ChipIn collects donations
It often seems like the Internet can streamline anything, and it sometimes feels like if you can’t make a process Web-based and lights-out then it could be too much trouble to be worthwhile. One of the latest real-world processes to fall to Internet optimization is, of all activities, collecting donations. The service that makes this possible is ChipIn.com.
ChipIn, which is free, supports the collection money for personal causes, group purchases, and fundraisers using a customized ChipIn page and or an interactive widget (for blogs and other social media). ChipIn also wants to partner with blogs and social networking sites which can earn revenue promoting ChipIn to members.
You collect money through ChipIn’s secure services via PayPal, direct deposit (ACH), or check. A new facility in ChipIn since I first looked at the service is Facebook integration, allowing you to include a ChipIn widget in your profile.
Creating a new ChipIn campaign simply requires specifying what you are collecting for, how much you want to raise, the date you want to raise it by, and the email address of your PayPal account.
Another new facility ChipIn is working on is a Google Maps mashup to plot the location of donors.
ChipIn widgets (which require the user’s PC to be running Flash 8 or higher) graphically show how much you’ve raised, your goal, the number of contributions, and the end date of your campaign (note that if you don’t meet your goal then you can change the current end date). There’s also a facility to copy the widget so that others can include the appeal on their Web sites and blogs – this is a very powerful technique for viral marketing of fund raising.
ChipIn has made some stats about the use of its service available: Their transactional volume each month grew from $20,000 to almost $300,000, the number of new events grew from 600 to 2,000 each month, the number of individual contributors grew from 500 to 7,500 per month, and the number of new users at ChipIn.com grew from 500 to 1,700 per month.
ChipIn is a great idea and could be what the future of fundraising for charities, politics and just about any other appeal goal. Of course, until the majority of America has access to the Web, there’ll still be a need for real-world campaigns, but at least the online ones will be efficient and easy.
