I decided to publish this in the interest of full disclosure and honesty.  I saw a YouTube video presentation by Gary Vaynerchuk, and he talked about how nothing is hidden on the internet anymore.  This post isn’t a glowing write-up of the infinite possibilities of YouImpact.us.  In fact, anything but.  What I am chronicling is the development of a social venture.  And if it doesn’t get off the ground, then that’s something worth chronicling as well.  That said, nothing is certain in this world.  This is merely a snapshot of where YouImpact.us stands, from my personal perspective.

The Change In Momentum

Last Saturday, I was incredibly psyched for my phone conversation with my YouImpact.us team.  I had been spending hours prepping for the call.  Reading about crowd-funding.  Looking at corporate social responsibility on the web.  Most importantly, I had an epiphany about our direction.  We were previously framed as a “match.com for charities and people interested in volunteering/donating”.  But the concept remained nebulous.  Organizations like AllForGood.org and GlobalGiving largely did what we wanted to do, but separately.  Our value-add was going to be putting the two notions together in one comprehensive package, and then utilize the power of social networks to an extent that the current leaders have not done.  And I remain committed to the notion that improvements on interface can be done.

But after some more research, the true image of where I saw YouImpact.us began to crystallize.  It happened after reading about Pepsi’s $10,000 partnership with FourSquare, the iPhone application that helps people share their locations and makes going out in public into a game.  Pepsi was going to sponsor FourSquare’s leaderboard – raising $0.04 cents every time a user scored a “point” on the game.  This would happen until $10K had been raised.

The Image Hit Me Like a Brick

This partnership was similar to Chase’s efforts with their Facebook giving platform.  Start with a certain amount of money, and then spend the money based on user activity.  Corporate sponsorship of charities contingent on users taking action.  Boom.  YouImpact.us had changed, at least in my head.

When making initial plans for monetizing YouImpact.us, we planned a number of revenue strategies.  One would be a 5% fee on all incoming funds.  Two would be companies paying for access to our volunteer-sourcing and participatory platform to assist with corporate-sponsored employee participation.  And a concept that had long remained nebulous was the notion of tying corporate sponsorships to giving.

The Initial Idea for Corporate Sponsorships

We would have Pepsi, for instance, sponsor a well.  When Charity: Water wanted to raise $5,000 for a well, users would be informed that Pepsi would match their donation dollar-for-dollar until the project reached full-funding.  Pepsi would put ads on our application and website.  They would also sponsor the text messages and email communications we would have with our users about specific fundraising and volunteering opportunities.

That said, we didn’t dwell on the subject.  And on that Saturday afternoon, as I prepped for our meeting (and after a hugely interesting and informative TWiST Meetup that Friday), the idea hit me.  We should tie the corporate matching to the users engaging with their social networks.  Pepsi might not match your donation without reason, but it will if you convince 100 friends to retweet your cause.  At that TWiST event, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis talked about tying business discounts to social networking access because of the enormous power of person-to-person marketing.  The idea just clicked.

The Balloon Deflates – Talking With The Team

I came to my team with immense energy and passion. We had been working on the application for the Unreasonable Institute, and I had been thinking about one of the questions asked – what need(s) does your project fulfill?  Initially we were filling two needs: that of the charity to get volunteers and donors, and that of interested people to get a cool platform on which to easily and effectively participate.  But I realized that ultimately, there were three constituencies whose needs we were fulfilling.

One remained the charities – they want funding and an engaged constituency.  Two was the users – they want an easy, time-inexpensive way to participate and give.  And the third was the corporations – they want to be socially responsible (or at the very least appear to be), and they also want to engage with consumers.  We would kill three birds with one stone.

Now, this idea would change our mission.  We wouldn’t be about volunteering and donating.  Instead, we would be about connecting charities to corporate sponsorships, using the power of social networks to tie corporate giving to user giving and sharing.  So the focus would shift to fundraising.  And we would make it happen in an engaging interface (a lot like Kickstarter) that would be easy and fun to use.  For the first time, I saw it in my head.  I knew it could work.

And my team was not interested.  Or I should say, they weren’t interested in dropping the 1.0 model.  Now I’m all for healthy skepticism.  I am the first to admit that I am a creator of ideas, not all of which will be great.  And having people to “bring you back to reality” is a healthy and necessary part of any team, especially when you’re essentially creating something from scratch.  But what I hoped to see from my team, and yet did not, was the key turn in their head.  They didn’t have that click.  I had, if you will, a break in the clouds.  Finally, a vision for how we could go forward and be successful.  But to the team, this was just another idea that “warranted further consideration” in light of our goals.

Passion and Vision Defined the Difference

I suppose, much of this comes down to passion.  The social enterprise I will eventually dedicate myself to must be important in two main ways.  One – I must SEE in my mind the path to make it real.  I have to FEEL and KNOW on an INTUITIVE level that a) I have the capacity to bring it about and that b) conditions exist to make it possible.  And two – I have to love what I’m working on enough to work on it tirelessly even if no one else gives a damn.  Period.

With YouImpact.us, I previously felt like it was a good idea – in the abstract.  But the concrete was simply undefined.  We had no idea how to move forward, and every step of the way we would be creating as we go along.  Now I have nothing against going forward into the unknown.  It’s an obvious requirement when starting something new.  But I need the VISION of what we will create in my mind the entire time.  I lacked that previously.

When I was registering voters at the University of Michigan during my sophomore year, I didn’t really know what I was doing.  I stepped into the responsibility as a freshman, knew few people on campus, and had never done organizing work of any kind.  But I had a love for voter registration and participation – I had an excitement for it.  And while we didn’t know how we were going to register 5,000 people, we knew what we were shooting for.  And we worked tirelessly – sleepless nights, untold skipped classes (couldn’t tell you how I managed a B+ in the Anthrobiology of Evolution), and hoarse throats.  But we made it happen.  By Election Day, we had registered 4,896 voters.  And we had increased student voter turnout by 130% from the previous mid-term election year.  It’s true – we hadn’t quite reached our numbers goal.  But we were damn close, and our core team (a family, really, at this point) experienced a magical mixture of exhaustion, appreciation, and elation.

That was a long digression.  But the point remains.  When you have the VISION and the PASSION for something, you can make it work.  I had a vision for where we were going to take our voter-registration organization.  And we were passionate about making it happen, and getting every student we could find to participate.

With YouImpact.us, we lacked that vision.  Or at least, I lacked it.  It sounds like Fernando had it.  But I didn’t really feel it.  And the same went for passion.  My passion is not for creating a fundraising platform.  My passion was, and is, raising money for charity: water.  For bringing clean water to people.  For working to solve the issue of global poverty and hunger.  And I rationalized to myself, if we can create this platform, then we can raise money for all kinds of organizations, and charity: water will be among them.

I think when we came out with the initial idea to do both volunteering and donating in one website/application, we were excited.  We could kill two birds with one stone.  But from my perspective, my focus was always on the fundraising.  I wanted to raise tons of money for charity: water.  More money = more wells.  It was that simple to me, the entire time, but in getting our team around a unifying concept we contorted the model until its then-current form.

And then the idea came to me.  We weren’t about volunteering and donating.  Our value-add, after all, was in effectively utilizing social networks.  And with the new YouImpact.us, we would engage users with social networking activity that brought further giving to their cause.  People had every incentive to participate, and so they would win, charities would win, and corporations sponsoring that extra giving would win as well.  I still believe in this idea.

Where YouImpact.us Now Stands

But the team was now fractured.  I had lost my excitement for the initial model, because I now saw a clear path to success with this new one.  Fernando wanted to continue with the initial model, for which the vision (in his mind) was clear.  But we had trouble articulating to each other the efficacy of our ideas.

Since that day, we’ve spoken one more time.  We attempted hashing out some common ground.  In the meantime, I submitted my new idea to the Unreasonable Institute.  I think it can work, and it can raise a lot of money for great causes.  So right now, YouImpact.us is in a state of flux.  We all think it’s a great idea.  But the notion of “it” is different for each of us.

The Importance of the Right Team-Mates

Before I close, I want to return to the voter-registration topic in bringing up a point about having the right people on board.  Our core team was about eight people, all of whom contributed something different and meaningful to the team.  But the “core-core” three, who really drove the decision-making and the mission, were myself, Jonathon Kendall, and Hannah Fishman.  We complemented each other perfectly.  You see, I am a dreamer.  I have big ideas, and big notions of what is possible.  Just like with the new idea for YouImpact.us.  So for instance, I would go to Jonathon with my idea.  And Jonathon, dreamer too that he is, would take the idea and run with it.  He’d say “YES.  And, X.  And, Y.  And, Z.”  And then I’d respond in kind.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  And then we’d have a well-developed and completely unreasonable idea that we were incredibly excited, and we’d talk to Hannah.  And she’d say:  Okay.  Now, let’s be rational about this.  Let’s THINK IT THROUGH.  Let’s PLAN THE EXECUTION.  And we would make it happen.  So there are a couple important keys here.

One – my team consisted of people who shared my vision.  We all had a deep passion for participation in politics, and getting young people (and everyone else, really) involved in the political process.  We were all political science majors, and we were all deeply engaged on campus.  This is what we cared about.  But importantly, I wasn’t the only person on my team popping out crazy ideas.  Everyone had crazy ideas, and then we validated each other because we saw the possibility underlying each one.  With many, Hannah would bring us back to reality.  Or Jonathon, or myself.  But I will say this of Hannah – she had a brilliant combination of thinking grounded in reality with a strong vision and “take-an-idea-and-run-with-it” mind.

So we had:  Out-there ideas.  Validation of those ideas within the team.  And then plans for executing the ideas.  This was our recipe for success.  I think validation is important, for sanity’s sake.  You need to feel like what you’re doing is possible.  And when the people around you are equally excited about what’s happening, you get that feeling.  Your confidence is reaffirmed.  And you go on, simply put, to win.

Back to YouImpact.us Once More

In saying all of this, I mean to direct no unkind words to my YouImpact.us teammates.  I have great respect for them both, and I particularly believe that Fernando will be immensely successful in his current and future endeavors.  He is deeply entrepreneurial, an excellent writer and communicator, and a good person.  But for the purposes of moving forward with this specific project, I got the sense that the motivation of our team’s efforts wasn’t as strongly grounded in a shared yet personal conviction for making the idea happen.  Ultimately, everything starts with that deep core conviction.  That foundation on which our personal relationships and our enterprise could be built.  And I don’t know that we had established that firmly enough.

So where do we stand on YouImpact.us?  Well, I think either way it’s a good idea.  Is the group sticking together to do it?  I don’t know.  I think the ideas are great but I’m not sure that the underlying passion is strong enough, particularly given our newly divergent paths for moving forward.  I want someone to build this.  It should be done, and the world will benefit.  But we need that strong foundation on which to build our group momentum and currently, we lack it.

When thinking about what it takes to be successful, it’s ultimately simple.  You must LOVE your idea.  Take the guys who are making Blippy, or the guys who made Twitter.  Maybe a messaging system isn’t their life-long passion.  Regardless, they fell in love with the idea of making it happen.  Once the romance was set, they couldn’t not do it.  And I think it’s like that with entrepreneurship at large.  You have to fall in love with your idea, and stay in love with it while you work on it.  It’s the only way it your enterprise can succeed, at least as long as you’re running it.

Where I Stood, and Where I Stand Now

I fell out of love with voter-registration after we were finished.  I had fought for my purpose, and then I had completed it.  I was done – physically, mentally, and emotionally.  Now, if you ask me about voter-registration, you will find it is something about which I still care deeply.  Nothing makes me smile more than being asked to register to vote.  But my love for voter registration has changed.  I liken it to the love you have for your uncle.  He’s family, and you always will find him important.  But you don’t wake up in the morning every day thinking about your uncle (I hope).

So moving forward, I have my passion in its nebulous form.  I want to help people.  And I want to use the power of enterprise to make it happen.  I have ideas, and dreams, but I am not sure yet of how to proceed.  But that’s okay.  I know that social entrepreneurship is my space.  I know that I want to use the power of business to help people and make the world better.  So when the flame of inspiration hits that inner candle of my deepest desire, I will act.  On this I am sure.