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We are more interconnected these days than we have ever been in human history and that is having
astonishing effects on the way the NGOs, charities
and creative individuals
get their money raised - in fact even presidents.
This guy would not be in the White House today if it wasn't for crowdfunding.
80% of the money that he raised for his presidential campaign
came not from corporations but from millions of individual Americans who gave
small amounts of money
for his cause.
You can't have missed this last week unless you were in a coma of some kind, this was the
biggest thing on Facebook last week. It raised an enormous amount of
awareness
and millions of dollars in funding
and then went completely the other way
and it had a lot of negative press as well - that's what we call
the the wisdom of the crowd
and when it's harnessed correctly, when it really works, amazing things can happen
as we saw last year
in the Arab spring. Now what was the first thing
that these dictators tried to do when trouble started brewing in their countries?
Shut down the internet,
shut down the voice of the people. This is where the power is and that
terrified them... but they lost out.
Governments all around the world getting scared. The elite
are running scared because the power base has shifted
in the world today - people are doing it for themselves
and
we have
lost faith
in the organisations we used to
go to mainly because they've lost all our money.
So we're a little bit lost now and we don't know who to turn to. There are no real
superheroes in the world.
So what we do we do?
We have superheroes
in the comic book world but in real life we only have the police to fight our
crime for us.
What do we do about the major villains, the really... the really big guys we need to
take down?
Well we don't need to shine a bat symbol into the sky we only have to turn on our Wifi.
OK? The real truth seekers, the justice seekers in this world are online too
and they're using social networks to get their message across.
And they're protecting the power and the freedom of the internet and it's the
power and the freedom of the internet
which NGOs like these
are beginning to understand is their key
to better fund-raising.
OK? So...
...just...
wait for this one to change!
There we go! OK, that's myself and Joe Wakeford right there. We wanted to
change a little bit of the world right here where we live in the Czech Republic
and if you look just over my right shoulder you can see through the window
the world changing
just as this photograph was taken...
so, it's amazing!
Anyway, we've had an awful lot of press here and around the world but what we
want to do
is offer the very best crowdfunding
tools available anywhere to everybody in the Czech Republic.
The website itself is available in Czech and English, is completely bilingual, and
because we use PayPal as our payment carrier
we give our uses the opportunity to engage with a truly global audience -
you can raise money in any currency from anywhere in the world.
Tonya Graves for example is using our website right now to fund her next
music video.
She has fans all over the world, she wants to engage with them in the most
effective way possible to raise that money and so of course she's chosen Fondomat
to do that.
Facebook is the first place to go to to connect with your social network but we
also connected to
Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, Linkedin
and every other social based connection on the web to give all users maximum
exposure to their social networks to really fund those goals. How does it work? Very
simple. Our users offer very generous rewards to as many people as possible in
exchange for small donations
which go towards that larger pot of money.
Prague Film & Theater Center, for example, wonderful new organization, who've partner with
us
so that all of their projects in theatre, film and the creative arts now all the
money, all the fundraising management goes through Fondomat
and
because of that partnership they have their own page on the website
which collects together all of their current projects
and not only does that give visitors a really excellent idea of what is that
they do
but from that point of view it gives them a wonderful and very, very simple
project management tool.
Everybody has access to real-time updated data,
they can connect and update their contributors and look at individual
donations
with updated statistics all the time.
This is pretty awesome stuff - it's here now, it's available. It works
and we'd love to join us - it's free.
Thank you very much.