October 15, 2007 at 06:42Fulfill my wish
There are several services on the Internet where anyone can write what they would like to receive as a gift.
All these projects work on the same principle. You place the so-called wishlist on the site (wishlist - wish list). Your friends who want to give you a gift go to the site and choose one of the items from this list. After that, they mark this item as reserved so that someone else will not give you the same thing again.
Here is a list of Russian services of this type:
All these services, it seems to me, originated in the west. There before the era of the Internet such methods of choosing gifts were adopted. For example, before the wedding, the newlyweds leave in the wishlist store what they would like to receive as a gift. All guests are told in which store this wishlist is located. Guests come to this store and choose from the list what they want to give, after which the selected item is deleted. This is very convenient for several reasons:
- newlyweds do not receive gifts they do not need
- guests can choose what they can afford
- nobody will give the same thing twice
Why am I all this? Oh yes. Quite by accident, I came across a similar, but slightly modified idea.
A certain Belgian, Renaud, slightly altered the concept of gifts and created the site http://www.payittome.com/ (pay for me). So, what is the highlight of his idea?
In fact, this is a kind of hybrid of wishlists and charitable activities. On the site, anyone can write about what he would like to receive by attaching a photo with a price. It is also necessary to specify an account on PayPal, where the money will be transferred. After that, your desire appears on the site. So far, everything is the same as in the case of classic wishlists. The main difference is further.
It is proposed to fulfill wishes not to friends and acquaintances, but to advertisers who want to receive advertising on the resource. The advertiser selects the desired desire and transfers the desired amount to PayPal. After that, the desire is marked as fulfilled and a logo and a link to the advertiser (or sponsor, if you like) are placed next to it.
Here is an approach. Let's see what happens next, but it seems to me that this initiative is unlikely to become very popular. Firstly, the links that the advertiser will receive will not be so weighty that they would recoup the costs (for example, the classic desire is a computer game, it costs from 30 bucks; you can buy a good "bold" link for this amount). Secondly, as the authors of Blogoscoped note, these links will not differ much from just purchased ones. Knowing Google’s attitude to purchased links, we can assume that these links will not have any effect on the popularity of advertiser sites. Thirdly, with a sufficiently large number of fulfilled desires, the links and mentions of advertisers will simply be lost in a huge stream, that is, this good deed will not bring even additional fame to the brand. However,
Meanwhile, the idea is quite good. But just apply it can be a little different. This idea was prompted by a friend of mine. For some time she worked as a volunteer in the organization "Nizhny Novgorod Volunteer Service." Volunteers go to the orphanage and make a wish list of the children of this orphanage. Then they come to the directors of enterprises and offer them to fulfill any desire of their choice. For example, buy a radio-controlled car. Whatever everything was without deception, entrepreneurs are invited to buy a gift and take it to the orphanage themselves. There joyful children thank the entrepreneur, and everyone is happy (children - with a gift, entrepreneurs - with themselves).
The idea is, using the Internet, to bring this information to as many potential sponsors as possible. To do this, you need to create a site, and place the following information on it:
You can make such a site first for one region, and then add the separation on a regional basis.
By and large, the site will be a copy of existing “gift” services, but with a focus on charity. It will be possible to simply transfer money to the account of a non-profit organization, giving her the opportunity to buy a gift. You can advertise such a site in local media, at various economic forums / fairs, etc. There are a lot of opportunities. One has only to start thinking about it, as many ideas immediately arise. The first example that came to mind: each organization will have an account in the system. You can attach comments to this account. That is, those to whom the organization has helped will leave their feedback. All the same, we have the era of web 2.0 :)
Theoretically, you can even figure out how to “monetize” such a resource, but this is the tenth thing. The main thing is that this will expand the charity opportunities on the Internet.
Here you go. I decided to search for such projects on the Internet. Found the project blago.ru - a joint project of Yandex and CAF Russia (Charities Aid Foundation Russia). First upset. Everything has already been invented before us. Then I realized that going to their site I really did not want to transfer money to anyone. Somehow everything is too ... maybe officially.
It seems to me that you need to make the site more “lively”. In order not just to transfer money to the charity public organization “Perspectives”, but to help a particular orphanage or a specific family. And not necessarily money.
The site is closer to this idea.All Together Moscow Charity Assembly. There are photographs, detailed descriptions and much more. Taking this project as a basis and finalizing it, you can get a very good resource that will really help people. The most important thing, it seems to me, is feedback. A person who helped someone (bought something or simply transferred money for treatment) should see the result of his activity. This will give him the necessary incentive for further charity, and indeed will make him better, since people by nature tend to do good. It is in our nature. This endeavor only needs to be supported and people given simple tools to carry out this assistance.
In conclusion, I want to note that this is not a startup idea. This is just the idea of a project that could provide real help to those who need it using the Internet.
Original article on my blog .