SproutBuilder Changes the Game
For the last four months, I have been asking the founders of ChipIn to supply me with an RSS feed of new widget fundraising campaigns. “We’re busy with other things” was the consistent response. Now I know on what.
SproutBuilder is a versatile widget creation tool, built by the founders of ChipIn, that helps individuals, companies, and nonprofits create social media widgets. A widget is a small piece of code that contains a combination of graphics, text, and interactive components. A single widget can appear in many locations at the same time.
Imagine if putting together a branded widget for your nonprofit or independent project was as simple as pasting the URL of a supporter-created video on YouTube, dragging a collection of photos from your desktop, and then plugging-in the RSS feed from your blog.
From what I can tell, creating a SproutBuilder widget is that simple. Supporters of your organization or independent project can then spread the new widget on their personal websites, blogs, or any of the most popular social networks.
It appears that the widgets can also include a “donate now” button that links to PayPal or possibly NetworkforGood. When I get clarification on the “donate now” process, I’ll paste an update here.
Here’s the official video introduction to SproutBuilder:
Below are a few excerpts from the initial reviews on leading tech news websites.
From TechCrunch
While Sprout’s current focus is on the widget use case, its capabilities don’t end there. Since you can create sprouts of any dimensions, there’s nothing stopping you from creating entire websites using Sprout. Its pages and linking functionality certainly lend themselves to this type of creation. And since Sprout has incorporated 3rd party services, it can also be used to create mashup pages/portals. The range of possibilities will increase when Sprout releases an SDK in the following month, allowing outside developers to add to the components library.
From Mashable
As for using the tool, if you’re familiar with Photoshop, the interface should feel fairly comfortable and usable. You can upload “assets” to Sprout – your own images, video, etc. so you can create something a lot more attractive than my nascent attempt. Once you’re done building your widget, Sprout provides you with options for auto-inserting it into various social networks or widget directories and tracking services such as Clearspring. You can also just grab embed code, like I’ve done above.
From ReadWriteWeb
I think the potential here is fantastic... The team behind Sprout originally built the ChipIn fund-raising widget for nonprofit campaigns. They found that there were so many requests for customization and white-labeling that it motivated them to build a builder that anyone can use.
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