Blacktie-Pittsburgh

Lee pointed me to the BlackTie-Pittsburgh website, a clearinghouse of information about local benefit events for non-profits. As a would-be donor, you can check the calendar and -- most important -- you can buy tickets. As a non-profit, the site offers what looks like an electronic soup-to-nuts solution for communicating with your constituency.

My initial reaction was -- there we go again. Benefit galas in Pittsburgh are often equal parts fundraising and hobnobbing among the region's social elite. A website about benefits that calls itself "BlackTie" reinforces the implicit narrative that services in the nonprofit sector are financed with the social capital of the well-to-do, who trade their discretionary income for photos in the paper.

But my initial reaction was wrong. The name of the company is cover for something a bit more subversive. BlackTie is online social networking for the Social Register.

BlackTie is, in fact, a successful e-commerce company, based in Denver, with local operations in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis, Arizona, and Kansas City. It offers event planning services as well as ticketing and financial management services. The calendars looks pretty comprehensive, and the site posts photos of each event. It's not just one-stop online shopping; it's a highly-sophisticated MySpace.com for the over-40 crowd. BlackTie can't replace F2F, but MySpace can't do that, either. What both of them do, however, is cut out some of the traditional social middlemen. Teenagers don't need to go to the Mall to hang out with their friends. BlackTie means that the upper crust can hang out online for fun, too. If this really takes off in Pittsburgh, it promises to take a big piece of the social calendar pie -- and thus a big chunk of advertising -- away from the Post-Gazette.