The power of fundraising is in your hands
Randy J. Hunt interviews John Pratt from Fundable via telephone on May 18th, 2007
"Your number showed up as 12345."
"I'm calling from Skype," I replied. How appropriate, crowdsourced bandwidth for a VOIP call.
Brisk and to the point, John Pratt evinced a convincing enthusiasm about the tool he's created to help groups of people use their money in powerful ways. John co-founded Fundable.org with Louis Helm in 2005. Exactly where the idea came from, he says he's not sure. He had been studying political science and social theories around the time he and Louis decided to build the site.
Randy Hunt: Q: What does fundable do for groups of people, "the crowd," if you will?
John Pratt: Fundable helps people coordinate group purchases and fundraisers.
For example, we had a guy who organized a surplus buy of microphones. The minimum order from the company was $10,000 and each microphone cost $250.00. Now, for most people, $10,000 is a lot of money. This guy takes on a lot of risk if people fail to follow through. He might get stuck with a bunch of microphones he doesn't
need. So, on our site he set a goal of $10,000 in pledges and told everyone, "If we collect $10,000 for microphones, I'll buy from this company and we'll each get what we want a lot cheaper than we could have otherwise. If we don't meet our goal, no one pays anything."
