Designing our business plan took us several years. Creating a financially sustainable nonprofit (i.e. an organization that provides good while generating enough revenue to survive without donations) is not easy. Facebook Causes for instance takes a slice off of the transaction fee for each donation a user makes to a cause. The more donations, the more causes, the more they make. IfWeRanTheWorld.com encourages individuals to voice their interests online and then pairs them up with nonprofits and corporations interested in looking socially responsible. The team behind IfWeRanTheWorld sells themselves as private "consultants" to these corporations and their multi-million dollar marketing departments. Every nonprofit has its own revenue model. For our revenue model, we're doing something that has not yet been tried in the nonprofit space - inviting users to purchase artist-submitted virtual goods for personalizing their Dashboard and Public Profile pages.

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Up until now, the main motivation to give time and money to reactionary causes is guilt. But guilt is not a sustainable nor productive motivator. That's why most crisis causes come and go like fads. They're hot, then they're not. No one wants to feel guilty all the time, so users will go elsewhere for their daily activities. Having a game is more interactive and sustainable for user bases over time. It gives them a "structure" to fit into, it educates the users on how the projects will unfold, and it lets users plan with long-term motivations how to use limited resources to benefit projects.

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There are many terrific organizations in the world tackling the world's problems. Armchair Revolutionary is most productive at facilitating projects that involve innovative solutions. Here's why... Innovative projects are usually a new idea, a new science, a new technology, or a new business model - and usually they are unproven. That means there's a whole lot of risk associated with funding them. Which is why traditional institutions (govts, foundations, nonprofits, venture capitalists) usually shy away from them. That's where Armchair Revolutionary can come in to save the day. By reversing the funding model from one donor giving a million dollars to a million donors giving one dollar, we distribute the financial risk so such an extent that it literally evaporates. If the project fails, the users who gave just a buck will not lose sleep versus the large donors who would lose a million dollars.

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The third area ripe for innovation is filtering. Now that we're in the information age, it's all about filtering the firehouse of information coming through our tubes - and identifying the most high value content you're interested in. We've all watched the success of Google and the rise in importance of search technologies over the last few years.

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The second area ripe for innovation is transparency. We view transparency in three forms - transparency of cash flow, transparency of strategy, and transparency of progress. Most social causes are not transparent. They ask you for money, but they don't work overtime to show you where exactly it's going, why it's going there, when it's going there, and most importantly, if it helped the cause. Even if they do tell you some of that information, it's really only valuable if you have the whole picture. We see opportunities to change this.

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The first area we'd like to innovate is action items. How active can you be from your Armchair? We wanted to push the boundaries beyond just giving money. We're not the first to try - Moveon.org was the first to roll out action items - like phone calls and emails to your congressman or senator - to a mass audience. But rarely is that model used outside of politics. And even over the past year, new technologies and software have been developed for more advanced "crowdsourcing" of action items. Armchair Revolutionary is adding Uploads, Downloads, Quizzes, and Voting to the mix. And we're using advanced VoIP technology for seamless phone calls that we create for you and connect you on, as well as easy to send email technology.

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We started out with a central premise: The user experience for online social activism simply sucks. Tens of thousands of causes have brochure-ware websites soliciting basic donations from the public. There's nothing fun about that or particularly engaging. Why is it the experience of activism online is so uninspired?

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Hello! This is our first blog posting. There's a lot of topics to cover - we're going to start with an overview of why we're here. We've been working on this for about two years. Ori and I co-founded and head up The Hollywood Hill, a well-respected social change membership organization in the entertainment industry (film, television, music and gaming). Our experience founding and heading up The Hollywood Hill for the past five years drove us to create Armchair Revolutionary. Along the way we convinced Paris to join the team, and now we're launching!

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