Category: General News

... a blog post about the blog!

Maybe you’ve noticed that the blog is now embedded within the main Charitocracy site? Goodbye blog.ch-y.org, hello ch-y.org/blog! (If you haven’t noticed, that’s a good sign it’s been a smooth transition.)

The blog predates the rest of the site by nearly a year, and was hosted on a separate server. My SEO gurus (hey, Dave & Tommy!) tell me that’s frowned upon by some search engine algorithms. Not to mention, it’s just a historical artifact that they were separate.

Build it and then what?

My “Build It And They Will Come” mentality is starting to show its naïveté. That saying only holds true for the ghosts of baseball legends when you transform a corn field into a baseball diamond. Or maybe putting up a Starbucks next to the research station in Antarctica. Charitocracy, without the same captive audience, will need to start taking marketing much more seriously in order to carry out our mission.

Organic growth has been humbling, in multiple senses of that word. On one hand, 100% year-to-year growth in donors on nothing more than word-of-mouth and the generosity of our friends and family fills my heart. You guys amaze me. On the other hand, we have ~200 donors today, while the site in its current form could easily serve 2000 or even 20,000 donors.

Expect to hear more about our new marketing efforts in the coming weeks, as we enter 2017’s Giving Season!

You've proven that you can accept a challenge and deliver results. We had 384 Facebook Likes, we asked you to invite your friends to like us, and 4 days later we had 500. That number continues to grow, and as a result September's winning cause will get an extra $132... or more!

Double the Donors

This week we have a new challenge: bring our donor count from 186 to 200. That's a net of 14 donors in the next 5 days. Doable, right? After all, last year we signed up 59 new donors in the last 5 days of September! You just need to pick a few of your raddest friends and invite them to join Charitocracy. Or if you haven't already joined yet yourself, then you qualify to be the raddest: simply click here, and for as little as $13/year you'll become Charitocracy's newest donor!

Hitting an even 200 would effectively double our donors from September 30, 2016 to September 30, 2017. 100% growth in a year. That's all we need. If we double in size each year, the monthly pot will exceed $1 million just 10 years from now! Think about it, that means each donor has to simply convince one friend to join each year. Not so far-fetched! Especially considering the busy bees going over quota. You know who you are. <3

Double the Fun

We know extra incentives help motivate prospective donors to seal the deal. That's why we're matching all new donor sign-ups, dollar for dollar. When a new donor donates $13, we'll double that by throwing an extra $1 into the coming year's monthly pots. A $130 donation will go twice as far when we throw an extra $10 into the monthly pots. If you give Charitocracy to a friend, that same doubling will apply.

And because we not only want to increase the donor base, but also the $ per donor ratio, we're matching the new donation amount for all donation increases as well! Let's say you were giving $5/month and you double your donation to $10/month. We'll throw in an extra $10/month just as if you were a new donor!

By my calculations, if we hit this goal and end up with at least 200 donors come October 1st, the September pot could break $1500!

You've heard the news that we've been up and running for a whole year now, right? We have things pretty well dialed in at this point. Deserving causes, nominated and voted in by you guys, win ever-increasing pots of cash each month. Now we need to turn our attention to growth of our donor base. And for starters, that means we need more Likes... from the likes of you and your friends.

The Plan: $1 added to the pot per Like

We have some great ideas on how to attract more donors, but we need to get the word out to as many people as we can. We're primarily "preaching to the converted" at the moment: those of you reading this are by and large our friends and family. You're already donors, or if not, you at least get what we're trying to do and are patiently waiting for the perfect day to join us. (We're ready when you are.) But to reach those other deadbeats out there who've never heard of us, we need lots and lots of Likes!

Instead of paying Facebook/Twitter/Google for advertisements drumming up more followers, we're going to pay ourselves. We received some large matching donations earlier this year, not yet tied to any monthly pots. We'd like to use those funds to catalyze growth at Charitocracy. Before we roll out other incentives, we'd like to grow the audience who'll hear about them. So the first incentive: $1 added to the pot for every new Like.

Right now we're at 384 Likes on Facebook, and 31 Followers on Twitter.  So on the night of September 30, we'll take the current Like count, subtract 384, and add that many dollars to September's pot. If our Like count is up to 500, we'd throw an extra $116 in. Same goes for Twitter and Instagram followers. Now that's what I call sweetening the pot! And we'd repeat with our new baselines in October.

The Ask: Invite all your friends to Like us

Here's what we'd... like... you to do:

1. On Facebook, go to Charitocracy's page.
   
2. Click on the ... button, then on Invite Friends:
   
3. Click the little blue page icon and write a one-liner personal note like this:
   
4. Most important step: Click every Invite button in your list of friends!
5. Head on over to our Twitter page and Follow us!
   
6. I don't know if there's a way to invite Twitter followers to follow Charitocracy, but let me know if there is and I'll pass it along!

Remember, you and your friends Like us, but we LOVE you.  <3

• For a limited time, while supplies last, void where prohibited, batteries not included. We should have more than enough matching funds to cover us through 1000 Likes and well beyond, so please get busy!