It’s micro-messaging meets micro-funding. Marketing consultant Laura Fitton is trying to raise money $2 at a time through Twitter. She is using Tipjoy, which allows people to turn Tweets into payments (via PayPal). Help her raise $25,000 for Charity:Water by Christmas. Tipjoy investor John Borthwick has agreed to match up to $10,000 in donations.
For less than the price of a double latte, you can give clean drinking water to children in villages across the world. All you need to do is enter your Twitter ID in the widget at this link, and then fund a TipJoy account. You can give $5 to the Salvation Army or the Google Lunar X-Prize through TipJoy instead.
And you thought Tweets were worthless.
I wanted to draw your attention to TweetmasFuture, a holiday specific campaign that allows people to tweet a online gift code, which can be used to support a variety of different international development projects.
So far we’ve raised nearly $15k and TweetsmasFuture has increased traffic to our site by 30%.
Contact me for more details.
What is your overhead margin on donations?
(I answered this below) 100% goes to projects helping to end poverty.
love hearing stories of how technology can help people. just hope that all the money gets to be used for helping and not admin.
100% of donations to Charity:Water go to the cause.
ChristmasFuture.org also ensures that 100% of the funds raised go towards the international development projects on our site and the people implementing them. We fundraise for our operations seperately.
We use a different credit card processing system than PayPal (we use IATS), so we even cover the cost of the credit card transaction.
Dig into our site a bit, I think you’ll like what you find.
@eric from springleap – yes, as Ivan said, 100% of funds raised go straight to projects via Charity: Water. That’s one reason I selected them for this cray Christmas wish of mine.
Scott Harrison has obtained direct sponsorship of all operating costs, plane tickets, etc. so that every penny goes straight to the work at hand.
They take this mandate so seriously that THEY even cover whatever processing fees PayPal deducts for payment handling. Classy act.
Thank you, and why I’m passionate about this issue. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/3qnrvHBVYL_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Thank you, and why I’m passionate about this issue. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/WiyaONvX2P”}}}
I prefer donating (or tweeting) my money to organizations that try to change the situation from the roots, and not those charities, who just help maintaining the situation but don’t make a change, despite their good intentions.
It seems to me that Charity:Water is making real change n the ground and then displaying results. Why do you think they are just “good intentions”?
Because so many people are cynical about charities and non-profits, the model for low-overhead and little-no money going to third-party operational expenses becomes very important in attracting people.
While some operational expenses are necessary, seperating the operational fundraising from the actual philanthropic work helps people gain trust and understand exactly how their investment to the non-profit helped to change the world.
We’ve found that by not forcing people to support our operations, most of them choose to give to us anyway.
I expect more NPOs will continue developing this model.
We could also use your help for our company charity drive!
No money required, just a thoughtful comment!
http://tinyurl.com/57wcpe
THANK YOU!
Cheers,
Kate
PS and yes, please retweet
(@just_kate)
You can also follow this Twitter user. Every follow generates some $$ which are contributed to charities:
https://twitter.../follow4charity
Do either of the current micro-payment services plan on allowing users to type a pymt command to pay third parties using email, IM, text mssge, Facebook. etc..?
Well, you can tweet via IM, right? And there are dozens of TXT based payment solutions. Tipjoy is entering that space with this twitter integration. Look at tweets like this:
innonate: p @msg $7 for that beer. Thanks
http://twitter....atus/1073486824
And who do you consider the “current” micro-payment services plans? There is no clear winner in the US right now. Tipjoy is going after the whole space.
All contributions to the Google Lunar X PRIZE go toward education and outreach programs. The X PRIZE Foundation is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to bringing about radical breakthroughs for humanity, and educating the public about the power of incentive prizes.
Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/glxp
Or visit http://www.goog...lunarxprize.org
This is a great idea. I’ve also recently been thinking that certain trends today allow for micro-charities. My idea (never got around to it unfortunately) was to raise $1 per year from as many people as possible and then give away the total sum raised among 3-4 charities that make the most impact on the world in terms of bettering people’s lives. I believe this sort of idea is more possible today because it could spread virally through social networks and social media . A key benefit is that the cost for attracting donations would practically be zero since it’s people telling others in their network to donate $1. Other overhead costs could also be close to nothing since all the money raised is given to the organizations that actually do the hard work such as Unicef or the Red Cross.
This concept could do well for everyone, especially in today’s times when people are cutting back on giving to charities. The main problem would be that it has to have a massive volume of people giving but again this is possible today if Facebook and Twitter are properly leveraged.
You’re telling me I have to trust twitter with my bank information? Or that I want any connection between my Twitter credentials and my money at all?
No thanks. I’m guessing twitter is pretty easy to spoof.
The money moves through Tipjoy. You fill up a Tipjoy account with PayPal, and give payments by tweeting “p $2 @wellwishes” or through http://tipjoy.com
Those payments move funds to other tipjoy accounts, who then can cash out via PayPal. That last step involves a great deal of review on the part of Tipjoy, and it would be very hard to fraudulently get cash from a Tipjoy account hooked into Twitter.
But if I have a tipjoy account and someone spoofs my twitter creds then they can empty out my tipjoy account.
At what point does tipjoy legally become a bank and everything that entails as far as regulation and security oversight? This is cute and all in the web community but I fear what real crooks might do with it.
Why not ask people to donate any way they can – seems more like a PR stunt for TipJoy ?
Do either of the current micro-payment services plan on allowing users to type a pymt command to pay third parties using email, IM, text mssge, Facebook. etc..