Supporting Causing and Causing a Scene with G-Team
We’re excited to announce the launch of G-Team, a new way to leverage the collective power of Groupon’s subscribers and customers to benefit our local communities. Each week we’ll identify a genuine community need and one simple thing you can do to get involved. Through G-Team, we’ll bring you the best causes in your community and only ask you to donate or act if enough people team up, ensuring your efforts will actually make a difference.
What types of community partnerships will G-Team feature? G-Team campaigns will typically aid specific projects to benefit the local communities of our subscribers. Through philanthropic fundraisers, volunteer events, and opportunities for civic engagement we hope to help you address the causes you care about.
Each G-Team campaign will be set up on The Point and featured on Groupon the day of its launch. You can learn about campaigns by checking Groupon.com, reading your daily Groupon e-mail, or by browsing G-Team tagged campaigns on The Point.
We’re launching our pilot G-Team in Chicago, and hope to come to your city soon. Today we’re highlighting a G-Team campaign to benefit Chicago Public School teachers. In partnership with today’s featured Groupon business, the Chicago Photography Academy ,we hope you’ll help us fund a study group through the Chicago Foundation for Education where teachers can build skills to inspire the children in our community. Check out today’s G-Team campaign on The Point.
We’ll have a dedicated submission page soon; in the meantime, we hope you’ll leave ideas for campaigns to support in the comments below.
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The Point is Hiring a Community Manager / Groupon Liaison
Since Groupon’s launch, we’ve expanded to over 50 cities and 3 million subscribers, presenting us with an unprecedented opportunity to tap into even more collective power. We are looking for a full-time, in-house Community Manager to organize Groupon customers to extend their collective consumer power beyond the daily deal to achieve something either good or hilarious. Campaigns may include anything from hilariously-themed flashmob meetups emphasizing Groupon’s creative social potential, to project-specific fundraisers helping local communities.
The Community Manager will be tasked with organizing new campaigns on The Point and integrating them with Groupon in a seamless way that provides value to customers.
This position will entail building relationships with community groups in multiple cities. Most of this can be done from our office in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, but some travel may be necessary.
Duties:
Coordinate project-specific fundraisers with local community groups
- Matching grants fundraisers (vendor and/or Groupon will match customer donations)
- Fundraisers to fund new community resources/events related to deal
- EXAMPLE: If we raise $2,000, today’s featured restaurant will offer free cooking classes focusing on nutrition to underprivileged young adults in the neighborhood
Tap into the whimsical, playful potential of collective behavior by creating social campaigns that enhance specific deals and connect the Groupon community
- Local meetups
- Create ways Groupon customers can collectively experience the deal together
- EXAMPLE: We’ll all wear capes to the ballgame if 300 people join
Administrative Duties
- Respond to organizer questions
- Handle all The Point checks
- Monitor discussions
- Manage Twitter & Facebook accounts
Requirements Experience in either Community Organizing or non-profit fundraising. Must have excellent writing skills. Social capacity to savvily navigate both the non-profit and corporate worlds. Firm understanding of social media platforms. Some knowledge/experience in marketing would be a plus, not required.
Compensation $40,000 annual salary and participation in our benefits program
Click here to apply.
New Blog for Groupon
As we are anticipating more regular Groupon-related blog content, we decided split up the blogs for The Point and Groupon. Groupon’s Blog (“Groublogpon”) is here. If you’re an RSS subscriber, make sure you grab the feed for your city, or you’ll end up with all kinds of stuff that will be completely boring to you.
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Crain’s “Entrepreneurs in Action” on Groupon
If you’re interested in Groupon’s origins and how it evolved out of The Point, Crain’s Business explains it all (and more) in the following piece from their excellent Entrepreneurs in Action series. Past segments have featured our friends at EveryBlock and CrowdSPRING. Our thanks to Brandon Copple of Crain’s for the excellent work!
The Point Moves Offices
The Point has outgrown our office space! Yesterday, we moved down a floor of our building into a larger space. Here are a few photos I took of the move.
Ken and the tech team packing up
Alex grabbing some last things
Nick setting up the new phone system
Unpacking in the new space
Aaron and Ben in their writing sanctuary
Our new conference room
The Point Presentation – The Rational Pursuit of Change
From last year’s Chicago New Media Summit (now the Chicago Convergence). I tried to fit a ton of content in 14 minutes, so its a bit fast – enjoy!
Watch Andrew Mason, The Point, Online Collective Activism in Game Videos | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
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Groupon Hiring in NYC
After successful launches in Chicago and Boston, Groupon is coming to NYC, and we need some talented locals to help us make it happen.
In general, we’re looking for people who know and love New York City. Groupon is a fast-paced and fluid startup – you should be able to think on your feet. You have to be hardworking, self-motivated, blah blah blah, all that stuff that everyone says. Read on for available positions.
Outside Sales Executive
We’re looking for a full-time sales executive to help us get the coolest New York businesses featured on Groupon. Each day, you’ll call (and occasionally visit) restaurants, theaters, spas, dentists, and everything in between, negotiating unbeatable deals on behalf of Groupon’s customers.
You should have experience in outside advertising sales. You should be skilled at negotiation and relationship building. You should have existing relationships with bars, restaurants, and other local businesses.
Compensation is competitive. To apply, send your resume to jobs@thepoint.com.
Freelance Writers
We need freelance writers to compose positive, funny descriptions for the daily deal. Good write-ups seamlessly entertain the reader and communicate the value of the deal. Also, since Groupon is a community site, it should be written by someone who knows the community and can bring that perspective to their writing.
The tricky part here is that we’re looking for “funny” writing, where funny is defined as, “what makes our managing editor laugh.” The best I can do to elaborate is to offer a few examples of past Groupon write-ups: Kafka Wine; Lincoln Park Massage Chicago Chamber Music Ineeka Tea. A few things we think are funny: The Onion; Adult Swim (in particular, Xavier: Renegade Angel and Tim and Eric).
Compensation is competitive. To apply, email us a Groupon-style write-up for a restaurant in New York City that you’ve never patronized with a Yelp rating between 3.5 and 4 stars. We won’t consider applications without a sample write-up.
-Filed in Groupon
Company to Donate to Charity if Patent Litigation is Dropped
Check this out – Desire2Learn will donate $1,000,000 to charity if Blackboard drops a patent lawsuit.
I like this “you wouldn’t hurt a puppy, would you?” style of building support for a cause. But what if you don’t have a million dollars? You can raise a pot of money on The Point, which are only released if the offending organization does as you please.
This has already been tried on The Point in an attempt to get Bono to retire from public life by donating a lot of money to fight AIDS if he does. Hasn’t worked – yet.
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Groupon Is Hiring Summer Sales Interns
Develop useful job skills! Make new friends and networking contacts! Drink delicious sparkling waters! That’s just a few things you can expect as a Sales Intern at Groupon. As an intern, you will be able to develop and apply a mix of creativity, hard work and sales skills to find cool and useful things to do at super-low prices. Each day you’ll call restaurants, theaters, gyms, and even dentists in a particular geographic area and negotiating massive discounts on behalf of Groupon users. We need driven, hard-working and intelligent individuals. Experience or interest with online sales, inside sales, and the Internet is preferred.
General Responsibilities
- Actively engage in cold calling businesses and negotiating deeply discounted prices on “things to do”
- Brainstorm new and creative businesses and activities to be featured
- Follow up on warm inbound leads and land contracts
- Miscellaneous tasks to help promote Groupon
Experience
- Interest or past experience in a sales capacity; inside sales is a plus
- Ability to focus in a fluid, changing, and quickly growing business
- Working on or completed a college degree
Characteristics
- Strong negotiating and people skills
- Ownership and accountability
- Driven and hard-working
- Enjoys and thrives in fast-paced, fluid work environment
- Can think on your feet
Compensation/Benefits
- Incentive-based stipends
Interested? Just send your information to Nick Cioffi at nick@thepoint.com. Good luck!
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Groupon Delivers a Healthy, Robust Baby Boston Groupon
Catch those gurgling goo-goo noises emanating from your computer speakers? Oh wow, you better see a psychiatrist about that! Hah hah, just kidding. No, that cooing that you hear is the dulcet sound of Groupon Boston, who was born at midnight on March 16, 2009. Right out of the Interwomb, Groupon Boston started working on behalf of Boston-area small businesses and consumers, offering a $40 voucher at the Brighton, MA restaurant Zocalo Cucina Mexicana for just $20. Smartypantses that they are, Bostonians responded with gusto, buying up 78 Groupons so they could enjoy mucho mas mole por menos.
Lil’ Baby Boston Groupon has had a smashingly successful first week on earth, with each daily deal scoring way more purchasers than necessary to make the deals tip over. We’ve got a community manager on the scene to nurture Boston Groupon into a modern-day Hercules of daily discountdom, as well as some sales nannies who are working tirelessly to secure those awesome deals that Chicago Groupon fans have become so used to by now.
“How come Boston, and not my town?” you’re probably wondering. Well, Boston has a ton of universities that churn out thousands of web-savvy graduates, some of whom even go so far as to marry their computers. It’s got a diverse, vibrant local business scene. And perhaps most importantly, we are exceedingly Old School patriotic — so patriotic, in fact, that we come to work every morning riding horses in the manner of Paul Revere, and dump a box of tea into the nearby Chicago River. Horse-riding and tea-dumping are activities that staffers must endure in order to enter Groupon HQ; anyone who fails has to spend the morning in front of our building, locked in wooden stocks and subject to the mockery of tomato-wielding colonists. So we pretty much had to go for Boston, or else we would have felt vile and seditious.
Worry not, Rest-of-America: We’re totally on board with the Brangelina/OctoMom modus operandi when it comes to birthing Groupon babies — i.e., more equals better. So expect more Baby Groupon news in the next few months.