At the end of the year the assorted media presents their biggest, most dominant stories and events that had the most impact over the last year in a summarized review. We from Kachingle would like to take this opportunity to present to you our own 2011 review.

Facelift – A New Design

For starters, we completely changed our website and have given her a complete facelift with a brand new logo, site design and color scheme. We`re still working on even more features, as for example translations into more languages, but those will be added in the near future. Over the past year we have further expanded our team with several new members. As you can see we are becoming more and more international as we now also have a Dutch marketing specialist joining our ranks.

Cost-reducing

Due to our good relations with PayPal and some clever programming we have been able to keep the total of all financial transactions cost to 15%.  This includes the PayPal incoming and outgoing fees, and the Kachingle fee.  From this we retain 7% to cover our running costs.  The rest covers both PayPal fees.

This means that neither the Kachingler (you) nor the site operator will have any additional transaction costs thus 85% of the total amount is guaranteed to be delivered to the site owners.

Normally, the user pays PayPal a percentage of the donated amount (3.5% +35 cents) and thesite owner will again incur another PayPal fee  to cash in the donation. Kachingle handles all fees so you really get the amount that was promised to you. Furthermore Kachingle genuinely pays out micropayments:  Payouts with Kachingle will start at one cent, a unique feature within the micropayment community.

Kachingle Anything and the KachingleX Bar

We must note with regret that our original idea with ​​the Medallions did not have the effect we had hoped for. A lot of site operators had the dreams that micropayments would generate a massive income stream. As before, micropayments does not make the site operators rich beyond their wildest dreams, but rather enables them to gather a little financial recognition for their hard work and the quality of their sites. But our users, the Kachinglers, wanted more:  There are so many excellent sites that deserve a little attention from their perspective, but due to the lack of Kachingle Medallions on these sites our users could not spend their money as they pleased.

For this reason we  introduced Kachingle Anything.  Kachingle Anything works together with the KachingleX Medallion bar. Now Kachinglers can kachingle any site they love by simply asking us to add a KachingleX Medallion bar without requiring the site operators to install a Medallion.

User Orientated

With this we have taken another important step forwards: We have turned our focus primarily to the users, but for the site owners nothing has really changed, they can still get their site achingled just as they could in the past. With Kachingle Anything it is now possible for anyone to add any site. This way we can satisfy the need of users to support their favorite sites. Every site proposed by a user can be Kachingled within 48 hours. This allowed us to increase the number of pages that can be kachingled to more than 2,500, and new ones are being added on a daily. We have received a lot of positive feedback from our community due to this new feature.

Happy Kachinglers

We have also received some great feedback from our “Happy Kachinglers” who are happy to add any sites that they feel are entitled to get a small contribution.
We also experienced a few surprises: Some of our Kachinglers included Google Maps, Google Translate, World of Warcraft and the IRS to our list. Furthermore by popular request it is now also possible to support Wikipedia. This is done separately for each language, so the English version is separated from the, for example, German one. So it is not surprising that the biggest online encyclopedia is ranking places one and four on our leaderboard.

More Social Media Integration

Another request from our users was to integrate Kachingle more into social media.  To this end we have developed a Twitter and Facebook integration that creates and sends tweets and posts directly into the appropriate channels.  So now our Kachinglers can share with their friends which site (s)he now supports, but the site owners themselves can also share with the world that they have received the gratitude of a new Kachingler. It is even possible to use your Facebook to log in your Kachingle account anytime and anywhere you want.

In the social media area we also became a lot more active ourselves with regular Facebook and Twitter updates. We have introduced theme weeks, where we refer to a specific category and request our Kachinglers to further add pages that they feel are missing.

More Transparent

During one specific theme week late November we got the attention of a small, but very passionate, part of that current theme`s community. Due to some critique on a few features that seemed to raise questions, we have been able to improve our service even further: For example it is now displayed on each page that you can Kachingle whether we have  the recipients’ payment method on file or if we are in the process of obtaining it.

The Future

In the coming year we will be working on various projects, all of them focused to further fulfill the wishes of our Kachinglers. A large wish from many of our users is to be able Kachingle a site immediately without any intermediate steps. A wish we`ll be trying to fulfill with the utmost priority.

Currently we are also working on alternative payment methods such as remittances,  etc. where our users will also be able to donate a personally set amount each month.

All in all, it was a very good year for Kachingle!

Zur deutschen Version.

By Anika, our Cool Nerd Queen Kachingler – Social Media Marketing Manager, located in Bremen, Germany