Impaq.me: connecting funding to social sharing & impact

Ken Doctor devoted much of his most recent NiemanLab post, "The Newsonomics of Measuring the Real Impact of News" to INN's new sharefunding tool, Impaq.me:

Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Tweet Button. What if you could tap me and unlock a brand new source of funding for startup news sources of all kinds? What if, even better, you the reader could tap that money loose with a single click?

That’s the delightfully simple conceit behind a little widget, Impaq.me, you may have seen popping up as you traverse the news web. It’s social. It’s viral. It uses OPM (Other People’s Money) — and maybe a little bit of your own. It makes a new case to funders and maybe commercial sponsors. And it spits out metrics around the clock. It aims to be a convergence widget, acting on that now-aging idea that our attention is as important as our wallet. Consider it a new digital Swiss Army knife for the attention economy.

Impaq.me replaces the typical social sharing widget with one that links sharing with giving:

Impaq-me-header

 

 

As of today, INN has run test Impaq.me campaigns on 12 nonprofit news sites.  Each campaign has a funder who puts up a pot of money, and funders and participating newsrooms agree to race to a particular date -- seeing how many social shares they can generate in a particular timeframe -- or simply run the campaign until the pot of money is expended.

Ken's article goes in depth with the Center for Investigative Reporting discussing how they used Impaq.me.  Read the whole thing here.