Category: General News

At 3am on Giving Tuesday, I completed the new invitation system. Hours ahead of schedule! Look for the Invite link in the menu when you're logged in at Charitocracy. You simply enter a friend's email address, customize the message if you like, then click send! When your friends sign up -- which if they're as smart and kind and attractive as you they surely will --they'll automatically become branches in your Giving Tree!

Since Thanksgiving we've had days for shopping in chain stores, for shopping in local stores, and for shopping online. Today is the day to give. Here are 3 concrete ways you can do that at Charitocracy!

1. Sign up if you haven't yet, as little as $13/year! But if you have, then consider sweetening the pot with a one-time donation of any amount, or upgrade your monthly donation.
2. Invite 5 friends. (That number is arbitrary. Go for 10!) How big can you make your Giving Tree grow on Giving Tuesday? Customize the message a bit so your friends will feel you, not just hear you.
3. Share this blog post! Whether you're on Facebook or Twitter or some social medium that's all the rave with the kids, get the word out about Charitocracy! It's pretty cool, right? Tell people about it!

I've been sacrificing a lot of sleep to get these latest features done: friendships, activity logs, privacy settings, and now invitations. But that's not the end of it! There's one more I hope to get done next month, and it's... bigly. More on that next time. But right now we need to focus on getting as many new Charitocracy donors signed up today, and just in time for the November pot to be awarded!

Any day now I'll be adding an invitation system to make it super easy to invite your friends and family to join Charitocracy, and to start growing your Giving Tree. But first I had to introduce a more social aspect to the site, so after you invite people to join you'll actually see each other on there!

Today you'll find three new components to Charitocracy:

1. Friendships: you can now make friends with other donors at Charitocracy. When you click on a user's avatar, in their profile header you'll find an "Invite Friend" button. This will send the donor a friendship request, which may be accepted or rejected. More on friendships below...
2. Activity streams: All your activities on Charitocracy are logged to your activity stream: your donations, your votes, your likes, your nominations and discussion comments, changes to your profile, etc. are all logged for posterity. And if you have permission, you can see some or all of other donors' activity feeds.
3. Privacy settings: All of this activity can be made as public or private as you like. And here's where your friendships come in: the default privacy setting is to show all of this activity to your friends and only your friends! But if you want to be more of an exhibitionist, you can make some or all of your activities "public" even to non-friends. Or conversely, if you want to be more anonymous, you can either set your privacy settings to "no one" or simply don't make any friendships on Charitocracy.

Different activities have different settings, so if for example you want only friends to be able to see your voting history, no one to be able to see your donation amounts, but anyone to see the rest of your activity feed (likes, nominations, profile updates, etc.) you can totally do that. But making everything visible to friends and only friends is a nice simple default.

Charitocracy isn't trying to become a replacement for other social media. This is not where you come to meet people and chat about what you had for dinner. But part of our mission is to make charitable giving more social. We believe that your friends and family seeing you donating, nominating, and voting for causes can only help encourage them to do more of that stuff, too, and vice versa. So let's go make some friends!

This week last year I was obsessing over the logo. I had no idea how the site was going to work. I didn't even know where to begin, what technologies to use, what trials and tribulations would lay ahead in 2016. But I knew we needed a logo. And you guys knocked it out of the park, voting for a symbol which still fills my heart each time I see it. Thanks!

And now, for the Giving... At our last board meeting, I was bringing Jessica up to speed on all of my Charitocracy development plans for the rest of the year. Giving Tuesday is on November 29, and my ambitious goal was to roll out a system incentivizing donors to invite their friends and family. Essentially, not only would you see in your Dashboard a tally of how much you directly donated*, but also how much all the people you've invited have collectively donated, including the people they've invited, etc. So while you may have given $13, you're perhaps responsible for $1300! (*Your individual donation total is kept private, but included in the aggregate sum of those "upstream" from you.)

Jessica was quick to give this donation hierarchy a clever name: your Giving Tree! And so was born Charitocracy's new pyramid scheme to motivate you to drag others into this most wonderful of charity-of-the-month clubs. Today I've rolled out the tree, which for most people is starting out extremely bare. Here's what Jessica's looks like! She wins.

Coming real soon: a proper invitation system where you can email friends and family with a customizable message and a sign-up link that automatically gives you "root" status for their new Giving Tree. In the meantime, let me know if I missed any connections: if someone joined because of you, or vice versa. And happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!