The world is ready for a charity app! (New idea inside, please critique and comment)
I believe we need a charity app! I know what you’re thinking: “Not another app!”. But hear me out…
-
Tax benefits. People expect that their charity donations are tax deductible. At least in Denmark, this is done automatically when one donates to the larger charities (e.g. UNICEF), which I am sure is a great boon for many “casual/sofa altruists”. It would be nice if the app automatically reports donations to the (local equivalent of) IRS, but it seems like this requires a lot of (tedious/bureaucratic) work.
-
Heterogeneities in countries. In extension to the above, different countries (I would guess — I have no idea) have a lot of differences between them when it comes to the law and policies concerning charity. For instance, the tax rules and the way you report donations to the IRS, but also how you handle credit card information and so on. It seems to me, that it might be impossible to have one app for all countries. In particular, one might have to develop (and maintain!) an app for each country.
Getting charities on board. I don’t know whether charities would be willing to participate in a project like this. I see no difficulties if the app were just to direct people to the webpage of the charity in question, but it might be more difficult if one allows for direct in-app donations. [when donating directly through GiveWell, they also mention that the charities prefer that people go to the actual charity webpage and donate, rather than through the GiveWell system. However, it is encouraging that GiveWell seems to have overcome this hurdle and have made their own donation system]
One could consider making the platform more “social media”-like, i.e. having the app include a social network. This could be through an existing platform — Facebook comes to mind — or a separate platform, where you have “EA friends” and you can “share” and “like” donations of you and your friends. This inclusion is controversial, though, but could possibly boost donations in a huge way (by a kind of positive feedback; when your friends donate, you might want to donate too).
If the charities are willing, people can also get feedback through the app. Maybe one has an “inbox”, where you get updates from the charities. Either broad overviews (in this month/year/whatever, charity X achieved this and this) or more specific (your donation X went into buying Y, helping Z).
This sounds similar to what Sanjay Joshi has been working on for the past year with SoGive. http://sogive.org/
It might be worth asking him for some ideas and potential problems.
Also Giving What We Can has the MyGiving section which tracks donations in a more manual way.
Thanks David! Much appreciated!
Hey, I may have misunderstood, but this seems similar to this existing EA project: https://www.agoraforgood.com/
Thanks, Ben! I didn’t know about this project. Will check it out!
I really like the World Food Programme app “Share the Meal’. It’s simple & intuitive and yes, it does give a little thrill when donating. Most importantly it’s really helpful to show my seven year old about giving. Every time she tries a new food, we get on the app and donate a week’s worth of meals to the WFP (a much better incentive than giving her the cash and it’s only $3.50 to do that—I suspect 3.50 would mean a lot less to my daughter and the effect would wear off pretty quickly). Now I’m linking other good behaviors to the app rewards, so it’s quite a useful parenting tool. There’s a little story about a child in need at the end—the only thing is my daughter thinks she’s donating to that particular little child, even though I’ve explained about the representative picture to her. But she also gets to learn about countries like Malawi and Jordan, so it’s all good.
Great to hear from you Mikkel, this is indeed very similar to my project SoGive (as David Nash has already mentioned)
SoGive is a UK-oriented charitable giving app which will enable tracking of donations and allow donors to see the impact of their donations—so very similar to what you’ve described. A few comments from me:
Positives:
I agree with much of your view that there is a need here
I am possibly more bullish than you are about the value of integration with social media—people are influenced by social norms, so I think there is potential here if it’s done right. For example, “nudging” donors to publish their donations could lead to positive feelings of pride, and allowing people to follow the donations of celebrities could be exciting features (if properly handled, of course)
I found getting buy-in from charities to be mostly easy
Challenges:
I question whether it makes sense to consider this an app for EAs (not sure if that’s what you have in mind) - EAs currently constitute a tiny market, and I personally wouldn’t build a project on the assumption that the EA movement will become mainstream
If you make this app more mainstream, then it will need to cover lots of charities—this is an important challenge. My (incomplete) research suggests that the UK is a better jurisdiction than most for access to charity data (but still not as good as I would like!) I haven’t considered Denmark
I agree with your points about heterogeneities between countries
You suggest that funding might not be that big a problem. I have not found this to be the case
More than happy to discuss further—I have just tried to connect with you (or someone with the same name as you!) on facebook. There is much I could say to expand on these points, so if you would like to discuss further, let me know.
Sanjay—it seems like your project is frozen. Would love to know why.
Dear Sanjay,
Thank you for your post. Much appreciated!
I did not know of your project. Sounds awesome and I will definitely look into it. As to your comments:
RE: Social media I am personally more bullish about this than my original post might suggest. In fact, I think the things you mention could be powerful motivators for increased giving. The reason why I sound bearish is that friends I have talked to were somewhat on the fence about the idea. And I can follow their reasoning: They/I fear that the social media integration might become “unhealthy” (I am imaging people “bragging” about their donations in the same way that some people feel the need to constantly tell all of Facebook how happy they are...I don’t like this side of social media). HOWEVER, either my fears (and those of my friends’) are exaggerated OR this might simply be a situation where the ends justify the means (it seems that, on a large scale, more donations to people in need would outweigh the negatives of social media).
RE: EA This was definitely not meant as catering to EA people only. However, I feel like having an EA backbone—or at least having people from the EA community contribute with ideas—would possibly make the project better AND be a nice outlet for EA to a more mainstream audience. I might be wrong, though. In any case, I agree with you that there should be as many charities as possible. This would appeal the more people, hopefully.
I am definitely also happy to discuss further! I added you on Facebook, but would prefer the discussion to stay here for a while—at least while the discussion is somewhat general, so that other people can follow it and comment if they want. I would love to hear about your experiences with this. In particular, I’d also love to hear if you think there are room for more than one app (i.e. for more than SoGive). I.e. if you feel like this is something I should continue with or whether some form of collaboration would be better.
Hi Mikkel. I’m a bit late here, but would love to chat about your findings.
Mikkel, I’m working on a gift-giving app:
https://creator.ionic.io/share/a17d95706fc3
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kmq4398ht10b7u1/AACtTAGkARkdwE0Ws9LKt_gIa?dl=0
that is very similar to what you are describing.
See also previous work: https://impact.hackpad.com/EA-Mobile-Giving-App-Working-Title-Donr-WArgpXCFp47
I’ll send a private message in a sec. :-)
Awesome Jonas! I will check out your work and get back to you asap! Please do shoot me a private msg—would love to get in touch!
Hey Mikkel,
Thanks for the post. This looks really interesting. I’m going to be making something similar in the next few weeks (an Angular2 web app with a simple RESTful API that tracks personal donation history), just as a personal project, so there could a bit of overlap and I’d love to contribute to the project if there’s support for it. If you’d like, just flick me a message and we can talk some more.
Andy.
Hi Andy, would be great to get in touch with you about what you have in mind—there may be scope for collaboration with SoGive too.
Dear Andy,
Thank you very much for your comment. That sounds like a pretty cool project! I will definitely be in touch (when I get a look at the above suggestions and get my own head sorted out).
Cheers!
There are lots of spammers on this forum, you may want to avoid posting your email
Thanks for the heads-up kbog, just changed my original comment.
I’m a little late to this party, but have been thinking about something very similar. I am a software engineer by training and trade and would love to contribute to any efforts in this regard. If any of the individuals who have commented here—Sanjay, Mikkel, Andy, others—are still working on something similar, please let me know and I would love to help out in any way I can!
-Rajat
Hi Rajat. I’m working on something. Do you want to chat?
Too hard to read the small font.
What do we know about whether there would be market demand for this app?
I have no idea, actually. My intuition is that there is one...or that there will become one. Or at least that there ought to be one.
Maybe the market can be created through social media? (see Sanjay’s post below).
Do you think it would make sense to try to assess this first through market research or creating an MVP?