Chris Hughes’ Social Causes Startup Jumo Gets Folded Into GOOD

Social causes startup Jumo has been acquired by GOOD, the publisher of a website and magazine aimed at do-gooders. Jumo was founded by Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s co-founders and a Harvard roommate of Mark Zuckerberg’s. Hughes left Facebook to run Obama’s Website and social media outreach during the 2008 Election. “GOOD acquired Jumo,” Hughes tells me, “and users will soon see a single online platform on GOOD.is. I’ll be teaming up with GOOD’s CEO, Ben Goldhirsh, to help grow GOOD and Jumo.” Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jumo is designed to match people with causes by categorizing them by topic and letting you follow 15,000 non-profits, making it easy to donate time or money. After an initial pop following its launch last year, the traffic to the site fizzled. According to Compete, the site went from a peak of 114,000 unique U.S. visitors last December to 8,500 in June. According to Hughes, GOOD’s website has 3 million monthly unique visitors (Compete estimates it at 760,000 U.S. visitors).

GOOD is an editorially driven media site, which is what drives its traffic. Now it will be able to plug in Jumo’s cause-matching technology platform. Hughes also says that Jumo’s codebase will be open-sourced.

Jumo’s site is certainly sophisticated and works well in terms of helping users find worthy causes. The issue perhaps was that most people don’t seek out good causes in the natural course of their day. They need to be pulled into it either through media, events, or by their friends (which is why Facebook app Causes first took off and continues to be popular—it is always in your face). Folding Jumo into GOOD could help the platform find its natural audience.