How Plus3 Network Encourages Corporate Philanthropy And Makes America Healthier Everyday!

In less than 5 decades – a blink in evolution time – a large segment of our population has “grown” from moderately healthy to morbidly obese; Gen X children and teenagers have cozily expanded into Gen XXXL. In parallel, more wealth is being created by the top 1% of Corporations and Businessmen than ever before in the History of this great Country, which bring another (nice to have) problem for these corporations and wealthy individuals. That problem is..

How do we do fulfill our philanthropic needs while ensuring that our donations are going for a cause that really really needs it?

Rick Sutton and Joe Fabris solve both these problems in an ingenious way with their Plus3Network mobile App and the accompanying website plus3network.com

Plus3 Networks is an App that tracks individual App users’ active lifestyle, rewards them with kudos / karma point for every step taken, every calorie burnt and then helps corporations donate money and resources to various organization based on the amount of healthy activities carried out by the individual App users.

I met Rick Sutton, the CEO and Co-Founder of Plus3 Networks at the SFAppPitch event here in San Francisco. Rick explained to me the idea behind the Free App, motivation for people to use it and do good simultaneously, the App Business Model, community reaction to the App and much more.

What is Plus3 Network?

Rick Sutton:Plus3 Network motivates people to be more active, to create healthier lifestyles. The secret sauce behind what we do is utilizing corporate philanthropy so as you do something and log it into our network, whether it’s walking the dog or riding the bicycle, not only are you doing something healthy for yourself, but you’re also moving money to charity courtesy of our corporate sponsors.

It’s not your money. It’s corporate philanthropy where they sponsor you through your healthy deeds to make the world a better place.

Let’s say I download the app and use it. How does it work? Let’s say I went out for a walk today. What happens?

Rick Sutton: We have a GPS location-based platform on the iPhone app. We also have a hand entry app if you don’t want to use the GPS. Seamlessly, you can launch the network on your iPhone. It will begin to log the distance and time you spend doing a particular activity. You can edit that activity on the phone, automatically upload it to your Plus3 web-based account and it will seamlessly move the money to charity.

So you have a set of sponsors who are looking to give charity for each mile or something like that?

Rick Sutton:When you look at it from the sponsors’ perspective, the members on our social network become the Pony Express and they replace the postbox. No longer does the company send the philanthropic donation directly to the charity. They power our members to move that money forward.

By being more active?

Rick Sutton:Yes. We do two things. We create a healthier America through physical activity and we also create donations to very needy causes that resonate with the individual.

What category does it fall under?

Rick Sutton:I don’t know what categories there are. I’m just here showing it off.

What is the status of the app?

Rick Sutton:It’s on iPhone right now.

How much does it cost?

Rick Sutton:It’s FREE!

What is your business model? How do you make money?

Rick Sutton:We make money by two ways. We have employee wellness platforms, where companies use us to inspire their employees to be healthier and they pay us a platform fee, based on the number of employees they have.

The second way is a marketing platform where brands want to create relationships with healthy people pursuing healthy lifestyles. An important distinction is that we don’t take a fundraising fee or administration fee out of the donation, so if a particular activity moves one dollar, five dollars to charity, you know as a Plus3 user that all of that five dollars goes to that charity.

Can you tell me a little bit about the company? When was it founded, who are the founders, are you guys actively looking to get more funding?

Rick Sutton:You always want more funding, don’t you? You can never have enough money. The two primary founders of the business, Joe Fabris and myself, Rick Sutton. Joe’s here tonight. He’ll present. We have a couple of other co-founders that are part of the board of advisors and directors.

We did a napkin drawing in 2007. We launched the platform in late 2008, early 2009. We’ve been in business for a little over a year now.

How is the community receiving the app?

Rick Sutton:Very well. If you measure by metrics, the metrics of our user base are very strong. We have 10,000 members in 60 countries so it’s already gone global. Depending on which market you look at — the cause marketing where we talk to a marketing director about building a brand relationship or when we talk to an HR director about creating a healthy workforce, we have really strong engagement on the healthy workforce side and we have pretty good engagement on the cause marketing side.