EasySponsorship is a free online application that allows users to create their own online sponsorship/fundraising pages to collect donations from anyone from anywhere in the world for anything.
Each user is given a unique web address that they can send to friends and associates as part of their fundraising efforts. Supported currencies are Pounds Sterling, US dollars and Euros. The service is completely free and all money goes straight to the user, with a revenue model reliant on site advertising.
Overall the service provides a sort of do-it-yourself service for sponsorships and fundraising. Competitors include JustGiving.com and the ChipIn Facebook app we covered in June.
Good idea.
My first thought is that most people who would use this application would have a list (likely an .xls sheet) of friends and family members they’d want to participate in their sponsorship campaign, yet I saw no ability to import a contact list.
Second, I’d suggest a “Sponsor My Project” widget/badge that can be pasted into a MySpace or other social networking site profile. This will help get the word out for the user as well as for EasySponsorship.com.
A clever idea, although the facebook application has a better chance at taking off.
Techcrunch is dead, this is complete trash. What happened to the innovative industry changing news? Michael Arrington is bamboozleing us all. He really is exploiting us, the users, for his dollars. I mean come one, this website is so saturated with ads. I wouldn’t mind if the news was relevant like it used to be. This dissent seems to be growing, and I think its time for us to classify techcrunch.com as being in the deadpool!
I just signed up. They have animated gif captchas though, which was extremely annoying.
@Markus: If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Opinions are the reason blogs exist.
I think its a good idea although I will need to look at it more to see how it works. I don’t understand why they went for the animated gif captchas on the registration page. The normal captcha does the job very well and unless there is something else that warranties the animated version I think I would rather go with the simple and straight-forward stuff.
Markus K
I never said the site was brilliant and if you don’t like this news, read another site. 
I write about web widgets and I get comments telling me to write about a startup. I write about a startup/ new site and I get your comment!
I gave to this one!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
I eat babies, and you should too.
…
Oh, snap! You thought I was going to leave a crappy one-liner and drop a link to my blog, didn’t you?
Sorry, I have more valuable content to contribute. ;(
EasySponsorships screams, “gimme money” — like third-world gamers who hang around MMORPG lobbies spammingishly begging for free money. But damn if the site doesn’t have a slick design, and the concept (in theory) looks like it could compete with Paypal’s “donate” buttons.
“Sponsor this website and I’ll …”
What’s sad is, there’s a part of me that wants to join and set up a profile on the off-chance I might get some free money. Sheesh.
We are currently doing something very similar on facebook, see,
http://apps.fac...com/sponsor-me/
If you have any suggestions I’d love to hear them.
Mat
Exciting post on Techcrunch!
Sadly the start up looks like it’s affiliated with Plagiarism.com hence copying off Justgiving.com word for word
But we’re getting tired of the copy and design so it won’t be long before we change that. Good luck to them but a D minus for effort. I think Paypal & BmyCharity are ahead of this by miles.
Can I see the demo, how it actually work.
That site is complete crap. No where on the site does it say that they charge a processing fee for people who donate. I work for a company that offers the same thing and they are very up front about it and ask you if you want the person donating to pay the fee or the person accepting donations to pay the fee. I tested it with $5 and they say that you will actually donate $4.42 which is a 10% cut. For anyone that knows anything about processing credit cards, they are definitely making something off of that. This site is definitely not free.
A 58 cent processing fee is pretty cheap actually.
If YOU knew anything about credit card processing, you would know a processing fee consists of a flat rate plus a percentage of the transaction.
So it’s probably something between 20-30 cents flat rate plus around 5-7% of the transaction, which isn’t too bad. You can’t avoid the fees in processing credit cards.
Good call on knowing what you’re talking about though.
No transaction fees is a nice touch.
I just came across this website called Startraising.com that allows it’s fundraising members make money while they raise money for non-profits. I thought it was very interesting and another way for people to earn extra cash.