December 8, 2010 – We knew this was coming. They’ve talked about it for months. An online community for nonprofits and charitable organizations – or more specifically, the people with and interested in those organizations. Jumo is the brainchild of Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook and the chief digital organizer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
The New York Times delivered this long-awaited news in their article, “A Facebook Founder Begins a Social Network Focused on Charities.” The site aims to “do what Yelp did for restaurants,” Mr. Hughes said, indexing charities “to help people find and evaluate them.”
The idea is to take the principles that helped Mr. Hughes organize a network of volunteers into a successful political force and apply them to a much broader universe of causes and issues. Reaching beyond soliciting donations, Jumo was established to connect individuals with issues they are passionate about with the intention of maintaining a long-term relationship beyond dollars.
Anyone with a social mission can create a page, but to discourage fraud, Jumo will allow only organizations that have been certified as tax exempt to solicit donations. Jumo is itself a nonprofit, and will rely on payments from users and sponsorships from organizations that want better promotion on the Web site.
It will be interesting to see how this takes off. Are people experiencing social media overload or have experiences like FaceBook and Twitter prepared them to engage even deeper?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
