Why Join
Spotlight is a social good platform for the modern advocate. We've created tools that allow organizations to collaborate with their supporters, leveraging dollars-and-cents to make a genuine cultural impact. On Spotlight, you can interact with our core feature set, which includes our:
Giving Wallet - *Think Venmo for Giving
Marketplace - Art-fueled market for activism
Spots - Blogs for learning, collecting resources, and taking action
You can also follow and connect with nonprofits, brands, and people like any other social experience. Here, culture and community collide to empower change.
Do I need anything special to join?
Spotlight requires a mobile phone. That's it! Once you're in, set up your profile.
Then, you can unlock your tools like the Giving Wallet, generate ideas within your Spots (blogs), and collect stickers by supporting the campaigns that move your needle. These items will open a new door to support your advocacy work. We'll also recommend outstanding accounts, content, and action items once you're signed up. You are enough. Brighten your world.
Why would I want a Giving Wallet?
Unfortunately, the nonprofit world is full of bad actors and fraudulent organizations. Your dollar should count and be used for legitamate purposes. We vet nonprofits in our directory across 1200 different safety lists to ensure a trusted giving experience.
We also know that not everyone is financially in a position to donate, but everyone is a position to spread kindness and generosity.
Giving Wallet is special because you can receive gifted funds directly from people and brands by wallet-to-wallet transfers. This allows you to be in control of these deposited funds to then direct grants to receiving nonprofits or retransfer the funds to another person - all with zero tax liability. We call this sponsored giving.
It is also special because you can have a centralized home for your giving, making it easier, safer, and quicker to give to the causes and organizations in need. It will also allow everyone to make giving habitual, which grows our individual and a collective sense of purpose. These actions raise our emotional IQ and make us healthier and happier. There's a bit of science to the whole thing, plus it saves us time and is simply more efficient.
Why would I shop this Marketplace?
Most marketplaces are another place for consumerism. We wanted to establish a new type of market where your dollar acts as a vote for the change you want to see.
Note: It is estimated that the carbon footprint of a digital good is 95% less than its physical counterpart.
We are your source for collectible digital goods (we call them Stickers) that actualize change. Our marketplace is an epicenter for creators who want to launch campaigns that give back.
A Sticker can:
1. Express your identity
2. Show your ambassadorship for what you care about
3. Generate impact via match fundraising, crowdfunding, and sweepstake-type campaigns
You can scroll, filter, and engage with stickers by clicking the marketplace icon. Whenever you purchase or contribute to what listing for the sticker, you will collect the sticker artwork, immediately displaying it on your user profile. You can manipulate its sizing and placement to create a styled scrapbook board of your collected stickers.
Why is collage such a big feature at Spotlight?
Sharing content on Spotlight is an expressive act. Whether it is making a Spot or creating your Sticker wall, everything you do with this content is under your control to collage.
This action allows you to sink into the content at a deeper level. Unlike fleeting stories that disappear or posts that flash by like news headlines, Spotlight content has roots and can feel emotional because it centers around the legacy of storytelling: Scrapbooking.
The act of collaging media itself has been in existence since before the photograph was invented. It has also been a powerful method for political subversion and change.
Your Spot and Sticker Wall serves as a collection of your thoughts and other collected resources. You will see that you can add pages to your Spot to expand the collection in whatever way. The content you post in your Spot can be personal or connect to a cause. If you dream of launching a nonprofit, you can utilize your Spot to host a nano-nonprofit.
Your primary page within a Spot is a Moodboard. It is a page to scrapbook where you can upload your content into a collage. You can also search a directory of existing media to place aside your collage. Your Moodboard is an illustrative space to shape culture and tell honest history. You can use this page for gathering media that might fit into a category like:
1. Family and Friends Photo Album
2. Vision Board
3. Brainstorm Wall
4. Zine for Clippings
5. Knowledge Wall
6. Social Movement Space
7. Motivation and Bits Repository
Moodboards are limitless. It is your space to sink into what you care about. There is no pressure to post on a schedule. There is no algorithm to manipulate your state of being on a topic.
Did you know?
Although not the first record of scrapbooking, the 1769 'Biographical History of England' by Reverend James Granger pushed the concept of self-expression into the public realm. The book was published with extra blank leaves, allowing readers to embellish or 'grangerize' the book with illustrations from their collections. The process was dubbed "extra-illustrating" and was extremely popular with the masses, who often used the extra pages in their family bibles to keep personal records.
The roots established by grangerizing and the invention of the printing press gave rise to the use of scrapbooking to thrust social movements onward. In 1839, a group of early slavery abolitionists from the American Anti-Slavery Society published "American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses." The book was an account of the actual treatment of enslaved people by their owners, based on a scrapbook of newspaper accounts assembled by the group. It is still considered a potent tool in the abolition movement.