The Gamification of Philanthropy, for Religious Arts Groups too!
ALPHA OMEGA ARTS
By TAHLIB
Contests are all the rage, on television and in fundraising too. It's called "Gamification" and it means turning ordinary problem-solving into a game. The mobile app, FourSquare is (was) a good example of gamification, as it turned the simple task of traveling from point "A" to point "B" into a game of winning points, earning rewards, and becoming "Mayor" of a location. Recently, the Knight Arts Challenge turned philanthropy into a contest resulting in 56 winners from Detroit sharing in $2.1 million. Gamification is hot right now, but what about gamifying religious art? A 2009 McKinsey & Company Report, “And the winner is..., ” put it this way: “Every leading philanthropist should consider the opportunity to use prizes to help achieve their mission, and to accept the challenge of fully exploiting this powerful tool,” and where better to put those gamification dollars than into religious art?
Non-religious groups using (or who used) gamification:
By TAHLIB
Non-religious groups using (or who used) gamification:
- Napoleon had a prize of 12,000 francs for a new method to preserve food for soldiers on the front, which led to canning.
- Corporations and government agencies are running them — Netflix, IDEO, Google and even NASA.
- Major foundations are doing the same such as the X-Prize Foundation, Case Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, McArthur Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to name a few.
