High Score Labs News   •   June 2, 2018

As an implementation partner, California mortgage banking firm CMG Financial enjoyed a successful launch of HomeFundIt, a federally-approved crowdfunding platform specially designed to help homebuyers afford down payments. HomeFundIt shows the power of applying an existing technology in a new way. Through its innovative positioning of crowdfunding as a viable option for home financing, HomeFundIt has already made a major impact, helping people to raise funds for mortgages since its October 2017 launch.

Following the successful launch of HomeFundIt, including a mobile app, CMG Financial had another idea for boosting the platform. CMG wanted to give employers an opportunity to incorporate HomeFundIt into their benefits packages. Companies would match donations to employee campaigns. By offering the possibility of home ownership as a benefit, companies can attract top employees and retain them by helping them to thrive. Just like HomeFundIt expanded on the possibilities of crowdfunding, this latest idea reconsidered what a benefits package can include.

It was decided to extend the HomeFundIt application in Sitecore to support Affinity Portal. The portal streamlines the process for companies to partner with CMG and offer their employees HomeFundIt donation matching. This required extending the infrastructure we’d built even further, while retaining the accessibility that contributed to the platform’s early success. Part of why homebuyers gravitate to HomeFundIt is that the platform is easy to use. We knew that for companies to partner with CMG and offer HomeFundIt donation matching to their employees, implementing the benefit had to be easy for them.

The goal of Affinity Portal is to help partner companies automatically create internal “microsites” to manage and track their employees’ HomeFundIt campaigns, including robust analytic reporting. These microsites are seamlessly integrated into the platform’s existing donation system, and employees with existing campaigns can easily migrate them into their company’s system. That means setting up donation matching is as convenient as setting up an account in the first place. We also streamlined the process for employees by creating custom educational content for each microsite.

HomeFundIt has already helped many people realize their dreams of home ownership. The company partnerships based on the Affinity Portal spread this dream even further, and opens up the possibility that help with mortgage down payments will one day be a benefit employees expect.