Walkstarter 2018 Update
As the 2018 school year approaches an end, it’s a good time to reflect on Walkstarter progress during the year. Let’s look at some of the numbers:
– 67 schools across the U.S.
– 75,000+ aggregate credit card transactions
– $1.9 million in aggregate donations
– 15,000+ fundraising pages
My goal for the next school year is to start scaling Walkstarter up to every school in the U.S. For this to happen, I’ll need a team and that means access to more capital. Therefore, I have incorporated a company “Edaptable, Inc.” as the parent organization for Walkstarter.
Edaptable has received IRS approval as a 501(c)3 non-profit company, which is great. Until now, I have funded Walkstarter by myself, but now, as a non-profit, I can secure some funding and potentially get more people to help. Of course, this is way, way easier said than done.
It’s a bit meta, but it’s time for the fundraising platform to do some fundraising. 
😃 If you have experience with non-profit fundraising and can help, please contact me. And if you have some extra BTC or ETH idle in your digital wallet, help support the platform by sending it to:
BTC: 1GdkvgCZEhpr8kEHTQhxKseXSa82HEeDH2
ETH: 0x25E2cB848BeFAeA8093752F2364543E2Fa6917Dc
This summer, I plan to rewrite major portions of Walkstarter that are overdue for improvement. I also plan to add features that many walkathon administrators have asked for, and add better support for mobile. And of course, support for crypto donations.
If you have used Walkstarter as a parent, donor or administrator, or are just an incredibly cool and helpful person, I have two favors to ask of you:
1) Please share your ideas for improvement of the platform in the comments, and
2) Please share this post with anyone you know that is in a U.S. school PTA and ask them to check out https://www.walkstarter.org
Thank you. Walk on!
Sola Grantham
Dear Nik, As our school ramps up to roll out your Walkstarter platform next week for our annual walk-a-thon, I am very impressed with how this actually makes it fun and easy for my kids to get involved. They spent the greater part of an hour customizing and re-customizing their avatars. After that engagement, I found myself as a parent much more willing/interested in actually writing to our extended family and friends for support, which I'm sure will be a boon to their school. Three technical feedback notes. a) I get only headers and no page body when trying to view my school's datas on Firefox 62.0 on Ubuntu. It would have been helpful to at least have a "This browser not supported" note. b) I would have liked there to be an easier way to "copy the link" to the student page from the student page. My attempt to share by email by clicking on the little envelope icon resulted in dialogue boxes wanting me to set up email from my browser... not something that I wanted to do. I ended up having to go back up to "My account" page and right clicking on the "view" button, to be able to "copy link address". (The little icon with the paperclip that had hovertext saying "Copy page link" also didn't work.) Note this in on Chrome 69.0.3497.81on Ubuntu. In retrospect, I shoulda/coulda copied it out of the address bar, but for some reason I didn't think of this. c) When my daughter was customizing her avatar in the "Girl" section, the arms seemed to have a bug where if you wanted the right arm to match (ie be symmetric to) the left arm... say in a canonical rest position, choosing the second one made the first one disappear. I'm happy to try to reproduce/give more details if this is not a bug you already know about.
Marcy Green
Hello. I really like your Walkstarter Platform. My suggestions are: 1) Enable the group to upload the parents email and precreate the page for each student. Then parents could go in and edit the avator, or the personal message as needed. 2) Can you have other options like Bike-A-Thons and Spell-A-Thons.