Rise: a program to make it easier to donate to important causes  

Independently created an application for phones of illiterate and low income men in India without broadband.


Team: Alethea Campbell and Simone Abegunrin

 

Our survey showed that people with disopsable incomes are disinclined to give because it is hard to verify the legitimacy of the cause and hard to feel connected. Also, referring back to Fogg, many people who have the fiscal capacity to donate do not have the right combination of motivational triggers. Our platform, rise, was created to make it easier to connect people with disposable incomes to charitble causes; the rise app has the user connect to their bank account and set the amount they would like to donate over a week/month/year’s span of time so that it is already figured in the budget. After indicating what types of causes they care about and whether they would like to hear about regional, national, and/or local causes, rise takes care of the rest. The user receives a notification regarding a small donation to a cause algorithmically chosen based on the preferences the user set, and all the user has to do is essentially confirm or deny the donation. Research, including our survey, has shown that people are more willing to donate if they specifically know how the money will be used, so rise tells you up front where your donation will be spent and exactly how that will impact the recipient.  rise only offers up certified, IRS-approved charitable causes and automatically compiles documentation for tax breaks. You can link the company you work with to meet up with other coworkers to volunteer, and you can link your Facebook not to see the dollar amounts of your friends, but just to see cool places they have donated. Our average survey respondent was a middle aged, Christian, white woman making $60,0000 dollars, so that is for whom we initially designed the product for as a go to market strategy.

The app is just one part of the platform. We see news as a great way to drive giving, as many people read about harrowing tragedies or interesting causes and want to help – they just don’t know how and don’t have enough initiative to search on their own given the “scroll” culture. Therefore, instead of forcing users to find causes on their own, rise would partner with news organizations to direct readers to making quick donations to support a charity related to the topic of the article via an impact calculator; e.g. on an article about water inequity in Mexico, the add on would say $5 can build a water purificatoin system in the town the article discussed. Organizations that allow the rise add on to appear on the page of their digital articles can match donations for users who are donating from the impact calculator on their site.

Users can also download a plug in for their bar that accomplishes a similar effect for things they search.

RISEplugin.png

With bright colors, easy diction, and simple integration into the workday, rise endeavors to make it easy for people to help others rise


Please view the application at proto.io: https://pr.to/9QYIJB/)


Course: Harvard University, Design Survivor, Designing for Desirability. 

*Please note, the following challenge was a 3 week design & research experiment.