The Proposal

There are numerous socially conscious brands existing in the marketplace promoting both ethical values and worthy causes. Yet, there is no unified forum currently in place to aggregate these companies’ messages. With KarmaConsume, we provide a network for these burgeoning social businesses to co-exist under one centralized philanthropic umbrella.

We believe in a world where people make money by doing good, and start businesses for the benefit of others as well as their pocket. Combine capitalism with philanthropy and you’ve got a recipe we like. Hey, it’s not bad to make money, but take a look at how you’re making it, and what’s happening along the way. We want to build this world, and help these businesses succeed.

When you shop with KarmaConsume, you’re not only doing one good deed—you’re doing two. With each product you purchase you are supporting the philanthropic mission linked with that particular item (remember, each product we feature is from a company with an explicit charitable component in their business model), as well as a charity of your choosing. With each purchase you make, you can choose from one of our featured causes and we will donate a percentage our proceeds.

We understand the value of aligning with brands that share our passion for inspiring social initiative within our target audience. Thus, we aim to partner with “Do Something” (www.dosomething.org), a well established non-profit that is one of the largest social change incubators in the country for teens and college aged students. Our synergistic relationship with “Do Something” will provide the foundation of our business’ charitable proceeds and our subsequent legitimization into the global sphere of social entrepreneurship.

We see our main audience and our greatest opportunity for growth to be young shoppers who are attracted to both the style and the mission of these social apparel and accessory businesses. We want our message to resonate with the conscience of youth culture and to build an online space known for stylish products and a commitment to philanthropy and growing companies committed to the greater good. Eventually, we want to become the definitive one-stop shop for the karmic consumer, combining hip products linked with philanthropy with an interactive buying experience that allows for further philanthropic giving in the process.

We don’t want KarmaConsume to be another generic e-commerce platform. Instead, we want to propagate a culture and lifestyle dedicated to doing good by looking good. Therefore, we want to engage users in an interactive buying process that allows customers to choose one of several charities to donate a portion of our proceeds on every purchase, adding an increased philanthropic incentive to purchase through our website. Customers can also create a profile on the website, tracking purchases and donation history as well as creating a conduit for their social media feeds. As users reach certain benchmarks of spending on the website, we will donate a higher percentage of our proceeds to their chosen charity. Simply put, the more you buy, the more we give.

The Team

KarmaConsume capitalizes on a new and unique market opportunity presented by the up and coming trend of for-profit social entrepreneurship. Our team is composed of four students from diverse backgrounds propelled by voracious ambition and joined by the desire to innovate and sustain social good. However, despite our capacity to create and pursue, we acknowledge the need for guidance and direction. We are a team composed of individuals who never embark on a project lightly or without purpose.

Adam Vojdany – Adam is a Junior in Trinity College majoring in Economics. This past summer, Adam worked for 8 Rivers Capital and help their emerging profile companies. He has a passion for people and numbers alike. He also had a brief stint as a child model from ages 3-6. Unfortunately, he peaked too early.

Jed Lavery- Jed is a Junior in Trinity College majoring in Political Science. He spent his Sophomore summer researching Chinese economic policy with Political Science professor Tim Buthe. Jed has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge that spans from Cosmology to Micro-finance and everything in between. His life goal is to beat Watson in a one on one Jeopardy bout to the death.

Marc Andrusko – Marc is a Junior in Trinity College majoring in Public Policy. While interning for EUE/Screen Gems, a full service film and television production company, he also linked up with the founder of WaveBorn, a designer sunglasses retailer that donates eyeglasses to those in need. Marc cares about environmental sustainability and international healthcare. At the end of the day, Marc is simply a hopeless romantic who lets his guitar do the crying for him.

Steve Kane – Steve is a Junior in Trinity College majoring in Sociology. Over the past year, Steve developed a national marketing expansion plan for SEA, an apparel company driven by the theme of “Colors for Causes”. Currently, he works as a Strategic Alliances Associate for a Raleigh based financial software company called Sageworks. For those of you who know Steve personally, it’s safe to assume that his mom edited this bio for him.

The Proposal

Who Represents You? Think about it. Do you know who your local representatives are? Do you even know what they’re supposed to be doing? Truth is, we don’t know our representatives very well at all. Those representatives, on the other hand, want us to trust them enough to give them our money. So how do you bring voters and candidates together in a way to maximize responsiveness and, in turn, campaign donations?

The solution is Represent.ME, a website where constituents and candidates create profiles, similar to facebook, but targeted to politics. Voters can type in their zip code and see everyone who currently represents them on the local, state, and federal levels as well as all contenders for their positions. A voter can post a problem he/she has or pose any question to his representatives and get responses.

What’s in it for voters? Voters can rank and rate responses and award points to elected officials or their challengers for either helping address a particular issue or for responding to a question. Politicians can be held accountable and be ranked on a metric scale. This makes comparing multiple politicians much easier for the voter. It also compels politicians to be more responsive to their constituents. The age of writing letters to our representatives is over; communication needs to take a new form, and Represent.ME will fill that gap.

Why would politicians use it? Campaigns are expensive. Local and state level politicians face the greatest difficulties raising campaign funds because they are least well known to their constituents. Therefore, most forego online contributions all together. Aggregating these candidates on one website would drastically diminish the costs associated with setting up a website and launching a fundraising campaign.

How is it profitable? Represent.ME has two primary sources of revenue:

• Targeted Advertising - The target market is composed of those citizens who care most about politics. But Represent.ME can accurately target advertisements to users based on ideological surveys which users can fill out to identify candidates who share their preferences and values. Not only will advertisements be directed primarily toward adults with established wealth, but they will be targeted to match the values these users espouse.
• Transaction Fees - Represent.ME can take a small portion of each donation as a transaction fee. There are currently over 400,000 local and state level representatives in the United States. Last election cycle, 535 members of Congress raised nearly a billion dollars. The market for state and local candidates is difficult to assess because it has not yet been tapped. We at Represent.ME believe that once citizens understand that their local representatives have much more impact on their everyday lives than national representatives, they will take a much larger stake in supporting local campaigns. With just an average of $100 raised for each local representative, the site would generate $40 million in contributions. A mere 5% cut would result in $2.5 million of revenue. Keep in mind that each of those representatives has multiple challengers, and that $100 is a highly conservative figure.

Social Return on Investment.
Represent.ME is more important now than ever. With a recent Supreme Court ruling, corporations can now donate directly to political campaigns. Represent.ME will give citizens a chance to counter the impact of increased special interest funding by collecting resources and buying back our representatives from the grasp of corporate interests.

Who is the Competition?
This is nearly uncharted territory. The only potential competition is a site called Politics4All, which tries to integrate constituents with candidates, but provides no financial incentive for candidates to participate. As a result, there are fewer than 100 candidates across the United States actively using the site.

Innovative Implementation.
Represent.ME plans to implement beta stages of the site in a regional deployment. The first market will be Durham in the next County election cycle, with rapid expansion to Chapel Hill, and several of the most politically active cities in the United States. We feel that beginning in municipal elections in cities with high voter turnout will be a good base measure of the website’s adoption rate. The goal is to rapidly expand to state-level elections and federal elections by November 2012.

Mentorship and Guidance.
Represent.ME’s competitive advantage lies in its implementation strategy and excellent mentorship. Represent.ME is advised by the CEO of Certpoint Systems, Ara Ohanian. Mr. Ohanian has been nominated by SmartExecutive as Executive of the Year, alongside Jack Welch, Larry Ellison, John Chambers, and Bill Gates. He has considerable experience in software development and implementation. Additional core advisors on the political front include a Federal judge and two previous state representatives from California and Colorado.

Expect Big Results.
This idea is founded upon two salient needs. First, in connecting voters with candidates it will generate significant social return. Voters’ voices will drown out special interests and politicians will finally be held accountable to their constituencies. Second, in addressing the need for local and state-level campaign funding, Represent.ME will be profitable and sustainable.

Vision.
With your help, Represent.ME can dominate the electoral marketplace. To date, no one has ever put multiple candidates on one website. Voters have to go to a dozen different places to access information about their representatives, and they justifiably lose interest. The only way to get people interested in politics again is to simplify the process. Represent.ME will stop the deterioration of American Democratic responsiveness, and you can be a part of it. We can achieve financial success while making those around us better off as well.

The Team

Represent.ME is an idea by Chris Abkarians, a Duke Public Policy and Political Science major who sought a solution to the deterioration of Democratic responsiveness in this country. He contributes combined electoral experiences with the Democratic Governors Association and the Obama Campaign with tangible strategic business experience at the Boston Consulting Group and LEK Consulting.

The team includes Soren Peterson, a Duke Political Science major focused on media and campaigns, who contributes novel research on the effectiveness of various social media outreach techniques on recent elections cycles. His experience with the Mobile Internet Content Coalition in Washington D.C. provides a unique blend of political with respect to emerging technological innovations.

Finally, the is proud to announce the addition of Neel Mehta, a Public Policy and Economics major. Neel’s previous experience as co-founder and President of the Roosevelt Institute at Duke demonstrates his entrepreneurial ambition and leadership ability. More recently, his experience with Morgan Stanley has bolstered his understanding of the funding dynamics behind creating a successful and sustainable start up.

U-Link, a social venture, is a user-friendly, social-networking website that will connect students with common political goals to relevant news, political information, upcoming events, and a medium for discussion.

The Proposal

The Problem
Teenagers and young adults are not politically active, as shown through the statistics detailed below. The U-Link team believes that this problem stems from a variety of sources:

• Lack of Time: The average high school or college student has a full schedule, leaving little time to read the newspaper or sit through long, detailed news reports. People in this demographic must balance their time between school, work, extra-curricular activities, friends, and family life, leaving little time to become engaged in politics.
• Lack of Political Organization: A CIRCLE Survey found that of college students, only 28% suggested that they had contacted an elected official about a public issue; 24% offered that they had protested; and 19% informed us that they belonged to a political group.
• Inefficient Media Outlets: No news sources allow users to collaborate after being informed by the content provided. The lack of connection between users results in a missed opportunity to impact change in the real world.

The Solution
Create an online political social network- U-Link. Partner with television broadcasters to share licensed, high-quality content using a revenue-sharing agreement. Bridge the gap between knowledge and action by allowing users to network, discuss news events, and plan political events:

• Short News Video Updates: By providing daily news digest videos between 3 and 5 minutes in length, U-Link will allow busy students the time to remain informed about current events. In doing so, U-Link hopes to increase the importance of political engagement to this demographic.
• Direct Political Connection with Peers: By providing students with a way to participate in political activities when their schedules permit, students will be more likely to become politically active. Also, by allow users to share videos and their political calendars via other social networking sites, students will be encouraged to participate to improve their social image.
• Informing and Connecting Users: By providing a platform for young people to connect and discuss political issues, U-Link will complement existing sources of information by allowing users to share their views and coordinate real-world actions after viewing U-Link content or content from other news sources.

Step 1: You see a friend’s status or post, via facebook or twitter, mentioning the U-Link Daily Digest. Curious, you decide to watch The Daily Digest yourself.
Step 2: Register for U-Link through your facebook or twitter account. Users can also choose to input their registration information manually.
Step 3: First-time users are directed to a short (30-60 second) tutorial. The tutorial explains all of U-Link’s features, including the following:

• PolitiMatch- Answer questions about your political views to be matched to political parties and candidates.
• The Daily Digest- The daily 3-5 minute video summarizing world news, with an emphasis upon U.S. politics.
• The Billboard- U-Link’s most popular political issues are posted on this portion of the site. Here, you can click on topics that interest you to join the conversation, post relevant photos and links, and plan events to address the issue.
• The Calendar- Based on your zip code, you will be directed to a list of user-created political gatherings, election dates, and other events in your area.
• My Contacts- This portion of the website provides the contact information of politicians active in the political topics you have expressed interest in, as well as the contact information of your elected representatives.
• Election Center- In this section of the website, you can enter in their values, positions on major issues, and more in order to be matched to politicians for local, state, and national elections. If you feel uncomfortable using this method, you can also view detailed reports on the histories and beliefs of candidates.
• Polling Station- Daily news polls to cast your vote on important political topics – and view voter results.
• My Profile- Displays your username, profile picture, and high school/university. In this portion of the website you can indicate the political issues that interest you and explain why you are invested in each issue. Your personal calendar, which lists events that you have indicated interest in attending, can be shared with your friends at your discretion.

Step 4: Use the site and share the daily digest, your calendar and other posts with your friends via facebook, twitter, and/or e-mail.

The Team

Stephanie Downey: Stephanie is majoring in economics with a certificate in markets and management. Currently, Stephanie is a development intern for Wishberry.us, where she works directly with the CEO on multiple projects including web design, branding, strategy, and marketing.

Jie Wang: Jie is double majoring in economics and political science with a markets and management certificate. In addition, she is actively involved with the Duke Investment Club and has taken the following relevant courses: Financial Accounting, Advanced Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting, and Intermediate Finance.

Jenny Su: Jenny is currently studying economics and physics. She has always been interested in the spread of knowledge through sustainable organizations. Jenny was the director of a non-profit called Hand in Hand which worked to advance appreciation of Chinese culture among adopted Chinese children.

The Proposal

Today, many Americans take clean water sources and waste treatment for granted. Yet most third world countries have little or no means of sewage treatment, and are also limited in their ability to respond to water contamination—in daily life, and especially after natural disasters. Because populations in the developing world are already reeling from the lack of adequate food, shelter, and clean drinking water, any additional natural or manmade contamination is exponentially more damaging. We can change this.

I have experience with a line of products designed and engineered to cheaply and effectively mitigate not just wastewater spillover, but also oil spills, gas leakages and other bio-hazardous accidents. My father and I started a small business in the Florida Keys that treats septic tanks, sludge filled ponds, oil and gas spills and other bio-hazardous spills with our own developed brand of microbe blends. Our microbes are custom attenuated to attack specific types of carbon based “pollutants” and render them harmless. The microbes accomplish this by eating the carbon atoms out of the chemical chain breaking the substance down into water and harmless gases such as oxygen or carbon dioxide. This process is widely known as bioremediation. It is a natural process that requires little equipment or labor; therefore, it is less expensive to initiate and maintain than conventional methods of sanitation and bio-hazard cleanup.

Sam and I began to consider the implementation of these microbes on a larger scale and for a greater cause after a discussion with our Economics professor, who has researched water treatment processes in the developing world. We want to now introduce this technology in regions that will benefit from it the most.  Moreover, we want to do it in an economically sustainable and environmentally conscious way.

There is hardly a market for low cost sewage treatment as corporations that are big system providers have sponsored laws and created designs and infrastructures for more advanced societies. We are ready to change that. The potential for bioremediation to mitigate sewage buildup as well as address water quality concerns in regions with underdeveloped systems is phenomenal. By going into smaller regions in the third world and providing cheap and thorough wastewater treatment, we could significantly reduce, if not eliminate, unnecessary death and illness from waste borne viruses.  Furthermore, we could provide a safe and effective way to clean up any other bio-hazardous spills.

The process is natural, the product is cheap, and the need is evident. Let’s get to work.

The Team

Allison Rhyne (T’13) and Sam Eisenstat (T’12)

We have been meeting with students at the Nicholas School of Environmental Studies to line up a biological analysis of the product that we currently have in order to gain the support of researchers at Duke as we begin to push for this product to be used on a larger scale. We have also enlisted the help of professors at the Sanford School of Public Policy in working on an economic analysis of the different ways to implement and market this system in the developing world. We aim to eventually assemble a team, create a business plan to raise capital, and begin to communicate with our first target regions. If we receive funding, our goal is to research on-site in one of these regions over the coming summer.  This would enable us to work with local policy makers, test the microbes, and research the actual demand for the product.

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