Pinkdingo Raises $1.4 Million To Make Charity Easier By Killing The Checkout Page

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Pinkdingo, a young startup looking to breathe new life into the charity space, is announcing today that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from a host of angels, including John Paul DeJoria, the Founder of Patrón Spirits and Paul Mitchell Systems as well as Sunil Sani, an New York-based angel and member of the board of trustees at Save the Children. The startup has also recruited several other advisors who are well-familiar with the fundraising space, among them is Mark Sutton, Founder of Firstgiving, one of the largest P2P social fundraising platforms and Founder of General Assembly, Brad Hargrreaves.

So, what is it about this private beta startup that’s drawn some big seed funding from these fundraising veterans? For starters, Pinkdingo Founder and CEO Scott Arneill brings a refreshing attitude to the fundraising space, saying that it’s important for non-profits to realize that there’s no silver bullet that will magically allow their organizations to convince people to give bucketloads of cash to their cause, or continue to donate until the cows come home.

In fact, while many fundraising sites today are taking a social or peer-to-peer approach to giving, Pinkdingo (in spite of a somewhat humorous name) is serious about taking an alternative, and perhaps less social, approach. So, rather than enable charities to get their donors to ask friends (and their social networks) to make donations, Pinkdingo is focused on helping charities keep the donors they do convert.

“We believe that scalable and replicable innovation for charities needs to be about retention, rather than creating more ways for charities to ask more people for money”, Arneill said.

Pinkdingo wants to make it so that charities don’t have to send reminder emails, and consumers don’t have to groan over the amount of email and snail mail they receive from charitable organizations. Of course, charities are operating in one of the few spaces where players have to reacquire their customers every year and the average attrition rate for first-time donors is between 50 and 80 percent, Arneill said. (Not to mention, solutions like Causes.com, Crowdrise, and Fundly are already working in this space and have some big names behind them.)

Even for successful fundraisers, be they charity events and campaigns or what have you, once they’re finished, that’s it. The charity is left with email addresses to try to convert their customers again the following year.

So, Pinkdingo has identified the big opportunity in this space to be one that eliminates the donor reacquisition hurdle for charities by giving them engaging recurrence-based apps built for easy, run-in-the-background-type retention. Really, it’s the opposite of what’s typical in this space. Rather than build a cloud-based solution for the non-profit or charity, Pinkdingo wants to focus on the consumer-facing side — to make the giving process less painful for the one unloading their wallet.

As the specifics of the solution are still in testing, Pinkdingo isn’t yet showing all of their cards. But, from what I’ve been able to gather, in practice, this means that the startup will be launching some interesting micro-donation technology that will allow charities to get rid of that painful checkout process and better retain their customers.

“From a charity’s perspective, recurring donors are the absolute holy grail”, said Firstgiving Founder Mark Sutton. “PinkDingo’s focus on recurring donations is one that helps charities build this important part of their giving programs … And coming at this as a frustrated donor that wants to invent better ways to give — not someone who just set out to build software for charities — could make Pinkdingo incredibly successful in doing the latter”.

More to come as Pinkdingo readies its product for the market.

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One Year Later, Facebook Killing Off Places …To Put Location Everywhere

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.

Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.

To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new “Nearby” area, as Jason outlined along with the bigger privacy changes today.

Reading over Facebook’s own post on the location changes, it wasn’t entirely clear what these changes meant for the concept of the check-in itself. But this page appears to make it a little more clear. As I read it, check-ins will remain as a part of the product, but they’ll no longer be emphasized. It seems that the hope is that people will move away from thinking of location in terms of “checking in” and instead think about it in terms of tagging your location to what ever it is you’re doing — sharing a thought, posting a picture, etc.

As the new location page makes clear, Facebook now views location usage in three main ways:

Share where you’ve beenShare where you are nowShare where you’re going

Past. Present. Future.

This is smart, as it’s something none of the other location services have really nailed yet. And now that location is being emphasized on every Facebook action (though it can easily be turned off) — and not just on mobile — a lot of people are going to use it. Location as a layer of context is about to get a big upgrade.

All of this is also smart from a location-based advertising strategy. It’s more data and more strong signals. What I’m not yet clear on is what this means for Facebook’s location-based deals service. Launched alongside Places last year, it would seem that this never really took off. And Facebook doesn’t mention it today. I’ve reached out to them to clarify.

The video on the location info page details how location tagging will work. The default on facebook.com appears to be city-level, and there’s a secondary location button to add an actual venue (which is then inserted into your status message). You can also add location to photos you’ve already posted.

The video also points out that on mobile devices there will still be a check-in button, but the functionality will be different. It apparently will only exist as a part of a status update and there will be no more big blue “Check In” button that inserts your check-in into a stream of other check-ins (and again, no more Places area itself). Instead, once you select a place, it will simply be tacked on to the end of your status message.

Location sharing will also be tied to the more direct and simplified privacy changes Facebook outlined today.

Update: Here’s what Facebook has to say on the check-in deals:

Once someone tags where they are on Facebook, they will be directed to the News Feed. If the Place is offering a Check-in Deal, the title of the deal will appear below the News Feed story. You’ll then be able to click on the deal title and will then be taken to the claim flow.

Below, find the flow diagram of how it will now work.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It...

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