Snoball lets friends jump on the giving train to make tiny donations "snowball" into a much larger one.
It's not unheard of for sports fans to buy a round of drinks for the bar when their team wins. But why not transfer the generosity of that beer-splattered exuberance to charity instead? Snoball, a new micro-donation platform, makes it easy to link small, charitable gifts to the accomplishments of your favorite teams—or, for sports agnostics, other everyday activities.
Snoball gleans data from a variety of sources, including sports stats and social media plugins, then lets users pick from nearly 2 million charities, allowing for highly customizable giving opportunities. Hate Tebow? Link a small donation to Planned Parenthood every time he gets sacked. Value your ability to express yourself on social media? Give a small sum to a nonprofit that supports free speech every time your tweets get retweeted. Trying to break your consumerist habits? Set-up a recurring donation to charity every time you check into the mall on FourSquare. Companies looking to do cause marketing could use Snoball to easily pledge dollars to charity for every person that likes their Facebook pages. The possibilities are endless and allow givers to get creative about the meaning of microphilanthropy in their own lives.
Through social media, Snoball lets friends jump on the giving train to make tiny donations "snowball" into a much larger one. The Austin-based startup says that 95 percent of every dollar given will end up in nonprofit hands, while the rest will cover overhead and credit-card fees.
"What we're really trying to do is change the way charities operate," CEO and co-founder Jeremy Kelley told the Huffington Post. "Normally, they try to have a big, expensive event and make a lot of money or try to get one big donor to write a $1 million check. We want to help charities get 1 million $1 donations over the internet."
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