Photo: G-Team/Edge of Seven
Are you a Grouponer? If you are still catching up on e-commerce and not yet buying everything on your computer, Groupon is a website for, essentially, group-sourced coupons and deals on goods and services in your city or town. The sales are local, for a short time, and from getting more and more people to buy a certain day’s deal, they extend greater savings to a larger numbers of users. It is a sales model that thrives on word of mouth, Twitter, facebook, and general viral excitement about wanting to know the next great thing.
Well, the next great thing is here. Groupon has launched the Groupon G-Team, a more philanthropically-focused endeavor that uses the group hype philosophy to find ways to reach out and support charities and special causes. Instead of getting a cool new widget when you join the day’s sales, with G-Team, you join a group that strengthens good causes, lending your volunteer time or donation, or organizing group actions. Each day’s email alert if you sign up, or update to the website if you surf there, can provide opportunities to help a new organization or community action. The great chance that brought G-Team to my attention is the opportunity to support my friends at Edge of Seven (see interview with founder, Erin Guttenplan, here), where the deal gets as many of us as possible to donate just $10 (and if 45 of us do, it will fund housing and schooling for one year for three girls in Nepal who wouldn’t normally have access to higher education–jump in here).
See what you’ve been missing, and see how crowd-sourced change invigorates philanthropy, and extends our reach.
Change by Doing 