I just learned about an interesting new website called My Dunk Tank [1].
The site helps you raise money by asking your supporters to create dares for you and vote with their donations.
Here's how it works:
1. You make a list of dares you're willing to do
2. Your friends vote for their favorite dare by making a gift in your name to the organization you are supporting
3. You do the dare that gets the most votes
So far, people have done some pretty interesting dares from jogging naked to eating worms to kissing a pig.
One of the bigger winners so far was Beth and Katie Cooke who raised $2,913 for The Spina Bifida Resource Network via the dare of "wearing a full head of cornrows in our hair for 2 weeks."
To date, it appears that all the fundraising has been for non-profits like the National MS Society, the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, and Talk About Curing Autism.
And the amount of the funding is relatively low, with most funding amounts ranging from $500 to $2,000.
So, if you have a non-profit organization looking for $500 to $2,000, you could certainly try MyDunkTank. But for the vast majority of you, this amount of funding is not going to really help.
However the bigger lesson here might be that dares and stunts can give any type of venture lots of attention.
Consider newspaper man Henri Desgrange. In 1903, his French newspaper was suffering from poor circulation. So, they developed a stunt to promote a new newspaper service route. That stunt garnered national attention and eventually turned into the Tour de France.
So, what kind of stunts can you do for your business to gain attention? I don't think silly stunts like kissing a pig or shaving your head are the answer. They're too short lived. Can you think bigger?
And specifically, is there anything that you can do that's interesting and related to your venture? One of my favorite example is when the manufacturer of Blendtec blenders made a video showing that it could blend an iPhone. That video has gotten over 8.8 MILLION views to date on YouTube (you can watch it here [2]).
The good news is that with brand new funding sources like Crowdfunding [3], even a startup with no revenues can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars if they can generate enough attention.
So get your creative juices flowing, come up with ideas to generate buzz, and you can parlay that into investors, customers, partners and more.