hey guys - CEO of the company here (Waterforward was made by my team at The Monkey Inferno here in SF).

Thanks for the feedback, hopefully we'll be able to improve the site. It's an awesome cause, and I'd love to see this raise money and awareness for them.

Here's a bit of background info:

We made the site, because we've been supporters of charity:water for years. They have a wonderful story, and are a top notch non-profit (they give 100% of donations to the cause...even going so far as to reimburse credit card fees).

One challenge they face is finding ways to scale. The vast majority of donations come in through the web, but those are from supporters they create in offline events. We wanted to find a way to grow their base of supporters, by telling their story simply and elegantly (that's the plan at least). Put more simply, we wanted to "make charity go viral". They have raised over $95M in the past 5 years, but they are trying to tackle a $1B problem here, so we did our best to scale their efforts. We normally work on for-profit ventures (www.monkeyinferno.com), so this was a unique challenge.

Attempt #1 took a year, and ultimately failed. (too complicated, viral coefficient = 0.7)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/michael-birchs-waterforward...

Attempt #2 is the product you see now at waterforward.org

30+ iterations in 30 days, trying to make this slide-show story concept work. We just went viral overseas (4M shares so far), but unfortunately haven't raised a ton of money. Biggest problem is that we are super viral in India, but can't process Indian Rupees.

Anyway - thanks for the constructive feedback. We'll work out some of the UX issues over time, but for now, we appreciate the general support.

-Shaan @shaanvp

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user:	shaanvp
created:	February 2, 2012
karma:	4