TILT: Taking the Hassle out of Group Fund Collection
Tilt, a P2P payment platform answers the struggles of group funding by taking the risk off the contributor and the administrative burden off the organizer.
Gone are the days of collecting funds by going door-to-door, chasing down the last individual who seems to have signed up for the party but conveniently forgot their checkbook. No longer are the risks associated with that group member who swears they paid in cash last week, but the treasurer has no record. Tilt has solved the problem for every group organizer or club treasurer. No longer is cash collection an organizer’s most dreaded task!
What Is Tilt?
Tilt is an online platform for Person(s)-to-Person (P2P) payment applications. Users can set up a campaign linked to a bank account. The user then sets a minimum threshold of funds required for the campaign to successfully ‘tilt’ and payment to be collected. One of Tilt’s key features is this setpoint, where no payment is collected prior to the group meeting that threshold, thus taking away the risk of contributing to a failed campaign and going through the process of returning funds. Instead of having to collect for each person individually, a link can be sent out to the full group of individuals at once. While the campaign is open, any individual with the link can contribute.
Started in 2012, Tilt has transformed the group resource pooling space with over 300,000 campaigns. Tilt is free to collect money for an experience purchase or gift. Revenue is gained through campaigns defined as fundraising in nature or selling something, where a 2.5% fee is collected of the raised funds.
Why Is Tilt Different?
Other players in the field of splitting costs include Venmo and Payso who both target the ability to collect money from an individual or small group of people. Tilt has managed to address a different segment of the market by focusing on crowdfunding applications. Where Venmo and Payso both target the end of the funding process, when both the targeted funder and the amount is already known, Tilt targets the early stages of the funding process. They do this by providing the threshold amount to be reached before payment is collected and providing one link that can be sent to large groups of people at any time as well as shared with others.
How is Tilt Sparking Creativity?
Tilt has provided ability for groups to mobilize and make a difference by taking the hassle out of the process of funding. Along with a bevy of campaigns focused on funds to charter a boat or take a group vacation, organizations have also found Tilt to be the perfect way to raise money from people they don’t even know.
Examples of creative Tilt campaigns include a Dallas neighborhood who raised funds to fix potholes in their streets. While the citizens had petitioned the city council for two years without success, the Tilt campaign ‘tilted’ in just two weeks.
With dreams of getting to Sochi for the Winter Olympics, the Jamaican Bobsled team posted their own campaign. In just 72 hours, they raised $129,000 from 2,855 supporters.
Who is the Winner?
Tilt is winning in digital innovation. The question becomes-who is the loser? Certainly not the group organizer or club treasurer who no longer has to track down that last dime!
https://medium.com/@yakhilmebro/the-future-of-p2p-payments-and-why-i-m-betting-on-tilt-bc8ce9150b7b
Tilt’s model reminds me of Kickstarter in the sense that you can actually post any event or cause and get funded for it with very little control or supervision on wether you fulfilled what you intended to use the funds for (although Kickstarter actually does ask for results). The Sochi example you gave made me think on the risk of having “fake” causes or “jokes” posted that get funded as they go viral, sometimes just for fun (e.g. the potato salad Kickstarter project: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zackdangerbrown/potato-salad). I wonder how can Tilt avoid that kind of behavior from both the organizers and the funders.
You bring up a good point. In order to get money as a fundraising campaign, then the organization must be a 501(c)3 tax exempt nonprofit, I believe. By providing that number, it should cut down on those sort of issues being linked to a nonprofit. For personal campaigns however, I don’t know that there is any legitimacy checking beyond requiring the individual to have a Facebook account and driver’s license or other form of personal identification. Therefore, the potato salad example above could still happen!
I agree that Tilt has solved a customer pain point in a space where company competition was limited – as you point out competition is group leaders / treasurers owning the initiative and logistics. I have some doubts regarding Tilt’s ability to maintain its position in the future: a) outside of MBA communities I have encountered few people with brand awareness; b) given the importance of network effects, I could see other companies with larger networks adding campaigns as a feature (eventbrite, venmo, splitwise, kickstarter going downstream); c) increased competition could place pressure on the 2.5% fee. Tilt has built a niche market and may sustain it position, but I am curious to see whether it will become absorbed or outpaced in the future by competition in payment services and social networks.