A Better Way to Do Good

Take a Cab to the Game

From Jim Barney:

Sports analogies can get tiresome, but I recently told a venture capitalist inquiring about Click & Pledge, that our product offering, an online fundraising system, is "a fastball."

So we continued our business discussion analogous to baseball.  (He wouldn’t let it go.)

Following a few innings of discussion, he summarized Click & Pledge as such:

“If I attend a World Series game, Click & Pledge is like buying a $15 Family ticket:  I get a good seat, a hot dog, a big bag of popcorn and a large cold drink.  Or, I could opt for one of your competitors and get a lower level box seat.  Ticket price is $115 and I pay extra for all the food and drink I consume."

"But when it’s all said and done, regardless of my seat, I saw the same game.   It’s about value,” he stated. 

I agreed with him.  But I switched the analogy challenge to a cab ride in New York.   

"Click & Pledge is like riding in a Ferrari but only paying for the price for a standard yellow cab," I said.  "That’s value."

He agreed.

I have not heard from him since.

From Jim Barney:

Sports analogies can get tiresome, but I recently told a venture capitalist inquiring about Click & Pledge, that our product offering, an online fundraising system, is "a fastball."

So we continued our business discussion analogous to baseball.  (He wouldn’t let it go.)

Following a few innings of discussion, he summarized Click & Pledge as such:

“If I attend a World Series game, Click & Pledge is like buying a $15 Family ticket:  I get a good seat, a hot dog, a big bag of popcorn and a large cold drink.  Or, I could opt for one of your competitors and get a lower level box seat.  Ticket price is $115 and I pay extra for all the food and drink I consume."

"But when it’s all said and done, regardless of my seat, I saw the same game.   It’s about value,” he stated. 

I agreed with him.  But I switched the analogy challenge to a cab ride in New York.   

"Click & Pledge is like riding in a Ferrari but only paying for the price for a standard yellow cab," I said.  "That’s value."

He agreed.

I have not heard from him since.

A Better Way To Do Good

From Jim Barney:

Like any business, we work hard to find the right words that succinctly describe Click & Pledge.   

As often happens, we stumbled across “A Better Way” during marketing communications discussions.   We sincerely believe that we offer a better way for our customers to achieve their online fundraising goals.   Bad grammar notwithstanding, the phrase “A Better Way To Do Good” defines our business approach at Click & Pledge…so now we own it. 

We simply offer non-profits a “Better Way” to use information technology for effective and efficient online fundraising.

It begins with selling our software-as-a-service.  Normally, you buy software and install it. 

We suggest instead that it’s a “Better Way” to access the software online…and only pay when you use it for financial transactions. Customers save a huge amount of money and time.  No IT staff required. Nor must they sign contracts, pay for maintenance, or pay for upgrades and customer support. 

Click and Pledge is a “Better Way” to manage donors and to build websites.   It’s also a “Better Way“ to lower risk;  to increase security;  to access detailed reporting and a real-time database;  and it’s simple and easy to use.   

There’s more.  Ease of use, great support and low cost access to world-class software are vital to nonprofits’ survival.  They must embrace technology.  So we’ve opened up Click & Pledge to software designers and customers to develop applications and enrich our product offerings beyond anything that our internal R & D efforts could produce.    Customers now use a choice of open source donor & content management systems.

That’s real value.  That’s “A Better Way To Do Good."

Are we getting dummer?

From Kamran Razvan:

Human beings are social animals. We live longer when we are in groups and die younger when we are alone. We recover from illness when surrounded by loved ones and stay longer in hospitals when left alone. Nothing is new in how hungry we are for communication and our thirst for belonging to a tribe. We all search for a place where “everybody knows our name”!

While our ancestors joined tribes to survive and did not have much choice in the tribe since all tribes were mostly geographically bound, today we join tribes for entirely different reasons. Today’s tribes are more like flocks of individuals with common interests and language. In the past, tribal members had to communicate with people they did not like or with whom they did not agree. Today's tribe has no reason to have contact with those with whom they don’t agree.

Facebook, MySpace, and all other social networking sites consist of those that agree with us. Our network is limited to everyone that further amplifies our self-verification needs. We listen to music “our” way, we read the stories that agree with “our” worldview, and we subscribe to podcasts that further prove “our” side of the story.

I truly wonder what this trend will do to our evolutionary process as human beings. Perhaps we are taking a step backward before leaping forward into becoming a super organism. Let’s explore this thought ..

Ants: How do they communicate? How do they behave and function as organisms that behave in perfect synchronicity? Every member’s presence is sensed by others and each serves a function that further complements every other member’s contribution.

What are we doing now? We visit a site and Digg the site and mark it with Reddit and tweet everyone to follow our trail. We are no longer a single entity bound by a geographical presence. We are being followed by everyone that thinks as us and for the most part behaves as we do.

In the absence of diversity and opposing viewpoints are we becoming smarter or just simply dumber?

Do we have to get dumber before we get smarter?

A few links & reading materials.

• Are you in the tribe?
• The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
• Wikipedia: Superorganism