Amicus (YC S12) Uses Facebook To Mobilize Volunteers for Nonprofits | Hacker News Reader

Amicus (YC S12) Uses Facebook To Mobilize Volunteers for Nonprofits

techcrunch.com

101 pointssethbannon16 comments

Awesome work guys. The gap between aspirational support and actually pushing forwards a cause is still far too great, and I'm looking forward to see how you narrow it.

I'm a little confused as to what is being targeted here. The title says "volunteers for nonprofits", which suggests a platform aimed at recruiting people to donate their labor to charitable causes (e.g. recruiting volunteer workers for the Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity or soup kitchens). But the article is entirely about increasing voter turnout in political campaigns, by having people canvass their like-minded acquaintances, thereby increasing their interest in elections. That seems quite a bit different as a use-case, though I could imagine similar technology aiming at both problems.

edit: Thanks for the reply; looks like TechCrunch just chose to take an election-year angle on the story.

Amicus helps all nonprofits turn supporters into fundraisers and advocates. The reporter chose to focus on only one use case -- political activism. This is only a small part of what Amicus does.

It looks like maybe the submission is just poorly titled? If you click through to the article, it has the following title:

>No More Calls From Strangers: Amicus Uses Facebook To Recruit Political Volunteers

And then, as you note, the article is about political campaigns. I'm not sure why the submitter felt the need to submit an article and then change the headline.

EDIT -- OP/founder clarified below.

Amicus is about more than just the political campaigns use case - since the submitter is the startup founder I'd imagine they wanted to make sure people knew there was something here for people beyond those interested in that one use case.

OP here. The title of this post is more accurate than the title of the TC article. The reporter focused on only one small use case of the product. In fact, politics is only a tiny part of Amicus' overall focus.

Getting volunteers to do canvassing or similar things is a very common problem. Working in person with an organization is one form of volunteerism but especially with awareness or issue-based organizations (which political campaigns roughly corollate to) getting people to active themselves and others is a huge idea. What Amicus is doing - making it more likely that these "unactivated" supporters get a contact from someone they know could be a big deal for increasing the success rate. Congrats on the story guys.

OP here. FYI Amicus helps all nonprofits turn supporters into fundraisers and advocates. The reporter chose to focus on only one use case -- political activism. This is only a small part of what Amicus does.

Are you guys a nonprofit? Some of the wording in the article made it seem like that was the case.

I think nope, just that many of their users are non-profits.

We're a social good for-profit.

A shame that the reporter chose to focus on just the political activism use case. Turning nonprofit supporters to fundraisers and advocates is so much more than that. Maybe I am a bit late to the party here, but did you change your landing page after the article? I was a lot surprised to land on just your hiring page from TC. Looked around and still didn't see anything that I showed me what you're about... but here's a cheer to you for working towards mobilizing volunteers for nonprofits!

To put the political use case aside for a second, Seth and I first talked over email just before YC started about how I could use Amicus to rescue dogs at shelters from euthanization and getting them into no-kill foster organizations instead.

Congrats to Seth and team!

Congratulations Seth

Nice work fellas!

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