Here we go! We’re finally live with a pretty comprehensive revamp of our services. Our market testing last year taught us an amazing amount, and this is the result. Is it Cauzoom 2.0? Maybe. Probably. Who knows. Doesn’t matter – we’re extremely excited.

No, really. This is going to be exCEPtionally cool.

What you can expect from the new site

First of all, Cauzoom still does everything we did last year: project funding, online contribution processing, web-simple promotion, cause marketing. Here’s the big difference:

You don’t have to do it all at once.

We heard a lot of that from our causes last year: “I want to take advantage of project funding, but not necessarily the cause marketing piece.” Or “can we do the online fundraising without the deadline of a project?” Our answer: yes.

The big difference is that Cauzoom is moving solidly into the cause-marketing space. Now, after about five minutes effort, any cause (yes, ANY cause, large or small) can get into the cause marketing game – sell stuff to raise money. And now (for the first time anywhere that we’ve seen) any business can get into the same game with five minutes’ effort. Restaurants? Check. Local hardware stores? Check. Artists? Crafters? Magicians? Check. Kids who want to rake leaves and contribute some money to their scout troop? Moms willing to do babysitting for the church? Check. Sell ANYTHING to support the cause you love. We handle the transaction processing and all the details – you redeem the printable voucher. Done.

And here’s the REALLY exciting part: sign up and we’ll send you an email every once in a while with things you can buy to support YOUR cause. Not the one we pick, not the one the marketing agency picked: the one YOU pick. It’s kind of like a Groupon, only rather than pocketing the discount you send it to the farmer’s market or animal shelter or nursery school around the corner.

A Heads-Up

• Like any beta, Cauzoom isn’t finished. We’re eager to hear your feedback and comments – especially around things that don’t work correctly or even the way you imagine they should work. Please send your feedback to us at feedback@cauzoom.com – early and often!
• Of course, all purchases and charges made are real and will be processed. It’s the real deal.

If you have questions or want to engage in more in-depth conversation with us about Cauzoom and the future of the platform, please feel free to reach out. Our phone number is 617 674 2717, and we’re around during east coast (U.S.) business hours. Stay tuned – we’ll be blogging about new features of the platform in the days to come. It’s not philanthropy, it’s a WHOLE NEW THING. It’s Cauzoom.

WHO: The Everett C. Benton Library

WHAT: A place to update supporters, collect donations and manage easily

The historic Benton Library in Belmont, MA was built over 80 years ago and as far as we can tell that was also when their website was built. When the library’s hours of service were cut from fifteen to five hours per week in 2006 – and later closed in 2009 – concerned residents formed the Friends of the Benton Library, Inc. The goal was to reopen the Benton and run it as a community organization. Their fundraising efforts were successful and in May 2011 they reopened the Benton Library to the community. They did this partly through their project on Cauzoom as well as a much needed web presence boost from our crew.

Benton Library told us they needed a site they could use to update members on upcoming events, programs and information. They also wanted an easy way for supporters to donate and volunteer as well as the ability for multiple users to update content. The Cauzoom team was able to build something functional and easy to understand for these web novices. After a meeting and a few phone calls they were up an running. It was great to work with the Benton and help bring their library into the 21st!

It’s critical to have a quality web presence. Not only will supporters find you through the web, more often than not they’ll make decisions about supporting you based on what they see online. We know how hard it can be to set one up, let alone one that’s easy to manage and integrated with the latest services.

Cauzoom is a startup in Cambridge, MA. We incorporated in April and launched in May of 2011; we started working with merchant sponsors in October. We’re a social enterprise committed to the idea that we need to be bold in finding new ways of achieving social outcomes – both within and outside the nonprofit sector – and that technology holds the key to many of these ideas.

We see ourselves as an online community funding tool, channeling community passion towards both business value and social good. We think that technology and social media gives us a new way to aggregate the support of groups that share common goals – whether they share a geographic location or a shared idea. Healthy communities also mean healthy businesses, so we’re intent on delivering true business value to our merchant partners. (This Fall we’ll be unveiling a new product that allows neighborhood businesses to participate in Cauzoom projects – very exciting for us!)

Cauzoom came out of an incubator called Opus Two Collaborative set up in 2010 with the idea of creating innovative web-based companies. During our time with Opus Two, it became clear that there were exciting opportunities emerging for what we call the “cause-related organization” sector. Shifts in perceptions and behaviors – especially around social media – were suggesting whole new ways to bring groups together and challenging long-held assumptions about philanthropy and community support. We set up Cauzoom to explore that potential.

While our intention was to concentrate on the greater Boston area at first, as of November we’ve funded more than a dozen projects in ten states and processed more than $20,000 in transactions. Our early experiments with merchant partners continue, but so far the result is undeniable: an energetic community can come together to fund commonly-held goals, and are happy to support businesses in order to meet their goals. Brands like Whole Foods, Target, and Starbucks have seen significant results in very short amounts of time, not to mention savvy companies like Naked Pizza, Massage Envy, and Kabloom.

Because our recent projects have featured the purchase of gift cards to support projects, many people have asked about how the process works. Generally our merchant partners ship us a supply of cards to distribute as they are purchased so we can send them out within a few days of them being ordered. There’s a tool on the site that shows you when you purchased your gift card and when you can expect it (or when it was shipped). As we grow we’re speeding up our fulfillment process – we’ve already cut down the wait time from 4-5 days to 2 or 3. We’re also rolling out online vouchers in December (Groupon-style) that supporters can print and bring in with them to a location. Online redemption should follow shortly.

When a project reaches its deadline, we wrap up all the contributions (sometimes we have to chase down errant credit cards) and issue a check to the cause partner in the amount that they raised.  100% of funds raised go to the project – we take our fee from our merchant partners. Our project-funding system is “all or nothing,” not a donation system, so if a project doesn’t raise enough money to accomplish its objectives it isn’t funded. That said, earlier this month we rolled out a feature that allows contributors the option of sending their contribution directly to the organization whether or not the project hits its goal – and over 90% of our contributors have chosen this option since it began.

We’re firm believers in the idea that businesses should be nimble and listen to their customers, so to that end we’ll be rolling out new services targeted at helping our cause partners take advantage of the online world more completely. The opportunities are compelling, and now is the time to experiment and  find out what works.

We’re also very excited about the possibilities of working with groups who already have communities dedicated to certain causes. We’re experimenting with employee-benefit programs, services for community managers, and promotional services for online businesses. The possibilities are enormous.

Cauzoom is a small company with only three employees operating out of incubator space in West Cambridge, Massaschusetts. We’re privately-held and bootstrapping ourselves along. Working for a startup is sometimes tricky, but we can’t imagine a better way to spend our time than helping committed groups achieve their goals.

Please feel free to contact us at any time – we’d be eager to chat with you!