Web Service Wed: ThePoint.com
Again, it’s Thu, but I’m sticking with the Wed name for this regular post.
I blogged about ThePoint.com before (their slogan: Make something happen), they’re based out of nearby Chicago. I started 1 campaign to bring a new restaurant to Downtown Goshen (we’re $1,870 pledged towards a goal of $10,000…) and have joined the campaign to save the booth at New World Arts.
The concept is simple: you create a goal (a campaign) and then recruit people to join it. If you’re raising money, no one pays until you reach the tipping point you define. So like with my restaurant campaign, people enter their credit card info but no one is charged until we reach $10,000.
Some campaigns that recently “tipped”:
- Fact check political ads in San Francisco ($2500 raised)
- Build a DonorsChoose plugin for WordPress (13 members agreed to test it)
- Raise matching funds for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation ($10,100 raised, matching total: $20,100)
Uses:
- Fighting the man
- raising money without anyone taking risks in the beginning
Suggestions:
- better UI nav bar
- the blog is not working
- better publicity tools for your campaign — automatically generated posters (I think they’re working on this)
Business model (as best can be determined):
- apparently, advertising (there’s none yet)
- they do NOT take a cut of money raised (except to pay credit card fees)
+’s:
- awesome idea
- growing user-base with actual successes
- under constant development – constantly improving
- announcements are a nice, needed feature
-’s:
- fairly early stage in development
- campaigns stall (our restaurant campaign has been stagnant for 9 months)
- UI is icky uses non-standard nav tab thingies
- under constant development – constantly changing
