Blitz Bazaar

Warning: Blitz Bazaar is not government tested and may cause addiction, distracting you from your work and family. You may spend more time taking real action to make the world a better place and less in front of mind-numbing media. You might use the Internet to foster friendships founded on selflessness and trust.

Blitz Bazaar is a website that lets you share your good actions with your friends. You check-in the good actions you do and get points! You can then cash-in those points for free gifts that you must in turn give away to other members of the community. All the while you can track and cheer on the amazing actions that others are doing.

Blitz Bazaar is also an ever-expanding online catalog of good actions that makes it easier for you to find meaningful actions to do. Have you ever wondered what you can do to make the world a better place? Well, Blitz Bazaar lets you check out the most popular actions in your community.

Blitz Bazaar is not an open, consumer website. We set-up and maintain independent versions of our platform for any ‘real-world’ community like colleges, businesses, congregations, schools, clubs or any other group. There are approximately 1.1 million formal communities in the US so we have a lot of work to do and we’re just getting started! Please note that you cannot login to use the platform unless you are invited by the administrator of a participating community. Please contact us if you think one of your communities wants to use Blitz Bazaar.

Factoid: At graduation, the average high school graduate in the US has played 10,000 hours of video games but does only 400 hours of community service. Adults are almost no different! By combining proven online techniques such as social networking, social media and social gaming, Blitz Bazaar makes doing good a big social game — that matters!

Your Involvement: The platform is now live for a select group of beta communities but we want more. Please contact us if your community is interested in deploying a custom-version of Blitz Bazaar for its own embers, employees, students, etc. It’s a very good action and would earn you lots of points!

Hi. Let me lead with my answer to the most common question I get: “why Blitz Bazaar?”

• Because I love throwing parties! Socializing is fun, and it’s healthy so why not do more of it but this time in the context of making the world a better place.
• Because society suffers from information overload and an action deficit. The biggest pool of untapped resources in the world today is humans’ good intentions that never get converted into action.
• Because there is an opportunity to repurpose some of the ~10 billion hours we spend weekly playing video games and socializing online towards something more meaningful but equally engaging.
• Because we don’t always have to donate to make our communities and the world a better place.

In 2002, I was just out of college and researching developmental economics in Argentina when that country had a massive economic implosion far beyond what we’ve experienced here in the US of late. Bank accounts were completely frozen bringing the whole economy to a complete halt and causing political anarchy with five presidents in a span of two weeks. It changed my life. I decided that I had to do something and started a website to raise dollars and Euros abroad to support high impact organizations in Argentina. Initially it was only for infant malnutrition projects but later became an online giving market for any high-performing Argentine non-profit. The donor chooses where to send their money and we make sure it gets there and is used appropriately. I ended up dedicating myself full time for four years before passing the day-to-day direction over to local Argentine leadership. I’m very proud to have built this organization into one of the country’s eading organizations channeling over $3.5 million to the country’s best organizations.

Starting HelpArgentina was an amazing experience for a New York City kid in his twenties. I learned a lot but my biggest frustration was how much fundraising dominates the world of social good. The best organizations are the ones that can raise money, not the ones that have the best programs. 80% of most organizations’ energy truly does go into raising money. There is nothing wrong with fundraising by itself. The problem is that the civil society and, of course, governments have remained border-line inept at raising non-monetary resources: utilizing people’s time and skills to make the world a better place.

People, like you, care deeply about your community and the world. We all want to get involved but lack a fun and engaging way to do so on a more permanent and reoccurring basis. Of course people volunteer and do get involved in different ways, but as a society we are way below our potential. It’s much easier to watch television, go to the movies or go shopping than it is to do a good action, or so we think. Organizations dedicate little resources and build little expertise around 'crowdsourcing' talent, the techie terms for it these days in Silicon Valley. As a result, human capital remain a massively untapped resource getting squandered every day while very urgent problems remain unattended to and, in most cases, are getting worse. Just imagine what the world would look like if we could increase people’s involvement in civic and community affairs by 10%. For a high school graduate, that’s 40 extra hours.

Then came along Wikipedia, and it gave me hope. People are spending hundreds of thousands of hours of their free time to build a public good, the world’s best encyclopedia. Wikipedia reinforced my instinct that if given the proper opportunity, people would dedicate more of their free time to activities from which they derive meaning and have a tangible impact.

Blitz Bazaar is a response to this opportunity. Instead of focusing on donations, Blitz Bazaar focuses on non-monetary opportunities to give. I challenge you and everybody else to show the world how much you care and how active you are. I challenge organizations, governments and businesses to design and put forth innovative actions that fit into people’s busy lives and leave a lasting impact on the communities. Finally I am challenging myself and the Blitz Bazaar team to build a platform that brings it all together. We’ll know that we’ve succeeded only when it is more engaging to take community action than to play RockBand, Farmville or the next hit video game.

Together, let’s reinvent community service for the 21st century and turbo-charge a budding civic participation movement in the US.
      — Lloyd Nimetz

• Kriss Deigelmyer—Director, Stanford Center for Social Innovation
• Matthew Nimetz—Partner, General Atlantic
• Mark Nelson—Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab
• Shira Levine—Founding Community Manager, eBay Inc.
• Carissa Carter—Social Media Director, Herman Miller Inc.
• Huggy Rao—Stanford Business School Professor
• Christine Hung—Finance, Apple Inc.
• Sarah Soule—Stanford Business School Professor,
• Paula Goldman—Harvard PhD and Social Action Expert