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Benj and Jessica launched a nonprofit. Follow our journey as we built a 501(c)(3) and a web site, and now usher in an endless stream of worthy charity nominees and monthly grant winners!

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No such thing as over-Sharing

Social Sharing Pop-Up

Sharing is Dead

Sharing nominee cause pages has been broken at Charitocracy for a long time. Any time you voted or nominated a cause, you'd get an annoying pop-up asking you to share with your social medium of choice. And no matter which cause you just nominated or voted for, it would always just share a link to Charitocracy's home page with a generic image. BORING!

And then even that annoying pop-up stopped working. Some change in my Charitocracy code or our social sharing plugin broke it, and I didn't bother to fix it. Honestly, that pop-up disappearing was an improvement, since the social sharing experience was terrible.

Well, I'm proud to announce: The annoying pop-up is BACK!

Long Live Sharing

I've been quietly laying a lot of the groundwork all year:

  • Most of the site, including the discussion/voting pages for nominated causes, was unreachable to the general public behind the "pay wall" unless they donated and logged in. So you really couldn't share anything but the front page anyway. I opened up the whole site to everyone, but only donors can click on Vote buttons.
  • When sharing, you want a nice big image to go with it. Furthermore, Facebook and Twitter prefer images of different sizes and aspect ratios. So I had to make some! 87 x 2 so far, to cover all past nominees.
  • After voting, Charitocracy used to redirect you to the Dashboard page where you could cancel votes or adjust percentage split between different causes sharing your vote. But then if you tried to share after voting, you'd be sharing the Dashboard page instead of the cause page. Nope! So now the vote adjustment controls are at the top of each Vote page, and voting just reloads the same page. So you're at the right place when it's time to share.

Call to Action

If you're on Facebook or Twitter, I hope you'll share your voting activity with friends and family each time. (If you're on both, please share to both!) You don't have to write anything extra in your posts, so it takes literally 2 buttons clicks. It may take some time, but when your people see your engagement with Charitocracy and the great causes you're supporting, they're bound to get curious and get tangled in our web of love and generosity.

And no better time to test it than right now. Get on there and vote!