What if the internet could be a hub for generosity instead of a hotbed for division?
Making goodness go viral wouldn’t be easy — but it’s possible, says Chris Anderson, head of TED and author of the new book Infectious Generosity, which insists that nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, and everyday people have a role to play in reclaiming optimism online and electrifying what it means to give.
It’s been nearly two decades since TED transformed from a little-known gathering in Monterey, Calif., to a global brand, boasting thousands of independently-run TEDx events, a billion-dollar philanthropic venture called the Audacious Project, a meme, and over two dozen podcasts.
It all started with a viral video.
Anderson, a former media entrepreneur, acquired the conference through his Sapling Foundation on the heels of the new millennium. When the dot-com bubble burst, imperiling Anderson’s magazine business, he pivoted his attention to focus full-time on TED — an acronym for Technology, Entertainment, and Design.
The new TED, he declared, would be a nonprofit, a designation that Anderson, the son of a British missionary eye doctor, took seriously as a covenant to work for the public good.
If TED was for the public good, he reasoned, the public should be able to see it. So TED uploaded a few talks online in 2006. Within three months, it had one million views. By 2012, the conference’s growing library of free lectures had over one billion views.
Yes, the price tag of the actual TED conference would continue to rise — a standard ticket now costs $12,500, which TED says helps fund the group’s free initiatives — but the barriers for virtual attendance have come crashing down.
Uploading its once-exclusive talks online was a leap of faith that paid off big time, says Anderson, whose new book is an appeal to other nonprofits, philanthropists, and volunteers to open themselves up to collaboration and be more daring in what they’re willing to give.
Not only will it help their causes, he says, but it could help save the internet.
It’s been over two decades since you first took over TED and transformed it into a nonprofit. How have changes at the organization and in the world affected TED’s trajectory?
For a while, it was hard to figure out the public good that could come out of a conference like this.
We tried to raise money. We tried to get TED on TV, but the companies didn’t want to air it. It wasn’t until online video arrived that it was possible to share TED more widely.
There was a very big reason not to do that: Who would come to a very expensive conference if the content was free? But, sometimes, when you give things away online, you can be absolutely amazed at what happens next.
Suddenly, lots and lots of people around the world knew about TED. Demand for the conference — far from falling away — skyrocketed. It’s been a growth story since then, with more people coming to the events, and then using the funding from those events for the free distribution of content.
In the connected age, radical generosity was a really smart strategy.
That’s also what led to TEDx. Allowing people to freely put on their own TED events seemed like a really dumb idea in terms of losing control. It’s true that a few embarrassing things happen here and there. But, we also ended up with this bounty of 25,000 videos annually, including many of the best TED speakers ever, like Brené Brown and Simon Sinek.
TED has popularized and amplified a lot of nonprofit ideas and figures — more so through the Audacious Project. What makes an idea worth supporting?
The Audacious Project emerged from two things that share a common solution.
One was being married to Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of Acumen, who in my view — which is biased, but true — is one of the world’s great changemakers.
I’ve seen her have to fight tooth and nail for funding. Many social entrepreneurs spend half of their time raising money, and it’s a horrible process. The donor has all the power, and it can take five or six or seven meetings to get anything. When you finally do, it comes with strings attached.
The second thing is that through TED, I’ve met lots of people who have big dreams about the future and a lot of resources. Their experience of philanthropic pitches — and this isn’t often said publicly, but I fear that it’s true — is that they’re kind of boring. It doesn’t spark their imagination.
The Audacious Project was an attempt to solve both of those problems. What would happen if you told changemakers to dream their biggest dream? Suppose money was no object. What could your team do? You get amazing answers.
Now, some of these plans aren’t workable, but some of them are. So you find those, spend time trying to help shape them into a credible, evidence-backed five-year plan, and then you bring together donors — not one by one — but together in one group, and try to get the whole thing funded in one leap.
It’s a magical process. Someone will say: I want to fund this, but will others come in with me? Then, others say: If you will, I will. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. After years of preparation, in a minute, you could have commitments for $100 million.
There’s a network effect in play here that is thrilling. In the last round of the Audacious Project, we raised just over a billion dollars for ten projects and with prevailing wind, we will be able to raise even more.
There’s a line in your book: “Threats, outrage, and disgust are compelling. Earnest goodness, alas, is boring.” Do you think generosity can regularly go viral on today’s internet, or do the algorithms need to change first?
I think we have to do both. The algorithms absolutely should change, and we should all put pressure on the social media platforms to do that.
There actually are serious efforts going on inside most of those companies to try to be more for the public good, but while that’s happening, there’s a lot that we can do ourselves.
The book is trying to crack the code of what could make kindness go viral. We’re often so boring in how we put stuff out there. Take a few risks, be playful, and dial up courage. In general, being more audacious is a big part of the recipe.
In recent years, so many everyday donors have stopped giving. What might a new giving model look like for them?
The hope with the Audacious Project is that millions of people will ultimately participate. What does that look like? We’re honestly still thinking hard about that ourselves.
Part of it is trying to make clear what a $10 or $100 donation can contribute — not just what millions of dollars can achieve.
One of the projects is a massive deworming program for children in Africa. Each procedure cost less than $1. If you can tell that story powerfully and make it easy for anyone to chip in $10, a lot of people would do that.
There’s a second more radical piece that I’m excited about: Communities could do a version of this themselves.
Instead of one person writing a check to an organization, a group of friends could work together to identify people who really have something special to offer — from a soup kitchen to a theater to a park — and encourage them to make a credible plan that a donor would take seriously.
Then, bring in some of the wealthier people in town and give them a chance to genuinely make a difference locally.
If you can bring together the people who will actually do the work and the people who will fund the work, it opens the door to a whole new set of possibilities of how change can happen at a local level. It could be really, really beautiful.
TED talks were once considered short, because they were about 18 minutes long. That is a very short lecture, but a remarkably long TikTok. How has that reduction in online attention spans changed TED?
Our talks have shrunk even further. Occasionally, we’ll do a long talk or interview, but most talks now are 14 minutes, 12 minutes, nine minutes, six minutes.
I mean, even nine minutes now seems impossibly luxurious. The attention war is challenging for everyone in media — it’s so hard to get noticed. We’re fighting to show that there’s all kinds of content out there. That ideas matter. Ideas change everything.
It’s actually our new tagline at TED: Ideas Change Everything. And, you can share an idea in well under 18 minutes.
When did the tagline change?
You know, I don’t think we’ve actually announced it formally yet.
There’s always been debate around “Ideas Worth Spreading.” People disagree on which ideas are worth spreading. Especially now, you can have really sharp disagreements.
It’s better to say that we want to give visibility to ideas that are certainly worth debating. We don’t know for sure what the right stance is, but we know that ideas change everything. That debate matters.
It can change your future, it can change the world’s future, and might be more consequential than another five minutes of doom-scroll.
