George Favvas

My friends Austin Hill and Alex Eberts have launched Gifter.org, an experiment in social giving. Visitors to the site can either make a wish, or sponsor one. To sponsor a wish, you simply donate an amount of your choosing to a charity of your choice — what can be simpler? Each dollar you donate sponsors one wish.

The goal is to raise a million dollars for charity. After trying to figure out the site’s business model (there isn’t one) or the future business model of Austin and Alex’s Project Ojibwe, I realized I was missing the point. Who cares? They’re encouraging people to give to charity, and that’s good enough for me.

So here’s my receipt. $500 for Seeds of Peace. The organization runs a camp in Maine which brings together teenagers from conflict regions and equips them with leadership skills to promote reconciliation and coexistence. After graduating from the camp, alumni continue to contribute towards advancing these goals in their respective communities.

A recent trip to Israel and Egypt reinforced my belief that a lasting, durable peace (however difficult or far off it may seem under the current circumstances) cannot be achieved by politicians alone but also needs to involve grassroots links between everyday citizens of different countries. Think of it as crowdsourcing for a good cause.

Please take a few moments to visit Gifter.org to either sponsor or make a wish. Happy holidays, everyone, and see you in 2007.

Updated: As a Canadian, I can’t benefit from the tax deductibility of this donation, but that’s tempered by the fact that board member David Avital has offered to match any donations received by December 31st of  this year.

Over the course of the past few months, financial lead aggregators such as LowerMyBills and NexTag have quietly switched from a 1:4 to a 1:5 model. This means that they are now selling the same lead to five different banks or brokers at the same time.

Prompted by stagnant traffic and an overall tightening of the mortgage refinance market, lead aggregators are looking to grab onto anything that will improve their margins, or at least keep them from eroding.

Theoretically, the total value of a realtime mortgage lead should be the same no matter how many times it is sold. Let’s say a bank is willing to budget $3,000 to acquire a $300,000 refinance loan. If a lead has a 1 in 10 chance of closing, that each lead is then worth $300. Since a consumer can only close a maximum of one refi loan at a time on the same house, increasing the number of lead buyers, logically, should proportionately lower the price each of those buyers pays for the lead. So you’d expect that that same lead, sold four times instead of once, would now fetch $75 per buyer.

But that’s theory. In practice, other factors come into play. Having two offers instead of one increases the chances of the consumer converting, since there is a greater likelihood that one will interest them. But having, say, ten would be overwhelming, and likely turn the consumer off entirely and drive down to zero the chance of any of the lead buyers converting.

The balancing act is finding the optimum number of times a lead can be sold in order to maximize their revenue without ticking off the consumers or lead buyers too much. Is 5 too much, or just right? By moving to 1:5, lead aggregators are betting on the latter.

Are they right? Time will tell. In a future post I’ll discuss why this may all be irrelevant, plus what the implications are for affiliate marketers who target the financial services sector.