When SEIU president Andy Stern decided to launch a national call for fresh, common sense ideas, he asked EchoDitto to manage both the strategic direction and model development—from concept to implementation—with a $200,000 ideas contest.
SinceSlicedBread.com was an award-winning contest that engaged a geographically and economically diverse community of Americans in a national dialogue to choose the "best idea since sliced bread." Ordinary Americans from all 50 states contributed more than 22,000 creative ideas for strengthening the economy and improving life for working men, women and their families.
Community members posted to the site more than 48,000 ideas as part of the national dialogue taking place across the website and blog. To determine the winners, the public cast ballots from every state in the nation during two rounds of voting.
In addition to developing the idea submission and review process, EchoDitto also developed a secure, independently verified voting system and managed a staffed help-desk to facilitate the process.
In addition to more than 125 earned media stories from Parade Magazine to CNN, the contest also attracted the attention of more than 200 blogs and support from organizations including MoveOn.org, Democracy for America and Rock the Vote.
After the three winners were announced on February 1, 2006, EchoDitto developed a folksonomy tool, which community members are using to tag and categorize all 22,000+ citizen-generated ideas to make them accessible to the media and policymakers through a coordinated online/offline communications strategy. We also developed and implemented a successful congressional advocacy campaign around a minimum wage bill that Sen. Hillary Clinton proposed based on an idea from SSB.
The Since Sliced Bread community was honored by the Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet with a Golden Dot Award for Best Online Community Response Effort, given to a campaign that “used technology to solve a local or civic problem."
The Since Sliced Bread community lives on today — evolving from an idea bank into an action center. Community members can now ‘adopt an idea’ and work with others who support the idea to make it a reality in their communities. Everyone else can purchase a copy of the new Since Sliced Bread book online and in bookstores to get a flavor of the thousands of citizen generated ideas and their authors that made Since Sliced Bread come alive: Since Sliced Bread: Common Sense Ideas from America's Working Families.