The recently launched Vote4Good seeks to mix voting and philanthropy by having charity donors wager on who’s going to win upcoming elections.
The way the game works, says Rob Sobhani, its creator and founder and the CEO of venture philanthropy platform Sparo, is players pick who they think is going to win a political contest, including next month’s gubernatorial contests in Virginia and New Jersey or the New York mayoral race.
Then, they choose a charity to make a tax-deductible donation. Part of that money goes directly to the charity, while the other gets added to an existing pot of $10,000. After Election Day, a randomly selected winner who correctly predicted the race’s victor gets to direct the big bank of moolah to a charity of their choice.
The idea, Sobhani says, is to give non-zillionaires a way of gifting a “mini endowment” to nonprofits and offer “the joy of being able to direct a massive donation to their favorite charity, which would then serve as an investment.”
Sobhani says he came up with the project following his own political loss after an unsuccessful bid as an Independent to unseat Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) in 2012.
In the aftermath of that, Sobhani says, “it occurred to me that you don’t necessarily have to be a U.S. senator to make an impact and make a difference in people’s lives.”
“Why not see if we can now basically marry our enthusiasm for voting, for politics, for good?”
The CEO of Caspian Group Holdings envisions the effort growing, with people around the world eventually casting their votes in international elections and throwing more money into the charitable pot.
“What I want to show the world is that we can still be passionate about politics, we can still be wedded to our candidates,” says Sobhani. “We can also do good in the process.”