ChipIn: making widgets that do good

       

                       [ Carnet Williams, CEO ChipIn.  Photo by Shel Israel]

I met ChipIn CEO Carnet Williams over coffee this morning for this morning and  immediately like him. He is passionate about so many things I care about--social media, online communities, causes and startups. I also like his tendency to take the long vision on a subject, and finally, we both harbor secret yearnings to spend more time on the ocean--him surfing and me sailing.

Honolulu-based, ChipIn has been an online toolset for fund raising campaigns. Since last June, it has had 3-4 iterations.  Carnet was in Silicon Valley to introduce the latest at an event produced last night by CommerceNet, one of his investors and this one seems to me to be a winner that will endure for a while.

ChipIn tools have been simplified and compacted into a simple little widget. But, the widget just isn't that simple, once you dig in. It has all the attributes that have already popularized widgets as an incredibly effective low-cost, online distribution system.

ChipIn's widgets will distribute a system for collecting funds, whether they are for disaster relief or an office collection. My sense is that they work best to collect a few dollars, pesos, euros or rupees from millions of people. I wish this had existed during the disasters of recent years when so many of us wanted to help raise funds but could not find a way to do so easily.

According to Carnet, in addition to this efficiency and simplicity, the ChipIn widget will incorporate unprecedented functionality including high levels of customization, video, tracking and metric capabilities.

My wife Paula has served in the nonprofit sector for nearly a decade, currently recruiting foster parents in Silicon Valley.  Over the years, I've become painfully aware of both how laggard that sector has been in adopting new technologies and how valuable those technologies can be.

I'm hoping some non profit gives ChipIn a try and knocks it out of the park for raising money, thus becoming the poster child that brings worth causes into the connected world, where the fund raising  capabilities are go beyond what you can do with posters, bulletin boards and cake sales.