Her ingenuity was the inspiration for Causora.com, a one-year-old startup created with the idea that whatever your qualifications or skills are, you can turn them into charity. “[My friend] raised money by doing what she loved to do, and got new customers for her own business,” says Causora founder Kai Buehler about the aforementioned yogi, who wishes to remain anonymous. “We started looking around at the marketplace for it, and couldn’t find anything.”
Buehler only launched Causora during the 2012 holiday season, but she already has recruited celebrities to help raise hands free access for the new platform. In addition to all the yoga, massage, search engine optimization help services and technical support offered on behalf of various causes on the site, Marc Anthony is offering tickets and backstage passes to his benefit concert for Maestro Cares, a non-profit Anthony founded to create safer and healthier environments for Latin American children.
Causora joins an ever-growing space in new media focused on activism, community involvement and philanthropy facilitated by Web sites and social networks. Before platforms like Causora, its unrelated cousins including Fundly, Causes.com, Crowdrise, StartSomeGood and Razoo (among many others) cropped up to address a similar question: what is the best way, or an alternative way, for people to give back, when donating money is the status quo?
Crowdrise, out of Detroit, offers incentive-based giving with a gameification twist: whomever raises the most for their particular cause receives a prize (whatever that might be). It’s their own way of opening up the world of philanthropy for more people. “It’s not just about top donor,” says co-founder Robert Wolfe. “It’s about who tries the hardest. You don’t have to have a million Twitter followers or millions of dollars.”
Unlike a lot of startups, Crowdrise wasn’t trying to fill a gap in the market. Its mission when it emerged two-and-a-half years ago was to make the philanthropic space more fun. This is one key to getting people more involved more often, Wolfe believes.
“If you get an email from one person raising money for cancer research, and another [similar] email from a someone saying they will dye their hair blue when they reach their goal,” he says, “you’re definitely donating to the one who said they’d dye their hair blue.”
Social networks focused on philanthropy or activism also offer a way for people to demonstrate that they live a charitable life. For example, each Crowdrise member gets a profile where he or she can catalog and comment on their various activities.
“It’s an interesting combination,” Mahan says. “On the one hand it’s a basic fact of human nature that people want to be involved and make a difference, but the reason for the explosion now is that technology is rapidly growing and it’s easier and easier to put out an app, a Web site, a platform. Everyone is a publisher and everyone has a voice.”
Fundamentally changing the way people participate in the world around them will take more than just changing the tools they use to take action. Making a difference from the bottom-up is a daunting task, Mahan admits. For now, though, he views the rise of people taking to the Internet to get involved as a great start.
“New tech allows people to get involved who otherwise probably would not, that’s the hopeful side of this,” he says. “In a world dominated by top-down communication and in an ever-growing and complicated world, we feel small and powerless. Newer technology has given a glimmer of hope: I can participate, I can learn more, things are more transparent, and it’s better than getting home to a mailbox full of donation solicitations.”
Are you tired of feeding meters and getting parking tickets? Starting Wednesday and for the next three months, you can pay the parking meter just by using your cell phone.
Deputy Director of Planning & Community Development, Wendy Thomas, says, “time and time again, and perfectly understandably, people complain about getting parking tickets and most people get parking tickets are for meter time violations”. Now Great Falls is jumping aboard the technology train and trying a new way to pay for meter parking. Thomas explains, “you can pull into a parking space, pull up an app on your smart phone and actually pay for your parking”.
This is a three month trial kicking off Wednesday. All the meters will have stickers with scanable barcodes and an assigned zone and space number. Your cell can even remind you when your time is up in hopes to cut down on parking tickets. Thomas explains, “when you pay you will have a countdown on your phone and you will actually be messaged when you have 15 minutes left on your meter”.
The city has looked at other ways to make downtown parking user friendly, such as swiping a credit card for meter parking, which proved way too expensive. Thomas says, “it was an incredible investment in infrastructure that meant new meter heads and new machines that would be paid by block”.
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