Can charities and startups learn from each other?

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- Great to see you here at the Capital & Growth day of Digital ShoreditchHope you have seen & heard many interesting talks, and you feel like today you can take home new ideas and inspirationIn the next 20 minutes I will not talk about how to fund your start up, or how to write your business plan. I will talk about we can use those skills to contribute to something greater then ourselves

UsTwo digital design studio in Shoreditch, we design and develop mobile apps and games with a user centred approachThe AlphaBet Club organizes monthly events for internationally minded people in Amsterdam and Madrid. And hopefully London soon. ... all the profits from our events support education of slum children in Bangalore, India.

By showing you how to organize a charity hackathon to gatherideas and designsHow to use crowdfunding to get the money to support your causeMaking your charity sustainable by with new business models

It has beenidentified six basic human needs , and everyone is motivated by their desire to fulfill these needs. That definitely is true for meEssentially these are the things that make you happy1. Certainty – the need to be safe and comfortable (survival need)2. Variety – the need for physical and mental stimulation (change, challenge, excitement)3. Significance – the need to feel special and worthy of attention (need for esteem)4. Love & Connection – the need to be loved and connected to others (need for relationships and intimacy)5. Growth – the need to develop and expand (growth, fulfillment, self-actualization)The need to grow and develop, one of the main reasons why we are here today, it gives us and this community a sense of fulfillmentTony Robbins/maslow

We all feel the need to make a difference and contribute to the greater good. Something that is beyond yourselfWouldn’t it make you feel great to be part of something bigger just by giving your money, your time or your skills?The need to give and provide something of value outwards towards other people, the world and the universe at large.

For me the place where I find this is being part of the AlphaBet Club charity. Expats open mindedFor 10 years I lived in amsterdam. When I learhed about abc a few years ago I thought this is great, because the abc throws lots of fantastic parties and I went to all of them and I met a whole bunch of interesting friends from all over the world. But I didn’t know there was more…

The abc is also a non profit organisation. The profits we make at our events are used to support education for children in India.Became active memberThese projects are pre-schools, schools for 3-6 year old children in the slums of Banaglore. These children and their families live in absolute poverty.No running water, no electricity and most importantly no education to enable them to improve their lives. The schools we fund provide them with preparation they need to be accepted into a schoolThey get cloting, 3 meals a day andregular health check upsWe can make a big difference and help them break out of the cycle of povertyWhen I moved to London I didn’t go to the parties as much anymore… but after 6 months in London I really needed a break!

To see the schools and meet all these incredible kids was an amazing experience. Seeing the schools and living conditions in the slumI also got to ask my friends for money and I could spend it on helping the families in the slums. With the help of friends I could donate waterdrums and kerosine stoves to xx40 families. The feeling of satisfaction and hapiness I got from that incredibleAnd then I went back to london to start my new job

and I got introduced into a whole other world, which is the startup world of east london or tech city as we like to call itUstwo is a digital design studio with an interesting structure.We get the freedom design and develop new ideas for games and other apps which means we can kind of act like a startup.Projects like this give us a chance to experiment, launch fast and learn fastWe like to say ‘Just fucking do it, and if an app fails it doesn’t matter as long as we have learnt our lessons from itTo us some failures are still a success!So I was wondering, is there any way that charities can learn from the way these startups work?

Traditional charities do these days? They struggleThis year saqw 20% decrease in donations overall (UK or global?) That’s a lot of money!This mostly affects smaller charitiesWhat about the bigger ones? They’re ok, but they have a problemPeople don’t trust them so much anymore. We see excessive salaries and expensive ad cmapigns in the charity sector and wonder whereopur money is going..We want transparancyA study conducted by the Charity Aid Foundation (CAF) and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) has reported a 20% drop in charitable donations last year.(especially small donations) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20310386The total amount of money donated to good causes fell from £11billion to £9.3billion – the largest one-year decline since records beganAlso… structure? People want transparancyThe ethos of the voluntary sector is being corrupted by the excessive salaries of some charity chief executives, according to trade union Unite.fear your donations are being swallowed up in big wages, administration, advertising and marketing?Charities only hire fundraisers, they are suffering from the crisis.Donations,Memberships, adopt a project

So how can we do things differently? By working the way a startup does!You can start your charity in a day and all you need is a cause you believe in. A problem you want to solve that’s close to your heartPoverty, pollution, hunger, water crisis, lack of education, etcStart with something small that you see happening and you want to changeMaybe you want to provide daily meals to homeless people in your area, or provide support for people experimenting with green energy

Now you can start raising funds, the easiest way to do this is using a crowdfunding platformOr create your unique crowdfunding campaign like iCancer didWe all know Just Giving, but I want to talk about the crwodfunding platform 1% club

They are very interesting because the provide a platform for charities but also experiment with other ideas around International cooperation 2.0So you can use their platform to raise funds,You may want to register as a NGO…Fight poverty with the solution of the massesSo. If all of us can write an online encyclopaedia together, why shouldn’t we be able to solve poverty together?Last year over 90 projects were successfully funded I think mostly active in NLMax 6 monthsFor smaller charities or temporary projects there are platforms like Just Giving and the Dutch 1%ClubTo date they have almost 450 completed projectsYour crowdfunding project may have an end date, but your charity hopefully doesn’t. So how can you use crowdfundingcontinouslyWhen we talk about crowdfunding there isanotheintesting model which more resembles a platform like Kickstarter is the Dutch 1% clubYou have 6 months to fund your projectOrganisation is enganged1%CLUB is the platform that connects smart development projects with people, money and knowledge around the world.They also ask for time and expertise from their members- Charities offer tasks on the websites for anyone to help out withAnd they organize co-creation sessions, a day on which members can come and solve a problem from a charity

Now you’re all set with your charity, start engaging your network, get on twitter and facebook, get the word out!Create a community by using meetupFind a project you want to help with your skills and moneyOr create your own and start raising funds

Start by gathering ideas and designs by organising a hackathon for your charityWe all know the traditional hackathon but charity hackathons are a little differentTwo examples are working 8 hrs for a good cause and the global sustainability jamHow does it work?

Working 8 hours is a good example of a charity hackathon, Annual eventAbout 8 cities in NLIn every city 5 or more groups of creatives work for 5 charities( lots of different backgrounds)Results can be new ideas for campaigns, logo design or a design for your websiteIt’s very easy to get creatives excited to participate because they get to work on a real project and help out a charityThe event itself is fun and inspiring and you meet a lot of great new peopleIn 2012 the event Working 8 hours for a good cause has gone international in 20 cities all over the world from Amsterdam, to Cairo and Berlin to Rio de JaneiroMore than 400 people Maybe next year in London

Example of a project that was done in Lisbon in a slightly different setting11 students from an art academy worked together for a non profit and designed a logo and website for them11 students from the Graduation in Design and Graphic Printing for a non profit NGO called “Corações com Coroa”

You can start one with one question and a handfull of peopleOr you can start one with a number of question and 50 peopleMake sure you have a clear brief and you have a professional brainstorm coach on board to help you out with the brief and planning the evening or day.Try to find creatives with the skills that you needIf you get them excited for your cause they may want to stay involved and help you out

Evolve this into a proper business modelMake your charity sustainableIs there anything else you need to get started, do you have everything you need?Value proposition, customer segments, key activities, Don’t use a traditional business models…To give you some inspiration you can look at business models of other charitiesValue proposition, customer relationships, key activities, and all that jazz

The alphabet club is not like a traditional charity55% of our income is generated from eventsWe work with team awesome volunteersFounder works 50 hrs and travels the world.Funded 2 schools and a school expansionWe have a partner in India that runs the schools on a day to day basisAnd we also pay for part of the running costs of the school or try to find partners that want to help out with thisPartnerships for example A4C who funds the day to day cost from the schoolsFor us this works because there is a need for these type of events, whether the charity exists or notProfits from partiesTicket pricePercentage of bar turnoverRafflesDonations (hardly!) not tapping into that yet as much as we shouldPartnerships: A4C, Philips?VolunteersThis makes us different, the events can exist on their own

Another charity which is disrupting the traditonal modelBringing clean water to people in needFor us its easy to turn on the tap but there is a billion people on this world that have no access to clean water.They have to walk up to 3 hrs to get to a source of water which is often contaminated causing a lot of diseases.Diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

Charity water decided to make a promise. When we started charity: water, we made a bold promise to the general public — 100% of their donations would go directly to the field to fund water projects.And we'd even reimburse credit card fees when donations were made online. So they work with separate bank accounts for both.For their day to day cost such as staff salaries office rent they depend on private donors, foundations and. This has enabled them to use 100% of public donations for water projects.It;’s a smart approach because it provides transparancy in funding

You’ll see the exact projects you funded with photos and GPS coordinates on Google MapsAnd this is important because people want to see what happens to their money (and they definitely don’t want it to go to the salary of the CEO)People are seeing tangible results!At charity: water, we've always believed in the power of proof. We use 100% of all public donations to directly fund water projects for communities in need, and we prove each one using GPS coordinates on Google Maps. Screen Shot 2013-05-18 at 17.13.14Transparancy is very importanttangible

Crowdfunding will help you fund your cause, but what if you want to keep rasing money this wayThere is some smart ways of doing thischarity:water have integrated their their unique crowdfunding campaign in their charity, and this is a conintuous projectThe funding is still time based because they revolve around someone’s birthdayJoey (25) raised $5,050 for people in Africa. A 30-year-old in Sydney raised $12,007. A 29-year-old girl in California just recently raised $32,398. (people have raised up to $32.000 with their birthday pledge interesting approach is the use of crowd funding in personal networks by letting people pledge their birthdayWhen you pledge your birthday, you ask your friends to contribute to the building of a water pumpWhen you have raised enough funds, your waterpump will be built

Can charities and startups learn from each other?

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Can charities and startups learn from each other?