ChipIn Widget – A Review

ChipIn is another of that new class of service providers whose business is their widget, and whose widget is their business.  As explained in GigaOM, ChipIn is a distributed fund raising tool that allows publishers to create custom widgets that facilitate money raising and tracking against a goal.  ChipIn is a Flash-based widget so it works with each of the major social networking sites and blogging platforms.

Applications & Opportunity

Fund raising is often a grass roots activity.  As such, it would seem that the practice of fund raising would be a perfect fit for a distributed, widgetized approach.  By distributing the promotion and tracking tools required to conduct an effective fundraise across all of the supporters of a given cause / event,  ChipIn’s widget-based system puts better tools in the hands of those who drive the results.

So where could something like this be helpful?  In addition to the no-brainers like raising cash for disaster relief and charity pledge drives, ChipIn seems like it might be a useful tool for unconferences and other sponsor driven activities to distribute the fundraising efforts.  For example, friends of mine Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells recently organized the Web 2.2 conference here in San Francisco.  As this was a grass roots effort, they relied heavily on friends to promote the event to potential sponsors via their blogs.  This process might have gone more smoothly with a distributed cash collection tool like ChipIn.

Another friend of mine just raised a bunch of money for Hodgkin’s Disease by running in a half marathon.  The fund raising process was conducted via email and PayPal, with no dynamic way to track progress towards her goal.  Additionally, there was no easy way for her friends to get involved with the fund raising process.  Again, ChipIn would have been a perfect tool.

Configuration & Testing

There’s really no way to miss the configuration tool on ChipIn – it’s displayed prominently on the home page for not logged in users.  ChipIn wisely sucks the user in by allowing them to start configuring their widget before prompting them for registration information.

The configuration tool is simple and well laid out.  The publisher submits a widget title and description, chooses from six pre-set dimensions, and selects from five background colors.  A real time preview of the widget is provided in the margin.

The publisher than selects an output destination for the widget from the usual suspects that generates the snippet of code required to embed the widget.

ChipIn does a nice job of providing customized implementation instructions for each destination site. I had no problems implementing the ChipIn widget into TypePad or MySpace.

The widget itself is attractive, and offers four tabs: a “progress” tab that tracks progress against the goal, a “share” tab that allows readers to grab the embed code, a “description” tab, and an “about ChipIn” tab.  By using tabs, Chipin is able to fit a lot of functionality and content into a small amount of real estate.  More importantly, they have the critical viral and branding components well covered.

Editorial

This is a nicely executed widget.  The grass roots nature of fund raising makes a widget strategy entirely appropriate, and nothing feels forced about this implementation.  The configuration tool is easy to use, and ChipIn goes to great lengths to provide detailed implementation instructions for each of the major widget aggregator platforms.

The Flash-based widget makes nice use of tabs, and does a nice job of executing the viral and branding functions of the widget.

My only beef with this service is that they are not yet making other people’s widgets available on their Web site.  While they are currently featuring one widget on their home page, there is no directory that would allow me to browse other widgets.  Providing this functionality would be as simple as offering a “make my widget public” option in the configuration tool.

In the world of user-generated widgets, I see it as a missed opportunity not to leverage the network effect.  Furthermore, making other people’s widgets available to the community could represent a barrier to entry – without this aspect, I don’t see anything to prevent a bigger player with more access to traffic to easily create an equally compelling product.

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