Crowdsourcing helped to defuse the
2007 election violence in Kenya and it also helped emergency responders more
efficiently target their relief efforts in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti
earthquake. Practitioners are also staking a great deal on crowdsourcing
as a means to close
the development loop. However, while crowdsourcing has proven effective in emergency
settings, little is known about whether and to what extent citizens will be motivated
to provide feedback under normal conditions.
In 2011, we worked with UNICEF
Uganda to design and implement two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to
systematically test the motivational factors behind two distinct aspects of
crowdsourcing: 1) recruiting citizen monitors (Ureporters) to provide feedback; and 2) procuring responses from these monitors. UNICEF Uganda’s innovative Ureport system aggregates RapidSMS text messages
from citizen monitors in Uganda and has the potential to
dramatically increase the amount of information available on development
projects and outcomes throughout the country. Ureport sends
out a weekly poll via text message to subscribed users on local development
projects. In the first experiment, we ran a series of radio ads in one set of
Ugandan districts promoting the usage of Ureport as a way to improve the
community (an intrinsic reward), and another set of ads that had the same
appeal to better the community but also explained that users of Ureport would
be enrolled in a lottery to win a solar charger (an extrinsic reward). A third
set of control districts received no ads. We found that while the radio ads
urging participation to better the community increased Ureport usage, the
districts with the radio lottery ad saw significantly more participation. 
And, contrary to important experimental results from psychology, we
found little evidence that material incentives dampened Ureporters' intrinsic motivation
to make a difference in their communities.
Instead, in both experiments, the lottery for solar chargers caused a
significant increase in citizens’ likelihood of replying to any query from
UNICEF and in the total number of responses received. Direct human feedback on texts from
researchers, interaction in thematic networks with other participants, and
appeals to “speak out on what’s happening in your community” also significantly
increased participation over the control condition where no intervention took
place. These findings shed new light on
a potential solution to one of most fundamental problems in development: the
broken feedback loop between donors and their intended beneficiaries. Over the
next 12 months, we hope to build on these findings with an additional study
designed to further assess the feasibility of connecting donor and government
officials with the intended beneficiaries of public expenditure. In particular,
we hope to gain additional insight into the factors that motivate citizen
monitors to give reliable and actionable feedback and how to collect,
aggregate, curate and transmit this feedback to decision-makers in ways that
trigger corrective action.
Dr. Daniel Nielson is the Director
of the Political Economy and
Development Lab and
Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. Dr. Michael Findley is Associate
Director of the Political Economy and Development Lab and an Assistant
Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. A paper summarizing the results of their research in Uganda is now available.
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