A social enterprise that taps into the hidden world of online sales referrals allows us to give to charity without opening our wallets.
Richard Morris
Would you donate more to charity if it wasn't coming out of your pocket? Thanks to the combination of several technologies and services, this is now possible through the social enterprise TheGivingMachine.
Every year, online shops pay hundreds of millions of pounds to other websites for sales referrals. This is a hidden pool of money to which we have all added by clicking on a link, buying a product and as a result unknowingly created a sales commission for someone else. TheGivingMachine taps into this established technique called affiliate marketing and enables you to generate a sales commission from buying what you were already going to buy from hundreds of the best known online shops. 75% of these commissions are then converted into free donations to the charities and schools you choose, with the remainder providing the income needed to operate the website and distribute the many donation payments every month.
The mature affiliate marketing platforms enable us to track commissions generated at hundreds of shops back to the user who generated them. By knowing the schools and charities users support (up to four in any percentage split), the donations can all be tracked and distributed correctly. For example, for every £100 spent online, between £2.50 to £5 in free donations is generated and donated to causes the user chooses.
This form of giving has some other interesting outcomes. First, the shopper can choose where to donate. Second, shops now see this type of giving has become a powerful engagement mechanism. Finally, charities and schools can develop a free and regular source of new unrestricted income by simply asking supporters for a small change in behaviour rather than directly "ask" for more money.
Our team, many of whom are parents who work between school drop-off and pick-up, have a very dynamic working environment which has a mixture of home working and community space working. Thankfully, there is a huge array of technologies that enable us to provide a professional service while keeping costs low.
Website, phone lines, email, document and issue management systems are all hosted on cloud platforms, which means we can easily cope with demand increases because all our data can be accessed, managed and amended from wherever we are. Team and board meetings around kitchen tables are as effective (perhaps more so) than around office desks.
Why is being a not-for-profit social enterprise important? Enabling you to generate free donations and manage the thousands of payments every month to charities and schools across the UK is a privilege and is driven primarily by our social purpose and outcome. Being awarded the social enterprise mark means that we join the many other social enterprises who are transforming commerce into a force for good for our communities and beyond.
In 2012, more than 17,000 new givers joined TheGivingMachine (that's more than 1,300 a month) and helped generate more than 220,000 donations that year. We hope to exceed a million free donations generated by the end of 2013. (
http://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/aug/02/technology-making-donating-free)
Richard Morris is the founder and managing director of TheGivingMachine
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