I’ve got a possible interview with Joe Green and his developers next week. They passed the two million user mark some time ago. Appaholic is showing the following chart for Causes:
They have formidable positioning as THE nonprofit to deal with on Facebook. I’m very curious how they’re handling the user load now as they are adding roughly 239,000 users per WEEK despite the throttling on adding new users imposed by Facebook about a month after the F8 launch.
Please feel free to post your questions in the comments thread or e-mail them to me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org.
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Except, they aren’t a nonprofit - they are a “venture-backed startup” - so what is their revenue model? Do they take a cut of the dollars raised via Causes?
They’ve provided an amazing resource, and were, for sure, first out of the gate on this one. Kudos for them. What does the future hold, given that eventually, they will need to provide value for their investors?
Oops, my bad, they are a for-profit. I still haven’t figured out their revenue model so far myself. I’ll make sure to ask the question.
I would be interested to know what amount of donations they have facilitated to the actual NPOs. It is fantastic the number of users they have generated to join the various causes available, but what has this amounted to in fundraising dollars for the organizations.
Thanks!
How are they programmatically donating to every 501(c)(3)? Is there some uber-non-profit API out there? Did they come up with it their selves?
Great question — but it’s not hard to roll your own solution though. They use Rails so they’re probably using ActiveMerchant as their library. That library can use both Authorize.Net and Paypal to make donations happen. I’ll definitely ask them what they’re using though.
Right, but do you actually get money into non-profits’ bank accounts? Do they have every non-profit’s PayPal account or bank accounts in order to do direct donations?
I think they cut a check. The problem wouldn’t be an API issue but a data entry issue. There’s no way to enter all the account numbers even if you hired a bunch of interns to do it. However, I will ask in the hopes that they have some secret sauce recipe…
But how would the donor get a tax write-off if Project Agape were to cut a check to the non-profit? Sorry, I’m new to the non-profit world. Thanks for any clarification!
Are they profiling donors?
I’m curious to know the gift-size breakdown with demographics…I’m unaware of any posts/research on facebook donors…is $5 the facebook ask, or $50?
How much have they raised to date? (and what’s their cut if any?)