An insurance salesman selling hope while entertaining via TEDx

WorldNomads General Manager Chris Noble is one of my favourite conference beer buddies. I have enjoyed many a post conference beer talking about social media, online travel and building a customer proposition. Great presenter and interesting bloke.

While Chris' day job is as a boss of an insurance company, at night he and his WorldNomad's fellow founders set up Footprints.org. I first blogged about Footprints here. It is a micro donations system that can be built into a purchase path so that small amounts of money can be collected from a large customer base as part of an unrelated consumer transaction. To date they have raised more than $1mm for 65 projects from 411,000 donations. If you are interested in hearing more check out the below video of Chris presenting at the recent TEDx Phnom Penh conference.

TRAVELtech: World Nomads and Footprints - building a brand by giving money away

The story of World Nomads launching Footprints is an amazing one. World Nomads CEO Simon Monk shared the story at TRAVELtech.

World Nomads is an online insurance company that decided to add an optional $2 charitable donation into the purchase path. More of the story here but quick version is that not only have they generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity, they also opened up a marketing channel. The donations spawned a video documentary which spawned an in-flight video series and eventually a distribution deal with National Geographic. Money raised for poor communities and global branding and marketing paid for by travel media companies and airlines.

The latest iteration of this story is that now Footprints is a stand alone charity business with an API. Means that any company that does a deal with Footprints can have access to functionality to charge a $2 charity donating and join the program. They are targeting a very ambitious $1billion. Amazing stuff. Love it.