Through cash loan payday till advance cash loan loan payday…

Seriously though, great concept in theory. I’m rooting for The Point. Home town team running with the west coast boys, saweeeet. I’m a visual dude, I like good user experience and IA wrapped in effortless aesthetic. I kinda wish the homepage focused more on “most popular” or “latest” campaigns… i.e., a rolled up version of what you see when you click on “browse campaigns.” Me no likey the clicky.

So I went ahead and created an account. Easy, good. I even joined the Walmart campaign. I was hoping to see some indication of this new campaign I’ve just joined on the homepage (bottom or right sidebar perhaps, a little “my” section?) Gotta click on “Me” though. Nothing major, but again, the clickly. I guess what I’m getting at is I like the campaigns homepage as THE homepage a little better, but I understand the current homepage’s purpose, edumacate peoples.

I was also surprised not to see (and forgive me If I’ve just missed it) an option to “watch” a campaign. Like save it and watch it without joining. (see ebay auction watch). If I find a campaign 10 pages in and I’m not necessarily ready to comitt to joining, what do I do?

That’s all I have gang. Rock on The Point!!

I’d also believe that there is an intangible PR value to the very existence of a campaign that will have those companies wanting it to go away regardless of how many are lining up to support - not sure how you quantify that though - might be a question for the ad agencies.

best of luck - its not without its challenges - but find me a start-up that isn’t.

Ok, a bit dramatic, I think it’s a pretty cool idea.

Yeah, the authorization is only good for a couple of days, so there’s a small risk that the funds won’t be available whenever a campaign finally tips. If unavailable funds end up causing more trouble than we’re anticipating, there are other options, e.g. running monthly authorizations.

To minimize chargebacks, we send people who have made contingent pledges regular updates, reminding them of their commitment. It’s easy to withdraw a pledge any time before a campaign tips.

Thanks for the questions — it’s a situation we’ll be monitoring closely.

My name is Andrew, I’m the founder of The Point. Thanks for the feedback; just a few things to contribute:

First, as a company, The Point doesn’t have a social agenda. We made it because it’s such an obvious way to use the Web to bypass many of the problems groups experience when trying to make things happen. Our goal is to give this “tipping action” model of group problem solving a fair shake with the public, and then to let the chips fall.

Pledgebank is a great site and shares the same basic “I’ll do something, but only if others cooperate” model, but beyond that, there are more differences than similarities. First, The Point is largely focused on “do this, or else” campaigns — ultimatums targeted at a third party that are designed to, once they tip, quickly force a change by creating an unendurable financial stress. For many campaigns on The Point, the tipping point is something that can be quantified — it’s the point where the cost to a target of the group action becomes greater than the benefits of not changing. The tipping point of a campaign on The Point shouldn’t be determined by a prediction of how many people are likely to join, rather, a calculation of how many people are needed to force change. On The Point, it’s less important that a campaign tip than it is for people to have the sense that they will only be asked to take action when the conditions exist for a combined action to solve their shared problem. We also have an awesome feature called conditional anonymity — your identity isn’t revealed until the campaign tips — that makes The Point a singularly powerful tool for forming issue-specific workplace unions.

@morgan: I think there are a lot of people (including me) who are overwhelmed by the number of big problems out there. We need a way to figure out where our time adds the most value. We can’t boycott every product that offends us — we’d be naked or broke. The Point is a tool for people to manage all that noise, and only take action when the public has demonstrated that the demand for change has reached the tipping point that will actually make it happen.

@mark slater: When a campaign tips, credit cards are automatically charged on the fundraiser campaigns(the CC info is taken and securely stored when you first join the campaign). For ultimatums, i.e. campaigns where people agree to take some collective action designed to force change, participants are notified via e-mail that the action has begun, and then campaign organizers keep them abreast of further developments. Eventually, the organizers make a decision whether the campaign was successful or a failure, and close it as such.

Obviously, the percentage of people that comply is going to vary with the cost to the individual of taking action, the magnitude of the tipping point, and the relationship between the participants. We’ll regularly be tweaking the platform to make that percentage as high as possible. However, we think the knowledge that there is a group relying on your participation, and with it you can solve the problem, will induce a far higher turnout than traditional attempts. That’s the power of only acting when you reach a tipping point. Think of it like an election that’s predicted to go 50/50 — many more people will show up because they sense that their vote will actually matter.

@nw: You’ll be glad to know that we’re working on Facebook / OpenSocial integration.

@jh: The logo is a play off of the Sisyphus myth, the greek that was punished to an eternity of trying to roll a rock over a hill that would always escape him at the last minute and roll back to the bottom. Our logo we’re showing him finally overcoming that hurdle, a reference not only to the “tipping point” idea, but also the fact that we’re using the Web to overcome the traditional hurdles to collective action, and thereby making it easier for policy to reflect the sum of individual preferences.

@Len: users create campaigns and set the tipping point. For users who aren’t sure what the appropriate tipping point is, there’s a “Problems” section under the Discussion area where people can collaborate on a shared problem and use their combined resources to quantify an effective action and tipping point. If a campaign has a tipping point that seems to low, I don’t think people will join. You can have multiple campaigns linked by the problem they aim to solve — people will gravitate to the campaigns that appear likely to have an impact. In other words, I think the most compelling content will rise to the top.

@Marc Miles: Some day, we’ll make money through targeted ads. We have a few ideas up our sleeves to make advertising more useful and profitable than it is on most social networks.

You didn’t report on “WHO” sets the ‘point’. (Or did I miss it?)

Is it the person that starts the campaign?
Is it the web site management?

Also, what relevance does the number have with respect to the cause.

Its all nice and dandy to set a point of say 50,000 - but if the number has little chance of making an impact - what’s the point? (pun intended)

If you need an example, how about Proctor and Gamble and all of the disposable products they make and we consumers consume. I doubt even 1 Million people signing up to boycott one of their products would make them change their practices.

One could make a case that if it isn’t disposable, consumable, and bad for the environment - P&G doesn’t make it. AND they continue to be one of the biggest companies out there without a sign of slowing down.

I think the beauty of this site is that if enough people sign up and then take an action as a ‘group’ at the same point in time - the impact can be seen (by the company) directly, without question.

Most of the campaigns have too low of a threshold to make much of an impact.

We’ll see if the site itself reaches its own tipping point. Cool idea - hope it works.

Thank you very TC