Jumo Exits for GOOD

The web world is a fickle mistress, even for high-rollers like Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, whose venture Jumo (which he discusses above with Stephen Colbert) was just acquired by GOOD, magazine-publisher-turned-digital-media-platform. The financial terms are: $0, an “advisory” role for Hughes, and the chance for Jumo’s 16 employees to reapply for their jobs with GOOD, according to Betabeat.

The guru behind Barack Obama’s acclaimed 2008 digital strategy (Fast Company called him, perhaps excessively, “The Kid Who Made Obama President”), Hughes proved less successful with a social network for philanthropy and activism.

Hughes arranged the deal with GOOD co-founder Ben Goldhirsh, an old friend from prep school days at Phillips Academy. Ironically, Goldhirsh tried to woo Hughes to GOOD early on, but he passed on that opportunity in order to start Jumo.

Despite Hughes’ pedigree, nonprofit 501c(3) Jumo managed to sign up only 15,000 companies, and garnered tepid reviews for the core concept: asking users to build a profile on a new platform, and trying to convert “liking” a cause into real action.

Hughes wrote on the Jumo blog:

When we started Jumo over a year and half ago, we had a simple mission: to use technology to help everyday people have a meaningful impact on the world. We’ve long believed that the best way to facilitate positive change is to connect individuals to outstanding organizations working on the ground in our communities and around the world.

Today, we are one step closer to fulfilling this goal. GOOD brings to the table a vibrant community of three million monthly users who read and interact with their dynamic content.

And in the spirit of our heritage as a non-profit, we will be open-sourcing our own codebase to enable other social entrepreneurs to use our progress thus far for their own endeavors.

Hughes’ vision that a network of volunteers could be mobilized to broad social causes -- a model that worked in the political arena -- proved lacking.

When Jumo launched last year, Hughes said he hoped that indexing charities would “do what Yelp did for restaurants…help people find and evaluate them.”

Seems that social good needs more than indexing, since it probes a for a deeper incentive than eating or buying or playing games. Perhaps the new partnership will bring the missing elixir of GOOD as an ROI in itself.