Safety in Numbers
Brighter Planet's blog
Finding a GOOD home for Wowcrowd
Quick version: Wowcrowd, our web application for crowdsourced funding allocation, has been acquired by our friends at GOOD.
Now here’s the background.
We started Project Fund as our main corporate philanthropy initiative a year ago to fill a need we saw in the climate community: neighborhood-scale climate projects needed quick access to small grants, and they were willing to work hard to get them.
To make a long story short, Project Fund was a runaway success, one we’re very proud of. With 199 projects submitted and over 100,000 votes cast, we were able to give $50,000 in grants to 10 spectacular causes.
But Project Fund was also successful in another unexpected way: the “crowdsourced funding allocation” model itself was a hit, winning us a Social Innovation award from Financial Times. When the Pepsi Refresh Project launched in January, it took the concept to a totally different scale. That’s when “How could I start my own Project Fund?” became one of the most common questions we at Brighter Planet heard.
So this past winter we spun up a new Ruby on Rails app codenamed wlpf1 (“white-label Project Fund”) and started filling it with Project Fund code extracted from our main web application. A few months later Wowcrowd was born.
Recently we realized that somebody else could probably do a better job of running with Wowcrowd. After all, we’re a climate company. The very first group that came to mind was GOOD, not only because they’re friends of ours, but also because they are an active partner in the Pepsi Refresh Project and have been closely involved since its launch earlier this year. They’re also probably the world’s best folks at connecting great people with great causes.
And a handful of weeks later, the ink is dry. Here’s the press release. GOOD, she’s in your hands. We can’t wait to see where you take this.
What blog is this?
Safety in Numbers is Brighter Planet's blog about climate science, Ruby, Rails, data, transparency, and, well, us.
Who's behind this?
We're Brighter Planet, the world's leading computational sustainability platform.