Philanthroper: The Groupon of crowdsourced social giving

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Guest post by Alex Wilhelm
The Next Web

Philanthroper, a Chicago startup that is focusing on improving the world of charity, is a wonderful mixture of Groupon, Woot, and the spirit of giving.

Every day Philanthroper works with one charity, and spurs as many people as it can to give a single dollar to that group. However, to avoid losing all of that money in transaction expenses, the company has teamed up with a second Chicago company, called mPayy, to handle their payments.

mPayy takes one penny per dollar donated, and Philanthroper takes none, meaning that 99% of donated money reaches the charity directly. PayPal and other solutions at the $1 dollar level would extract 30 cents or more. Philanthroper hopes to sell ads on their site to cover their expenses.

I signed up for Philanthroper and mPayy, and found the system to be simple, if a bit step-intensive. Still, I cannot recall a place where I can give small amounts of my money to a large number of different groups so simply and quickly.

Alex Wilhelm is a Chicago-based technology blogger and entrepreneur. He has worked for a number of technology companies in recent years, and has a particular interest in watching the social web monetize. Follow Alex on Twitter or on Facebook. Republished from The Next Web.

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