is the big announcement? The 14th, or the 15th?

[Gerald W. Gaston]

Per their statement: Chase Community Giving Voting is now closed. Come back on December 16th to see which charities will receive $25k each!

[Florin]

Doesn't that depend on when these kinds of contests start? For example, if another contest were to start a week from today, wouldn't you be forced to send mass emails again?

Dont these contests go on all the time? At this time I would tentatively lean toward waiting for at least 2 months to potentially start promoting another one of these, but of course we would all have to discuss that. However, I would love to do them every day if we could, if we knew it wouldnt stress our volunteer hours and resources.

No, I don't think these contests go on all the time; there are only a few per year and usually don't overlap.

If Imminst wants to do something similar more often, how about looking into partnering with GamesThatGive? Their business model is to donate 70% of their advertisement revenue to partner charities that their casual gamers choose to support. Imminst's demographics might be attractive enough for them to consider a partnership; it doesn't hurt to ask.

I guess one thing we could do is create a poll to see what people think about these mass emails, if they appreciate the action, if they are overwhelmed by them or not, if they tend to ignore them when they get them more often, etc... If we get positive results, maybe we could do these as often as they come along.

Cyberbrain has that idea to build a ready list of voters for things like this. I think we should work it in to our take action list. But that wont be ready for probably 6 months to a year and a half from now.

Why not kill two birds with one stone by simply asking people if they want to opt-in for these kinds of emails? You'd automatically get a self-selected groups of willing supporters and avoid bother the rest.

We are also going to work to build our facebook numbers for things like this. We have some work for that underway already. 5,000 facebook fans would go a long ways in contests like these. We could message that with out much of any limit for sure.

If you don't want to deal with email limits at Facebook, you should setup a Facebook Cause instead of a group since a group has a mass email limit of 5k. However, I'm not sure what advantage a Facebook Cause would have over your current email list if you encourage list members that would have already opted-in for vote-in-charity-contests emails to also create a Facebook account.

Another thing along these lines is, why dont we hold one of these? We could offer say, $5,000 top prize, $1,000 second prize, $500 third prize and 5 $100 placings or something like that to organizations that get the most votes here at imminst. It would drive our membership up. We could offer it to causes that work with diseases, and other longevity related organizations. 10,000 or more additional registered users and members who are already in to this kind of stuff, and already have experience with this kind of stuff, and have clout with these things and all that would go a long long ways.

This might be a good idea. I'd suggest limiting this kind of contest to age-related disease charities with less than a certain amount of annual revenue—perhaps $10 million which is Chase Community Giving's limit.

Edited by Florin Clapa, 15 December 2009 - 05:33 AM.

[Mind]

I checked the Chase Facebook page but did not find the results as of yet.

Many thanks to all those who helped in this effort, especially Florin Clapa, BrokenPortal, Dfowler, Aubrey, and many others who voted and promoted.

[brokenportal]

Thanks, and I second that extra special thanks to Florin Clapa, and on that subject, special thanks to Mind, exapted, and my friend Jason too. (I feel like Im missing a few people)


Florin, games that gives looks interesting. Please do add it to the project ideas section if your interested. I will if I remember.

Opt in... of course, I understand the concept, that would help a lot, but I cant as of yet imagine how we might set that up. Do you, or anybody, know of a way we could set that up?

A facebook cause, Im pretty sure, is what we are going for, if thats the one that includes the "fan me" option. It seems to me that such a facebook page would help a lot. Some things that come to mind right away are that we could message it more, people can recommend it to their friends, it shows up on many many peoples pages, and we could just generaly spread the meme in facebook more. Lets say we embed the cause "fan me" application at imminst and we get it to grow to say 3,000 members. I would think that would help collect another couple thousand not to long after that from facebook, and those thousands would then be more likely to join imminst. Over the years I would think we could draw in thousands and thousands of people through facebook. If another contest like this came along in facebook we could message the heck out of it and have the audience built in and ready to go, in addition to other lists, like the member list here, our contact lists, etc...

I wrote to about 15 causes in myspace today asking them if they would be interested in a give-away we are considering, to the person with the age related disease cause that gets the most votes. One of the causes, a parkinsons cause wrote me back already and they said hell yes they would be interested in competing for $5k or $500. He said any money is good money and that their fund raising workers are very aggressive. Thats the kind of thing I would have said if they would have asked me something like that.

By the way everybody, myspace seems to be finally getting its act together, tougher spam policies, pages that dont jam, and now they have a wall-like feature like facebook and twitter.

[Florin]

Unfortunately, we've lost.

Fortunately, the following mainstream age-related diseases organizations won:

• American Cancer Society (Eastern Division)
• Nephcure Foundation (kidney diseases)
• Pancreatic Cancer Action Network
• Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (Cincinnati, OH)

I'd like to thank everyone that took the time to vote and also those who helped organize this effort such as Mind and brokenportal. Perhaps, we'll be better prepared and more motivated next time.

Edited by Florin Clapa, 17 December 2009 - 02:27 AM.

[Da55id]

Unfortunately, we've lost.

Fortunately, the following mainstream age-related diseases organizations won:

• American Cancer Society (Eastern Division)
• Nephcure Foundation (kidney diseases)
• Pancreatic Cancer Action Network
• Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation (Cincinnati, OH)

I'd like to thank everyone that took the time to vote and also those who helped organize this effort such as Mind and brokenportal. Perhaps, we'll be better prepared and more motivated next time.

what I find disturbing is that for the final 3 days they 1) hid the vote totals 2) unilaterally extended the voting by one day 3) without any prior warning. Also, I cannot find any final tally of votes for winners and non-winners. IMO It is a waste of resources to chase these things unless I'm missing something.

[Florin]

Opt in... of course, I understand the concept, that would help a lot, but I cant as of yet imagine how we might set that up. Do you, or anybody, know of a way we could set that up?

A "Send me charity contest updates" check box under the Privacy Settings section (accessible by clicking in "Email Settings" in any forum user's Control Panel or on the "Visit your email preferences" link at the bottom of any mass email) might do the trick. If this is or a similar solution is impossible to implement, I'd suggest not bothering with other more difficult to implement solutions; if some Imminst supporters are upset by these kinds of emails, they can either uncheck "Send me any updates sent by the board administrator," vote early (so Imminst doesn't have to send lots of mass emails), or find another organization to support.

A facebook cause, Im pretty sure, is what we are going for, if thats the one that includes the "fan me" option. It seems to me that such a facebook page would help a lot. Some things that come to mind right away are that we could message it more, people can recommend it to their friends, it shows up on many many peoples pages, and we could just generaly spread the meme in facebook more. Lets say we embed the cause "fan me" application at imminst and we get it to grow to say 3,000 members. I would think that would help collect another couple thousand not to long after that from facebook, and those thousands would then be more likely to join imminst. Over the years I would think we could draw in thousands and thousands of people through facebook. If another contest like this came along in facebook we could message the heck out of it and have the audience built in and ready to go, in addition to other lists, like the member list here, our contact lists, etc...

Since a Facebook Cause is used mainly for fundraising, I highly doubt many members will urge others to join a Cause whose sole purpose is to send mass emails in order to get its members to vote in charity contests.

However, if Imminst wants to setup a Facebook Page (fan page) and/or Facebook Cause to promote itself in a general way, that would be a much better reason to do so. Regarding mass emails, I think only the Causes app has this feature; the fan page seems to only be able to publish status updates on fans' Walls.

Edited by Florin Clapa, 17 December 2009 - 04:50 AM.

[Florin]

what I find disturbing is that for the final 3 days they 1) hid the vote totals 2) unilaterally extended the voting by one day 3) without any prior warning. Also, I cannot find any final tally of votes for winners and non-winners. IMO It is a waste of resources to chase these things unless I'm missing something.

Yes, it would be nice to see the totals, but I don't see evidence of vote tampering or favoritism or that we didn't know roughly how many votes it would have taken to win if that's what you're implying. I'd be concerned only if we already had around 1,500 votes (which we clearly didn't) and failed to appear in the Top 100.

I think the bottom line is that we weren't able to gather the necessary number of votes in time even though we have the capability of generating the necessary amount. We might have squeaked by on a little over 1,000 votes (maybe), and we would've been assured of winning at around 2,000 votes. So, I think the blame rests more with us than with Chase since we're capable of generating over 2,000 votes as the 3banana contest demonstrated (although we did have significantly more time—about one month—in which to gather votes).

Since it took a few days to create a charity list before starting the mass email campaigns, that also slowed us down. At the time, it seemed like a good idea but as a workable strategy it failed; it generated few votes for the mainstream charities and possibly contributed to voter fatigue and confusion.

Anyway, I suggest implementing the following strategies to maximize our chances of winning future contests:

• Identify contests as early as possible (I monitor Google for these kinds of contests, but this one slipped through. Perhaps a better strategy would be to monitor non-profit news blogs that have mentioned these kinds of contests before in order to increase our chances of participating earlier.)
• Send mass emails as early as possible
• Send many mass emails
• Include clickable links (links in some mass emails weren't clickable)

Edited by Florin Clapa, 17 December 2009 - 05:54 AM.

[AgeVivo]

the bottom line is that we weren't able to gather the necessary number of votes in time (...) since we're capable of generating over 2,000 votes as the 3banana contest demonstrated (although we did have significantly more time—about one month—in which to gather votes).

bravo Florin for your energy. I fully agree with your analysis. Also the 3banana contest was initiated by Aubrey de Grey I think (somehow more appealing) and since the very beginning (it increased our belief that we could win and decreased other organizations' beliefs that they could win).

Edited by AgeVivo, 17 December 2009 - 06:26 AM.

[Florin]

the bottom line is that we weren't able to gather the necessary number of votes in time (...) since we're capable of generating over 2,000 votes as the 3banana contest demonstrated (although we did have significantly more time—about one month—in which to gather votes).

bravo Florin for your energy. I fully agree with your analysis. Also the 3banana contest was initiated by Aubrey de Grey I think (somehow more appealing) and since the very beginning (it increased our belief that we could win and decreased other organizations' beliefs that they could win).

Besides Aubrey's personal involvement, he had to send out a total of 15 mass emails urging his supporters to vote. Aubrey sent only 2 mass emails in support of this contest, but they didn't seem to cause nearly as many people to vote. So, I have to conclude that the frequency of the emails made much more of a difference than who was sending them.

[Mind]

I don't think we had enough votes, but I can't help but think they are hiding the vote totals because they disqualified some groups.

Also, how can the American Cancer Society win (not that I mind so much), but don't they have an annual budget over $10,000,000?

[j0lt_c0la]

I don't think we had enough votes, but I can't help but think they are hiding the vote totals because they disqualified some groups.

Also, how can the American Cancer Society win (not that I mind so much), but don't they have an annual budget over $10,000,000?

I believe you are correct about disqualification of some groups. Students for Sensible Drug Policy had more votes than NYRA, the charity I was rooting for the most due to my own personal involvement as a former director, but NYRA won and SSDP did not.