Fundable is an piece of a larger puzzle that's starting to come together. In their own words:
Fundable is a new service that lets groups of people pool money to raise funds or make purchases. Here's how it works:
- 100 people want to go in on a purchase. One of them creates a Fundable group action.
- Each person joins the group action by paying $10 through PayPal [or a credit card], making a total of $1,000.
- This $1,000 gets "turned on" only if everyone contributes $10 within two weeks. Otherwise, Fundable refunds all money.
- The person who organized the group action makes sure that everyone receives what he or she paid for.
Distributed fundraising! Why would this catch on? I can think of three reasons:
- People want to give, but they don't want to be on your email list, because they're not going to read your boring newsletter, and they don't trust you to keep their address out of the wrong hands. Don't call them; they'll call you.
- People want their gift to be more than a drop in the bucket. When they give as a group, everyone's a major donor, and they know they're having a major impact.
- People are more and more comfortable with anonymous aggregation of resources (legal and otherwise). First Napster, now Grokster, Flickr, and the like.
There are still a few missing pieces that people will need to bring to the table themselves--communications tools so "group leaders" can tell their friends, content management tools to make a "group action" page more informative and compelling--but these are trivial tasks for the early adopters who are likely to be "group leaders."
And if this does catch on, how would it affect online fundraising? I think at least some answers can be found in the ongoing discussion about blogs/websites that's kept me and a few other folks occupied this past week. If power continues to shift to the donors (and it's happening in every other market; why wouldn't it happen here as well?), then the established model of keeping donors metaphorically captive in your house list and prodding them into action using email newsletters and alerts is going to become less effective over time.
You're going to have to pull them to your site with frequently updated, compelling content (i.e. authentic, interactive conversations), you're going to have to talk to them and answer their questions, and you're going to have to do it all in a highly visible, discoverable way. In short: your site better look like a blog.
(Yeah, that's right: I said "blog," when just the other day I declared the term "obsolete." Eh, so sometimes it's useful. Write me a letter and I'll refund your subscription.)
Hat tip to Lifehacker.
