You are reading this on the internet. You might have found us because of the super awesome, witty posts on about video games. That’s fine; good job. Now that you are here, at this point you have probably figured out that we do some charity work via gaming marathons considering that’s the tagline in the giant banner up above. In the past, we have used Chipin and Paypal for our donations, but for our next event (coming soon!), we might use Crowdrise, a social oriented fundraising site.
Crowdrise makes setting up a fundraiser super easy. That’s what you need to know to start this whole post. It’s a three step process, and you can get up and running in no time. It’ll create a project page, and then you can tell all your friends. That’s what you do. But what makes Crowdrise cool is that you, as a member, can get points when you get donations or when you donate. With those points, you are entered in to win prizes, or if you happen to be the person with the highest amount of points, you get a prize. For example, I have 850 points (you get points for signing up), and if I somehow get a few hundred thousand points by November 30th, I can win an iPad. That’s the grand prize for this next give-away.
But there’s more! Even if you simply donate, you can be entered to win prizes. Right now for instance, if you donate exactly $99 you are entered to win a Apple Macbook. If you donate $11, you are entered to win $500 at Zappos. This is why we are contemplating using this service for our next marathon.
Back to the profile business, there is a whole social aspect where you can have friends and post messages, and this and that that will keep you within this circle of fundraisers and users. You can post status messages that can throw out to Twitter to help promote your stuffs. All of your former projects are shown on your page along with amounts raised. You can also give 100 points to other users to help them get motivated to help others.
The only thing that might not work with us that there are no widgets that we can throw up on this site. Chipin is great because you can see it update and it’s all fresh the whole time. But, for those who want to donate and possibly get even more awesome prizes, Crowdrise may very well be the way to go, even if we have to push people to another site to donate.
At the end of the day, outside of anything we do at Hardmode.org, Crowdrise is a really great place to start up a fundraiser that has interesting incentives for everyone involved. I would suggest you check it out and then be my buddy!
Update: I completely forgot to mention that this service was started in part by the most awesome Edward Norton. Watch this business: