Amazee Launches to Help Internet Activists Achieve Important Goals

Today Amazee is officially launching its platform to help people join their efforts online and offline to work on the causes that matter to them. Amazee can be described as a “Ning with a purpose” where people can create social networks (same as we do on Ning) to collectively help achieve some purpose that is important for all the members of the network. The networks here are dabbed “projects” because every network is dedicated to a particular project its members care about - be it environmental problems or helping cure cancer.

We first covered Amazee when it was only launched in testing mode and were not impressed with the functionality and user interface. With today’s official release it looks like Amazee is making a huge step forward and actually brings powerful tools to community activists.

On Amazee any member can initiate any project and invite other people to join. People can also discover projects they may be willing to help by searching Amazee itself. The community can use quite a broad range of social networking and collaboration tools provided by Amazee to work together on accomplishment of their goals. The tools are everything you’d expect within a social network focused on collaboration of its members - messaging, newsfeeds, to-do lists, calendars, forums, file sharing, etc.

Every new project created on Amazee is assigned a URL that will serve as its dedicated page and can be visible to anyone from outside of Amazee so that community members can promote the projects they belong to elsewhere (even though the quite obvious functionality of embeddable widgets for members to promote the projects on their blogs and social networks seems to be missing unfortunately).

Initiators of projects are offered additional opportunities to promote the projects to get more visibility to them. But what is really interesting about Amazee is that it instantly provides all the tools for fund raising that project owners can use to leverage the power of the community further. Members can support projects either with their money (donated via PayPal) or with some offline physical activities needed to accomplish some tasks related to the project. What’s more, project owners can even sell sponsorships and advertising within the networks they manage on Amazee to raise further funds to support the project.

Amaze also has a business model in place: project owners that sell banner ads on their pages are supposed to share some part of the revenue with Amazee itself which makes it a sustainable platform for joint actions.

As you can see from the description, Amazee can serve as a platform both for short-term projects that need to bring more people in for the goals to be achieved and for large-scale non-profit organizations that can use all the Amazee tools to increase awareness about what they work on and recruit internet users to help.

One of the causes Amazee will host is Chicago bid for the Olympic Games of 2016. The decision will be made by the International Olympic Committee next year and Amazee will host a dedicated project for Chicago residents (as well as anyone willing to help) to work together on various tasks intended to help make Chicago bid stronger - Amazee platform will be used by Chicago2016 organization to help prepare the city to the IOC decision next year.

I am a big fan of all the startups that focus their efforts on helping people achieve goals that are important for the entire mankind and I really like the approach Amazee has chosen to empower activists and give them the tools to bring people to work together on a project. I do hope these tools will prove to be efficient enough to actually help bring the change to some important problems.