Moolala is a brand new internet company just launched by my friends in Texas. I have mentioned Tony and Felicity Dale [house2house] before on this blog. They are medial doctors who are involved in global mission movements and hope this new company, started by them and their two sons, will give away huge amounts to mission as well as saving people like you and me some cash in our online purchases.
Check it out and let me know your thoughts. It might have the potential to help a lot of us.
Related on TSK: House churches and medical professionals,
Andrew, Moolala is an interesting start up. I will be curious to see if people grab onto the paymatrix aspect of their model. Paying out 2% to members essentially replaces the sales commission part of most group buying sites sales force budget. It will be interesting to see how they hire sales and scale into new cities.
I have a stake in this game, as I’m on the launch team of a new group buying service in Seattle. What we’re doing is partnering with local non profits, and allowing our members to designate 25% of their daily deal purchase to the cause of their choice to fund specific, measurable outcomes in their communities. We are in soft launch mode right now, and go into full launch within the next 2 weeks. If anybody wants to check it out we’re at http://www.idealnetwork.com
Hey Andrew,
Thanks so much for telling our story and linking to us. We’re excited to do everything we can to help you.
Let me know if I can do anything at all.
Jon Dale
Co-Founder, Moolala
for the Moolala Member Experience Team
Sorry to ‘rain on your parade’ here guys, but the concept that one can or should “give away huge amounts to mission” troubles me from both a giving and receiving perspective. It undermines the enormous creativity that exists within a Christian walk and the biblical principles that I’ve learned in life about money in God’s economy. I respect the brains and experience behind the project and hope that you guys do well but essentially doing business to create income for giving is a highly Americanized approach to life that I don’t see espoused in Scripture. Instead I’ve learned that the Lord is more interested in relationships than monetary things. I’ve blogged a little more about Andrew’s post here and the Moolala business at http://www.dennis.co.nz/samoa/~d/2011-01-03/post/all-about-money-again/id/259/
Dennis – i read your post and would have responded but you do not have comments enabled on your blog
sorry for “ticking you off”. you might be right about the crudeness of the project but when say things like . . .
“When a Christian talks and thinks about money as an answer to all things, thinking that money will do God’s work, we miss His greater blessing.” . .
then i can only conclude that you do not know very much about the projects we have been funding and how we measure success . . and the fact that most ministries we are supporting are grossly under-supported but manage to move ahead anyway.
`i invite you to attend one of our leadership roundtables and camp out in the tents like we all do at these events, and take a look for yourself.
I’m with Andrew here. This is similar to say Kiva where someone is given a bit of seed money and you watch an entire forest grow. Compare that to some foundations and nonprofits who sponsor their favorite author/speaker to “entertain” them at some fancy conference. I think of how much money is wasted at say an anti-poverty conference where folks “talk” about the problem while at a very swanky resort.
hey this looks good – even though it reminds me a bit of amway! i have just subscribed but there are a couple of little problems:
1. it doesn’t yet have a presence in my country so i can’t yet get deals. ok i’ll be patient! but…
2. shouldn’t i have put some code in so you benefit from the referral when i do buy something? don’t know if I can add this retrospectively!
if you hit the link on this post, you go into the site with my password intact.
you will see R5UU8WG
yep it does smell like amway and i normally hate all that stuff, esp. when it is disguised as “giving to missions” when much of the profits actually go into a new home theater system . . . but in this case i am trusting my friends and supporting them because i know they are people of character . .. and because i love to help launch things that have potential.
> you do not know very much about the projects we have been funding and how we measure success . .
Andrew, I desperately do not want to put down anyone’s work, or belittle you or the projects. I just want to draw attention to the high focus of money as a prerequisite for achieving for the Lord’s work – and as you put it “[measuring] success”. I do want your mates to succeed. I do want them to make money. It would be great if there is a bunch of moolala/dosh/cash that came to your projects but I’m trying to go deeper here than your projects.
> most ministries we are supporting are grossly under-supported but manage to move ahead anyway.
> … take a look for yourself.
I am located in Samoa. I am very sensitive to this issue as I have “sold all” for the Cause and am working through these very issues in my own life as we help the Prime Minister of Samoa (a proudly “Christian” country they say is “Founded upon God” BTW) to rebuild tourism post-Tsunami. The understanding that the Lord has given me in the context of front-line ministry is that money always comes secondary to relationship – both faith in Him AND through exercising our faith in relationships with others around us. Furthermore end-times challenges will likely remove most traditional and current funding streams for many Christian ministries and projects forcing us all to deal with and think these very issues through afresh.
I have given greater detail to this subject in my latest Blog post; http://www.dennis.co.nz/samoa/~d/2011-01-09/post/its-not-about-money/id/291/
You can contact me through my website http://www.dennis.co.nz if you wish.
I appreciate your time responding to my comment.
Thanks for responding Becky. In my latest blog post I’ve gone into a lot more detail about it. Money is not the issue. Not even wasting money (or not) is the issue I am trying to raise. It is the Western/American/Greek/logical FOCUS on money that came out in Andrew’s phrase “give away huge amounts to mission”. Now I don’t know you or Andrew so I want to be careful not to ping either of you personally. Andrew might have been talking lightly and it could have been a ‘throw-away’ phrase but still the point I wish to make is that doing something to raise money for ‘mission’ is essentially not a biblical practice whereas mixing it – people on people – is. Resourcing from in-house, rather than external is sustainable and the biblical model. May I put a proposition to you that one day Kiva could ban all true believers and their projects, as could VISA, E-Bay, Mastercard and other banks? It could be that at one point in time Christians could no longer use the Internet (certainly safely) and that perhaps, maybe mainstream money ceases to be a realistic option for believers?
Again, I’m not trying to say don’t do it, bad luck to these guys, I’m digging deeper and trying to draw our minds to the way the Lord would be doing it. I explain it better here: http://www.dennis.co.nz/samoa/~d/2011-01-09/post/its-not-about-money/id/291/
Bless you