NZfusion.com

Christmas is quickly approaching us, and we are busy putting together a questionnaire to gather feedback on what we are doing and what we should think about doing.

Our sharethestars project is coming along very nicely, but we’d like to get some research data around peoples giving habits. Which will help us understand what type of people are most interested in the idea and why they are interested. We started the project as a way to advertise charity organisations, helping charities collect donations, and helping people publicise their involvement with charities. we have realised that Kiwi’s give so much more than just money, helping charities by donating time, collecting on the streets and the day to day running of charities.

This indicates that some market research would be really useful, helping us to understand how our initial product launch should work. And we can always amend it a little later, based on community feedback!

Another side project we have been playing with is whizzoo. Our catch phrase for whizzoo is: “What is it?”, because with our web hosting plan we could choose a free domain name, we chose whizzoo.com, but we had no idea what a whizzoo should do. We set up a simple interface that recorded user input and allowed users to vote on their own input and others, making the site self-regulating. It turns out that this is a reasonably popular application in its own right, it isn’t in the same league as Twitter, but it has struck us that the concept is rather similar - the difference being content voting.

So stay tuned, we expect to release our questionnaire early next week and we are expecting some sort of prize!

So we’re currently in the process of developing a website that will benefit charities. We’ve got our concept and design pretty well fleshed out and in terms of implementation, the next thing we’re doing is creating the php pages that will be the core of our site.

While development is going relatively smoothly, we figured it’s never to early to get out there and test our idea with the community. Test early and test often they say… so this week we’ll be out there talking to Charities to see what they think of our idea and what else they’d like to see. Will be very interesting to see what sort of feedback we get!

We’re also in the process of putting together an online survey that will give us an idea of what people’s experiences are like with donating, online payment and fundraising. It strikes us that we all have somewhat biaised views and similar experiences at NZfusion, so we thought the best way to get information from a wider pool of people is to ask for it! Please leave a comment below if you’d like to be notified when this survey is ready or sign up to the nzfusion.com mailing list.

There is a good chance there will also be a prize involved…

Hi all,

We are deep in production mode, thinking outside the box (and outside the galaxy infact ;-) for our implementation of a site to positively affect the way charities fundraise for money.  We came to the conclusion that it isn’t just about the money.  It’s about the support and the community that people like you provide to help charities reach for the stars!

And people like you deserve an exciting place to do your good deeds.   While we’re working away, we were hoping you could help by telling us: “Are there any things you can think of which would make your job as a fundraiser or a charity so much easier?”

While the unveiling of our main project draws ever closer, we thought we’d try a cool experiment on the side.  And it’s cool because we want YOU, the anonymous reader who is brimming with potential and clever ideas, to be a part of it!  A few weeks ago, we came across a great word - Whizzoo, for which the .com domain was available.  (Infact, kiwiwebguy on http://sharemynz.co.nz/ told us about it, and told us we could run with it.  So, we did!)

Now, the million dollar question: What exactly IS a Whizzoo?  What does it do?  We don’t know yet, and we want you to come to www.whizzoo.com and tell us.  We are thinking to unleash the collaborative power of the internet and… build a social tool that is socially designed!  You can also vote for ideas that are already there by clicking the little ‘plus’ button next to each suggestion.

Looking forward to your suggestions and we will announce the greatest idea … when you have put it there.

Well the NZfusion site has been up for a couple of weeks now and we just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone that provided suggestions for improvement - we’ll be sure to build them into the next release.

At the moment we’re focussed on our first official project and I have to say we’re making fantastic progress. We’re in the design phase and can’t give away too much detail just yet, however I can tell you that charities and other fantastic causes will be very keen to hear about what we’re doing. It’s also closely aligned to NZfusion’s goal of reaching out to others…

This all sounds pretty vague, I know, so I promise we’ll have more juicy updates for you soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t already subscribed to the NZfusion mailing list you should get onboard now to ensure you don’t miss any of our upcoming press releases!