There’s a new social network on the block.
The brainchild of Chris Hughes, one of the founders of that social network you may have heard of, Facebook, Hughes says he wants Jumo to “do for charities what Yelp did for restaurants, to help people find and evaluate them.”
It launched November 30. To use Jumo, you sign in using your Facebook ID. You can browse through broad categories, and choose which ones you want to follow: arts and culture, education, technology, and social issues.Twitter, YouTube and Facebook all integrate seamlessly, both posting to Jumo and posting from Jumo to other social networks.
If you are an American not-for-profit, you can create a page for your organization and begin to interact with other users. Once you have a page, people can make donations to you.
According to a NY Times article, however,
Jumo would not be primarily about soliciting donations. Instead, he said, the site would first try to deepen ties between its users and their favorite causes.
“The more connected that individual is to an issue they care about, the higher probability there is they will stay involved over a longer period of time,” Mr. Hughes said.
Rebecca,
This is a great post and really good potential for donations for USA not-for-profits.
What I get in Canada is that the CND Credit Card industry, hence the banking industry, does not allow “aggregation” and this is the hick-up to setting up a like entity such as “jumo” in Canada and what Paul is experiencing with Fundchange.com in Canada, whose launch is delayed until sometime in January.
Thanks for sharing!
Cheers!
Susan
I think the idea is a good one, but the execution is rather flawed. The first and most obvious problem is that it requires a Facebook account to sign up. This is a problem for a few reasons:
1) Many users (including myself) are loathe to connect their Facebook accounts to other services, particularly after the variety of privacy-related fiascos over the past year or two,
2) A lot of people, as hard as it is to believe, don’t have Facebook, and
3) Using one social network to power another leads to dependencies that don’t need to exist. If Facebook goes down for whatever reason, Jumo cannot have any new users. If Facebook goes under, Jumo loses the back-end that it had before.
There are a few other problems that I can see just by browsing around, including the “yet another social network to join” syndrome.
As I said, I think it’s a fine idea, but it’s suffering from some logistical problems that will keep it from exploding a la Kickstarter.