By now, if you’ve heard about the location-based service Foursquare, you know that a key component of it is the gaming element. One level of this game is that users compete to get mayorships of venues within cities. A second level involves obtaining badges. But a third level is much more straightforward: A leaderboard. Now Foursquare is trying to up the motivation behind that element of the game by bringing in charity.
Foursquare is teaming up with an org in New York City (where they are based), Techies Give Back, to translate checkins into donations. Ideally, this money would come from brands/organizers that would sponsor the Foursquare Leaderboard for a week, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Money earned would be given to CampInteractive, a nonprofit that works with inner-city youth on both outdoors and tech projects, which Techies Give Back is working with to hold an event on December 13.
Here’s how this would work: When you checkin on Foursquare, you generate points that go towards your score on the leaderboard. These points differ based on a few factors. Generally, you get more points if you’re checking into a place you haven’t been to before, or in a long time. You also get more points for adding a venue that isn’t yet in Foursquare’s system. Based on these points, a sponsor would donate a set amount of money per point.
Foursquare is looking for a brand that will donate at least $0.03 to Techies Give Back for each point earned. In NYC, that means the charity would have raised over $4,500 last week. (For those keeping score at home, that means there were about 150,000 points earned from checkins in New York last week.)
The sponsorship would allow for a complete re-skinning of the Foursquare leaderboard, Crowley notes. The week they are targeting is December 7 through the 12. Ideally, they’d have a brand step up with a winning proposal by December 1. Those interested should email info [at] techiesgiveback.org.
While this will just be an experiment in NYC at first, Crowley hints that this is something the company is thinking about doing with its leaderboard going forward. And this extends upon the idea of using the game element of Foursquare for good. Last month, the service teamed up with BART, the public transportation system in the San Francisco Bay Area, to encourage people to check in more at BART stations to earn rewards such as free rides and a special badge.
Of course, none of this has to do with the business model Foursquare is also working on, which involves partnering with local venues to create incentives such as free meals/beer for users who checkin.
The one week that I don’t go out every night and that’s the time the leaderboard gets on TechCrunch.
Good to see that my friend Nick Starr is up there though.
Wow this will mean a lot for charity, having an app ranked in the 50s in the social media section of the app store, beneath the Photo Trader and Sex Stats applications, offer up its leaderboard for skinning.
Great idea to drive local awareness of businesses. I would argue the $4500 is a cheap way to make everyone in a city aware of your product, business or service.
The big challenge for FourSquare, IMO, is convincing stodgy old businesses that this type of social media platform is worth paying attention to. They’re coming around, but I would bet it may be a tough sell for those who don’t get it.
I’m one of the co-founders of TechiesGiveBack.org. Thanks for the great writeup and to Dennis (and Foursquare) for helping us out.
Two points of clarification:
(1) TechiesGiveBack.org is an organization set up to help tech-related non-profits raise funds. We’re not a charity ourselves. We created NY Tech Gives Back Day for the NY tech community to come together for a day of volunteering and giving. On December 13th we’re bringing down 50 CampInteractive kids to go ice skating and partnering them with 50 volunteers. Details and tickets are on our site.
(2) The charity/non-profit we’re helping to raise money for this year is CampInteractive (not “campusinteractive”).
Where I live the leaderboard is full of people who are cheating by checking in a place that don’t belong. Some obviously at work (one guy is mayor of overstock.com), others who are mayors of the local Costco, or in one case a local bus stop where he checks in daily.
I’m not sure how happy companies are to donate whe people are gaming the system like that. On the otherhand, all more money for charities.
Hey Kerensky, we on the cheating problem… got some fixes in the works (beta testing now). Can’t wait to get this one fixed
-d
Like the story the other week said, there’s got to be a way to not reward people for adding their friend’s private house as a venue without permission for privacy reasons. The bonus they get for finding a new place has got to be negated if they do something like that (people have to be able to remove their own house as an addable venue as well)