Anyone who’s ever made a donation to charity would probably tell you they have no idea what happened with their donations. Usually, donations are made purely based on a certain level trust for the charity, but unfortunately practice shows this often simply isn’t enough. More often than not, donations disappear into a black hole. And if you want to find out what happens to your donation, you’ll have to wait until the end of the fiscal year for the financial report – and if you’re like most people, you won’t be able to understand much of what going on in that report anyway.
At Incitement, we’ve spent the last 10 years working with charities around the world, and we recognize the importance for donors to have visibility into what happens with their donation. Which is why on Incitement, you don’t donate to charity, but to a charity’s project. And if the charity isn’t able to deliver the results they promise, you the donor get to decide what happens with your donation. Our highest goal is to ensure transparency and integrity to donors.
Decide What Happens To Your Donation
Think of Incitement as your new command center for keeping tabs on your donations. Each time before you make a donation, you get to decide whether you’d like to receive a credit refund in case the charity project fails to meet its fundraising target, or you can decide to let the charity keep your donation. However, the charity won’t be able to cash out your donation just like that. That wouldn’t be very transparent. The charity can re-purpose your donation to another project on Incitement. This way, charities are better able to demonstrate what happens to donations made to their cause, and as a donor you get to follow progress updates to see the impact of your donation. Win-win!
Introducing Purpose Points
So what are Purpose Points? As you may have picked up from the incredibly clever play of words just now (ahem!), Purpose Points are the points that can be re-purposed by either a donor or a charity to, well… continue creating purpose!
As a donor you’ll receive Purpose Points if a project you donated to didn’t meet its fundraising target. That is, if you selected that you’d like to receive a credit refund. You can use your Purpose Points easily to make another donation. If a donor, however, indicated that the charity can keep the donation even if the project fails to meet its fundraising target, the charity will receive the donation in Purpose Points. The charity can then set up a new project and allocate their Purpose Points there. You see how that works?
Charities are only allowed to cash out funds from Incitement for successfully funded projects. If a project isn’t successfully funded, it means they wouldn’t be able to deliver the impact they promised, and so it wouldn’t be right for the donor to send them their funds anyway, nor would it be right for a charity to receive money for a project they wouldn’t be able to deliver.
Of course we want to empower charities as much as we can, but not at expense of transparency and integrity to our donors. So we’ve designed the system to preserve the highest level of transparency and integrity by allowing the donor to give the charity the benefit of the doubt (or not). Fair is fair, we believe.
Corporate giving using Purpose Points
Another great feature we’ve launched is Purpose Points for corporate social responsibility. As a company, you are probably looking at ways to positively impact society and environment in line with your company’s operations. Corporate donations are a great way to do that, but there are many clever ways to do this aside from just making a one-off donation. You can engage you staff in your corporate giving, you can do cause marketing and involve your followers and customers, you can conduct matching programs… There are many ways. Incitement offers fantastic solutions for this – all of the above, and much more!
Companies can buy a package of Purpose Points, and aside from making a one-off donation (which of course you can still do) you can set up a cause marketing campaign, a matching campaign, repeat donations, employee engagement programs, etc. on Incitement to get that little extra edge for the great work you do. If you are interested to do your corporate social responsibility with us, send us a message via support@theincitement.com and we’re happy to help you out.
We have a variety of options for your company to enhance your corporate giving strategy. And we are happy to provide custom solutions for your as well to meet your company’s specific requirements. We do this all the time!
And a lot more improvements above & under the hood
If you’re a frequent Incitement user, you’ll have noticed some serious enhancements to the user interface to give you a better user experience. Many bugs have been fixed, lots of interface changes, and small feature enhancements. Here’s the rest of the list of what this new update has in store for you:
- You’ll now receive updates from your favourite charities directly via email
- Design improvements on project listings
- Enhanced donation box
- Design updates for successfully funded projects
- New and improved checkout experience
- Mobile design enhancements and improved donation experience
- Speed & load time improvements for notification box and overall site speed
- Re-post layout redesign
- Improved design for image display in posts
Up next: A First-Of-Its-Kind Charity Affiliate Program
What do all the successful retailers, insurance firms, properties agents, multi-level marketing schemes, airlines, travel sites, e-commerce platform etc. have in common? Exactly – they all have an affiliate program that allows anyone to market their products and earn a commission for the sales the refer.
Why doesn’t such an affiliate program exist in the charity space? It’s because there is huge stigma around earning commissions over donations that are supposed to go to charity projects. But what if we told you that according to The Guardian only 2% of donations to international NGOs actually reach the beneficiary? And what if we told you that typical NGOs spend anywhere between 20 and 70% of the donation they raise on fundraising? Would you then be ok with a small commission for someone who refers a donation?
We live in a time and age where the world is slowly but very surely slipping into deeper and broader levels of poverty than ever before. From the 100s of charities that we work with, every single one of them would rather receive 90% of a donation, than no donation at all. That’s why Incitement is launching brand-new Partner Program where ANYONE can promote the charities and causes the love in their own networks and earn a cash commission for donations referred. This will allow for example students to earn a little extra on the side, or enable influencers to monetize their content and channels with something truly meaningful, while the charity gets to tap into market they would otherwise never reach. Stay tuned!
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