Okay, so you've heard we just turned two, right? Key word: "We." This is us. Together we made it this far. Two years, 24 monthly winners later, we've distributed nearly $30,000! WE.

Growth report: 😭

I don't want to sugarcoat the growth situation. We gained some and lost some over the past 12 months, and ended up right where we were last September. Our generous donors opened their pockets wider, in some cases dramatically and overwhelmingly wider. But the donor count is just above 200 like it was on our first anniversary. I have yet to crack the code on how to turn advertising $ into new donors. Not for lack of trying!

We received significant major donations this year, along with employer matches, which the donors earmarked for attracting new donors. Experimental advertising has come out of these funds, and we'll continue learning the art and improving those efforts. But we saw some success last year incentivizing new signups and social media follows by releasing matching funds into the pot. So we'll try that again this year, using this same new donor attraction earmarked money. Without further ado...

Announcing return of $1 Likes

We just crossed the 600 Like mark yesterday. 615 at the time we went to press with this blog post. Each and every cumulative new like will get a dollar of matching funds tossed in the current monthly pot. So if you invite 100 friends to Like Charitocracy's Facebook page (instructions in this blog post), and 30 of them actually listen to you for once and do it, that's $30 extra for September's winner! Nice and simple. Additional Twitter or Instagram followers get the same treatment. We're at 60 and 116 followers on those platforms, respectively. This can add up really quickly, and we have plenty of matching funds to back it up. The goal is to get more folks tuned into Charitocracy so that we can over time convince some of them to pony up $13 and join us for real!

Also return of $1:$1 matching funds for donation increases

If any one you were on the fence about increasing your annual donation (or to switch to one of our new monthly plans), let me help pull you down and drag you to your wallet. If you decide, for example, to bump up to $5 per month, we'll throw an extra $5 per month, for a whole year, into the pot. Nudge, nudge. That fence is a lonely place. Added bonus, this doubling will be counted in your Giving Tree as a matching donation, as if it came from your employer. (If your employer also matches it, that of course gets counted, too.) You may not be too familiar with your Giving Tree, but read on to the Leaderboard section...

New this year: $2:$1 matches for new donors!

Every new donor's initial donation, whether $13 or $390, will get tripled out of the matching funds. I have a feeling incentivizing new donors in this way will cost less than acquiring them through advertising. And this money will go to winning charities instead of social media companies, another big win in my book! So be aware of this incentive when talking to friends about Charitocracy or inviting them over email.

Leaderboard coming...

All of my work trying to crack the social media advertising nut has deprived me of my true love: coding up new features and ways to streamline and push the envelope with Charitocracy. But one of these months I'll crank out the leaderboard where we can recognize extraordinary efforts by donors to grow Charitocracy. Not just in terms of their own donations, since many of us prefer to keep those private. But by recognizing donors' Giving Tree growth, which includes new donors they invite (or gift) into Charitocracy, we could bring a healthy competitive aspect to Charitocracy.

I'm thinking categories like these:

• Biggest Giving Tree
• Fastest Growing Giving Tree
• Most New Donor Recruits
• Most Generous Individual Donor (opt-in)

Your ideas are always welcomed, and may I say even critical to our success! So please reply to this blog post, to our social media accounts, or directly on our site.