(Flickr: unionsquareventures)

Back in August, Fast Company reported that Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes had sold his startup Jumo, a social network to connect people to nonprofits, to GOOD, the magazine publisher and digital media platform, for undisclosed terms.

Betabeat reported the terms were for $0 and a graceful exit.

Our story said Mr. Hughes's company was a flop, and that the sale was more of a face-saving effort than a true acquisition. "Rather than folding the grant-funded, well-meaning and inordinately high-profile startup and admitting what would surely be a very public failure, he arranged a deal with an old friend," we wrote at the time. Ben Goldhirsh, who went to boarding school with Mr. Hughes, is the CEO and owner of GOOD.

Betabeat has now obtained documents pertaining to the sale, which confirm every bit of our theory, except one. At the time, Mr. Hughes insisted the sale price was not $0, and he was right: The sale had not yet been approved by the state attorney general, a requirement because of its nonprofit status.

The sale was approved and the approval was filed in the Supreme Court of New York on December 30, 2011.

Jumo, a nonprofit corporation which raised more than $3.5 million in grant money from the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the Knight Foundation., among others, was not sold for $0. It was sold for $62,221, based on an appraisal of Jumo's value by Morrison, Brown, Argiz and Farra.

Time and the documents have shown that public statements made by Mr. Goldhirsh and Mr. Hughes were disingenuous. The "Jumo team will be fully integrated into the GOOD ecosystem" or that Mr. Hughes would be working on "Jumo’s next act... will appear under the GOOD imprimatur in some form this November or December" have both proved false. We could find only one employee who had been hired at GOOD after Jumo: Jen Chiou, Jumo's former outreach director. Ms. Chiou is now general manager at GOOD Worldwide, LLC; other Jumo employees went to Tumblr, Artsy, BlackBook Media and other places. Jumo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Additional fun fact: Jumo paid pretty well! Ms. Chiou made $95,000, the CTO made $150,000, and the engineers made between $107,500 and $135,000; Mr. Hughes, as executive director, took a $1 salary.)

Furthermore, while Mr. Hughes was supposedly slated to be a senior advisor to GOOD, we heard nothing about it after the announcement. The Facebook cofounder, whose second act included working on digital strategy for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, has gone on to join the Knight Foundation board, some kind of agency for the viral spread of progressive ideas with MoveOn veterans, and, most recently, take over as publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

Here is what GOOD did get from Jumo:

(a) 1-year exclusive license to use the Corporation's trademarks, copyrights, and brand likeness and the goodwill of the business associated therewith;
(b) a minimum of 10 registered users communications;
(c) a secure API endpoint for the retrieval of the Jumo profile and social graph information based on an email address (personal information to be transferred only if the user opts in to the transfer pursuant to the process described in paragraphs 11 and 12 below); and
(d) facilitation of Purchaser's recruitment of Seller employees.

Jumo also agreed to hand over five MacBook Pros, according to documents.

According to the document, which was filed in December, Jumo was also working to return approximately $488,944 in unused grant funds to The Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, Pershing Square Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation, in accordance with written grant agreements. No debt was transferred in the "sale," but GOOD didn't even get Jumo's domain name or its two patents.

The document filed with the New York Supreme Court:

Jumo - Leave to Sell Assets

Ben Weitzenkorn contributed reporting.

Good Magazine.

Good help—pun unintended—is apparently really that hard to find.

It's pretty typical for companies to offer internal recruiting bonuses to anybody who can bring home a viable applicant that pans out. It wasn't until recently that media companies started offering up these kinds of bonuses (or at least at decent sizes) when they all started looking for engineers (one company this writer worked for offered up a $1,000 bonus for an iOS programmer to the entire company including editorial employees, which is more than any potential editorial bonus was worth).

But a media company taking the bounty to the public—and to Twitter—isn't something we've seen before...until now:

This probably isn't the first time this has ever happened, but it's one of the first instances we've seen of and/or heard of it from such a public, viable brand. For what it's worth, Good Magazine "partnered" with social networking service Jumo back in August; it was founded in 2006 by a then 26 year-old Ben Goldhirsh (entrepreneur Bernie Goldhirsh's son) and among their recruits including one Al Gore III, the son of America's Would-Be President. Despite criticism of their profit models, Good has not only managed to persist, but thrive due in no small part to angel funding and pivoting from being merely a media operation to an "integrated media platform" focused on social causes. They also produce a pretty quality product; between that and their deep pockets, this seems like a smart, crowdsourced version of spending money to make money. Upshot: Don't be surprised if larger, more prominent media brands follow suit in search of tech talent.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has struggled with his ambitious solo start-up, the social network for activism Jumo, ever since its bumpy launch. Waning traffic and disinterested users were making it obvious that the site was not going to catch on, despite multiple redesigns; a tough pill to swallow for the wunderkind whose second act after Facebook, online strategy at the Obama presidential campaign, was another huge success story.

But Mr. Hughes found a solution: rather than folding the grant-funded, well-meaning and inordinately high-profile start-up and admitting what would surely be a very public failure, he arranged a deal with an old friend. GOOD, the publisher-turned-digital-media-platform with a focus on good design and social causes, announced today that it has acquired Jumo for undisclosed terms. But the "acquisition" is not quite the earth-shaker it was made out to be. Betabeat has learned the terms amounted to $0, a loose "advisory" role for Mr. Hughes at GOOD, and the opportunity for Jumo's 16 employees to interview for the start-up's new owner.

Mr. Hughes and GOOD co-founder Ben Goldhirsh are old buddies who went to boarding school together at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. After the Obama campaign, GOOD tried to recruit Mr. Hughes to build out GOOD's online community--but declined so he could try his hand at his own start-up.

The Goldhirsh Foundation became one of Jumo's early investors and the pair stayed close during their entrepreneurial journeys. When it became clear that even Mr. Hughes's resume and extensive network could not save Jumo, Mr. Goldhirsh offered a way for the CEO to save face while imparting web 2.0 cred to GOOD, which produces a website, videos, live events, and print magazine, but wants to beef up its technology, interactive apps, online community and other digital offerings.

Since GOOD is acquiring no technology--Jumo is open-sourcing its code--and hasn't committed to acquiring any engineering talent, the partnership is more of a symbolic marriage than a business deal (contrary to the report today that the companies are "merging forces" in Fast Company, the source of an earlier profile of Mr. Hughes called "The Kid Who Made Obama President").

Jumo is a nonprofit 501c(3) dedicated to building loyal online communities for causes and charitable organizations. But the site's traffic peaked when it launched, and the reaction from the nonprofit sector was tepid, although 15,000 nonprofits signed up. The site's design was confusing, some elements such as a Kickstarter-esque component for campaigns fell flat, and the core idea itself was questionable: why ask users to build a separate profile on a new network, and how do you get them to go from clicking "like" to meaningfully supporting a cause with action?

"As our teams combine, you will see the emergence of a single, vibrant online network on GOOD.is," Mr. Hughes wrote in a vague post on the Jumo blog today. "I will be teaming up with GOOD’s CEO, Ben Goldhirsh, to help grow GOOD and Jumo through an important stage of development."

Sources report that employees within Jumo reacted to the story in Fast Company which broke the news of the acquisition and discussed the future integration. Mr. Hughes is a former Fast Company cover boy. And Inc. Magazine, Fast Company's sister publication, was founded by Mr. Goldhirsh's father, Bernie Goldhirsh.

Betabeat reached out to Chris Hughes, Jumo and Good Media for this piece. Jumo general manager Kristen Titus responded: " We are not disclosing the terms of the agreement, but GOOD is purchasing Jumo assets for an undisclosed sum. Chris Hughes is joining GOOD’s team, along with other Jumo employees, as a Senior Advisor."

Jumo had raised $3.5 million dollars through a grant from the Omidyar Network and Knight Foundation, according to Crunchbase.

Video of Chris Hughes talking about Jumo on Colbert - h/t Working in Boxer Shorts