Still remember that summer when everyone was dunking buckets of ice water over themselves to raise funds for people with Lou Gehrig’s Disease? The ALS Ice Bucket Campaign engaged more than 400 million people in the cause, raising over US$100 million for the ALS Association to help their patients. The projects demonstrated the power of social media as an effective marketing tool.
Kliptap is a Hong Kong/Shanghai-based video platform for individuals to raise money for social causes and call friends to take action. The site aimsto do so by triggering a chain reaction of video responses to elicit donations and raise awareness.
Most traditional offline fundraising projects have to spend as much as 50 percent of their funds on marketing and admin. Kliptap wants to create a crowdfunding platform to globalize your campaign while minimizing costs, said company co-founder and CEO Connie Leong. The site will receive a five percent platform fee on all transactions on its platform.
Connie Leong Introducing Kliptap at ChinaBang-Shanghai Station
Video campaigns can be set up in a few simple steps, as Leong showed us at TechNode’s ChinaBang event. After setting your fundraising goal, users can upload a video to introduce your cause and determine which challenge you want people to take. You can then invite your friends through social media or email, which will directed them to a centralized campaign page where they can donate or upload a video response. Leong added that it is up to users to decide which form of challenges they want to take, either silly but funny ones like the ice bucket or more serious and artistic ones.
Online giving is a US$30 billion market, Leong noted, adding “We are in a position to capture this market as a cause-related crowdfunding platform that primarily features video content”. Kliptap uses video as the primary tool of communication, because it is an powerful way to evoke emotion. It has been proved that video campaigns are more successful, she added.
Compared to its competitors, Kliptap is the first of its kind in Asia and claims to have more social media engagement. It also offers tailored services for video production and has data analysis tools that enable users to understand the outreach of their video messages.
The company has recorded 275% month-on-month growth in monthly active users since launch in November last year. Most of the early adopters came from Hong Kong, an established market in online giving. Kliptap is planning to first develop successful cases in Hong Kong and then expand to mainland China and the global market.
Leong said they have several routes for user acquisition, ranging from university students to corporate co-operation across Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Movember Showdown, a recently closed campaign raising awareness and funds for men’s health, secured US$3,710 of a US$2,000 goal from 75 backers. Three are two other ongoing campaigns on the platform, one providing bakery training to disadvantaged Chinese youth, the other providing scholarships to girls from rural Guangdong.
Connie Leong and Jasmine Lau, the two company co-founders, have worked together since they met studying at Yale. Two years ago, they started Philanthropy in Motion, a social enterprise developing the next-generation NGO talent in China.
Kliptap graduated from Batch VI of Chinaccelerator in November 2014, where it received US$16,000 in funding. The company is planning to raise more funds for further development.
image credit: Kliptap
Editing by Mike Cormack (@bucketoftongues)