Fifty thousand reasons... for what?

Fifty thousand reasons it's hard to run a charity?
Fifty thousand reasons to complain about solicitation registration paperwork?
Fifty thousand reasons to decry social media advertising costs?
Fifty thousand reasons to give up?

This morning I'm writing out Reach Out and Read's $1722 award check. That's for winning the October monthly pot, plus drawing an unusually high $540 worth of "pot sweetener" one-time donations. And I'm noticing something worth mentioning...

We have crossed the $50,000 mark!

As of this morning, Jessica and I have cut $50,000 worth of grant checks. They're for worthy nonprofits you've selected, packed full of your donation funds. You guys are ever-generous, and also gift us with the continued motivation to make Charitocracy even better each month.

I have some big plans for Charitocracy. I probably say that a lot, and I mean it every time. There's no joy like adding new features, fixing old bugs, and doing whatever I can to make Charitocracy easier to use for current donors and more attractive to prospective donors. If you asked me, a GPU software engineer, ten years ago or even five years ago, I never would have predicted this is how I'd be getting my kicks on the eve of the year 2020.

And yet 4 years ago this week we were registering the ch-y.org domain and kicking off the logo design. We were setting up social media pages, and purchasing this laptop I've been banging away on ever since in my free time. And 4 years ago next month we'd be filing to become a nonprofit corporation in the state of North Carolina. As far as we've come in 4 years (3 years fully operational), I have a feeling 2020 will be our biggest yet.

Fifty thousand reasons to be proud, and fifty thousand reasons to keep at it. ❤️

Sharing is Dead

Sharing nominee cause pages has been broken at Charitocracy for a long time. Any time you voted or nominated a cause, you'd get an annoying pop-up asking you to share with your social medium of choice. And no matter which cause you just nominated or voted for, it would always just share a link to Charitocracy's home page with a generic image. BORING!

And then even that annoying pop-up stopped working. Some change in my Charitocracy code or our social sharing plugin broke it, and I didn't bother to fix it. Honestly, that pop-up disappearing was an improvement, since the social sharing experience was terrible.

Well, I'm proud to announce: The annoying pop-up is BACK!

Long Live Sharing

I've been quietly laying a lot of the groundwork all year:

• Most of the site, including the discussion/voting pages for nominated causes, was unreachable to the general public behind the "pay wall" unless they donated and logged in. So you really couldn't share anything but the front page anyway. I opened up the whole site to everyone, but only donors can click on Vote buttons.
• When sharing, you want a nice big image to go with it. Furthermore, Facebook and Twitter prefer images of different sizes and aspect ratios. So I had to make some! 87 x 2 so far, to cover all past nominees.
• After voting, Charitocracy used to redirect you to the Dashboard page where you could cancel votes or adjust percentage split between different causes sharing your vote. But then if you tried to share after voting, you'd be sharing the Dashboard page instead of the cause page. Nope! So now the vote adjustment controls are at the top of each Vote page, and voting just reloads the same page. So you're at the right place when it's time to share.

Call to Action

If you're on Facebook or Twitter, I hope you'll share your voting activity with friends and family each time. (If you're on both, please share to both!) You don't have to write anything extra in your posts, so it takes literally 2 buttons clicks. It may take some time, but when your people see your engagement with Charitocracy and the great causes you're supporting, they're bound to get curious and get tangled in our web of love and generosity.

And no better time to test it than right now. Get on there and vote!

September brought with it another Charitocracy birthday! We've been online, spreading your dolla dolla bill to worthy causes, for 3 years now!! Whether you've been with us the whole time, or just joined us recently, THANK YOU. It's your birthday. And we have some happy news to share.

Or better put, The Happy News has us to share! Thanks to donor Ealish Wilson, Jessica and I have been nominated as Everyday Heroes! Aww, shucks. ☺️

Big thanks also to Emily Coxhead for publishing Ealish's kind words in her extraordinary newspaper, and for making Charitocracy's birthday extra happy this year. ❤️