What is Scoop?

Scoop empowers human communities and brands to grow together.

The Problems We Face:

1. Imagine this: you're responsible for keeping thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people connected, informed, and engaged. You lead a university with 50,000 students, a congregation with a devoted following, or a sports organization with passionate fans spread across the country. Every day, you craft important messages, hoping they'll reach the people who need them. But here's the painful truth: they probably won't. You're forced to rely on the same tired tools that have barely evolved in decades: email and SMS. These weren't built for the world we live in today. They were designed for a different era, one where inboxes weren't battlegrounds and attention wasn't the scarcest resource on earth. Now? Your carefully written announcements vanish into the void, buried under promotional spam, algorithmic filtering, and the relentless noise of a hundred other voices competing for those precious few seconds of attention. Despite living in the most connected era in human history, we're paradoxically more isolated than ever when it comes to meaningful community communication. The infrastructure is fundamentally broken. These systems were never designed to foster real-time conversation among thousands, to create genuine belonging, or to cut through the chaos of modern digital life. When your message lands in the same inbox as bot-generated emails, phishing attempts, and endless marketing noise, it simply disappears. And here's what breaks our hearts at Scoop: human community has never mattered more. As our world grows more digital, more fragmented, more uncertain, people are desperately seeking connection and belonging. Yet the very tools meant to facilitate this connection are failing us catastrophically. The digital age demands infrastructure built for today's challenges, not yesterday's assumptions. We cannot keep trying to force tomorrow's communities through yesterday's pipes. Every community leader knows this frustration intimately: the sinking feeling when you realize your important update went unread, the exhaustion of fighting against systems that seem designed to defeat you. This isn't just inconvenient. It's eroding the fabric of how we come together, how we stay informed, how we maintain the bonds that make us more than just isolated individuals. We deserve better. Our communities deserve better.
2. There's a deeper crisis unfolding beneath the surface of our digital lives, one that strikes at the very heart of human trust and connection. Since the internet's earliest days, digital identity has remained an unsolved puzzle, and the consequences are now impossible to ignore. Consider this staggering fact: more than half the world's population still lacks a verifiable legal identity. As we stand at the threshold of what many call the Age of Intelligence, this problem has evolved from inconvenient to existential. The question of proving we're human, of knowing with certainty that we're speaking to another person and not a sophisticated algorithm, has become one of the most urgent challenges of our time. The statistics are chilling: internet traffic is now split almost exactly in half: 50.2% human, 49.8% bots. And the vast majority of those bots aren't benign; they're designed to deceive, manipulate, and extract value. They're everywhere. Not just on public social networks, but infiltrating every messaging platform you use: WhatsApp conversations with "friends" who might not exist, Telegram groups filled with synthetic voices, Discord servers where you can't tell human from machine. We've reached a troubling threshold where many of us, in our most honest moments, must admit: we can no longer reliably tell if we're communicating with another human being or with a machine programmed to manipulate our emotions, our decisions, our trust. This erosion of certainty is transforming the very nature of online interaction. Trust, that precious, fragile foundation of all human connection, is crumbling. People are withdrawing, becoming cynical, questioning everything. They need spaces where they can be absolutely certain they're engaging with real humans, where authenticity isn't a hope but a guarantee. Yet when you look at the platforms that dominate our digital lives, you find not solutions but indifference. They have no incentive to solve this problem; in fact, they often benefit from the confusion. The dream of the early internet, of genuine human connection across distances, is slipping away, replaced by a landscape of uncertainty and manufactured interaction. This isn't just a technical problem. It's a profoundly human one, touching on our deepest needs for authenticity, connection, and trust.
3. Now let's talk about what this broken system means for the communities themselves: the organizations that have built something real, something valuable, something worth protecting. There's a revolution coming in how brands connect with consumers, and it's going to center on direct community engagement. Everyone can see it coming. Yet today, the path to reach your community is blocked by gatekeepers who profit from your relationships. Picture this scenario that plays out thousands of times every day: You're a brand with something valuable to offer. You want to reach the University of Cincinnati's student body: 50,000 young people who might genuinely benefit from what you're offering. But you can't reach them directly. Instead, you must pay Meta, X, Snapchat, or TikTok premium rates to "geofence" the campus and run advertisements through their platforms. These platforms charge you handsomely for access, yet they can't guarantee that a single view, click, or engagement comes from a real human being. You're paying for bot traffic, for fake clicks, for manufactured engagement. And it's getting worse every day as AI-generated content floods these platforms. Brands understand they're trapped in a broken system, but they have no alternative. Here's what makes this situation truly unjust: the University of Cincinnati owns its community. They built it. They nurtured it. They created the value that brands want to access. Yet when brands pay to reach that community, the revenue flows to Facebook, to TikTok, to third-party ad exchanges: to everyone except the university that actually created and maintains the community. The university owns the asset being monetized, yet captures none of the economic value. This dynamic is playing out across thousands of member-based organizations: non-profits orgs, alumni associations, professional groups, sports clubs. They've invested decades building trust and community, only to watch others extract the financial value. The approach is indirect, impersonal, and fundamentally disrespectful to both the community and the brands trying to reach them. Trust erodes on both sides. Brands grow cynical about where their marketing dollars actually go. Communities feel exploited, watching their carefully cultivated relationships turned into someone else's revenue stream. And the gap between authentic community engagement and sustainable revenue generation continues to widen. There has to be a better way: a way that respects the value communities have created, that gives brands confidence they're reaching real people, and that allows genuine, trust-based relationships to flourish. The current system isn't just inefficient; it's fundamentally unjust.

The Solutions We're Building:

1. This is where Scoop enters the picture, not as another platform promising to solve everything, but as a fundamental reimagining of what mass communication can be when it's built from the ground up for the world we actually live in. We looked at the problem facing community leaders (those managing thousands or hundreds of thousands of members with nothing but clunky email tools and expensive SMS campaigns) and we asked a simple question: what if we could design something better? What if we could create a space that combines the real-time energy and reach of Twitter, the familiarity and accessibility of email, the directness of SMS, all in one unified experience that actually respects people's attention? That's what we've built. Scoop integrates real-time messaging, email, and SMS into a single, elegant feed that's designed for both scale and clarity. Instead of messages disappearing into crowded inboxes or getting lost in endless thread chaos, they appear in one thoughtfully designed space where they're easy to find, easy to trust, and easy to act upon. This isn't about bombarding people with more notifications (God knows we all have enough of those). It's about creating a modern digital commons where important information flows naturally, where updates feel relevant rather than intrusive, where community members can stay connected without feeling overwhelmed. Let me give you a real example of what this looks like in practice: Take the University of Cincinnati: 50,000 current students and over 360,000 living alumni scattered across the globe. In a world without Scoop, reaching these people meant sending mass emails that maybe 8% of recipients would open, or expensive SMS campaigns that felt impersonal and were easy to ignore. Now when that community is using Scoop; they will have a vibrant, living feed where targeted, timely updates reach people where they actually are, in a format that feels natural and approachable. When the university needs to share breaking news, event updates, or important deadlines, those messages don't compete with spam and promotional noise. They appear in a dedicated space that people actually want to check. And here's the crucial difference that makes everything else possible: every single person in that feed is a verified human being. Not a bot. Not an anonymous profile. Not a fake account. Real people, creating real conversations, building real community. This is the promise of Scoop: trustworthy, real-time mass communication that honors both the sender's intent and the recipient's attention. It's what modern community infrastructure should feel like.
2. Building on that foundation of trust, we're tackling the identity crisis head-on with a solution that's both powerful and elegant. Scoop is creating a mass communication platform exclusively for verified humans, using cutting-edge identity providers like WorldID, Veriff, and Persona to ensure that everyone in the conversation is exactly who they claim to be. The process is beautifully simple. Anyone whose joining their community, whether that's a university, a congregation, a professional association, or any other group must verified their human identity. And we've made this as frictionless as possible. The verification typically takes less than three minutes. It's fast, secure, and nearly invisible in the user experience. You do it once, and then you're in: a verified member of a community where everyone else is also verified. This isn't some futuristic concept we're promising will arrive someday. It's happening right now, today, because the need is urgent and the technology exists. As bots continue to overwhelm the open internet, people deserve spaces where they can be absolutely certain they're interacting with fellow humans. Where a like means something because it came from a real person. Where a comment reflects actual human thought, not AI-generated engagement farming. Where the community you're building is real, not artificially inflated with fake accounts. The psychological impact of this certainty cannot be overstated. When you know you're speaking to real people, when that doubt and suspicion is removed, something profound happens. Trust returns. Conversations deepen. Community strengthens. People stop performing for algorithms and start connecting with each other. This is what we're building at Scoop: not just a verification system, but a restoration of the trust that makes authentic community possible in digital spaces. In a world increasingly overrun by synthetic interaction, we're creating spaces that are undeniably, verifiably, beautifully human.
3. Now let's talk about how this transforms the economic equation and creates genuine win-win scenarios that simply weren't possible before. Remember that University of Cincinnati example? Here's where everything comes together in a way that's both elegant and just. When brands want to reach the UC community (those 50,000 students and 360,000 alumni), they don't go through Facebook or TikTok anymore. They work directly with the university. The university owns the feed. They control the experience. They set the standards. And crucially, they capture the revenue. This isn't just a technical change; it's a fundamental redistribution of power and value back to the communities that created it. Our platform is thoughtfully designed so that advertising doesn't feel like an intrusion but rather like a natural part of the community experience using the media rights concepts in sports marketing, where brands become sponsors of a community based on context rather than irrelevant ad contents. When brands advertise in a Scoop feed, they're doing so in a context of trust, reaching real verified humans who have chosen to be part of this community. The ads are transparent, relevant, and respectful of the space they're entering. And this model works for every type of large community you can imagine: alumni associations, professional organizations, non-profit organizations, athletic clubs, and so on. Any community with scale can now capture the economic value of their own audience instead of watching others extract it. Think about what this means for brands: they achieve dramatically better ROI because they're reaching verified humans in trusted spaces, not buying bot traffic and fake engagement. They know their message is landing with real people who have genuine interest. The certainty alone is worth the investment, but they also get better response rates, more authentic engagement, and stronger brand affinity because they're approaching people in a space those people have chosen and trust. For communities, this is transformative. Suddenly there's a sustainable revenue stream built on top of the audience they've spent years or decades cultivating. They can reinvest in better programming, more services, stronger support for their members. They're not being exploited by platforms anymore. They're being empowered to capture the value they've created. And for community members themselves? They get advertising that's actually relevant, delivered by an organization they trust, in a space that respects their attention. No tricks, no dark patterns, no algorithmic manipulation. Just straightforward value exchange: access to valuable community content and communication in exchange for occasional, transparent brand messages. Brands gain confidence and results. Communities gain revenue and control. Members gain respect and relevance. This is what happens when you realign incentives and build systems that honor the true value of human community. This is the future Scoop is building, where authentic connection and sustainable economics aren't in tension but in harmony.

Who is Scoop for:

1. Non-Profits
2. Universities
3. Communities
4. Athletic Clubs

Have Questions?

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at [email protected]