Our thanks to Robert Loerzel (@robertloerzel) of Crain’s ChicagoBusiness.com (@CrainsChicago) for including GoodPays.me in his startup report this week.
“One advantage to signing up for the beta launch is that beta users will get advance notice of sponsor offers for life. This gives them ‘first dibs’ on these offers before they are claimed by others, since each offer will have a limited amount.”
Thanks to Monika Jansen @monikajansen from TechCocktail @TechCocktail for the nice coverage of GoodPays.me … get paid for doing good. Here is the story.
Did you know that purpose is rapidly becoming the 5th “P” of marketing? According to the Edelman 2010 goodpurpose Study, 86% of global consumers believe that business needs to place at least equal weight on society’s interests as on business interests.
In response to this shift in people’s mindsets, Chicago-based GoodPays.me is applying the consumer rewards program concept to social good in order to encourage people to do good deeds and to provide businesses with a way to easily jump in on the social purpose action.
I asked founder Bill Scheuer why people needed to have a carrot dangled in front of them – don’t people want to volunteer or plant a tree simply because it makes them feel better?
“What happens with nearly everyone is that you want to do more good than you actually do,” said founder Bill Scheuer. “So instead of feeling good, you end up feeling bad. This idea is similar to a workplace incentive program. It’s not just the extra perk you get, which is meaningful, but the attention you get as well.”
Scheuer’s background in the incentives industry, coupled with his experience in the nonprofit industry (he created a marketplace to exchange ideas called caramelcorn.com) taught him that people need an extra push to help them break patterns of inertia. So, he decided to try this new system – and so far it is working: 1 in 6 people who visit the site sign up.
Using GoodPays.me is easy. Since it is a social app, so you can join the program with a Facebook login and easily share your activities on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Once in the app, you can browse or search to find offers that appeal to you and simply click to add them to your list.
By re-establishing connections in the incentives industry to furnish the rewards, Scheuer has been able to offer some really interesting rewards. One of the sample offers is from Kevin Bacon asking you to join him at SixDegrees.org, the social network that plays off the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game to show how we are all connected and make it fun and easy for people to reach out to help others in need.
Scheuer was quick to point out that GoodPays.me is different from other programs:
“There are a lot of programs out there that are trying to combine social good with commercial behavior by inducing you to buy something and then get rewarded with social good. GoodPays.me is the inverse of that.”
By signing up for beta, you will get advance notice of offers, basically giving you first dibs on the ones that interest you most (each offer is limited to a certain number of people). If volunteering or getting more involved in your community is on your list of New Year’s resolutions, GoodPays.me is a great place to start. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!
Thanks to KillerStartups for giving GoodPays.me our first media hugs. Apparently, the GP.me screenshots are too good, because KS didn’t get that they are just samples at this time? :-)
We are less than a month into the GoodPays.me startup process and have some good progress to report:
1. Startup Evanston picked GoodPays.me as one of four companies to present at their inaugural Pitch Day event. Lots of great feedback from the judges and audience.
2. Betaspring picked GoodPays.me from hundreds of applicants to make the first round of interviews for their mentor-driven startup accelerator program in Providence.
3. Nearly three weeks into our pre-launch debut, 15% of visitors to our landing page sign up for our beta launch — even before the program is live — and half of these bold social explorers take the added step of sharing this to their Facebook feeds.
4. We’ve also had our first unsolicited inquiry from a business about being a sponsor.
Still very far to go, but not bad for less than a month! Now, we need some media channels with boldness and vision to start covering us.
GoodPays.me … get paid for doing good
We are testing a new app concept:
GoodPays.me … get paid for doing good
The basic idea is very simple:
1) Sponsors offer to pay you money for doing good deeds.
2) Use it to buy whatever you want at leading online stores.
You can be part of our first test group & get first dibs on offers.
Please visit our website to sign up: http://GoodPays.me
You can follow the GoodPays blog at: http://blog.goodpays.me/
And the @GoodPays twitter feed at: http://twitter.com/#!/GoodPays
Also, feel free to share this with others you think will like it.
