Red Ink - the Financial Social Network
We help turn your financial data into social capital by conceiving of private information as a public resource.
About You
About You
First Name
Ryan
Last Name
O'Toole
Twitter URL
Facebook URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Red Ink
Organization Website
Organization Country
United States, MA, Middlesex County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States
Is your organization a
Not registered
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
The information you provide here will be used to fill in any parts of your profile that have been left blank, such as interests, organization information, and website. No contact information will be made public. Please uncheck here if you do not want this to happen..
Innovation
Entry Form title
Red Ink - the Financial Social Network
Select the stage that best applies to your solution
Start-Up (a pilot that has just begun operating)
How long have you been in operation?
Operating for 1‐5 years
THE NEED: Describe the need for your solution and the size/dynamic of the community (ies) you will engage
Large financial organizations, such as banks, are able to exploit massive amounts of our personal financial data for their own private strategic decision making. And yet, as the individuals who generate this vast amount of information, we lack access to the same data and tools to inform our own decision making. In public hands, collective personal financial data and tools will powerfully serve our own individual, social, and civic goals.
THE SOLUTION: Please explain what your solution offers and how it is innovative. How will you put your solution into the hands of users or beneficiaries? Be specific!
Red Ink, is a web platform that enables its users to share, aggregate, analyze, visualize, and publish their personal financial information on the web to support the causes and ideas they believe in.
Sharing our personal financial data, just like donating our money, time, or energy, is an important asset for many community based organizations who use financial data to define and quantify issues such as poverty, foreclosure, energy consumption, green consumption, supporting local economies, and many more.
On Red Ink, anyone is able to create a campaign that asks others to share specific bits of their financial data in order to support a cause or idea. By joining, you grant the campaign read-only access to only those pieces of your financial data stream (which the platform automatically ingests every 24 hours), and your data is then aggregated, analyzed, visualized, and shared according to the goals of the campaign.
THE MODEL: Walk us through a specific example of how your solution makes a difference through use of information technology and media
A local green living group would like its members to reduce their energy consumption and would like to quantify for the public in real dollars how good they are at doing that.
The create a Red Ink campaign for their community that identifies transactions that match local gas stations and energy company bill payments. People joining the campaign agree to have matching transactions aggregated from their personal financial data streams into the campaign.
The campaign can then output this data in a variety of formats, including web page embeddable charts/graphs, tabular reports (Excel, CSV, etc...), e-mail blasts, private messages, badges, or anything else that will help get the message out there.
The result of the campaign is quantifiable information about this communities group's efficacy at reducing its constituent's energy consumption.
THE MARKETPLACE: Who are your peers and competitors? What challenges could these players pose to your success or growth?
Red Ink relies on the availability of banking aggregation services such as Mint.com, Yodlee.com, and others becoming common place in the financial services industry and providing API's (application programming interfaces) to connect with a platform such as Red Ink.
Recent years have witnessed the birth of such financial aggregation services and their rapid adoption by the traditional banking industry as a commodity service to their customers. For example, Bank of America and the MIT Federal Credit Union now offer Mint.com-like aggregation services for all checking/savings account customers.
Broad penetration of such services into the general public is a key risk factor for the viability of Red Ink as a financial social network.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
FOUNDING STORY: We want to hear about your “Aha!” moment. Share the story of where and when the founder(s) saw this solution’s potential to change the world.
The biggest Aha! moment for me has been in talking with executives at places like Bank of America and Mint.com and realizing exactly how much of our "private" data they exploit for their own ends. The data is obviously very valuable, but unfortunately it is only in the hands of the worst organizations with the most self-serving goals. The potential we have now to change this scenario is usually not just an Aha! for me, but for anyone I pitch the project to.
Specify both the depth and scale of your solution’s social impact to date
Red Ink has been brought to a point of technical proof of concept. The core code demonstrates that the idea works within the existing financial service infrastructure and that web interfaces will allow people to create the afore mentioned campaigns.
Significant social stigma hurdles around the sharing of financial data have limited the projects reach to-date. However, strong interest in the work has been indicated by the nearly 90 user registrations recorded in the last year. Considering almost no promotion of the project has occurred during that time, these numbers indicate support for a bigger push for public awareness.
What is your projected impact within the next 1-5 years? Is your idea replicable? If so, how?
Growth in the next 1-5 years will be focused on increasing the number of user created campaigns and adding members to those campaigns. Our goal is to make engaging with the site as easy as possible, so that it can serve as large an on-demand audience as possible.
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve and mark growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
In the next 6 months, I'd like to see 10 - 20 new campaigns created and pass the 5,000 user mark.
Six-Month Tasks
Task 1
Re-design user enrollment / campaign creation user experience
Task 2
Use online marketing to engage usage of the site.
Task 3
Engage with community based organizations to drive usage of the site.
Now think bigger! Identify your 12-month impact milestone
Pilot with a name-brand non-profit in a media campaign to prove the platforms efficacy and utility.
12-Month Tasks
Task 1
Build the product brand through demonstrable utility and usage.
Task 2
Liason with non-profits at conferences to network and build advocates.
Task 3
Develop a pilot for a non-profit whose mission aligns with the platform's capabilities.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
Fewer than 100
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Sustainability
Explain how your company, program, service or product is structured
Undefined
What barriers have hindered the success of your project to date? How do you plan to overcome these and other challenges as you grow your solution?
Lack of human resources and money have limited my ability to grow the project or work on it full-time. As the sole instigator of the project my time has been spread thin between development and outreach. I'd like to find additional open source developers interested in carrying some of the burden of development, while focusing my energy on finding community partners to help scale usage.
How do you see the information-technology and media sectors shifting over the next decade? How will your solution adapt to and/or drive that changing environment?
Red Ink is premised on the growth of a new wave of Web 2.0 financial services that began several years ago, but has roots in the birth of online banking from the late 90's. The growth of the sector is undeniable, and Red Ink strives to be a thought leader in this domain.
Failure is not always an option. If your solution fails to gain traction in the next two years, what other applications of the idea could you explore?
The principles of personal data-mining can be applied to a variety of interesting self-improvement applications from finance to health care. With the maturation of mobile computing and the explosion of personal-data feeds, the ecology of services premised on these ideas is a growth market whose greatest applications are yet to be conceived of.
Expand on your selections, explaining how you will sustain funding
I have not currently received funding.
Tell us about your partnerships
In the past, I've worked with organizations such as the Knight Foundation, the MIT Center for Civic Media, the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County and the Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina to develop Red Ink as a tool for non-profits.
What type of team (staff, volunteers, etc.) will ensure that you achieve the growth milestones identified in the Social Impact section?
web engineers to continue technical development of the platform and outreach support to help develop relationships with non-profits.
Changemakers is a collaborative and supportive space. Please specify any community resources you would need to grow and sustain your initiative. Select all that apply
Investment, Human resources or talent, Marketing or media, Collaboration or networking, Pro-bono help (legal, financial, etc.), Innovation or ideas, Mentorship.
Specify any resources you might offer to support other initiatives. Select all that apply
Human resources or talent, Marketing or media, Research or information, Collaboration or networking, Innovation or ideas, Mentorship.
Please elaborate on any needs or offers you have mentioned above and/or suggest categories of support that aren’t specified within the list
Summary
Define your company, program, service or product in 1-2 short sentences
Red Ink is a financial social network that leverages collective information to help people make better financial decisions.
Identify what is innovative about your solution in 1-2 short sentences
We help turn your financial data into social capital by conceiving of private information as a public resource.
 | 32 weeks agoRyan O'Toole said: Hi Ravi, Thanks for your positive comment. From the user experience perspective, the data collection piece works as follows: 1) ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 32 weeks agoRavi Saxena said: Ryan, I see a lot of power behind this idea. Could you talk a bit about how data is collected i.e. how do people volunteer specific ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 36 weeks agoRares Pamfil said: Thanks for posting these! about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 37 weeks agoRyan O'Toole said: I was not able to upload my videos since they weren't hosted on a major video ... about this Competition Entry. - read more > |
| 37 weeks agoRyan O'Toole updated this Competition Entry. |
| 37 weeks agoRyan O'Toole submitted this idea. |
