Crowdsourcing from the Ground Up: How a New Generation of Nepali Nonprofits Uses Social Media to Successfully Promote its Initiatives

Abstract

Social media have swiftly become an invaluable tool for small-scale nonprofits in Nepal to obtain publicity and funding, frequently via crowd voting contests and crowdfunding drives. Social media have also enabled ideas and methods overlooked by traditional development grantors and institutions to be directly promoted to individual and institutional donors previously out of reach. Crowd voting and crowdfunding have made it possible for people to have a greater share and say in development projects they heretofore were rarely consulted on. Social media driven crowdsourcing campaigns for initiatives such as urban vegetable parks, rural hospitals, cooperative schools and children’s art museums allow a broader swathe of the public to participate in development and its communication. In addition, on the ground efforts are revealed to be extremely important in obtaining votes and when carried out alongside online social media based campaigning activities have netted nonprofits grant awards ranging from $ 2,500 to 300,000. Despite geographic, economic, technical and linguistic barriers faced by residents of Nepal to widespread participation in crowd voting and crowdfunding, a significant number of recently established small-scale nonprofits have altered the way development projects in the country are promoted, funded and participated in.