The World at Work is powered by . This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place.
Name: CauseCart
Big Idea: CauseCart is a Chrome extension and Firefox add-on that works with ecommerce websites to donate a portion of every user’s online purchases to charity.
Why It’s Working: CauseCart seeks to revolutionize the culture of donation by enabling shoppers to give money to a charity of their choosing for free. All donations are handled between CauseCart and the ecommerce platform.
Social startup CauseCart revolutionizes the online donation model by siphoning a percentage of a user’s ecommerce purchase to a charity of his or her choice — all at no cost to the user. The idea came to entrepreneur Michael Geer when he realized that online giving would skyrocket if users could integrate it easily into their everyday lives instead of one major yearly donation.
“There’s a bit of frustration today that there’s really great people making a difference, but they’re built on top of a donation model,” Geer explains. “We’re not optimizing all that traffic and that goodwill.”
The way that CauseCart works is simple: Users log on to the startup’s website, drag the CauseCart add-on to their Chrome or Firefox browser and select a charity of their choice. Then the user continues to shop online the way that they normally do. CauseCart communicates with popular ecommerce platforms, such as Amazon, to donate a percentage of each purchase to the charity. For example, if a user buys $20 worth of goods on Amazon, the platform will send at least 5% of that money to CauseCart. The user pays nothing extra, and he or she is able to micro-fund a cause like charity: water or Pencils of Promise.
“The money we’re actually raising, the money that goes out, is driven by the energy that’s already there,” Geer adds. “The actual money is coming from the marketing expense of the online shop.”
No comments:
Post a Comment