News

Tomorrow is our company holiday party and probably unlike most other Tech startups in the Valley, we are going to the beach for a picnic. Setting up food and a keg from the local microbrew. It is technically illlegal to drink open beers on the beach, but that’s what red colored plastic cups are for eh? I am gonna bring a bunch of surfboards and my standup surfboard to take the team out for surf lessons out at old man’s or the reef in front of the Natatorium. Of course the bocce balls will be thrown for the first ChipIn Bocce Ball championships. It will be good to get out of the office and hang out with everyone outside of work.

Since it is the shortest day of the year, it seems apropos that Todd and I decided to sit down and make a decision on the future direction of ChipIn. We are making a slight shift.. more on that soon, but we will have a beta out by end of January and it is gonna be kick ass! Innovation does not stop even with an iteration focused on cleaning up the code and fixing some features from last iteration… Olin managed to roll out a new mashup map for ChipIn events. Check out a map of the 8wishes campaign. Notice that you can click on the green colored tabs to see contribution info and the purple tabs show you the comments people left. This feature is in beta, but we plan to roll this out soon. If you want it now, drop our support a line asking for the Map.

Turkey day was supposed to be a quiet time for the team so everyone could eat and rest up for the next big push. Unfortunately Paypal was not playing nice and a bug took part of the team a couple hours late in the day to fix. It turns out that the event title has a length limit that Paypal decided to not truncate, but rather send back an error. It was terrible as it coincided with the Honolulu Christmas Fund launch which we did not know was happening on Thurs. Oh well. We are releasing today with a bunch of small fixes and some changes to the ChipIn Badge (our new name for the Widget). Two major features we finished this iteration are not even visible as we have not built the admin wrappers for them yet. But by next iteration we will be releasing our blograising product! Hopefully that will be at the Dec 12th CommerceNet party! (fingers crossed).

Beth successfully finished her campaign today!! Yeh!!  She had another great post about her campaign

Some additional coverage: Phicons and Marcus

We released our ChipIn widget on Widgetbox today making it even easier to embed our contribute now badge on many more sites. You can easily place our contribute now badge on your Typepad blog, blogger, Myspace, Xanga, Friendster, Wordpress, and many more. Check it out at widgetbox.com/widget/chipin

A couple other postings about ChipIn today… Nonprofit Matrix Blog and donorinsite has a great write up on the Return of Influence.

Kevin’s on a roll this week releasing a series of tweaks to the system while the rest of the team has their heads down on V2 of our system. Today’s delight is an organizer checklist which gives tips and tricks on how to make your event successful. Organizers just have to login and the checklist is immediately available if you are the organizer on any active events. If you have more than one event running, you can use the drop down menu to select the event you want to view. The checklist recommends ways to set up, promote and close your event. We hope you enjoy our tips!

Organizers can now export a list of ChipIn participants in CSV (Comma-Separated Values) format, which is compatible with Excel. You can see who contributed, when, and how much. You’ll also get a record of who viewed the event page and who did not. Those slackers can’t hide from you!

Here’s a list of the data that’s exported. Note that only the organizer can export this information:

• Participant name (first and last)
• Participant email address
• Status: donated, declined, viewed event or not viewed
• Date: when the participant donated, declined, or viewed the event
• Amount donated

As a startup, it is important to be agile and react quickly to the changing marketplace. Last week Facebook released their API - a move that we have been eagerly awaiting. Our goal is to create a social payments platform, so being able to interact with social networks is a great way to enhance the ability of organizers to connect and collect from their contacts. After an exciting day or so of drawing up ways to integrate with Facebook, we realized that their API is very limited in the information they provide. So instead of a full-blown integration between Facebook events and ChipIn events, we were only able to pull in Facebook event titles, start and stop dates, and a list of friends with pictures.

Not a worry, we still believe that we can demonstrate the power of a tighter integration with third-party services such as Facebook. You can take a look at the landing page we made at http://chipin.com/facebook.

Just a little plug for our guys… Kim Komando mentioned us as a cool site!

You can now track who clicked on their email invites and viewed your ChipIn event. When you login as an organizer or participant user, you can see which invited participant has contributed, viewed and not viewed your event page. We hope this feature helps organizers send gentle reminders to invited participants to contribute either by using our “resend” feature (click on the cross next to each participant’s name) or to include the open event link in a personal email reminder.

You can easily create a flash based ChipIn widget for your events. You can insert the widget on almost any website or blog including myspace, blogger, bebo, and many others. The flash widget is fully customizable and allows you to change the widget size, color, and content. You have to make your ChipIn event “open” in order to use the widget. See the FAQ for more information.

Came across a couple of pretty cool ChipIn events on our system today that are raising money for some pretty great projects. One in particular is a girl named Mia who qualifed for the National Junior Olympics in the 1500m and 3000m. You can see her open event here and even contribute. The organizer set up the event as an open event which means that they have a public link (http://events.chipin.com/14844b1d5339de0a) that allows anyone to contribute by either receiving the link via email or posting onto a website.

You can easily create a flash based ChipIn widget for your events. You can insert the widget on almost any website or blog including myspace, blogger, bebo, and many others. The flash widget is fully customizable and allows you to change the widget size, color, and content. You have to make your ChipIn event “open” in order to use the widget. See the FAQ for more information.

You can now announce your ChipIn events to the public via a unique url link provided on the event summary page (just above the description). You can send that link out via email, or post it on a Web site or blog. Individuals who want to participate in your ChipIn event will click on the unique link to arrive at your event summary page where they are asked to enter their name and email address. Their request to be added to the event is automatically emailed to you for approval. What a great new way to promote your ChipIn event!