NetSquared Nomination

Summary: ChipIn turns blogs, social networks and Web sites into powerful, distributed fundraising systems, making raising or collecting money more conversational, successful, and fun.

The Rise of Social Media: The meteoric rise of “social media” – blogs, social networks, and interactive Web sites – has made online content creation both simple and widely distributed. The vast majority of social media creators publish primarily because they enjoy it or because they are passionate supporters of a particular cause. The combination of captivating, widely distributed social media and fundraising (aka “social payments”) has created a potent and still largely untapped way for individuals, groups and institutions to collect funds. We are in the early stages. Social media is used every day to raise money for thousands of different causes. Social media empowers “Blogathons” to raise money for charity or political campaigns, musicians to appeal directly to their audiences to underwrite albums and individuals or groups to raise money for schools, clubs, sports teams and special individual causes. Email drives with embedded media components are now part of the normal range of fundraising options for all non-profit organizations.

How ChipIn Taps Into Social Media: ChipIn is a powerful and unique approach to social payments. The heart of the ChipIn service is the “ChipIn widget,” a small application that is easily integrated into social media. Much more than a simple “donate now” button or graphical fundraising “thermometer,” the ChipIn widget is highly customizable and provides real-time updates on the status of fundraising events (such as the amount of money raised and the number of contributors). The widget also includes dynamic options such as contributor comments, multimedia content (video and audio messages), and more. The widget is also unique in that anyone managing a fundraising campaign can create a widget but also allow anyone who downloads that widget to alter it in key ways and localize, customize and personalize an appeal for funds. These features are all available within the ChipIn widget and will require no sophisticated technical expertise to turn on or use. If you can run PowerPoint, you can run ChipIn. It's really that simple.

Viral, Many-to-One, One-to-Many: The ChipIn widget has both “many-to-one” and “one-to-many” capabilities. That is, one widget can display information for many fundraising events, or information for a single fundraising event can be displayed using multiple widgets. This flexibility makes the ChipIn service highly viral. Anyone with a blog, Web site, or social networking page can post a widget to promote his or her own event, or support another cause. Likewise, ChipIn Widgets can be pasted into HTML-based email templates and distributed in that manner. Anyone who sees a ChipIn widget can make it their own by clicking on a "copy this widget" button and cutting and pasting the simple widget call-up code onto their site or into the body of an email message. Larger institutions can also distribute ChipIn widgets that support their cause through affinity groups and stakeholders. The upshot? Institutions large and small, from a town raising money to send a baseball team to the Little League World Series to the a multi-national charity seeking to fund a rescue effort in a war zone, can build a polished appeal and scale that effort up quickly and easily.

Easy to Build, Easy to Track, Easy to Control: Building a ChipIn widget is as easy thanks to a sophisticated tool that translates complex, behind-the-scenes, flash coding into a simple point-and-click widget assembly tool. Widget builders can upload and edit images or inlays for other widgets (Google Video or YouTube clips) without writing a single line of HTML or code. The ChipIn system also includes a sophisticated tracking mechanism that lets a fundraising campaign manager monitor revenue inflows, pageviews/impressions, and IP addresses down to the individual widget level. ChipIn lets campaign managers watch all of this in real time and identify the real fundraising heroes and, ideally, why their messages resonate so well. The tracking tool will also allow the campaign manager to preview widget customizations before they go live and to turn off widget displaying inappropriate content or behaviors. In other words, a fundraiser can use ChipIn to tap the social passions and creativity of the blogosphere without compromising control of the campaign message.