Would you give a little more to charity if it was REALLY easy?
I'm trying to get a side project going which aims to have a positive impact.
It also sort of solves a problem that I have - but does anyone else have it?!
Basically I'd like to support great charities - but I don't want to spend loads of time researching the best ones. I'd also like to respond to urgent appeals - but sometimes I forget or feel like I don't necessarily have the money set aside right now.
So basically I'm trying to create a simple donation management tool https://givesuper.co.uk. Essentially you choose causes you care about rather than specific charities, and what percentage of your monthly donation you'd like to go to each. Then set up a single monthly donation for your entire charity budget and Give Super decides the best way to support those causes - and urgent appeals?
I know there's sites like Charity Navigator in the US which are good for researching charities - but I still feel like it could be a lot simpler?
Would really love any feedback and if you could take a look at the MVP I created at https://givesuper.co.uk
Personally I would rather donate to specific charity than a domain. Even if I don't have much visibility (either I don't want to research, or it's not transparent), donating to some cause without knowing which charities it goes it feels quite shady to me. You might as well be keeping all the money to yourself.
Sometimes people are also very geopolitical and don't realize we all live on the same planet. Why should my money go to some forest restoration efforts in Brazil and Argentina when we have homeless people here in country X?
Similar to the commenter here from Chechia, in Estonia it's very easy to setup direct debit via phone or your bank to the charity you want to support. However this works only for local charities but I personally want to support some international too. I might [1] use your service if the navigation was via causes/domains, and in the end you have the option to either select the whole domain (but still have a list of all the charities), or you could fine-tune it more by the geography, charity size, or some other aspect within that sector.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47883410-the-mom-test - my statement here that I might use this service doesn't mean I would def use it.
Really enjoying the Mom test. Really agree with the idea of asking about people's problems and trying to avoid discussing your solution, and not to be mislead by compliments or vague enthusiasm.
I also appreciate it's length - so many books could convey their key message in a similar length - but end up 4 times the size!
Also - I've downloaded The Mom Test. I'm familiar with the general concept but not read this
Thanks for your comment.
I agree that trust and transparency is crucial and are my core values. Users will know exactly where their money is going in the end. The platform is just a tool to help broker where that money goes.
Geopolitics is something I've encountered as an important factor a few times. Users would have the ability to filter at local, national or international level - among other things like charitable spending ratio, income size, number of volunteers and anything that is publically available.
I responded to petr17102018 about donating directly which is a good point - but I still think I can add value here.
I also think it's a good point that controlling individual charities is extremely important - users can have the choice of how much control they want.
Appreciate the feedback - if you think you "might" use a service like this - I'd really appreciate if you sign up to the mailing list and give me any feedback or see if I can offer something of value
I feel like I've seen this idea pass through here before, and I definitely like it. One thing I'd like to see more of is transparency and accountability when I'm donating. What's my dollar going towards? Instead of donate to charity X, how about donate to project Y of charity X, and have a way to view its progress and final outcome. I'm sure a lot of these big charities see a lot of waste and mismanagement.
Thanks for your comment.
Transparency is crucial and one of my core values. Unfortunately it's not an easy thing to index and select against when searching a large db of charities...
Similarly it's difficult for a central platform to be able to index on specific projects within charities.
This comes under the qualitative analysis - which can be done for a small subset of charities - but would be difficult to drill down - say Homelessness in Moscow.
Waste and mismanagement is something that can be measured to an extent - large UK charities are required to report their "Charitable Spending Ratios" - which at least gives an idea of administration expenses.
I don't have this problem. The charities I'd support are pretty well-known in the Czech republic (there are not many of them), and some of them can take a payment by card online, so it is pretty easy to donate money.
Thanks for your response. It's great to hear from people who don't have this problem as well.
May I ask if you ever feel like donating to additional charities/causes - but choose not to because you already donate enough?
I guess the use case I'm implying is that you could add a new charity to your portfolio without setting up a new payment or increasing your overall spend.
Similarly you could increase your overall spend and boost donations to all your existing charities in one go.
This makes sense only to people who donate to multiple charities, often or regularly. Which is not my case.
Yes totally - 100% targeting people who would want to donate a fixed regular amount and have it end up at multiple charities and causes.
I love this idea and would use this if somehow you were really good at proving to me that the charities you picked based on my preferences actually were the best / most effective to give to at any given time.
I love the idea of having a charity broker type person just like I can have someone who decides how to invest my retirement money based on my risk tolerance. I’d love someone who I can trust to donate my money based on my personal prefs and also based on which causes are “performing” best at that time.
Great idea! Will be following this!
Thanks, I like the way you framed it as a "charity broker", that is a useful analogy.
Feels like there's two slightly different use cases that I need to get straight in my head - basically qualitative vs quantitative.
The quantitative data. eg causes, income size, age of institution, areas of operation is more easily available and searchable - but is unclear whether this is useful enough for people to choose charities based on it alone.
The qualitative data - evaluation of current projects, effectiveness and operations. This can be translated into some kind of scoring system - like Charity Navigator - but it's difficult to see how to scale that across every charity. Although I can see the value in it existing...
Would appreciate if you want to sign up to the mailing list and tell me what I'm doing wrong!
Done 👍
Thanks! 🙏
Absolutely! I think that if it was really easy to give more to charity, more people would be willing to do so.
Personally, I try to donate to charity whenever I can. For example, I sometimes give my old clothes to the homeless or orphanages. And one time, I even donated my car to a car donation Oregon that helps families in need.
If there were more convenient ways to give to charity, I think that more people would be willing to do so. Whether it's through online donations or mobile apps, making it easier to give would definitely encourage more people to get involved and make a difference in the world.
Wow - thanks for the feedback. It really does make so much difference to hear what people's first impressions are - what's obvious, what's not and what thoughts and questions jump to mind.
It really helps solidify thinking around what is and isn't useful.
I was busy all day yesterday with my son's birthday party so didn't get a chance to respond.
There's a couple of common threads here so I'll address those first:
I think this part is achievable. The goal is that as a user you will see and control (if you want to) the specific charities you are donating to as well as a complete history - broken down by cause, geographies, institution size etc.
Currently if you click through a cause - the next page show a list of the top charities and you can choose them manually or select all. I can see that some people may prefer to choose just a cause and let the charities change month to month - others just select specific charities. Either way it's extremely important to show exactly where the money ends up and which charities you've helped.
This is much trickier to do at scale. There are around 169,000 registered charities in the UK alone, also it's extremely subjective as to what types of projects you might personally believe to be the best where others may disagree - eg relgious activites. There's some excellent resources like Charity Navigator which rate and research specific charities - and I recommend people look there if they're interested. I couldn't provide that level of detail and the resources that go into that research - at least not initially.
However it's possible to leverage that research and other public resources to make my own recommendations. Which is what I'm doing now to produce the charity lists for each cause. Over time if there was enough interest I'd be able to spend more and more time partnering and researching across causes and regions and explaining why.
The other aspect mentioned was geopolitics and fine-tuning. I think this is one area where I can really add value. There is decent detailed public data which allows searching on various dimensions - "area of operation", annual income, number of volunteer, charitable spending ratio etc.
So you could choose "Homelessness in London" as opposed to Homelessness. And also "Climate Change Internationally" - then filter down to a smaller and smaller set of charities tailored to you.
If people are motivated and organised to donate directly to charities - I encourage them to do so. Give Super's niche needs to be people who want to give more to charity but really are not sure who to donate to - or who want to donate to a variety of causes without researching and managing them all individually and maintaining say 10 or more separate recurring payments.
Also I'm personally excited by the idea of an "Urgent Appeals" category - which sort of by definition is not a fixed donation to a specific charity or cause. But as a user you could feel good that you're donations are responding to different urgent appeals each month automatically.