Contests like Pepsi Refresh and Chase the Good have donated a lot of money to the winning nonprofits, but they suffer from 3 fundamental design flaws:

1) Their system of voting for nonprofits is meaningless. An empty vote does nothing to advance the mission of the cause except for trying to help them win. What a wasted opportunity. Instead, we can have some kind of meaningful action count as a “vote” in the contest.

2) Their winner-takes-all system for awarding the cash prizes distorts nonprofit behavior and creates a poorly engineered incentive-disincentive dilemma for participating nonprofits: Do we think we can win? If so, go all out. If not, stop participating.

3) The combination of 1) & 2) results in an erosion of social capital for participating nonprofits, instead of an increase in their social capital. They relentlessly flog their lists trying to scour meaningless votes to win the cash prize — basically, a spam-like activity. This wears on the good will, patience and attention span of their fans and supporters, while doing nothing for these key people or for the nonprofits themselves.

We have conceived a better way to run these contests/games, and would like to find hackers and designers to help us build the first one.