A blue spandex unitard hides in Weinberg senior Lucy Dietch’s closet, and has made occasional appearances throughout her college life. No, she’s not a superhero — but she does wear the silly outfit with an altruistic purpose. Dietch will proudly don the unitard every minute of the first week of December to raise $500 for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. She’s putting on the charity stunt because of BeExtraordinary.org, a website run by her friends Jackson Froliklong and Matt Cynamon, senior social policy majors in SESP.
BeExtraordinary.org encourages its users to do almost anything — as long as it’s not illegal, pornographic or dangerous — they want to raise money for charity. Users conceptualize a challenge and then complete it for donations, with the website facilitating fundraising through social networking. On Monday Oct. 20, after eighteen months of development, Cynamon and Froliklong officially launched their site, which all started with Cynamon’s announcement of his own challenge.
In the fall of 2006, Cynamon and Froliklong began formulating the idea of fun, engaging philanthropy in their frat house Chi Psi, familiarly known as Lodge, as they considered how college life lacked connection to the real world.
“I’m wasting my time, I’m just going through the motions of college,” then-sophomore Matt Cynamon complained to his Lodge brothers as he threw aside his economics textbook. “Forget this. I’m dropping out of school and walking across the Great Wall of China.”
“He wouldn’t stop talking about it,” says Jackson Froliklong, a Lodge brother and business partner. “So we said, ‘Hey, if you can’t beat him, join him.’”
After what could have been easily dismissed as a joke, the conversations about Cynamon’s Great Wall journey began to take a serious turn. Froliklong and other friends brainstormed ideas about how to realize his goal. Quickly, the idea of attracting sponsors and then donating the money emerged, along with some key strategies that shaped the beginning of the challenge-for-charity system. In the fall and winter of 2006, the group members convened and decided that they could quickly start fundraising through a Web site.
Cynamon’s original ambitious goal of conquering the Great Wall of China for charity became a template and a serious business plan for BeExtraordinary.org. The group, consisting of Cynamon, Froliklong, Weinberg student Micah Friedland (now a senior) and Communication student Devin Balkind (who graduated last year), decided to apply for a few grants. But Froliklong called participation in the NU Venture Challenge, inNUvations’s entrepreneurship challenge, the tipping point.
InNUvation, an entrepreneurship group on campus, describes their Venture Challenge as a “platform for entrepreneurial students to experience first-hand the process of cultivating a business idea from scratch.” During the first annual NU Venture Challenge, the undergraduate team from Lodge proposed their concept for BeExtradordinary.org to a panel of judges. The website team beat 30 semi-finalist teams, many of which consisted of graduate students (the second-placed team even had a Feinberg faculty member), to win 3rd prize overall, best social entrepreneurship idea and best undergraduate pitch. The competition netted them a total of $7,000 in start-up capital.
“After the competition, we got to work doing everything we thought we needed to do to get a business off the ground, with relatively little knowledge about what it took.” Cynamon said.
Froliklong describes three distinct phases of development since the initial influx of money. The group knew immediately that as non-tech people trying to start a tech company, they needed web designers. After enlisting Northwestern friends to lay the infrastructure for the Web site, the group linked with a University of Chicago professor who facilitated a relationship with web developers in India.
“Talk about a concrete learning experience,” Froliklong says. “I now have experience managing web development in another country, which is absurd.”
After a few months, the relationship with the Indian developers dissolved because too many details were getting lost in translation, so Cynamon and Froliklong began working with Chicago web-development company Midventures, and they eventually finished the site with Michael McNally, an independent contractor from Texas.
“There was no straight-line trajectory,” Cynamon said. “Everything was two steps forward, one step back.”
Before the beginning of their senior year, Froliklong and Cynamon decided that they needed an office. “We are college students but we are doing something very serious, especially when it comes to handling money,” Froliklong said.
They now rent one of the offices at a business incubator at 820 Davis Street. The room is small, with one table for laptops and a landline. The large whiteboard that occupies most of the right wall is so cluttered with black marker splotches that it slightly resembles a Jackson Pollack painting. In the upper right corner, one phrase is outlined: “minimize the office frat.” It helps the group reduce conversations of collegiate activities — beer pong and kegs — and maintain a professional atmosphere.
Walking down the fourth-floor hallway, one might hear the faint electro funk beats of Chromeo’s ”Bonafide Lovin”; one might also hear a curse word, quickly followed by chastising.
The idea for BeExtraordinary.org may have been born out of Chi Psi, but Froliklong and Cynamon emphasize how far from that starting point they have come. Their office shares a building with the Evanston Family Therapy Center and Chicago’s Green City Market. Although Cynamon and Froliklong still take classes and focus on graduating in the spring, they constantly remind themselves that this is a professional business.
By Friday of the site’s first official week, six challenges had been published. Posted challenges now include running the 2009 Chicago marathon and wearing a full mustache for the week (The marathon challenge is aiming for little bit more money than the facial hair feat). Dietch’s blue spandex unitard challenge has almost reached her fundraising goal of $500.
“Matt approached me about doing the first challenge for the site and I’ve always had this blue spandex suit,” Dietch said “I thought it would be a funny, eye-catching thing to do.”
Dietch said that she has relied exclusively on e-mail chains such as school listservs to raise the money and was surprised by the quick response. She thinks that the site’s main strength stems from tapping into this generation’s obsession with online communities.
“It does a great job of incorporating fun elements of Facebook: making a profile, adding a picture, comments,” she said.“There are a lot of elements to make it fun and keep you involved.”
Cynamon and Froliklong recruited friends to undertake challenges, and the founders personally know most of the challengers on the site now. One recently completed challenge though, which raised more $200, was completed by two Northwestern students whom Frolkilong and Cynamon didn’t know.
“Right now what we’re doing is trying to get people on the site and build community at Northwestern before expanding it nationally,” Cynamon said. BeExtraordinary.org is still a work in progress. Cynamon and Froliklong want to use Northwestern as a model to work out all of the kinks and that’s easier to do here, where the site has been positively received.
Although the ultimate goal is to get local businesses and corporations to sponsor different challenges on the site, its success isn’t a numbers game right now, its founders say. According to Froliklong and Cynamon, if people use the site, raise money for charity and have a good time, the founders will feel like they’ve accomplished what they set out to do.
“In a year’s time I’d love to say that we have funding from investors and that we’re at another university,” Froliklong said.
Their vision extends beyond just a year. With the possibility of investors still only on the horizon, a lot of the money they are now working with is their own: Both Froliklong and Cynamon say they have invested their life savings in this project.
“Honey, are you sure that was the right decision?” Froliklong’s mother asked. “No, I’m not, but I did it,” he replied.
Cynamon’s parents were thrilled about the project and supported him in using his own money. “My goal was to make this a viable career option. And what better time than in college to take on a risky venture,” Cynamon said. “I have no children, no mortgage, so why not try to launch our own company?”
In addition to “minimizing office frat,” the BeExtraordinary team has another, more serious mantra: “Philanthropy is greater than advertising.”
“We’d like to change the paradigm of marketing and how businesses communicate with our generation,” Froliklong said.
There’s evidence that Foliklong’s ambition might be attainable because of recent trends toward investors supporting altruistically minded companies. A study of investors’ behavior by the Social Investment Forum in Washington showed that socially conscious investment assets grew by 18 percent from 2005 to 2007. The inaugural Conscious Consumer Report from marketing and branding firm BBMG claims that “nearly nine in ten Americans use the phrase say the words ‘conscious consumers’ describes them well” and many consumers are more likely to “buy from companies that manufacture energy efficient products, promote health and safety benefits, support fair labor and trade practices and commit to environmentally friendly practices.”
“Instead of pouring money into silly TV commercials, corporations can put that money into positive initiatives, charities and challenges, and frame themselves on our site by how they interact with challenges,” Cynamon said. “We want our site to be on the forefront in pioneering the trend. All it takes is for this community to be successful to move onto stage two and start what we see as the philanthropy-is-greater-than-advertising movement.”
Before Cynamon or Froliklong can think about expanding, they still have to graduate. Both say that the site is their number-one priority after finishing school. Froliklong is going to apply for Teach for America, depending on BeExtraordinary’s financial viability next year. Cynamon says this whole process has imparted a passion for social entrepreneurship, and he sees the Web site as an introduction to the field.
Two years ago, Cynamon’s original declaration may have seemed like the grumbling of a discontented college student, but he wasn’t joking about the Great Wall of China.
“I want to spend a good portion of next year actually walking across the Great Wall,” he said. “As soon as things calm down here a little, I can put the challenge up and start promoting myself.”