News

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 I know many of the folks that started in this sector with me are no longer active, but it is always nice to think back to the many fun times we had together…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.

Alex just came by the office to ask how things are going and I said.. in the next 29 days of March it all goes down. Thus the title March Madness. We are working on a new release, packaging up our technology to white label our chipin widget management system. We have several clients signed up (see Press Release below) and on our team is working hard to get it all done in time to implement as scheduled. Rob, our web whiz is here from San Diego.. trying to get some surfing in, but we are working him hard to meet our deadline. So in the spirit of widgets, I have attached something to keep us all ticking..

We are happy to announce a new partnership today with Papilia. Full press release here.

Papilia And ChipIn Partner to Provide Best-Of-Breed Solution for Donor-Centered Fundraising and Communications

Web 2.0 social fundraising widgets to be integrated into Papilia’s donor engagement services.

San Francisco, CA; Honolulu, HI (PRWEB) February 26, 2007 — Papilia, a pioneer in donor-centered fundraising solutions for nonprofit organizations, and ChipIn, the leading provider of Web 2.0-based social fundraising widgets for nonprofits, today announced a technology partnership to integrate their offerings within Papilia’s donor engagement web-based application. The enhanced solution will provide Papilia clients with an integrated fundraising suite consisting of ChipIn’s Widget technology and services, as well as the personalization and communication power of Papilia.

“In the past, nonprofits’ fundraising staff has carried the burden of raising funds for their causes alone. Now, with Papilia and ChipIn, donors can easily raise funds on an organization’s behalf by engaging their social network,” said Stephane Giraudie, co-founder and chief product officer at Papilia. “We are very excited about guiding the future of Blograising and anticipate a huge demand in the combined functionality.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Papilia and ChipIn will co-develop a private-labeled version of ChipIn’s Widget Management System (WMS), and integrate it into Papilia’s existing service offerings. This will enable nonprofits to conduct viral, donor-to-donor fundraising campaigns seamlessly within Papilia’s existing donor-centered fundraising solution.

“Widgets have been widely adopted by social media users for blogging, social networking and personal websites, and are the core components of some of today’s most popular online services,” said Carnet Williams, chief executive officer at ChipIn. “Considering the ease of implementation and the results ChipIn’s widgets have provided fundraisers to-date, the combination of ChipIn and Papilia is a great solution for nonprofits looking to engage, monetize, and retain donors in a personalized, result-driven manner.”

Development efforts are to begin immediately, and integration completed in the second quarter of 2007. For more information, please contact Papilia by visiting www.papilia.com.

About ChipIn
ChipIn, based in Honolulu and San Francisco, enables organizations and individuals to conduct supporter-driven marketing campaigns within social media. ChipIn’s widget management service leverages the passion and creativity of social media users while allowing organizations to retain full control over content and distribution. For more information, please visit www.chipin.com or email e-mail protected from spam bots.

About Papilia
Papilia, a privately-held San Francisco company, is a pioneer in donor-centered fundraising solutions for nonprofit organizations. Papilia helps nonprofits secure more donors with less effort by enabling them to deliver uniquely personal online experiences to each donor. Inspired by the thoughtful attention routinely offered to major donors, Papilia’s new generation personalization technology lets organizations treat every donor like a major donor. Leading nonprofits, such as Catholic Charities, California Pacific Medical Center Foundation, and Big Brothers Big Sisters, are using Papilia to attract new donors and better engage their existing ones. For more information, please visit the Papilia corporate website at www.papilia.com or call (415) 692-0071.

Things have been a bit quiet lately at Chipin. We getting ready to cease holding funds on March 9th and convert completely to transmitting funds via our partner, Paypal. We have been busy building the next version of chipin.com and plan to have a new beta ready for testing by mid-march. Keep an eye out for announcements and an opportunity to help us test.

I was recently interviewed foa two podcasts. The first by Britt Bravo for Net2 and the second by Corey for 501c3Cast

I wrote a long winded explanation of the changes to our payment service, but decided to keep this post short and to the point. This weekend we decided to end Chipin holding money for events and require all organizers to use their Paypal account to receive money directly. There are numerous reasons for this change, some deal with risk management (fraud), administrative costs, change in business focus, and a strengthening of our partnership with Paypal. One other reason is that Paypal can accept money from 60 different countries, while we can only accept U.S. currencies. We are working hard on a new Chipin.com that should be unveiled in the next month.

Don’t worry.. we are as healthy as ever and are landing some very impressive new clients for our white label system. We just need to focus and the value of us holding the money for our business did not justify the costs in time and money.

Again.. thank you very much for your continued support and please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments.

The team is humming. The UI is coming together. The consultants are arriving. The client contracts are being signed. The Netvocate prototype is coming along. The new business model is getting clearer. The sales leads keep coming in. Am I just dreaming? Today all is going as planned at Chipin.

A couple interviews just posted on our fundraising widget:

1) nfp2.co.uk

2) Techzi

Beth Kanter and Chipin are pleased to announce the release of our first case study entitled”Using the ChipIn Fundraising Badge for a Personal Fundraising Campaign”

From the Exec Summary:

This case study walks you through the step-by-step process of using the ChipIn widget to implement a successful a personal fundraising campaign on behalf of any nonprofit organization or cause. The tips and techniques shared in the next few pages will help your organization guide supporters and transform them into effective fundraisers for your organization’s cause or program. The case study looks at how to set a realistic goal, crafting an effective message, identifying likely prospects, incorporating social networking sites into your implementation efforts, and how to best use the Chipin widget.

A couple blogs covered the article including Podnosh and Deborah’s blog and or course Beth

My friend Yunus also sent me a link to this video that makes me convinced that Chipin is really a great solution for active giving… a buffalo

Yesterday was a bit of a fire drill at Chipin. We had a huge surge of widget views hitting our system just as we were migrating and expanding our servers. Not a good time, but Murphy’s law does state that just when you have your pants down someone walks in. A big thanks to our team for getting on the problem and working all day to fix it. Another big thanks to Caucho Technology for jumping in and helping us find a consultant to help optimize our resin install. I have used resin for several other projects, including at Stanford and I can only say great things about that team… they really support their product and price it right.

I apologize to any users that experienced a slowdown yesterday. We are working hard on a brand new architect that will scale to 100+ million widget views a day. Your input has been great and our next release is pretty cool! More soon.

There’s a saying that many companies use and that is drinking one’s own Kool-Aid. This is normally a cocktail allocated to startups when they first sit around dreaming of the next BIG thing. I know when we started Chipin, we sat around visualizing how our group collecting system was going to help organizer collect money from groups of people. We kept chugging the Kool-Aid when we decided that our fundraising widget was going to spur on blograising campaigns so content creators could monetize their activities. The after dinner Kool-Aid was when we decided that the $4.5 B online fundraising world needs Chipin fundraising widgets to expand their distributed fundraising activities.

Well, I am happy to announce that we are finally off the Kool-Aid and onto the real stuff. We are repositioning our product as a Widget Management System that is blowing the doors off our early clients. We have people who want to buy our system and who have plans to roll it out big time. Let’s say Kool-Aid high is starting to wear off as we dive deep into a nourishing meal of revenues and clients.

So… hats off to the Kool-Aid that got us started and now I’ll just have to sneak a couple drinks here and there to keep the juices flowing.