We are all committed to creating a company that does well by doing good. While tragedies are always a blow to a person’s view on humanity, it is often times the recovery and healing that helps us move on as people and society. The Virginia Tech shooting is and will continue to be a terrible event for those directly impacted and also spectators like us who can only begin to comprehend the terrible loss, fear, anger, and distress that those closest to the event are going through. Money is not the answer to everything that is wrong, but it is an easy way for people to show their support and help create something great from something so wrong. Chipin is proud to announce, in partnership with Network for Good and United Way, a Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund Widget. Chipin has waived all fees for this campaign and all payments will go directly to the VA Tech Foundation Hokie Spirit Fund.
Please help spread the word by spreading the widget. Just click on the copy tab and then the copy button and paste the code on your blog, website, myspace page, etc …
BYU students have used Chipin to collect over $20K from 533 contributors in just a few days to fund a BYU alternative commencement. What a great way to use the Chipin widget.
This weekend I took Sat afternoon off in celebration of Earth Day. Started the day by helping Amoeba select a College to attend and then headed to the beach around noon for a surf at Courts while Hampig got some BT. I then headed out to meet some friends for drinks before the show. The Kokua Festival is a yearly music festival celebrating environmental education and awareness in Hawaii. It was a great time with Eddie Vedder, Jack and friends all having a great time. Needless to say, we were all having a great time. It is nice to remember that it can’t be all startup all the time. An afternoon off to be with friends and family replenishes the soul.
Of course Sunday we were back at it as Kev, Todd and I put the final touches on our new stealth project.
Woke up pre-dawn hoping to go for a quick surf and get wet. It has been weeks. Just another typical Thurs. Phone started ringing around 6 a.m. with a couple business partnerships we are working on (sheesh.. more soon on that), followup conversations to use Chipin to create a speical memorial fund for VA Tech, calls with investors, revise presentation, get ready for Justin and Todd to come in for a working weekend of meetings, and well, the list goes on. Just another typical day in startup land. But you know what… I love it! There’s a fat smile on my face when I realize everything that we can do with Chipin to help people. I am also excited with our new stealth project that Kevin and Olin are leading on and to top it off, Rob should be done with the new Chipin.com site very soon. We are already playing around with the alpha version.
Had a great trip to D.C. and totally wore myself out. Hardly can keep my head up, but must stay awake until tonight. Kev’s Chipin design was just selected as the top nonprofit site design. Lots of interesting conversations that will definitely shape the future of Chipin. More soon!
I’m off to NTEN in the morning and Lani is whipping up some flyers and postcards for our table while Justin is filming a new demo movie of the Chipin white label system. Rob is trying to get a “preview” version of the new chipin.com site up and running. The engineers are starting the next two week iteration to add some features and polish a couple others on the white label. The team is cranking. This is a big month.
In the spirit of the Widget panel I am going to be on, I’ll use this box.net widget to upload our files for the conference.
Pretty neat Wall Street Journal article about online fundraising and Chipin today. You need a WSJ account to read the article, so here’s the text…
Virtuous Reality
How Online Networks Can Boost Good Causes
March 30, 2007
JAKARTA, Indonesia — When Beth Kanter added a few lines of computer code to a Web site in December she proved a simple truth: All the fancy social-networking, Web 2.0 stuff we keep hearing about can have a useful purpose.
The computer code was what is called a Web widget. Think of it as a mini Web page within a larger Web page, a panel where the data come from a different source from the rest of the stuff on that page. Widgets are increasingly popular as a way of delivering little slices of information or content to Web logs (blogs) or other Web pages. Usually, it’s geeky stuff like a clock or a piece of music or video. But in Ms. Kanter’s case it’s about raising money for charity.
Ms. Kanter, a 50-year-old Massachusetts-based consultant to nonprofit organizations, wasn’t new to computers. So when in November Honolulu-based ChipIn launched its fund-raising widget, which allows users to contribute money and also displays how much money has been raised and how much still needs to be raised, she took the plunge; she placed the code on her Web page (sharingfoundation.chipin.com/sharing-foundation) and set a goal — raising a modest $750 to fund Cambodian orphan Leng Sopharath to go to college — and a deadline of a month. She then raided address books, instant-messaging buddy lists and networking sites for people who might be interested. ChipIn handled the donations. She raised $882 in 26 days. (You can find details of her campaign at widgetfundraising.wikispaces.com.)
Raising money online isn’t new. But what’s interesting about Ms. Kanter’s case is that the panel she used taps into something else: the growing trend of social networking online. Web sites, Web services and blogs all thrive on the ability to reach others and build informal, ad hoc networks of people with similar interests and goals. What Ms. Kanter proved is that it’s possible to use these networks to raise money, quickly, without a lot of back-office stuff. As Michael Stein, California-based nonprofit strategist and author of a book on online fund raising, puts it: “Everyone talks about Web 2.0, viral marketing…Beth sat down one afternoon and wanted to make it work for her.”
Ms. Kanter, says ChipIn founder and Chief Executive Carnet Williams, is not alone. Since November, ChipIn widgets have been used for 3,000 events, raising more than $500,000 for them.
Expect to see this kind of thing grow. Peer-to-peer fund raising, or personal fund raising, or distributed fund raising may appear more authentic and appealing to people fatigued by overexposure to TV, newspaper and magazine appeals. “People want to know where their $10 is going and how it is helping,” Mr. Williams says.
The system isn’t perfect. One area ChipIn and other similar services have yet to master is money: While it’s easy to donate via their widgets if you’re a user of online payment service PayPal, this doesn’t work in all currencies and in all countries.
And it remains to be seen whether this is just a fad. After all, donor fatigue is just as likely to kick in online as offline. If every Web site and blog we visit is festooned with tip jars, donate badges and fund-raising bars, we may just switch off. But on the other hand we read the people we trust and we trust the people we know, so it’s more likely that we’ll give to a charity they believe in. That we’re able to monitor what’s happened to our cash just may end up making us more discerning, generous givers.
Widgets may not herald the end of the big, mainstream charities, says Ms. Kanter, but they are here to stay. “Organizations that think it is a fad,” she says, “will be left out.”
We finished up the Chipin white label product today and had a very quiet launch. Since it is not a consumer facing product, there was not major public push. Instead, we sent off the API keys to the sandbox for each of our customers and also made a general sandbox available for prospective clients. The new system is pretty sweet and we can’t wait for the first client to push it live. Now comes the hard part… waiting for the “other” engineers to start implementation. It is a bit nerve wracking to sit and wait… but it does mean that we can finally open up the sales channel again and begin to sign up new clients.
I am off to the NTEN conference next week and will be speaking on a panel about widgets with Beth Kanter and Marshall Kirkpatrick (of Netsquared, Techcrunch and Splashcast fame). I am also meeting up with a whole bunch of really cool folks for different conversations.
NTC is really going to be fun as I am looking forward to seeing old friends, colleagues and names that I have not put a face to yet. I spent many years on the Nonprofit technology sector having started a nonprofit while in Law School called Netcorps that recruited college kids to provide technology assistance to social justice nonprofits. We also built some of the very first online advocacy campaigns (fax/email your congressperson). I was also the founding board member of NTEN way back when. I know many of the folks that started in this sector with me are no longer active, but it is always nice to think back to the many fun times we had together…
It is going to feel great to get back into the fold of things… and I hope that Chipin can continue to play a role as both a fundraising widget and social advocacy tool.
There is a post today on Techcrunch about Agape, the new stealth project by Sean Parker (Napster, Plaxo, Facebook). Parker’s goal, he says, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism. That is gonna be pretty cool if it is a friendster meets facebook meets meetup meets chipin… chipin? Who knows, maybe there’s a fit. We are working fast and furious on the next generation chipin.com site and should have a beta preview up by end of April. It is being totally redesigned from the ground up using our own white label system for the widgets, contributions, and tracking with a new front end that will include multiple levels of social networking and community features.
I can’t wait for April.. it is gonna be such a great month of activity. I hope to find more time to blog about what we are up to.. I promised Shel I would.
The engineering team hit the white label demo deadline and crunched right through it. Now we are getting ready to implement the system for our first set of clients. I can’t wait to get the system up live and running. We are also working hard to get the new chipin.com site ready for beta and launch before the NTEN conference in April. We have not released many new features on chipin.com since the beginning of the year because we are rewriting the entire site with many more social/community features.
We had a nice shout today on the techsoup newsletter and website.
