Many of you have expressed concern about our Terms of Service prohibiting the use of sites like PinkBaller.com, which have been used by members to post their badges in comments in order to accumulate points for their causes. This might be confusing, because a while back, we gave kudos to PinkBaller.com – as a fan site for SocialVibe. However, we need to make sure that these fan sites are operating in a manner consistent with our TOS. We wholeheartedly love and accept any fan sites you guys create for us; but we cannot endorse sites and networks that are being created to accumulate points in ways that are contradictory to our TOS.
Now would be a great time to clarify and educate a little bit about this area of our TOS. It is against our Terms of Service to post your badge on any page of which you do not own the content. This includes forums, comments, or any location other than your social networking profile, blog, or self-owned website. (This includes MySpace comments!) We realize that this may be a difficult transition for some members, but it is a necessary one to ensure we can continue to support our charities in the future.
We appreciate your passion to earn as many points for your causes as possible. However, posting in forums such as these can actually negatively affect the charities you support. Think about it from the point of view of our brand sponsors: they are not willing to pay for badge impressions that are generated in this way, and if brands don't pay there will be no money to donate to charities.
In addition, from a practical standpoint forming groups like this does not actually help you to raise any more money for your charity. Let us explain how our charity contributions are made: Every month, we collect money from the brands in our system and place it into a pool. At the end of every month, we allocate that pool of money to the charities in SocialVibe based on the number of points that were earned by the users supporting each specific charity. For example: if the members that support To Write Love On Her Arms earn 20% of all the points raised by members that month, TWLOHA will receive 20% of the pool of money. Because the amount of money we receive from brands varies from month to month (as brands change), the amount we donate to our charities also varies. Nonetheless, since May of 2008, we have donated just over $215,000 to the charities in our system - which is currently over 100% of our revenue.
Because our points system works in this way, groups that attempt to generate tons of points are actually ineffectual, as the badges that are posted in these groups support a variety of different charities within the system, which keeps the distribution of points even.
In addition, it is unfair to other members who are "playing by the rules" and making an honest effort to earn more points. It also results in a negative perception of SocialVibe, and could even make us look like spammers.
We hope you understand our need to enforce such rules, and we look forward to continuing to do great things for our causes with your support, in an honest and ethical manner.
As always, if you have any suggestions, comments, or feedback we would love to hear them. Send us a note at support@socialvibe.com (we read every single one!)
