Amazee offers a social network for grassroots organizing

There’s a new social network launching today called Amazee, which nonprofit groups and others can use to collaborate. It’s a site where users can create and join projects that they think are interesting or worthwhile, and can take their profiles with them from group to group.

There are a lot of products and sites that sound kind of similar. On the nonprofit/social change end, the most prominent example may be the Causes Facebook app. And of course there are dozens of collaboration/productivity tools available — for example, I’ve written about Central Desktop, which was apparently used by the Barack Obama campaign during the Democratic primaries. But Causes focuses on donations, while Central Desktop and similar tools are designed to be used by an existing team, rather than for recruiting new members.

That’s where Amazee’s social networking component comes in. An Amazee user doesn’t just exist as part of a single project, but as a free agent of sorts, with an individual profile, who can join multiple projects. Co-founder Diana Gerhardt says Amazee can be used for any type of project, but this “join any project” model seems particularly well-suited for grassroots social change organizations. The Zurich, Switzerland-based company (which also operates out of San Francisco) may be most similar to The Point, which focuses on coordinating specific mass activities like petitions and boycotts.

Amazee’s collaboration features include newsfeeds, calendars, polls, discussion forums and more. Groups can create basic pages that are the “public faces” of their campaigns (see screenshot above), and even make money by placing advertising on those pages (the money is split with Amazee, of course). Groups can also raise money directly through Paypal.

As one of the demonstrations of Amazee’s capabilities, the site is launching with a campaign to make Chicago the site of the 2016 Olympics.