Charities Galore But How To Find And Compare Them?
Est. read time: 5 mins
Fishburners
Recently I found myself in a giving mood but without money attending a pitch night at Fishburners where I watched several Charity Startups with great enthusiasm sling their WHY in an elevator pitch of about 90 seconds towards us. One such Startup was Alexandra Martin’s “Kindpay”, a charity donation platform where you can find charity effectiveness star scores, select from low default donation amounts and donate to multiple charities of your choosing in one simple transaction via Kindpay.
And another, Jessica Walker’s “Wonderfund” (https://wonderfund.com.au) an investment platform which allows friends and family to collectively invest in the children they love. And in times of Corona I got inspired and thought “How can I give back?”, “What are the ways for me, the broke coder, to give back?” It doesn’t come as a surprise that how I love giving back is by giving something of myself, my own creation, my own effort for the betterment of the world. I had done so previously with "Recyclingideas"
(https://RecyclingIdeas.org) which has been put in the freezer for the mo’ because of the need of an income (I’m still looking for passionate participants to become co-founder though, so yeah, reach out!) and like I always start my businesses, I start with the name. The mission is always the same for me, it’s give, give, give tremendous amounts of value that is needed and wanted and that should result in a win-win situation, a situation that doesn’t create losers or leave people behind. I always try to keep the name of the business extremely memorable, sticky, like velcro, with simple nouns that everyone uses and that when combined are making a whole lot of sense. And thus "CharityCoders" was born: Coders looking for charities, charities looking for coders. Simple. Now what’s not so simple is to create and develop the platform for both parties to find each other efficiently and work together effectively from an authentic point of view and with a purpose-based approach.
The Vision
The way I see it is this: It should allow legit charities to create a profile as a Charity and allow them to scan, filter, save and invite coders to tasks they wish to see accomplished. The Coders on their end need to be verified people, perhaps through Linkedin (now they’ve got something at stake i.e. face), who have created a skillset that can be rated by previous Charities that they have worked for. The more they work, the more ratings they get.
The more ratings they get, the more Charities and other people will find them. The idea is it becomes a platform where not only Charities can benefit from the receiving end but Coders can benefit from both the giving and the exposure. A Coder with 53 ratings at an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars, can be contacted by other parties for 1) primarily because these parties look for people who are GIVERS and 2) because their profiles get picked up by search engines and obviously also by Linkedin. To me, that’s a win-win. Even if you as a coder have only performed 4 hours with 1 Charity.
So How Would It Work?
Questions that rise:
- How would Charities deal with coders in terms of privacy, contracts and/or agreements?
- Would they give out a contract at all?
- And how binding would that contract/agreement be?
- What about access to the code, the cPanel, the hosting?
- What if the Coder screws it up?
- What if the Coder abandons the project?
- Could we require the use of existing Coder platforms for communication purposes such as Slack?
- Would the Coders have to do the work 100% free of charge?
- Does CharityCoders come in between?
- Will CharityCoders ask for a fee from either or both parties?
Give Coders Exposure
One possible business model that would work, in my humble opinion, is that we asked for a yearly fee from the Charity but not from the Coder. Coders can stay on for as long as they want as long as they keep their profile up-to-date. The moment they do not want to be contacted anymore by Charities through our platform for charitable work, they should be able to set their profile to “muted”.
Then some of their profile settings won’t show anymore so that they can’t be reached anymore, only the settings that are needed to showcase themselves on their résumé i.e. that they do have an account and that they have worked for X number of Charities.
Charities ought to get exposure
Charities would need to pay in order to get on the platform because we provide exposure for them. We provide great looking profile pages and comparison views so that coders and other people can easily compare them and make the best choice for them. We understand that Charities do have costs and we are trying to reduce their costs by offering them free Coders. In return for that, we ought to earn an income and make a profit, maybe a limited profit, sure but without budget, it’s very unlikely that we’ll stay afloat in the long run. Charities need money to run, Coders need money to survive or thrive, we need money to run as well. Oh, and did I mention, CharityCoders isn’t a Charity? Let’s be clear on that.
Just because we're a company doesn't mean we won't give back to society. Providing jobs is philanthropy in and of itself.
