Somewhere in the busy heart of London, a group of modern-age genies are furiously rubbing lamps to make the wishes of the world come true.
Crowdwish is an online, community platform on which users are granted ten wishes, which they can use towards making the most common wishes posted on the site become a reality.
The minds behind the platform select the most popular wish each day – the wish that received the most hits from users – and do everything in their power to action it on behalf of those who requested it.
Bill Griffin, the founder of Crowdwish told MM that he was inspired to create a meaningful and charitable platform after he witnessed groups of people coming together online to create outcomes for themselves which they couldn’t possibly achieve on their own, from Kickstarter to the use of social media during the Arab Spring.
“I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but I wanted to create a site where people could come and ask for literally anything and get a meaningful and freshly generated response,” he said.
Starting with the initial brief of creating a charitable, insightful platform, Mr Griffin said it took some time to figure out how it would work, and a little longer to design, and then around six months to build with everything falling perfectly into place.
While some of the wish requests Crowdwish receives are outrageous, such as ‘I wish I could afford to fix my bad boob job’ the organisation has been able to grant some truly life-changing and inspiring wishes.
Mr Griffin said: “We did one once when a woman made a wish on behalf of a friend whose husband had died.
“She had been his carer for years, but had been totally floored financially by medical bills once he died.”
Crowdwish set up an appeal in the USA for her, and raised an impressive $1,000 the next day, which paid off the most pressing of her bills.
“That was a pretty cool wish to grant,” said Mr Griffin.
However, when Crowdwish deal with the wonderful, they must brace themselves for the weird, as the two really do come hand in hand, particularly when ambitious people take to the internet.
Crowdwish recently granted the ‘I wish I was Batman’ request for a man called Craig Stewart, a self-confessed, proud geek and script-perfect comic book enthusiast.
Mr Stewart, who had recently opened an online store called ‘Nerdgazzum’, was sad to learn that he couldn’t actually be Batman because he was in fact a fictional character.
While they were unable to transform him into a comic book character, Crowdwish decided to do something exceptionally cool for the mega-fan.
They sent Craig a genuine Batmask, along with ‘The New 52 Villains Omnibus’ comic book collection – featuring Batman’s arch nemesis The Joker – and after some intense hard work, they managed to get their hands on a final shooting script from The Dark Knight Rises which was signed personally by Tom Hardy.
Mr Griffin told MM that the ultimate dream for Crowdwish is to develop the site more and more, with the ultimate endeavour to grant any and every wish, no matter what it may be, providing it adheres to the rules of the site:
1) Don’t be lame. No one cares that you wish you could fly. You can’t and this site can’t help you. Sorry.
2) Don’t be greedy. ‘I wish I had a free Rolex’ isn’t going to get traction.
3) Don’t be crude. We don’t need to hear about your Mila Kunis fantasies.
4) Don’t be vague. Try and be specific and imaginative at the same time.
5) Don’t be (too) selfish. The more a wish is shared, the more likely it is to come true.
6) Don’t be a dick – any form of behaviour that breaks the law, or advocates doing so, won’t be tolerated.
“That’s the goal, which I realise is stupidly ambitious, achievable though,” said Mr Griffin.
“The aim is to join together the world’s hopes and ambitions, collate and quantify them, then use their critical mass to help bring those dreams closer to reality.
“We don’t really consider ourselves to be, like, pioneering evangelists trying to inspire other people, we’re not born again Christians or anything, we just wanted to build something cool which made the world 0.00000001% better, that’s all.”
