Benevolent has received a grant from the Knight Foundation and Marjorie S. Fisher Fund to grow its crowdfunding site that anyone can use to make small donations to help low-income individuals overcome a one-time economic hurdle.

“Over 104 million people are living in low-income households in the U.S. today,” said founder Megan Kashner in a Q&A. “This is a higher percent of the population than in any recent decade. For 20 years, I have worked with low-income families to help them reach their goals and prove a sound future for their children. Over and over, I would see a family derailed from their goals by a challenge that would have cost only a couple of hundreds of dollars to overcome.”

Kashner is a licensed clinical social worker who repeatedly saw families struggle to break out of their current situation. Along the lines of Kiva or Watsi, a small micro-loan or donation can make a tremendous difference in someone’s life. Benevolent’s niche is microdonations that enable people to buy a specific item or accomplish a specific task, such as getting a car fixed, a refrigerator, or business training. Sometimes, obstacles as seemingly minor as these make all the difference.

Benevolent partners with local nonprofit organizations to identify individuals with specific needs and then provides each person with a profile page where they can use stories, photos, and videos to describe their unique challenges. All funds raised are sent to the nonprofit as a grant, which then fulfills the client’s needs. Kashner said this approach distinguishes Benevolent from other crowd funding-for-social-good sites because each story is brought to Benevolent by someone personally familiar with the recipient’s need who can not only verify their challenges but also manage the implementation of the resources.

“In the past, we didn’t have the technological tools to scale this sort of help at an individual level,” Kashner said. “Today, we have the tools and the connections, so Benevolent is the actualization of my belief that no low-income family should have to become homeless, jobless, or stuck because they need a radiator fixed or have to buy eyeglasses, a work uniform, or a new computer.”

Benevolent launched in December 2011 and the pilot program in Chicago raised more than $35,000 for 70 people. The average donation is $50 and the average amount of a funded need is $470. With this grant, Benevolent will expand into Detroit, Charlotte, North Carolina, and San Jose/Silicon Valley.

Photo Credit: Benevolent/ Facebook

King is the founder of HopeMob, a nonprofit crowdfunding site dedicated to supporting charitable causes, organizations, and individuals around the world. HopeMob primarily funds smaller scale, focused projects and provides direct aid to recipients instead of just wiring money. Despite the proliferation of crowdfunding platforms, King felt that too many people remained underserved because they did not have the tech or social media savvy to wage effective campaigns.

“We founded HopeMob to fill holes that we saw in the crowdfunding space,” King said in an interview with VentureBeat. “I don’t see our competition as other crowdfunding sites, I see it as the ills of society that cause people harm and prevent them from living their best life. A lot of people with compelling stories are totally blocked on other sites and this is often because if you don’t already have a crowd, you struggle to raise money. We flipped that on its head by building the community first around the idea that when generous strangers come together, we can get a whole lot done.”

HopeMob’s community is now 150,000 people strong and has funded over 100 campaigns, ranging from $400 for a medical procedure to $100,000 for victims of Hurricane Sandy. Before campaigns go live on the site, they go through a series of steps to make sure they are legitimate, as well as presented in the best possible way. HopeMob verifies stories that goes through the system by asking for references, conducting interviews and researching on social media. The fact that campaigns don’t receive money, but rather the actual aid they need, also weeds out disingenuousness. For example, a teacher raising money for her school receives the specific textbooks or water purifiers she needs and a cancer patient may have her bills paid for her, rather than getting a check to do it herself.

Once HopeMob approves a campaign, the user can ask for help building a compelling profile. King has extensive experience leveraging social media to achieve goals and built that into HopeMob so that if someone goes to the trouble of posting a campaign, they have a better chance of reaching their goal. Before founding HopeMob, King raised millions of dollars for the relief and recovery after the earthquake in Haiti, largely through social media, and he realized that bringing together social good with social media as “his calling.” He went on to launch an auction site called TwitChange where people could bid on the chance for celebrities to mention them on Twitter.

Along these lines, King launched Upfront today, an online community for influencers and their devoted fans. King said that the “value of fully engaged celebrities in a platform” is huge. Upfront provides opportunities for influencers to communicate with their fans through messages, photos, videos, emails, unreleased music, status updates, and live-streaming of events. Access is available on s subscription basis and a percentage of every transaction completed on Upfront goes into the Upfront Foundation to support causes they believe in.

King has played a number of roles through his life, including victim, teacher, pastor, community organizer, social media consultant and entrepreneur. He is driven by the desire to empower the downtrodden, and believes in the power of social media (and the influential people using it) to rally support for charitable causes.

With piles of beautifully wrapped presents under the Christmas tree, we can’t help but feel grateful for everything we have. This desire to give back translates into an army of willing volunteers at food banks and homeless shelters, which usually dissipates by New Year’s Day.

How do we keep up the spirit of giving all year round? Here are three ideas from the tech community to turn you into a change-making habitual philanthropist.

Change.org

Why not start a grassroots campaign?

Company: Change.org
What is it? An online petitioning site.
Membership: 25 million users; the company is growing at a rate of 2 million new members a month.
Who’s it for? Ordinary people who want to start hyper-local movements against corporations or interest groups. “If you want to win battles, you do it locally,” Change.org CEO Ben Rattray (pictured, above) told VentureBeat.
How does it work? Petitions are nothing new, but marrying them with social media and focusing them in a hyper-local way — that’s where things start to get interesting. Simply launch a petition on Change.org, share it with your social networks, and watch it take off. The startup has a support team that will help you mobilize and put pressure on your target.
Greatest success story: Don’t believe you can take on the big banks? Twenty-two-year-old nanny Molly Katchpole launched an online petition on Change.org to put pressure on Bank of America to drop its new $5 monthly debit card fee. It was signed by 300,000 people. Victory was affirmed in November 2011.
What is the secret sauce? The company has a charismatic CEO in the form of Rattray (pictured, above), who believes that technology can arm ordinary people to start revolutions. In a recent interview at his San Francisco headquarters, Rattray said that people are apathetic because they learn over time that their opinion or vote doesn’t matter. Inspired by examples of successful campaigns launched on blogs, Facebook and Twitter or sites like Change.org, they are recognizing that they can make a difference. “As the platform gets bigger, people in power know who we are,” said Rattray. “They recognize the potential power of viral campaigns.”

Why not raise money for a charitable cause?

Company: Rally.org 
What is it? A platform that helps people to rally around and raise money for causes they believe in.
Who’s it for? A rebel with a cause.
How does it work? Create a fundraising page on Rally.org in a matter of minutes, and start accepting donations. Add your extended social network to your support list, and reach out to them on Facebook and Twitter. If your fundraising takes off, you can access a dashboard to analyze what’s working and view a list of your greatest supporters.
Membership: Approximately 1.5 million users.
Greatest success story?  A member recently raised $20,000 to help save a Minnesota church from foreclosure.
What is the secret sauce? Its all-star network of supporters. Rally.org has successfully rallied celebrities like Bon Jovi and Silicon Valley’s venture capital community. When Digg.com founder Kevin Rose joined Google Ventures, Rally.org was his first investment. It was further propelled into the spotlight when the Romney campaign chose it as its fundraising platform. “We’re increasingly seeing artists, brands and large corporations being very vocal and open about leveraging their celebrity and brand to benefit causes,” said Nick Warshaw, Rally.org’s business development lead in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Why not offer an internship to a teen programmer?

Organization: CodeNow
What is it? A nonprofit that encourages high school students from inner city neighborhoods to pick up computer programming.
Who’s it for? Developers with a few hours to spare on an occasional evening who would be willing to teach; tech startups that can offer an internship to teen graduates of the program; kids from want to learn foundational skills in computer programming through free extra curricular off campus training.
How does it work? Teens reeceive netbook computers when they enter the program and sign up for 45 hours of programming training after school and during the summer or winter break. Once they complete the program, some of the graduates land internships at tech startups like LivingSocial.
Membership: The program has about 50 alumni. It started in Washington, D.C., but it recently expanded to San Francisco.
Greatest success story? Wilfred, a teen from a rough neighborhood in Washington D.C., who was ready to hand out handwritten business cards with the title “future engineer” in a few months. A natural at the programming language Ruby on Rails, he is now teaching the new recruits.
What is the secret sauce? Its close ties to the tech community. In attendance at the recent launch event in San Francisco were venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other high-profile techies like Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, and Roy Bahat, chairman of Ouya. The organization’s emphasis on diversity is both impressive and unique — about 40 percent of the program’s graduates are girls.

Red ribbon image via discpicture // Shutterstock

Startups often say their technology will change the world — a claim that seems wildly optimistic at best.

But step into the San Francisco offices of Change.org, the online petitioning site that is arming ordinary people with the tools to start revolutions, and you’ll be swept up by the mission. You won’t be alone. The movement is about 25 million people strong and is growing at a rate of 2 million memberships per month.

Can an individual spark a revolution?

Governments and corporations, they say, will be forced to listen if hit by thousands of signatures on Change.org, an army of Twitter and Facebook fans, and a few well-placed newspaper articles.

I meet Ben Rattray, the company’s charismatic CEO (pictured above), in his corner office. He’s weary from frequent travel: we joke about the “networking opportunities” during the red-eye flight from New York to San Francisco on Sundays. It’s typically jam-packed with tech execs returning from East Coast trips.

Directly behind his chair, a single photograph is framed in an otherwise sparsely decorated room. It’s the face of Molly Katchpole, the 22-year-old nanny who took on Bank of America. In November 2011, Katchpole’s victory was affirmed when 300,000 people signed her petition and the bank dropped its new $5 monthly debit card fee.

This is one of many recent campaigns that caught the attention of the global media. On Change.org, a trio of high school girls secured CNN’s Cindy Crowley as the first female presidential debate moderator in 20 years. One of the site’s members rallied hundreds of thousands of people to put pressure on the South African government to crack down on “corrective rape,” a term used to describe the horrific practice of a man raping a lesbian with the aim of ‘turning’ her heterosexual.

Something has shifted in recent years. Political activism is no longer the realm of the youthful and naive. Obama’s election and re-election were fueled by social media, and protests against SOPA and PIPA were staged on Twitter. Social media has created a culture of transparency that is making a site like Change.org truly effective.

“The strong thesis we hold is that people aren’t born apathetic, they are trained to be,” said Rattray.

“If you show them that their voice matters, you can radically change behavior.”

The company is hiring at a rate of two people per week and forecasts revenues of $15 million this year.

The blurry line between profit-making and change-making

And this is where Change.org has faced some criticism. Some say the company has crossed the line between change-making and profit-making; Clay Johnson, author of “The Information Diet” told the Wall Street Journal he has “huge problems” with the site as it is a “lead-generation business disguised as a social-change organization for whoever is willing to pay them for the email addresses.” He continued, “It’s dangerous to monetize ‘change’ because there’s an economic incentive to sensationalize.”

Certified as a B Corporation, the company makes its money through their cause-based ad model. For instance, the World Wildlife Fund might place a sponsored ad on a campaign that supports the environment, or might pay for Change.org to promote an existing campaign. It’s not dissimilar to sponsored tweets or sponsored links on Google.

Rattray claims the company is less concerned with the profit motive than with maximizing impact. To deflect critics, he uses the example of an ongoing engineering project to build a mobile offering that can be deployed in developing countries. This is not intended to make money.

He says Change.org, as a revenue-generating and angel-funded business has been able to offer its employees a competitive salary and benefits. Meanwhile, nonprofits are struggling to hire and maintain talent.

Why work at Change.org?

This week, the company brought on a high-profile CTO, Tom Hughes-Croucher, to lead the engineering efforts. The new hire has a strong reputation in the open-source community, and has worked as a technical evangelist at Joyent and Yahoo.

On the engineering roadmap is a plan to incorporate machine learning so members will be matched instantly to a petition based on their pre-existing interests.

“I’m really excited to be starting at Change.org because I know we have such an amazing opportunity to have an impact on the world here as well as some really interesting engineering challenges that come at the scale we operate,” Hughes-Croucher said.

Still, the company has not been able to lure quality engineers that are interested in a sky-high salary and large chunk of equity. “Eighty percent really care about the equity upside and a massive exit,” Rattray told me. “For the 20 percent that care about the mission, we are the fastest growing company in this space.”

The company has openings in communications and marketing, business development, customer support, and engineering. Check out the full list here.

“Startup culture” is a new series that highlights what it’s really like to work at a Bay Area startup. We’ll be profiling a startup every two weeks. Please send your suggestions for the most rockin’ office spaces, startup happy hours, or company perks via email (christina@venturebeat.com) or Twitter (@chrissyfarr). 

It only took a few months for Wilfred, a teen from a rough neighborhood in Washington D.C., to begin handing out handwritten business cards with the title “future engineer.“

With a presence in D.C. and now San Francisco, CodeNow is a nonprofit that encourages high school students from inner city neighborhoods to pick up coding skills. Wilfred (pictured left, teaching a fellow student) was one of the first to join the program — he practiced up to five hours a night and has a proclivity for the programming language Ruby on Rails.

Wilfred’s was just one of the many heartwarming stories shared at the launch event, held at a co-working space in San Francisco this week. In attendance were venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other high-profile members of the local tech community. Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, and Roy Bahat, chairman of Ouya, are among the organization’s supporters.

“About 40 percent of the students have the potential to be developers,” said CodeNow founder Ryan Seashore during a phone interview with VentureBeat. Once they pick up these skills, the kids increase their chances of getting into a top engineering school at college, and many aspire to become entrepreneurs.

There are already over 50 alumni of the CodeNow program, which has close ties to the tech community. Teens are given netbook computers when they enter the program and sign up for 45 hours of programming training after school and during the summer or winter break.

Once they complete the program, some of the graduates land internships at tech startups like LivingSocial. The internship program is still under development — Seashore told me he’s hoping to connect with tech companies in the Bay Area that would be willing to mentor a budding developer.

Seashore had the idea for CodeNow in early 2011 when he struggled to find a great programming class. “If I’m having trouble finding a program, these kids must not have a shot,” he told me. Convinced that high school students, particularly those from underrepresented communities, would be empowered by learning to code, he launched a pilot class.

CodeNow is currently oversubscribed, and its focus is on maintaining diversity. The program’s directors are particularly proud that 40 percent of its students are girls.

Seashore is confident that CodeNow will be met with a warm welcome in the Bay Area, the nation’s tech capital. “We can do it if we get the financial resources and the right companies behind us. It’s the perfect place for our program,” he said.

CodeNow is looking for volunteers, mentors, programmers, board-members, and donors in D.C. and San Francisco. If you’re interested, apply through the site. 

This landed in our tips line this morning, and really, how could we not write it up?

Come4.org is a not-for-profit porn site that takes all the glorious ickyness of online porn and channels it toward the greater good.

Here’s how it’ll work: Each video clip on the site will be associated with a specific cause. The Come4 spank bank will feature amateur videos as well as professionally produced erotica, and users can upload their own clips, as well. The site will serve ads and sponsored videos from adult brands, including sex toy stores; that revenue will be used to fund the causes.

If you think about it, the Come4 premise makes a lot of sense. In terms of web traffic, online porn sites are third only to Google and Facebook; Come4′s founders say porn is a $100 billion market. Yet while we spank and buzz our way to self-satisfaction, people around the world go without life’s necessities: food, clean water, shelter, medicine, education, etc.

So why not crowdsource a little free pornography and use the money we spend on it to help those in need?

Here’s a video from the founders explaining what it is and why they think it’ll work:

“The tech is well-known. It is the idea that is disruptive,” wrote co-founder Riccardo Zilli (pictured above) in an email to VentureBeat.

The founders also acknowledge the flawed nature of porn itself, saying on the site that most online porn “fosters a one-dimensional perspective that is often fake, violent, macho-centered, and in many cases barely legal.”

The first cause Come4 will tackle is the Asta Philpot Foundation, an organization that raises awareness about the rights and issues (including sexual issues) faced by disabled people.

Future causes will be selected based on a few criteria, such as whether they provide cost-effective solutions to real problems and whether the Come4 community supports the cause. The organization will also give special consideration to organizations that support and defend individuals’ sexual rights and raise awareness around violations of those rights.

To date, the Milan-based company has raised just a bit more than $4,000 through crowdfunding on Ulule.

In Silicon Valley, we understand how to market a new iPhone app or game to millions of people in a matter of weeks. What if we applied these principles to support a good cause?

Bay Area tech founders and venture capitalists gathered today to hear a presentation from the United Nations Foundation about its plans to make its charitable work more relevant to young people. The nonprofit organization launched the Global Good Challenge this fall to encourage people to take action on the world’s most pressing problems and engage via their social networks.

It’s not a fundraising effort. The Global Good Challenge is an educational game that is already spreading on Twitter and Facebook.

Former Senator Tim Wirth, Kyri McClellan, CEO of the San Francisco America’s Cup Organizing Committee, Jimmy Spithill, Veteran Yachtsman

Zaw Thet, a veteran entrepreneur who started his first company as a teenager, told VentureBeat that was inspired to create the game that could educate people about how to empower young girls in developing countries, prevent diseases like malaria, and combat global poverty. He approached the U.N. Foundation with the idea six months ago, and he interviewed dozens of friends in the tech community for their advice on developing a “viral” social campaign.

Click here to play the game. Sign in via Facebook to unlock prizes like a trip to Africa or a VIP tickets to a Stevie Wonder concert.

“Instead of donating money, we want people to donate their social media influence,” Thet told me. Last year, Thet (one of the youngest people to graduate from the Stanford Graduate School of Business) was selected as one of 10 entrepreneurs to serve on the U.N. Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council. 

Serial entrepreneur Zaw Thet.

Thet told me he was inspired by a mobile game that is educating female players across the world about different ways to prevent pregnancy. This is one of many social and educational games that are popping up on the market. The team behind the initiative also borrowed from the “gamification” trend. In Silicon Valley, tech companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are finding ways to leverage game mechanics to influence user behavior. (Read up on the “gamification” trend here.)

“People involved in the gaming industry are thinking about how to create social good,” Rick Thompson, the founder of Playdom, told me. Thompson, an adviser to Thet, was an attendee at today’s presentation alongside about a dozen other Silicon Valley big-whigs.

Read more about social entrepreneurship, and the tech startups that want to change the world.

Another highlight of the event was that the announcement of the latest prize. One lucky player will be selected to be the guest racer in a sailboat competing in the upcoming America’s Cup in San Francisco. Veteran yachtsman Jimmy Spithill attended the event to deliver the news in person– ladies, trust me, you will want to win this one!

The U.N. Foundation is currently working on the mobile version of its game, which will be released in the coming months.

Top Image via Shutterstock 

Razoo is like the next step in the legacy of the telethon, which uses variety show entertainment to get people to rally around a cause.

Razoo is an online community where nonprofits create pages about their campaigns and individuals give direct donations. Over 14,000 nonprofits around the country have raised money on the site.

This largest driver of this success are Razoo’s Giving Days, which are 24-hour online fundraising campaigns. These campaigns capitalize on gaming principles to motivate people to donate.

Giving Days are regionalized, so multiple organizations in one area participate simultaneously. The events are structured like contests with deadlines, hourly goals, strategies, leaderboards, and prizes to keep people giving money and engaging with their social networks to raise more.

“The excitement around the event is about constructing the gaming element of competition,” said Mansford. “We find that the contest itself is addictive. Nonprofits reach out to their supporters in the communities and get their donor base involved. People check back to see how their causes are doing and rally their social networks. It becomes both meaningful and fun.”

Razoo has executed 15 Giving Days across the U.S. It’s most successful Giving Day occurred in Minnesota, when in one day, 35,000 donors gave over $14 million to 3,000 nonprofits.

The site acts not only as a catalyst for local giving but also as a resource. Even after the Giving Day is over, Razoo offers tools to help organizations manage their community. It has a full infrastructure to conduct payment processing, provides tax deductible receipts, and customer support, and helps causes continue to engage with their supporters.

Razoo takes a 2.9 percent processing fee for all transactions. The company received seed funding from Legatum Group and is originally based in Washington, D.C., with a new headquarters in San Francisco. So far this year, Razoo has conducted 12 Giving Days and has plans for seven more.

Even without Milton Berle and his comedic charm, 24-hour fundraising campaigns are just as effective in 2012 as they were 50 years ago. Fortunately on Razoo, no dancing or walking through the night is required. Just a computer and a credit card.

With 1.7 billion people around the globe living in absolute poverty, 2 billion living under censorship and 6 million children dying of hunger every year, we have some real demands to meet. The numbers are grave, the challenges immense, and yet many of the most capable minds in Silicon Valley are focused not on solving real problems, but on … games; not on impacting those who desperately need aid, but on being number one in the App Store; and not on making a difference, but on turning a profit.

It’s time we took a cue from innovators such as the duo behind MobiCrops, an app aimed at eradicating world hunger. New Jersey Institute of Technology graduate students Daniel Boston and Manoop Talasila developed the app as a tool to enable farmers around the world to communicate better, therefore improving their efficiency for planning and growing crops for those most in need.

“Our first goal is usually to solve the problem, not make money,” the students said.

It’s this mentality that should serve as our guide as we launch start-ups and build business plans. The world doesn’t need another mind-numbing game. It needs solutions like the ones the NJIT students devised. Once you identify a true problem and develop a means for addressing it, the money will come.

One of my heroes is Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank which provides microcredit loans to the poor. What started as a $27 loan from his own pocket to help 42 impoverished, Bangladeshi women turned into a viable business model that inspired similar efforts across the world. As they say, “do well by doing good.”

My childhood friend and I decided to follow that mantra when we created a tool called Hotspot Shield to help people stay safe and private online and, more importantly, gain access to blocked content in areas of the world where information is either scarce or heavily censored. From where we stood, freedom of speech and access to uncensored information is a basic human right, one we often take for granted here in the U.S. Over the years, the tool took on a life of its own, most recently helping a million Egyptians communicate, rally behind a common cause and ultimately overthrow a corrupt dictator. First came the idea, and then the profits.

The opportunities for business that do social good are endless, and we’re seeing a new breed of entrepreneur emerge to bring these ideas to life.

Just take a look at Better World Books, which has donated millions to global literacy initiatives since launching in 2002. Based in Indiana, the company is a reminder that innovation is springing up outside the typical tech zones. A shining embodiment of the “triple bottom line” – positive impact on environment, community involvement and engagement and sustainable, responsible business practices – Better World’s impact has skyrocketed almost as quickly as its revenues. The company took in $55 million in 2011 and donated close to 5 million books.

Then there’s angel investor-backed Academic Earth. Founded by Richard Ludlow, a Yale grad who married his entrepreneurial spirit with a desire to do good, the company launched in 2008 with a mission to provide free access to high quality education. Sustained by ad sales and affiliate marketing, the company delivers a precious commodity so far out of reach for much of the world’s population.

Switching gears from education to one of San Francisco’s favorite topics – food – we turn to CleanFish, an eco-friendly, Bay Area-based company that recognized the need for sustainable seafood in mainstream supermarkets and restaurants, and jumped on it. Since launching in 2004, company founders Tim O’Shea and Dale Sims have connected dozens of small suppliers lovingly referred to as “the CleanFish Alliance” with larger markets for their sustainably harvested catches. Within just a few years of launching, the company hit the $20 million mark.

And who can overlook the darling of the socially responsible startup world, TOMS shoes. Dreamed up by serial entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie on a trip to Argentina, TOMS pioneered the “One for One” model: for every pair sold, TOMS donates a pair to a child in need. Not only has the shoemaker donated more than a million pairs of shoes to impoverished kids around the world, it’s become a wardrobe staple across the country at the same time.

It’s time for more innovators to shift their focus to creating tools to effect fundamental social change in the world, a new way of thinking that can engender a fairer world revolving around equality, innovation and freedom. All too often, the idea of doing good and making an impact is an afterthought, when it can be the main driver behind a sustainable, profitable business.

So what’s missing and why haven’t we seen a greater swing toward entrepreneurship around social good? It seems that the shift in thinking isn’t fully complete. As Yunus said, “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us.” Those with the desire to effect social change around the globe are still looking at it as a form of charity rather than an exchange of goods and services. And many entrepreneurs looking to create the next big app, service, tool, etc. to turn a profit aren’t tuning in to some of the most obvious markets out there.

Smart entrepreneurs with a desire to do good will recognize this massive yet often-ignored marketplace and create solutions that will reshape the tech landscape. We put so much effort into launching these great companies; we might as well do something that has a real impact.

David Gorodyansky is CEO of AnchorFree, which makes Hotspot Shield, a privacy shield for internet users around the world. He co-founded the company when he was 23, with a belief that all users should be in control on the Web. He was named among the top CEOs under 30 years old by Inc. Magazine, CEOUnder30.com, FastCompany, Red Herring and other publications. He also runs a blog on Forbes.com, where he shares his passions about technology and innovation, and served on the Technology Advisory Council to Gavin Newsom, the former mayor of San Francisco. 

[Top image credit: arindambanerjee/Shutterstock]

Billed as a social network for social causes and activism, the service aims to help people find and discover issues they care about with their friends, keep tabs on them through news and updates, and over time, help support their work and raise awareness. A nonprofit itself, Jumo is the latest example of broad efforts throughout the industry to bring the energy and innovation of venture-backed startups to the world of philanthropy.

Getting started with the service requires you to connect your Facebook account, after which you’re asked to select various issues, ranging from Arts and Culture to Education, Health, and Human Rights, and rate them according to your level of interest. Jumo then suggests charities and organizations to follow out of the 3,500 it has signed up for its initial launch.

Once set up is completed, the crux of the service is a Facebook-style “Top News” section on its homepage that contains latest activity from your followed issues and charities. Items in the news stream are supposed to be relevant to the your interests and help you keep updated with issues, charities, and people that you care about.

While Jumo has a well-executed user interface and is headed in the right direction, something I found peculiar about the social network is, ironically, a lack of social features. For example, even though accounts are connected to Facebook, there is no way to see which of my friends I can find on Jumo, other interesting people worth following, or invite others. I had to search for my Facebook friends, as well as founder Chris Hughes, to find and follow their profiles.

All this may not be an entirely bad thing considering that it leaves much of the site’s focus on the issues and charities themselves, but if Jumo plans on billing itself as a social network that helps users spread the word and raise awareness, it may not be a bad idea to make it easier to find likeminded souls.

Worth noting is Hughes’ intentional lack of focus on donations on the site. 

“We are not trying to build another donation platform. We are really focused on building a social network where you can find compelling projects and issues and connect with them in a way that will be lasting,” Hughes told the LA Times.

That may help differentiate Jumo from Causes, a similar application started by Sean Parker and Joe Green, two entrepreneurs with similarly close ties to Facebook’s founding circle, which has reached 119 million users over its four years of existence. It has a more overt focus on fundraising, with prominent “Donate Now” buttons and windows which pop up suggesting donations.

Jumo is based in New York and has raised $3.5 million from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation, and other individual backers.