These guys are doing some cool things with charities and gift cards and could use some help promoting. We could do a Widget, tap into their API and help them promote.
I just checked out their site and got excited about this idea. I just gave a talk on promoting non-profits via Facebook and recently worked on a FB app to get charitible donations, so I can share some of my experiences around that. Here are some ideas:
1 - Create a "virtual currency" service that can connect widget makers with tisbest. This way, widget makers who are looking for a way to give out incentives to users can give them tisbest best cards instead of cash. This might work well for a new crop of non-profit-based widgets like the Dank App's "Social Change" or one of the many "Free Rice" knock-off apps.
2 - Build an Open Social app for Linked In to promote this as a gift for corporations. To me, a sweet spot for tisbest is corporate gift giving (aka boss giving employees a xmas gift, conference giving thank you gifts to speakers).
3 - Another thought around this corp concept is to help tisbest build a bulk email uploader, so if say Microsoft wanted to give these to a team who shipped a product, they could do so very easily.
Hi. This is Erik Marks, the founder of TisBest. I met with the 6 Hour Startup board members a couple weeks ago and I am excited about cooperating with your group to do something cool. And now is a great time because we are just kicking off a new Development push for the TisBest website – the Spec is just getting wrapped up and launch target is July 2008. The big features for this build are (i) we will start selling “hard cards” – i.e plastic (100% recycled) gift cards, (ii) users can upload their own images for the gift cards and (iii) we will have increased support for bulk orders of hundreds or thousands of cards in one order.
I think Kelenway had some great thoughts – my input is below.
1 – I am not sure I understand why a “virtual currency” comes into play. If a widget maker wanted to incentivize with TisBest cards, he can simply buy them with ordinary currency. If the suggestion was that we would accept “virtual currency” in exchange for issuing a TisBest card, that is not feasible. Although our cards have no marginal cost to issue, they do have a marginal cost when they are spent because we must give money to the selected charity. And so in the end we need to collect real cash for each charity gift card that we issue. But maybe I am not understanding.
However, this suggestion made me think of something else. Perhaps we could build an App that the widget maker can put a Name and Email address into and the app automatically orders a preformatted TisBest Card to be sent to to that Name and Email address. Sort of a TisBest Automatic Ordering App. See more discussion of this below
2- I like LinkedIn. I think reflects TisBest’s target demographic. Using TisBest for business purposes is something that I believe strongly in. In our current Dev-cycle we are building a few features tailored particularly to the business user – (a) the ability to upload an image to our TisBest Cards will allow the easy use of corporate logos and branding on TisBest cards and (b) we are making it convenient to order, send and manage orders with hundreds or thousands of TisBest cards.
I am not sure what Kleneway had in mind for how his Open Social app would promote TisBest on LinkedIn. I think it is a good idea. But we would need a particular strategy for how the promotion would work.
Promotion and increasing awareness are Job #1 for TisBest, so if there are ideas to achieve that, please share them. Currently all of our efforts are focused on Public Relations – gift guides, endorsements, news articles, etc.å
3 – A bulk email uploader is part of our current Dev Cycle, to launch July 2008.
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Here is my favorite idea so far – a further development of #1 above. What if we built an application that would allow automatic ordering of TisBest Charity Gift Cards over the web. A TisBest Automatic Order Placing application. The cards would be preconfigured by the application owner, and a credit card stored in the application. More than one card could be configured so, for example, a $25, $50 or $100 card could be issued in different circumstances. When a name and address was input (and maybe an authorization code), the app would automatically order one of the preconfigured cards for sending to the recipient. The name/addresses could be input through the front or back end.. The Application could allow TisBest card ordering through the back end (e.g. by the Widget Maker in #1 above) or through the front end by the TisBest Card recipient (e.g. by the Shell survey taker described below).
EXAMPLE 1 – front end data input. Let’s imagine a Shell Corp survey about gasoline prices; upon completing the survey, the user would see a screen where they would put in their name, email address (or mailing address if they are getting a hard card) and the application would automatically order from TisBest a charity gift card that was preformatted – with a particular image and message from Shell thanking the survey taker for their time and encouraging them to save the world just like Shell is doing.
Another way this app might be deployed is in regulated arenas where the giving of valuable gifts is prohibited. (For example, Politics, insurance industry, government, etc). The TisBest Charity gift Card has no monetary value to the recipient. And so, for example, maybe a campaign offers the card as an incentive for voters completing a survey.
EXAMPLE 2. – back end data input. Widget maker wants to give a TisBest card to early adopters. Widget maker uses TisBestAutoOrder but does not make it public facing. In a back-end interface, Widget maker can input one or more name/address combinations, identify a preconfigured card to be sent to each one and then place the order automatically.
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I don’t know if this sort of application is technologically feasible or wise. But I do think it would appeal to some users and we could get some adoption of it through the TisBest website.
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