Raise Pad

Crowdsourced Public Giving

RaisePad is a ground-breaking platform that will transform how charities and communities of giving interact. RaisePad is designed to expand donation options, improve how information is shared and to leverage the power of data. RaisePad will bring donors and charities together in a new way and help to create a more persistent and engaging giving experience.

Urban Opus Rationale

RaisePad is a definitive Urban Opus project: partnering with a leading community organization to develop distinctively original data-driven services that can realize their core mission objectives.  RaisePad features the ‘crowd-sourced’ generation of original citizen data, which can be combined beneficially with other data sources in the Urban Opus Datahub.  The data and information will be employed to better understand patterns of community giving and citizenship, which can help us build better communities and better cities. The ultimate goal is to create a better link between people and their communities through giving.

Description

Charities today face a number of challenges. Most charities do not know enough about their donors so they struggle with targeting the right message or story to the right demographic. Charities are also often disconnected with their donor communities as the donations are raised outside of the charities reach. Donors also face a number of challenges. It is difficult to donate time out of our busy lives. It is also hard to justify donating money when it is complex and donors do not know exactly where their money is going.

Charities face an uphill battle trying to get cash donations and/or time from busy people, leading to missed opportunities and development goals that are short. Conversely most donors don’t know enough about the charities they donate to or what happens to the money when they donate so they are less likely to donate more than once. Potential donors today don’t have time to donate and often donating money can be a hassle so they don’t bother. This established system thus alienates huge segments of the potential donor community leaving tens of millions on the table. RaisePad is designed to create a simpler and more flexible platform, which allows for expanded donation options and greater data sharing. The goal is to expand who donates, how they donate and most importantly: why they donate. In addition, charities will be able to gather data about their donors and they will be able to communicate directly with them.

Users of RaisePad will see the impact they are making and have new options for donation. Raisepad will enable traditional options like direct donation but more importantly it will enable new options like marketplace donations. Marketplace donations will enable donors to buy or sell goods and services and donate some or all of the proceeds of the transactions to a charity of their choice. In other words they will be able to do business and donate at the same time. Donors will also be able to donate their “social support” by sharing and raising awareness on their social networks. This will help to engage other individuals and expand the community that cares. Donors will also be able to raise money by donating their demographic / giving data and sharing it with the charity community and/or corporate partners. In that way organizations will pay to understand more about the donor and that money will go to benefit a cause of the donors choice. Another key to RaisePad is that donors will receive targeted information about where their money goes when they donate and they will get a tax receipt.

RaisePad shared data will help to build stronger relationships between charities, donors, community organizations, churches, businesses and local governments.

Activation Path
The full platform and app whould be available within 3-6 months. The prototype, market research and early validation are nearing completion in Vancouver with a team involving students from the Centre for Digital Media.  A first major charity is engaged and the plan is to approach additional charities in the near future.