Foursquare Goes Live With Charity Sponsorships

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-12-07 12:05:00 UTC
Topics:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a plan by geo-location application Foursquare to get brands to sponsor Foursquare city leaderboards - the list of who has checked in the most - and donate the sponsorship to charity. Today, the first sponsorship has gone live in New York City, and it's Pepsi who will be donating.

This morning, Foursquare biz dev guy Tristan Walker tweeted some screen shots of the Pepsi sponsored board. I was able to grab him for a few minutes by phone, where he said that the Foursquare team was thrilled to be working with Pepsi on this first launch. With their upcoming "Project Refresh," Pepsi is angling to make 2010 the year that Pepsi rebuilds it's brand around collaborative good.

For those who don't know, Foursquare is a service that uses game mechanics to inspire users to "check in" to their favorite locations. The idea is to create a local social record of participation and make it easier for people to run into their friends and contacts. They use fun experiences like "badges" (I.e. the "Bender" badge for 5+ nights in a row of checking into bars) and "Mayorships" (the person who has checked into each location the most is named the "Mayor") to inspire users to check-in, rather than using GPS as an always on location tracker

Every time you check in, you get points. Points are aggregated on your city's leaderboard. Pepsi's sponorship means that for every point that people in New York City get this week, Pepsi will donate $0.04 to CampInteractive, a program to empower inner city youth with technology and mentoring programs.

For Foursquare, this is one more exciting way to help brands interact with their customers, as well as making it even more compelling for users to discover their cities.

I'll report at the end of the week to see how they sponsorship worked out.

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Three Great Ideas for Good Holiday Shopping
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (0)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.