Rabble

According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer report, "a lack of faith in societal institutions triggered by economic anxiety, disinformation, mass-class divide and lack of leadership has brought us to where we are today – deeply and dangerously polarized."  Compounding this problem are the current business models today: misaligned incentives of big tech and advertisers in information dissemination that drive the attention economy and attention focused consumption vs contribution. 

We began exploring the problem area in 2017, when Secretary Clinton assembled a taskforce to answer the question "What Happened?" in Election 2016 and the impact of digital media on real-world outcomes. This provided an opportunity to interview/survey ~3000 young people about why they were opting out of the formal process of democracy.

What we found was not only drivers of disconnection and isolation as a result of social media, but a sense of not belonging. As one of the most diverse generations, young people in "Generation Participation" (Gen Y/Z/A) feel they don't fit into the boxes that current institutions try to put them in - they feel they cannot be themselves by current definitions.  

As a result, they are opting out of traditional ways of participating with established institutions of media, education, employment, and speaking truth to power and taking direct routes to getting things done - creator economy, the internet, gig economy, and grassroots efforts and direct action.

Youth, long synonymous with activism, face a different reality than previous generations where zeitgeist has brought the crises of climate, economic disparity, and governance to the forefront of attention.  Youth participation in social movements remains a key differentiator of success because youth williness to cross conventional lines to create social cohesion across social groups.  And while 91% believe that current tools (like social media) are easy, but not EFFECTIVE. They seek meaningful encounters while in local participation, cultural and community reconciliation, and justice efforts.  They are looking for a destination, a resource, a tool for change and a way to earn.  

Business remains one of the few institutions seen as competent and ethical, yet it’s easy for business to get it wrong [cautionary tales include Pepsi, Budweiser, Chick-Fil-A]. Young people look to brands to lead the way, yet the most common ways are often focused on consumption.  We posit: are there other ways businesses can help drive change?   The cost of not doing so - reputational risk, employee turnover, increasing cost of competition for shorter attention span of a generation with the largest share of wallet - may be too great for the company and society.   

Current solutions monetize attention on entertainment and crisis, while aggregating the financial exchange for themselves.  We must re-align the incentives of attention and time in a way that benefits all stakeholders across users, platform, businesses, and society.

We submit this solution for the Economic Prosperity Challenge to help reduce loneliness and increase social cohesion by empowering cultural and community organizers to provide more opportunities for gathering and belong and rewarding those who participate.  

Rabble rewards young people in the ways they make impact by gamifying local participation and makes it possible for businesses* to help young people fix the world from the ground-up (and get creds for it).

1. A platform where people can discover and take action in modern movement making: create/view content, recruit, promote, attend, volunteer, share, and more

2. Offering local businesses an action wallet, where they can sponsor actions and events with perks/cash to find new consumers and show them their commitment to the community

3. A way for organizers, non-profits, and foundation to enlist the community for help, get support through events like fundraisers, gatherings, volunteer opportunities and report participation 

We provide tools for cultural and community organizers to turn their audiences (and beneficiaries) into an organized power of modern movement-making actions.  We provide event listing and management, communication, and reporting tools to help them create sustainable resource networks within the business community.  

Events are listed on our platform so that consumers - especially young people - can participate in and earn rewards.  The rewards platform verifies proof of attendance, proof of work (attending an event, volunteering, posting, sharing content) onto the chain and aggregates these social good actions as badged actions to prove status.  We also provide social tools like posting videos/posts as proof of attendance as a rewarded action.  

Businesses find and activate at local community events through our platform, donate, provide engagement opportunities for employees, and SMS/advertise to users through the platform and through organizers as creators. Businesses can claim their impact for sponsorship, employee engagement thru contribution and volunteering, and donation.   Through the platform, Rabble can also provide employee engagement opportunities.  Through sponsorship and donations and engagement, businesses create authentic, locally focused, and verifiable connections with consumer and employees to increase loyalty, reduce turnover, and improve ESG ratings in social susainability.  Rabble will offer businesses ad units through organizer-creators and the platform that meet consumers in ways that brand stories of engagement resonate authentically.  

Based on the verified activities, we plan to launch resiliency funds where local foundations can provide funds to those in the community that have a proven track record of action to direct funds (see Kensington Resiliency Fund in Philadelphia, PA as a model). 

We posit that we are a new social technology infrastructure beyond social media that will help - focus on in-real-life participation (beyond commenting and clicking) - fosters status on impact beyond online metrics - emphasis on contribution beyond consumption - yet leverages the benefits of social media, including virality of information-sharing, personalization, commands attention

An effective solution (and we believe there are many) will have to rise within the defraying digital media ecosystem that has businesses and brands grappling with privacy issues and loss of targeting capabilities as big tech continues to make changes that require brands to create authentic and verifiable connections with their market, their customers, and their employees. 

Our technology uses gamification, AI, web3, social engagement mechanics, and superior user experience and inteface design.  

As a marketplace, the supply side of the marketplace is organizers who create events that bring young people in participation.  The buy side are local businesses and community-focused brands.  

Our pilot target population are those disproportionately affected by SDG Goals 1 and 2 in Philadelphia PA, although our platform can be used to empower grassroots cultural and community organizers.  Our mission is to uplift communities impacted by SDG Goal focused on Hunger, Poverty, and Water THROUGH organizers and organizations that look like them.  We choose Philadelphia for the following reasons:

1. In Philadelphia, less than 1% of Center City residents are more than a half-mile away from a grocery store, but in North Philly neighborhoods like Kensington and West neighborhoods like Chester, that number can reach between 40-50 and up to 70%.  
2.  the Philadelphia region has the 5th largest college population that spans across DE and NJ as well. 
3.  Philadelphia ranks among the top 10 cities for giving in Food, Health, and Arts and Culture - which makes it ideal as a Rabble profile.  

Our secret sauce is our ability to rally the community of organizers - cultural, social impact, events - who create experiences that give the community opportunities to gather - in celebration, in times of need, in mourning, in coming together in solidarity, in communion. Rabble promotes these events to those who want to make a difference, namely "Generation Participation" who can earn points. These points are redeemable for local business perks. For a fee, businesses can associate their name with the perks/money/support they provide that gives back through organizational support and rewards those who participate.

Our competitive advantage is our startup experience, our relationships to grassroots organizers, our brand relationships, and our experience in web3/AI.  

Currently, we're launching to 250 Philadelphia and Bronx NY community organizers in food security to support 25K users within the next 3-6 months. We also have evolving opportunities with arenas supporting sports teams and musicians to gamify impactful engagement. We’re also working on a strategic partnership with a community bank and a sports league.  

Our solution gives organizers (and their communities they serve) a way to build a sustainable resource network beyond philanthropic funds.  By creating ways for the business community to participate through sponsorship, employee engagement, and donation through consistent event activation, we provide new ways for the community itself to be involved.  

Our solution also engages young people in the ways they already create modern movements and recognizes these actions are critical to the missions they have taken on.  

We are well positioned to deliver this solution for 3 reasons:

1.  Our technical knowledge

Our leadership team includes our CEO with brand relationships and SMB experience through Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses program; our CTO with leadership expertise in AI, web3, and platform development; our Creative Director with deep relationships in the community and cultural organizing space.  

2.  Our relationships to activate the market

We have deep relationships in the brand space through our leadership and advisory team.  

We have deep organizer and cultural organizer relationships in both Philadelphia, NYC-Bronx, Chicago, Austin, Baltimore, and globally in cities in Northern Nigeria, South Africa, France, Spain based on our growing network of organizers.  

3.  Our proximity to our community 

Our onboarding strategy is focused on providing tools to community and cultural leaders to organize themselves using our event management and communication tools.  Upon pooling of their audiences, we approach aligned and community-focused businesses to activate and sponsor.  Organizers decide whether they wish to participate with the sponsor; distribution is based on the audience network they have cultivated on the platform.   This distribution is managed by smart contracts based on organizational metrics.  

We have launched 2 market prototypes: 1 at the end of 2022, 1 during Juneteenth 2023.   Please see our case study video:  

https://vimeo.com/866134863

In our first prototype, we built a marketplace of "events" to see how people interacted with cause.  We tested the relationship between "causes" and learned that users that are focused on "solutions" and not specifically problem areas were more likely to attend events and seminars.  

In our second prototype, we launched with one key organizer in the Food Security space:  

We will be releasing our next version to 200 organizers in summer 2024. 

We believe Solve can help in the 3 key ways: 
1. An introduction to a network of impact-focused investors who believe in scalable solutions that can engage multiple stakeholders; we're interested aligning foundations and corporate sponsors to provide grants that can be decided upon and disseminated to the community BY the community.  By aggregating community actions, we have the ability to find and elevate those in the community who have made an impact in ways beyond financial. 

2. An introduction to a nationwide and global network of foundations, non-profits, academic institutions to continue to introduce our platform to young community leaders

3.  An introduction to a mix of economic, technical, and business community that is interested in time banking and recognizing other forms of capital 

Our solution does 3 things different than the competitive landscape of dApps, social media alternatives, general event platforms.

1.  We are focused on a specific audience group with a specific set of problems that need a customized toolset to achieve the big, ambitious goal of driving social change at scale.   In this case, we seek to solve problems that grassroot cultural and community organizers have - reporting, attention for their cause, alternative resource networks

2.  Our use of blockchain is necessary without forcing adoption; rather, our solution allows us to elegantly transform social capital into financial capital as "buyers" of social capital enter the market (currently, that's brands who know that participation in cause and local community events impact purchasing decisions) 

3.  While we are focused on organizers in the Food and Poverty Goal areas, this platform could we used by organizers in other areas as well.  

Specifically, the use of blockchain provides the following benefits:  Why: For consumer, blockchain offers a way to protect activist and organizer identities, drives more civic participation; provides time banking and a way to recognition of social capital. 

For brands: we provide first-party data management that meets consumer privacy concerns; interoperability of resonant brand communities on a data and experience level; driving activity that create community loyalty in which brands can participate  

We're interested in the growth of DeFi.  We believe that by quantifying other types of labor into capital (like social capital), we have an opportunity to recognize and create markets for these types of economies.  

Our theory of change is as follows:

Rabble empowers youth with the following:

1) provide technology tools
2) provide sponsorship through local businesses
3) nurture partnership-ecosystem to provide incentives

Youth then engage their peers and broader community in a sustained way, by creating more opportunities for community participation and contribution.By empowering youth, we believe three chain reactions happen:

1) Responsible stewardship involving money, stakeholders --> increased academic performance, improved social-emotional well-being, building skills + networks valued in the workplace --> source of economic stability

2) Less Loneliness --> Greater Social Cohesion toward impact

3) Youth Engagement --> Greater Social Cohesion toward impact

We believe our solution tackles the following indicators and how we will measure progress:

8.2 achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors ---> # of organizers access to greater resource networks and $ flow

8.9 By 2030, devise and implement policies to promote sustainble tourism that creates jobs and prmotes local culture and products ---> # of local activities for participation 

8.10 Strengthen the capacity of domestic financial institutions and encourage and expand access to banking, insurance, and financing for all ---> # of actions written onto the chain 

16.X - develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions; ensure responsive, inclusive and representative decision-making --> # of organizers and groups of organizers on a DAO-like system to enable voting on funds

17.19. build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development that complement gross domestic product, and support statistical capacity-building in developing countries --> reporting for measurement

How we do this:

1. We incentivize (and track) social actions and community-building activities 

2. Through incentives, young people spend more time making and consuming meaningful content and participating in activities

3. Through a peer- and culturally-relevant lens, discover more actions and activities that’s meaningful to the community

3. Onboarding young people to a single platform that focuses on content creation, sharing around actions More opportunities to create social connections in the context of contribution and socializing community-building activities

4. Aggregation of participant time (known as time banking) where people provide services to one another and thereby build greater community cohesion

5. Recognizing actions that become community-building services young people provide

6. Aggregation of participants data to engage local businesses that also protects privacy 

7. Providing mediated ways for businesses to communicate their alignment with the same things they care about - through organizers (as paid influencers) and through our platform (as ad units)

8. A pathway for youth to organize quality events for their communities that local businesses can participate in

Expected outcomes

• More focus, peer-initiated, on community-building 

• Elevation of organizers as “influencers” in communities to serve as role models through doing

• More opportunities for organizers to access brand dollars that align with their mission

• Aligning action with currency

• Gathering data to strengthen ties between positive UGC-media

We leverage both AI/ML and blockchain technology. 

Blockchain: How it works: 

- Identity abstraction while allowing trust building 

- Verify previous experience and value creation in communities for organizers 

. blockchain enables the proof and verifiability of previous achievements 

- Brands can participate and prove a track record by referencing a blockchain 

. the records and proof of accomplishment and prood of attendance are written the the blockhain and lend forecastability and a way to to vet the community so that brands can have confidence in associating themselves with an audience 

What we do: 

- Tokenize badges and credentials - enable participation with the risk of being cancelled and targeted 

- Link people of similar interests in an interest graph, powered by an authentication system and identity management which safeguards the users 

- Allow for marketplaces and attention networks to reach the best end-users, without needing to expose un-imprtance to idenfity themselves

AI/ML: How it works 

- leverage chatGPT to create internal concept map on related terms to description social challenges, causes, and solutions 

- leverage embed models to develop our own core AI models:   embeddings are a compressed form of a considerable amount of human knowledge and shrink features that used to be substantial specialized projects into

What we do:

- enable better tagging for discovery

- more relevant search results

- better feed to encourage more RSVP and participation


Gamification: How it works

-create game mechanics to create a flywheel of actions and social validation

What we do: 
- points/leaderboards

-challenges

-badges based on participation

- social features like displaying event content (FOMO!)

We have 3 full-time staff and 3 part-time staff working on both the platform and onboarding organizers onto the solution.  We have 2 contractors who support the business.  We have anywhere from 1-10 contractors that join the team when we are collaborating with a brand or organizer on events based on budget.  

The problem area was first introduced to our team in 2017 when Secretary Clinton put together a taskforce to explore the impact of big tech on the 2016 elections.  This afforded us the foundational work to interview hundreds of young people about why they were opting out of the formal processes of democracy.  

Since then, a lot has happened: market opportunities appeared when brands began taking a stand for cause and market adoption of web3. 

We incorporated in 2021 and began working on product-market-fit since then.  

Rabble's founding team reflects our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Our team reflects diversity in gender/gender identity, ethnic, race, religion, sexual orientation, education, and political leanings.  

As a college-educated, queer-identified, liberal east Asian woman, I've cultivated leadership who not only represent other cultures and identities, but who also stand for political ideologies that differ from that of my own to represent the diversity of the communities we serve.  

Through our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we endeavor to create a sense of belonging of the whole person by advancing a respectful and caring community.  That is core to our mission as a business.

Through Rabble's core values of optimism, participation, inclusion, human-centered action-oriented solutions, and inclusive technology, we believe: 

-in democracy as a neighborhood sport
- local communities [aka neighborhoods] only change when people in the neighborhood change them

-that goal-based neighborhood blocks can achieve anything
-in speaking to the problem through facts, not speaking to popular opinion
-in the power of shared values [modeled to us by strong corporate culture as well as religious organization]
-that community is built by doing
-in the power of brand and businesses and turn their causes into mini-brands
-that if you don't participate, you don't get what you want

Our job to be done is as follows: 
-create more seats at a bigger table
-empower youth with financial responsibility

Thusfar, we have also reflected this mission in the pilots we've launched.  So far, we've working across food security with black, brown, and white communities through community organizers, faith-based organizations, and service-oriented groups like the American Legion. 

Our business model is a 3 sided marketplace.  

1.  Organizer/Non-Profit:

We offer a freemium ticketing platform, communication tools, reporting features, and an opportunity to be included in multi-organization events eligible for sponsorship opportunity.  The important feature here is to encourage use of the product.   These tools also offer organizations new ways to increase their resource networks they otherwise wouldn't have.  This also offers young organizers a way to resource themselves and the causes they believe in.  

Community impact:  We offer community and cultural organizers a way to elevate their events above the social media fray by serving as a contribution-first platform.  


2.  SMBs: 

Through Rabble, we aggregate events and activities around calendared, community themes, we offer SMBs ways to activate their businesses to the larger community.   We also offer them opportunities to capture pre-event and post-event enthusiasm through our digital platform via SMS and sponsorship of user-generated content.  SMBs demonstrate to the broader community that they are also participating in change.  

Community impact:  Many SMBs activate in-kind perks [free stuff] during events.  Our platform allows SMBs to reward behaviors including attendance of the event, which also includes beneficiaries.  Through our first event, we found that organizers use these perks to make events fun and reduce the stigma of "charity."  

3.  Enterprise:  

Rabble can, in future iterations, serve as a corporate social platform that supports employee engagement in the community through volunteerism as well as employee donation. What makes Rabble unique is the quality of volunteer opportunities that are lead by the community and are grassroots in nature.  

Community impact:  Donors and volunteers are more likely to sustain the cycle of donation and giving when they can meet beneficiaries face-to-face.  

How we think about our value creation:  

Impact for brands:  Platform Visits (young people) X  RSVP Events/Actions X Engaged Action X  CPE (Cost Per Engagement) 

Impact for young people: # of events attended x recognition [points/badges]/event x reward/recognition

Impact for organizers: # of events x RSVPs/event x Influence/RSVP  

Key Factors of Success in Value Creation: 

1. User Acquisition:  Sign-up to Rabble is driven by sign-up to an event 

2. User Engagement:  Amount of content created at events

3. Partnerships and "Suppliers" - Quality of events based on organizer 

4. Rabble and what we provide:  

a. Quality of listed Events

b.  Our ability to help create pre-event activity on the platform leading up to the event

c.  Our ability to drive online engagement during events

d. Quality of rewards, incentives 

e.  How well we sell to brand/foundaiton sponsors

f. Our ability to provide scholarship programs and collaborative events and grants to maintain diversity of events 

5.  Customers/Brands:  How much will a brand pay for an engagement and # of users engaged

    1. Number of people who redeem 

    2. SMS Ads

    3. User-Generated Contact + Cross posting on other platforms

Our revenue model focuses on 3 means: 

1.  Organizer/Non-Profit:

We offer a ticketing platform where we charge a % fee per transaction.  We offer communication tools, reporting features, and an opportunity to be included in multi-organization events eligible for sponsorship opportunity for $25+/mo/org.  

2.  SMBs:  Through Rabble, we offer ways to participate in events for a revenue-share model with cultural/community organizers on activation and sponsorship fees.  We also offer pre- and post-event advertising opportunities through the organizer themselves (paid promotion by the organizer) and on the platform itself by sponsoring UGC content.  

3.  Enterprise:   Rabble charges a per employee fee to track employee engagement and a % of donation fees transacted through the platform.  Employers receive reporting and an opportunity to offer grassroot level activities.