Crowdtilt + Beer Pong
Who says beer pong has to be a tacky affair? Not Dan King and Sam Roston, who host a beer pong tournament called El Clasico every few months down in sunny Los Angeles.
This September, they used Crowdtilt to collect payments for El Clasico Tres. Check out their campaign here: https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/el-clasico-tres
Held in a private ballroom at one of L.A.’s best sports bars, and featuring college football, food, beer (of course), and friendly competition (40 teams), the party, we’re sure, was awesome.
If you happen to live in the L.A. area and would like to experience this first hand, check out the group’s Facebook page. They will be announcing the next El Clasico here: https://www.facebook.com/ElClasicoCervezaClub
What’s also awesome for us here at Crowdtilt is to see people come together for a fun, shared event. Crowdtilt can enable heartwarming causes - we recently featured a few campaigns - and also simply bring friends together for a rollicking good time.
Beer pong doesn’t have to be tacky, and pooling money doesn’t have to be hard. So the next time you’re thinking to collect money for a party where you - say - arrange dozens of Solo cups on a table, fill those cups with beer, and invite people over to throw ping pong balls into those cups - use Crowdtilt!
- Angela & the Crowdtilt team
Wednesday Night at Crowdtilt
Yesterday was a big day at Crowdtilt.
Groups throughout the country were fundraising, collecting, and pooling money on Crowdtilt as they do on other days; lots of fun campaigns for fantasy football, house parties, and tailgates as people are gearing up for the opening weekend of college football (Go Longhorns!).
There were some great campaigns for some amazing causes yesterday/last night including one where people are raising money for a comic book writer to buy back his keepsake collection of comics, which he had sold to afford the medical costs of a baby he and wife adopted. This campaign is definitely heartwarming in its own right (and the outpouring across the web in various articles on the campaign are inspiring to see).
However, a different campaign happening in Tennessee caught my eye as well. Students at Vanderbilt University pitched in to help cover tuition costs for an international student who was facing the possibility of having to leave the country by week’s end because the cosigners on his loans were denied. We don’t know the specifics of the student’s situation, but his classmates did, and what happened blew me away. Within *24 hours* (and just a day before the tuition payment was due), over 150 students came together to help fund their friend’s education. We have seen some amazing flash fundraisers in the past few months on Crowdtilt, but nothing quite like this because there wasn’t a single whale-donor that gave $2,000 or $3,000 or $5,000 (every contribution was under $200), and there was no celebrity push or news media distributing the fundraiser to the masses (98.6% of the traffic came from Facebook).
These students weren’t buying something, but they were paying for something. There weren’t “rewards” in it for contributors, and all the traffic and awareness came from them and their networks. No blog articles, no hype-men, no external attention, no PR at all.
To put this in perspective, here is a fundraiser by celebrity Ashton Kutcher (who has 12 million followers on Twitter): it raised $6,600 over the course of multiple days.
The idea for Crowdtilt was born a year and a half ago with a simple thought: that the “connected” web was a network of communication and collaboration around information. The potential of collaboration around an equally critical resource - money - was still left for initiatives to disrupt. Of course, we’ve had PayPal for a several years, but exchange and collaboration are not the same thing. It’s the difference between email and something like Facebook. And as deposed dictators and the whole world have seen in the last year and half, there is a clear difference between exchange and collaboration.
Last week, parents from a school district in Utah used Crowdtilt to privately fund a full-time science teacher for a local elementary school (and the libertarians in the district likely high-fived!). Though the campaign yesterday didn’t raise as much money, the difference was speed - less than 24 hours. A quiet 24 hours to the rest of the internet but a lively one for those students at Vanderbilt. Tomorrow we open up Crowdtilt from 10 days to 30 days, and we’re excited to see what your groups will tilt in the future.
-James Beshara, Co-Founder, Crowdtilt
Funding Fun with Friends on the Fourth
It’s August!
As we usher in this last full month of summer, it’s a good time to think back to the inaugurating holiday of the season. Cast your mind back a few weeks: How did you celebrate the 4th this year?
If you threw a party, you’re not the only one!
Check out Claire’s recent Crowdtilt campaign.
We can’t all have friends who were born on or around July 4th, but, with the help of Crowdtilt’s group-funding service, Claire’s friends Nicole and Charisse got to celebrate their birthday this year right alongside our illustrious nation. Lucky gals!
And these ladies weren’t the only lucky ones. They partied with a group of no fewer than thirty friends who pooled funds on Crowdtilt to enjoy a party bus, plentiful drinks, *and* a Pat Green concert!
Even if country music’s not your thing - and even if you aren’t as tickled as we are by Claire’s awesome campaign picture (juxtaposing bikini top, body-builder muscles, and stars and stripes!) - you know what a hassle it can be to pool money between friends for a group celebration.
The paper checks, the uneven sums, the tardy contributors (you know who you are)? Claire, Nicole, and Charisse bypassed all that with Crowdtilt.
So the next time you’re pooling money for a party, take a page from their book - create a campaign on Crowdtilt!
- Angela and the Crowdtilt team
Fantasy Football + Crowdtilt
Collecting money from friends was a major hassle before Crowdtilt. It was just… painful.
Friends Always Have Your Back - Group Gifting With Crowdtilt
Grad school - for those of us who have never been, there’s a glamor to high education. We picture ourselves deep in discussion at a seminar table in a 300-level course, or at the head of a class of eager, wide-eyed undergrads, or curing cancer in a beautifully stocked genetics lab (hey, we can dream!).
*** Follow Crowdtilt on Twitter here ***
But even those of us who’ve never attended know that you really, really need a computer in grad school. We also know that finances are tight for the average student, and if - imagine this - you’ve just been accepted into a prestigious grad program, and you’ve popped the champagne and broadcast the good news to all and sundry - and the next thing you know, your laptop decides to commit spectacular, ill-timed suicide - well, goodness, what do you do then?
That’s where Crowdtilt comes in!
The above nightmare scenario happened to Brielle: her laptop bit the dust a few months before she was due to leave for grad school. But her friends Alicia and Chad came to the rescue - with the help of Crowdtilt’s group-funding service.
Check out their campaign here: https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/send-brielle-off-to-grad-school-with-a-mac-book-pro
Education may be expensive, but friends are priceless! What can you do for your friends today? Whatever it is, go ahead and try it on Crowdtilt!
New Features: 24 Hour Direct Deposit & International Credit Cards
More awesomeness dropping this week @ Crowdtilt - 2 features we’ve added:
1) 24-Hour, Direct Deposits… Yes, 24-hour Next-Day Deposits.
Pooling money online has NEVER EVEN COME CLOSE TO THIS! Until now.
Once your direct deposit is set up, you are guaranteed to get your funds within the next business day (and once your direct deposit is set up, you never have to set it up/configure it again)! This is faster than what any of the major payments platforms currently offer, and it’s ONLY ON CROWDTILT :)
2) International Credit Card Support!!
You can now start a campaign on Crowdtilt and accept contributions from all over the world! Do you have friends in Canada, France, or Japan? Invite them to your campaign and make your community span across the globe. And your friends get to take advantage of our One-Click Easy Payments :)
Our goal is simple: to help you do more with your group. We hope these two new features are another step in this direction.
New Features: Follow & Invite Friends
We are excited to announce two REALLY BIG features coming out today!
Introducing Follow Friends
You can now easily see what your friends are doing on Crowdtilt by following people. Once you click on the “follow” button under your friend’s image in the campaign community or on their profile page, we will let you know when he or she starts a new public campaign. New private campaigns will not send these notifications, so you can still safely plan that surprise birthday party!
If you want to see who is following you, as well as who you follow, click on the “Followers” or “Following” links on your profile page. And just for thrills, we’ll ping you if somebody starts following you.
Invite your Friends to Crowdtilt
If you want more of your friends to join you on Crowdtilt, you can now effortlessly invite them right from your profile and we’ll do the rest. Send invitations via email, Facebook, Twitter, or take the reign yourself and share a short link any way you like. We can also help you access your contacts from popular email service providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL, so you don’t have to guess on emails addresses either.
Ready to check out these new features? Jump on over to our website here.
How Crowdtilt is allowing groups to do more offline
Our goal at Crowdtilt is to help groups do more awesome things offline by building the world’s easiest way to pool money together.
If you hosted a casual/informal party for St. Patrick’s Day and didn’t use Crowdtilt, you probably either asked each person to bring food and drinks, or you bought everything in advance and asked people to pitch in when they arrived (Or God forbid, you made friends buy tickets online to your casual party through a service like Eventbrite).
If it was the latter, how much of your expenses were you able to recover and how much effort was required to get the money from each person?
This is where Crowdtilt comes in. For example, this group raised more than $1,000 for their St. Patrick’s Day party to cover everything from kegs of green-dyed beer, an abundance of food, all the way to blow-up leprechauns (the full list is actually pretty impressive).
You might think $1,000 is a lot for a party among friends, but the beauty of running a campaign on Crowdtilt is that no credit cards were charged until the campaign tilted. It’s simply the best way to get the whole group on board with an idea (and is a much less risky approach to planning things), instead of hoping enough people show up with cash in their hands. Admit it, collecting $1,000 at the door of your own party would be awful… So awful in fact, that without Crowdtilt, you’d likely just resort to making everyone just bring food and drinks so that you don’t front the costs for everyone. Well tsk tsk - there’s no point in imagining a world without Crowdtilt, because THAT WORLD IS OVER!
And while this is a typical example of the power of you+Crowdtilt, what we love the most, is that this campaign (and subsequent party) was funded in just hours - and instead of food and drinks, it was an extravaganza that would’ve made St. Pat proud.
So, what is keeping you from planning your next awesome get together? Is it the fear of getting enough money from friends?… Fear no longer, Crowdtilt is here.
New Feature: Custom Message to Contributors
You can now send custom messages to anybody that contributes to your campaign. You can add this message when setting up your campaign.
Here is the field you will have to fill out in the campaign form.
Your message will be shown in the email after people contribute to your campaign (regardless whether it is tilted or not).
If you only want to send a message to everybody once your campaign tilted, you can use our older “Contact all contributors” button, and write your message there.
4 Tips to Make Your Crowdtilt Campaign Successful
If you’re new to Crowdtilt and are still getting a pulse on this exciting new way of pooling money with friends, follow these tips and blow the roof off your campaign! This advice is based on our personal experiences of watching campaigns be extremely successful or totally flop.
Know the Cost - Before you start a campaign, you should know how much it will cost to do what you are planning to do. Asking for additional money or returning money afterwards will not only create additional work for you, but it may actually cause your camaign to fail.
Write a Good Description - It’s not about the length but rather the content. Communicate the main aspects of your campaign in a few sentences. “When”, “Where”, “Why”, and “How Much” are your best friends in this.
Share. Share. Share - As with many things in life, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Make sure to share your campaign with your friends via email, Facebook and Twitter so they understand what you are asking of them. Repeat as often as necessary.
Post Progress Updates - This is probably the most overlooked aspect of running a campaign. Celebrating crossing the halfway point is a great way to re-introduce your campaign. Repeat when crossing 75% (and 90% if necessary).
As always, we’re always right behind you to answer any questions you may have. Email us at team@crowdtilt.com or hit us up on the Live Chat.
