Max Gladwell

It’s all about the cause: YourCause, JustCause, FreeCause, Cause Wired, CauseCast, FoxyCause.

“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” –Albert Einstein

The theme of this post is quite clearly “the cause”. It’s a term with a lot of meaning, and it’s integral to many new online brands. Most of these serve to support good causes, such as nonprofit charities, by providing online platforms and tools to assist in raising funds, awareness, and/or in-kind donations. As we’ve seen, there are many other companies in this space. These just happen to be the ones with “cause” in the branding…that are also not the Causes application on Facebook and MySpace.

YourCause.com is a new social networking platform that empowers individuals to create their own personalized causes, rally support for them, and generate donations for relevant charities. There are similar models, but YourCause is unique in how it enables people to start their own causes. It’s like being able to form your own charity without having to form a 501c3 and file for tax-exempt status. So it makes a distinction between Causes, which are created and driven by the community, and the actual Charities, which stand to benefit from the Causes members start.

For example, we started a cause called “End Our Fossil Fuel Addiction“. We described it, entered a mission statement, and tagged it. Based on this info, YourCause recommended compatible charities with a similar mission. Or you can search by keyword and location in order to select the charity yourself. We didn’t find any that matched perfectly, so we went with Conservation International to start. The charity has its own platform and set of tools. You can change the charity your cause supports if you later find a more appropriate one.

Once “your cause” is set up, there are a number of tools for recruiting supporters (i.e. MySpace friends with a purpose), promoting it, and raising donations that go to the associated charity. YourCause is built on a “freemium” revenue model, where an upgrade to premium features such as collecting donations for a particular goal, loading pictures for your cause, and writing blogs costs $9.95/month. There is also some display advertising throughout the site as a secondary revenue stream.

YourCause is backed by Blastoff Ventures, a Dallas-based incubator whose services include “financial backing, marketing direction, idea development, and entrepreneurial execution. BlastOff Ventures seeks to develop new ventures that have a legitimate opportunity of generating $20 million in revenue within five-years, become cash flow positive within three years, and that are lead by intelligent, passionate, and execution oriented individuals.” The firm is actively seeking “entrepreneurs and ideas for new venture concepts.”

Just Cause is a media company with a print magazine and an online counterpart, JustCauseIt. “The mission of JUST CAUSE is to shine a bright light on individuals, corporations and the change agents who are working for the greater good. To inspire people to get involved, to reveal and help people understand the relationship between charity and community, to educate people about how to MAKE A DIFFERENCE and impassion them to TAKE ACTION; to give them a technology platform to enable that action.”

The online platform is rich with content while allowing members to create causes and group blogs for free. As with the print version, it appears to be supported by advertising. Family Farming and Burners Without Borders (Burning Man) are among the most popular causes to date.

FreeCause has worked with nonprofits like Susan B. Komen and AnySoldier.com to design and deploy social networking (Facebook) applications and custom browser toolbars that facilitate donations.

“FreeCause has created custom browser toolbar, available for download at no charge, to help users navigate the internet while raising funds to help support Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s promise to end breast cancer forever. The toolbar, loaded with features specific to the Komen community, allows supporters to feel constantly connected to the organization while also financially contributing to the cause without spending a dime!”

In some ways, this is a form of “green search“, since Yahoo! is built into the toolbar. Your search queries generate ad revenue, part of which goes to the charity. FreeCause generates revenue from this as well, though it isn’t entirely clear from the company’s website. It’s also not clear whether these charities knew that their members would be participating in countless affiliate programs through the browser toolbar. Joe Solomon commented about this on a related blog post:

[FreeCause] allows any of these groups to easily customize a toolbar for FREE so that they can then get all of their members to install it. In theory, a toolbar is an excellent way to engage with your constituency so a nonprofit would be very much inclined to encourage their thousands or millions of members to install a fully customized, branded toolbar.

And for every member who installs the toolbar, FreeCauses likely generates a significant & quite sustainable revenue. There are over a dozen affiliate programs that are built into the toolbar and FreeCauses likely gets a cut of all the revenue generated from the ads that get clicked on when people do a Yahoo search (which is the toolbar’s main feature).

Back to the facebook conversation — if you install the toolbar through the Facebook app, some of the money goes to Breast Cancer, right? — but if you get a toolbar from the site directly, ALL the money goes to the MIT grads who started FreeCause. As far as I can tell, anyway. They don’t really discuss this stuff on their website. This raises a lot of questions…about transparency, revenue-sharing, and how we should be engaging pro-social institutions.

The point is not so much that FreeCause is making money but that it’s not made clear how they’re doing it to anyone, especially the end user who installs the toolbar or uses the Facebook app.

Entreprenur and journalist Tom Watson will soon release a new book on this topic: Cause Wired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World.

“While many books have covered the impact of digital media – from blogs to video to the rise of social networks – this will be the first to track the impact on causes, from the charitable to the political, and provide a road map to anyone serious about understanding the social impact on the social web. Technorati, the leading search engine for blogs and social media, currently tracks more than 118 million socially wired sites. Facebook is expected to pass 60 million members by the start of 2008 and a quarter million of them use the Causes application to raise money and consciousness for charitable and political causes. Clearly, the numbers in the Cause Wired movement are approaching critical mass, and this is an accessible, jargon-free business book on the impact of social networks on charity, politics, and consumer movements – one that explains the trend, offers real-world stories of success, and introduces the reader to some of the people–famous and almost unknown–powering this movement.”

Watson is also Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Changing Our World, a New York-based philanthropic consulting firm.

Slated to launch this summer, CauseCast will help you to “connect with the leaders, organizations, and people who inspire you; participate by uploading and sharing content, donating and volunteering for causes; and get rewarded by your community and leaders through exclusive events.” We’re anticipating a sneak preview prior to launch. Otherwise, that’s all we have.

FoxyCause is an add-on for the Firefox browser that is also scheduled to be released this summer. According to Joe Solomon, “FoxyCause’s goal is to leverage the entire Firefox community for philanthropy, which is approximately double the size of Facebook, in terms of active users. Through a Firefox extension, we want to make it super easy to give to your favorite nonprofits — just by searching the web & shopping online.”

It appears similar to other affiliate-based models that donate a portion of the fees it earns to charity. You can be certain, though, that Solomon and company will be 100% transparent about the revenue-sharing structure.

Let us know your thoughts about all of these cause-based business models and cause-happy entrepreneurs. Making a buck, making the world a better place, or a little of both?

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