Aviva scores a home run with community competition

I was driving between meetings yesterday and turned on CBC Radio's "All in a Day." Host Alan Neal was speaking with a young woman named Alyse Schachter, who is part of a VERY cool competition.

Alyse came up with an idea called "Snacks in Packs" -- a way to ensure that children who get food and support during the week from school breakfast and lunch programs, etc., get to take a backpack full of nutritious snacks home with them over the weekend.

The idea's a great one, and she is a great evangelist for it.

But the competition is what has impressed the heck out of me.

The Aviva Community Fund, which is part of Aviva Canada, a division of an international insurance company, is running a competition to allocate $500,000 to support projects that will make a positive change in their community.

They've taken corporate giving and found a way to crowdsource it. In a way not too far off Dell's Ideastorm or My Starbucks Idea, they have encouraged people to:

1. Submit their ideas for making positive change
2. Encourage others to support their ideas
   
3. If you're a browser, look for ideas you can support and vote them up.
   

They've received more than 1000 ideas from across the country, and now there are 25 semifinalists, based on vote popularity, including Alyse Schacter's idea. Those semifinalists are going to be judged by a VERY diverse panel, including Ben Mulroney, Mike "Pinball" Clemons, and MAC Cosmetics entrepreneur Julie Toskan-Casale.

And they've built a full-on social media platform for this, using Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, and Youtube to support the project as well as their own site. Credit is due to folks at Fleishman-Hillard and at Idea Couture for the strategy and execution.

It's a great job of making what could be a stuffy, closed-door philanthropic process an open, exciting, and buzzworthy one.

Ciao,
Bob.