Charities already host challenges and casino nights for more effective, engaging fundraising events. When donors are competing, they tend to open their wallets and keep them open. Pledge Your Bets extends this common knowledge by putting it online.

 

Competitions on Pledge Your Bets begin with a challenge. A challenge can be a local charitable golf tournament, national award ceremony such as the oscars, or national sporting event like the Super Bowl. Once a prospective donor picks a challenge they then bet on which outcome they think will win the challenge. The twist is that when donors place a bet, they mark what charity they would like to benefit from it. When the event is run and results are entered, all losing pledges are divided up and used to augment the winner’s donation to their charity.

While there are many other services similar to Pledge Your Bets, they have a distinctive feature that the others are lacking:

Some charitable betting companies do exist in this space, but no one does it like Pledge Your Bets. Most solutions are peer-to-peer (e.g., if you do this, I will give $5 to your charity). Others allow a group of people to put money on whether one person will complete a promise such as running a marathon. If the person completes the marathon, that money they pledged goes to his/her charity. No one allows a pool of people to bet against one another for the benefit of their own individual charities. Organizations can even drive their small donors to the Pledge Your Bets to try win their slice of these pools while increasing small donor engagement. For these reasons, we believe Pledge Your Bets is a unique fundraising platform.