Non-Profit Tech Blog

I’ve decided to expand the focus of the blog to cover nonprofit technology startups. To that end, I attended the Pace University Pitch Contest yesterday and was pleased to note that out of the 12 contestants there, five of them were pitches for social ventures. The contest was simplicity itself: each venture had three minutes to pitch in front of an audience and numerous judges. It was fascinating to see social ventures compete with new business ideas on the same stage and kudos to the Pace University Lubin School of Business for breaking down the walls between the sectors.

The most dramatic pitch to me was the one by Rethos. These two young men, Alexander Salzman and Chris Advansun, were very engaging in their pitch, complete with verbal handoffs between the two somewhat akin to seeing two personal motivation coaches vie for your attention. They had great visuals, electing to go with a Flash-oriented presentation somewhat similar to the www.rethos.com Web site. We could use more of this kind of energy and savvy in our sector. They did well, coming in third in the contest. That’s a quite a good showing as the other two candidates were clearly further ahead in their development cycles, one already had actual product and the other was already pitching to VCs out west.

I’m happy to see a social venture place in the contest. They ought to be commended for at least trying to start up a social venture that was in tune with the times. It was your basic Web 2.0 pitch — join our social network, talk about the issues of the day (in this case, a social network for young twentysomethings who want to question the status quo in the world), get some corporate sponsorships and then in the midst of all this, make money. It’s a questionable financial venture at best but they have pinpointed a target market that is underserved. The main community for the nonprofit donor/activist is Care2, which is about as depressing a nonprofit web site as I’ve ever seen. How the people there can stand the barrage of click-here-to-save-the-world ads is beyond me. Donors surely can be better served instead by a social network but how Rethos monetizes those eyeballs will be an interesting trick that not even Myspace can pull off.

I’m hoping to contact them soon and talk about their startup. If you’re a principal in a nonprofit technology startup, please contact me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org. My intent is to Skypecast an interview with you wherein we discuss how you plan to change the world (preferably not via a “click-here-once-a-day” ad).