Designing our business plan took us several years.  Creating a financially sustainable social venture 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 causes users post, the more donations, the more they make.

IfWeRanTheWorld.com encourages individuals to voice their interests online and then invites nonprofits and corporations interested in looking socially responsible to pursue them.  The team behind IfWeRanTheWorld sells themselves as private consultants to these corporations and their multi-million dollar marketing departments.

Every social change venture has its own revenue model.  For our revenue model, we're doing something that has not yet been tried in the social change space - inviting users to purchase (virtual) digital art submitted by professional artists around the globe (armrev.org/artists) for personalizing their Dashboard and Public Profile pages.  The virtual goods sector of the online gaming industry is exploding. Games like Mafia Wars, Farmville, Maple Story, etc. are making extraordinary sales numbers with transactions in the $1-$5 range.  Our artwork will sell in the same range.

There's really two kinds of social "causes":

1. reactionary causes that target a specific crisis (ex. Haiti)
2. forward-thinking causes that target a sustainable solution (ex. Architecture for Humanity)

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.

Roleplaying in itself is invaluable as users can experience different viewpoints and avenues for resolving problem.  The long-term engagement in projects lead to deeper education.  And an opportunity to  bravidachio on user profile pages leads to a successful social model of viral promotion and a sense of reward.

That's why we've incorporated game design into Armchair Revolutionary. There are almost no limits on how far you can take this experience - we plan to push it as far as we can.  Our mission is all about building a long-term commitment to our experience and sustain motivation over years.

World of Warcraft (WoW), and the Sims franchise are shining examples of long-term roleplaying games that have hit this out of the park.  We're certainly excited to have advisors who continue to work on both of those games.

There are many terrific organizations in the world tackling the world's problems. Armchair Revolutionary is most productive at aiding projects that pioneer 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.

With this model, Armchair Revolutionary can take on highly-experimental projects - hundreds of them in fact - that are high-risk, simply because they have not been proven.  We can get them through their prototype stage so they can do a proof of concept, and then they can attract a more traditional donor base for their next stage. Our non-financial tasks also help these projects get executed and launched into the marketplace.

The third area ripe for innovation is curation.  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.

This issue couldn't apply more to the social change space where tens of thousands of projects compete against each other for public attention.  In our view, the nonprofit world has not yet risen to this challenge - it's still in "database" mode.  A handful of nonprofits and databases have been created to store information on a vast amount of projects, but they require users to sift through that information using inefficient methods which is utterly impossible considering the sheer volume of it.

Ultimately, users need a better experience, a personalized one that's intuitive and served up to them based on their needs, wants, and what they should know about.  Armchair Revolutionary is designed to provide this experience.  Every user has their own private Dashboard page where every type of content we provide is customized towards the user's profile and history. And our projects are tightly curated so that we're ensuring each is in fact a "revolution" in its own right.

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.

Being more transparent about project strategies and budgets is pretty straightforward - posting them online in easy-to-read layouts is an obvious first step, but so much more can be done and should be. How about video tutorials further explaining that content and how those decisions were reached? Even more exciting is visualizing their progress - and that's where new (and inexpensive) technologies can play a major role - tapping into the data revolution.

You can now make a video for free on your cell phone.  And that video can be uploaded and shared with the rest of the world in seconds.  You can even stream live video from your cell phone onto the internet (Qik.com).  You can also take photos from your cell phone.  You can set up inexpensive webcams connected to wifi hubs and stream onto the internet.  You can embed sensor networks and gather data that streams straight into the internet where charts and line graphs automatically update with it in real-time.

Armchair Revolutionary is working to use these game-changing technologies in exciting new ways to shape a completely real-time progress report online.