London based creative technologist and product manager. Currently working on saving the music industry.

Schulze & Webb partner Matt Webb really wants a heard of plastic cows for his house. Fact.

This is all good, I like cows as well and I’ve often mused with my good friend Rob whether it would be possible to engineer a herd of real, live miniature cows that would graze freely in my lounge in South West London…

My own personal pipe dreams aside, Matt has come up with a great approach to achieving his dream by crowd sourcing his cows through the ‘nice actions result in even nicer actions’ model.*

The premise is this: Matt can’t justify spending £375 on cows., however, in his words, “I would be perfectly happy encouraging 100 other people to each spend 1% of that (plus postage and packing). This is because of my willingness to take advantage of that happy human psychological miracle called out of sight, out of mind.”

If 100 people do this, Matt will make a £500 donation to one of four charities. Buying a cow allows you to also nominate which one the money goes to; the one with the most votes will recieve all the cash when the herd is completed (and I’m assuming installed in a miniature ranch or dairy farm inside Webb’s abode).

“Really it’s like you’re donating to charity but via me. Or like you’re paying to vote for which charity I donate to and meanwhile I get a free cow.”

It’s all a bit silly. I like that. It’s a model for making charitable donations that I can get behind. It isn’t all that new, this type of ‘do something fun or enjoyable and charities will be the winner’ thinking has been around for a long time, however more recently it has started to kick off on the web in some really interesting ways. Just this week I gave my friend Chad some money to grow a moustache as part of Movember.

This is the kind of thing that sweeps across the web. Because it can be interesting/fun/wacky/different/insertyourownreasonhere. This is the kind of activity I would talk about in the pub (seriously, I’m going to do it in about 3 hours time, don’t judge me).

The simple fact is, giving to charity isn’t interesting (bit of a generalisation), although I do it and if you do too then great, and with more and more charities popping up, the fight for your cash is becoming an increasingly innovative one and the big win is on the web.

You could turn Matt’s idea into a web app/service pretty easily if you were so inclined. It would have to be super simple and provide a load of promotional tools such as facebook ‘boxes’, badges, and social graph communication tools such as ‘notify all my GMail contacts’.

If you could kick things off my simply sending a Tweet, IM or SMS to a bot, that would work for me.





From that Tweet you’ve got your donation amount, required item and the amount of people you need to involve. The app could then set up the basics of site for you, including scraping partners to return a list of places to buy the item you’re looking for. Once complete, in a few seconds one would hope, you’re returned a link with which to set up some more details (contacts gathering, charities to vote on, confirmation of purchase places, locking down the donation amount etc.) and you’re off working on getting your own herd of plastic cows (or whatever animal, or item you so desire!).

Would it really work? Maybe. It’s getting increasingly hard to tell what will work and what won’t take off on the web these days, however the more simplistic the app and the more connected to the online world a user has already built, the better chance it has of succeeding.

Additional note: There is no word at this time whether Matt will name the cows he receives after the people that bought them.

*Might not be a model. I was tempted to quote something from the bible. I didn’t.