By WALE MAFOLASIRE
Guest Columnist
Each year on GivingTuesday, nonprofit organizations and places of worship everywhere hope to collect donations to support their crucial, life-saving missions. With conflicts raging worldwide and massive food insecurity, it came at a critically important moment this year.
Around a decade ago, I found myself asking a question: would I be more willing to donate to a cause if there was a more accessible and trustworthy way to do it? For instance, I found myself at Sunday church service without any cash on hand to donate, inadvertently forgetting to stop at the ATM beforehand, despite my motivation to contribute. When I tried to find online donation portals to give, I would encounter complicated and extensive forms that did not work on mobile devices.
Donating to a cause near and dear to your heart should not be time-consuming or complicated, especially since the motivation to contribute can sometimes be an inspired moment. People want to support the things they care about passionately. What’s more, research shows that people want to be more generous, with most saying they want to give at least once a month.
The difficulties I and others experienced and the desires of generous people inspired me to develop Givelify, an online and mobile giving app that provides a simple and safe process for individuals to find and donate to the organizations and causes of choice. From the palm of one’s hand, people can give any amount their heart desires at any time, from anywhere.
As always, we were amazed at the generosity of our community this year. This past GivingTuesday, $3.3 million in total donations was given through Givelify to 8,698 organizations from over 20,000 individuals.
Since its inception in 2014, Givelify has supported mission-driven organizations in ways I could not have imagined. We have grown to over 1.3 million donors, supporting more than 60,000 organizations. Overall, our platform helps our organizational partners collect nearly $1 billion every year from donors who can give in just three simple taps. And this spirit of joyful giving continues to flourish, in part facilitated by the seamless ability of donors to track their contributions right from their fingertips and celebrate the impact they make with each gift.
While first-time app development was a challenge, I felt empowered by the encouragement of those who believed in its mission and by the developer-friendliness of the mobile app ecosystem.
I began developing Givelify’s first versions after crowdsourcing startup capital from friends, family, and community members. When it came to creating the app itself, I found Google Play to be profoundly helpful. The guidance and initial materials provided were instrumental in helping me shape the user experience of the app and further my own understanding of concepts like copywriting.
And I’m not alone. According to a new report, 94 percent of small app publishers reported that they can build, innovate, and achieve new things because of apps and app stores. Ninety-three percent of small app publishers noted that they can compete with larger companies thanks to apps and app stores – a reality we’ve seen throughout our growth journey in working to keep pace with bigger players.
We’ve come a long way since the earliest versions of our app. Today, we are driven by friendly competition in the mobile app ecosystem to develop the best and safest user experience for charitable giving. In line with these goals, we now have a large team of developers dedicated to continuing to improve the app based on user feedback, a suite of different analytical tools that can be used to help organizations understand their donors built on the LAMP stack, and machine-learning-driven fraud protection to protect our user base built on Python.
While Givelify started as one of the first apps of its kind, the market has since expanded to include more apps centered around charitable giving. The competition across the mobile app ecosystem is not only beneficial for the organizations they support, but also for our company to continue to build the best experience we can for our giving community. We know that together, we can do more good.
After all, for these organizations, every dollar counts. We would encourage everyone to think about the impact they can make in their communities. No contribution is too small.
Wale Mafolasire is the founder and CEO of Givelify, an Indianapolis-based online and mobile giving platform.