Non Profit Crowdfunding or Web Development Volunteering
This article is mostly a transcript of my presentation on Uzhgorod Developer Meetup 11.0
In this story I would like to show how everyone can use own skills to make a city or a society better. No matter of occupation. Just use it. And I would like to share my own small success story.
The idea
Almost all my childhood I lived in beautiful city Uzhgorod in western Ukraine. I finished my school and spent few years there working as a web developer. And as thousands of other cities around the globe it has the good and the bad parts.
The good parts are — the city is located near Carpathian mountains, cost of living here is pretty low, the city is relatively small so you don’t have to commute a lot. And of course the downsides — bad roads, low quality of public transportation and so on. I can continue the downsides list but none of the items in this list is unique. People live here and they are happy, so don’t hesitate and come visit Uzhgorod at the beginning of May, which is the best time for a visit.
It is easy to become desperate, loose all hope and start to look for the ways to relocate when you start thinking about the downsides. Anyway “east or west — home is the best”. So I started to think about how I can help the city.
And there was one more inspiring thing that pointed my thoughts to that direction. There are a lot of projects developed recently in Ukraine that aimed to make a life more comfortable, deal with the problems that appear in our country. Here are few examples:
- Prozorro — the product started as open-source and is used now by Ukrainian government for public procurement.
- pidvezy.org — there is no uberPool option in Uber in Ukraine so one of my college-mates with small team of enthusiasts created a service to share a ride with other people.
- recyclemap.org — waste sorting is not a common thing in my city but the situation started to change recently. Waste sorting is obligatory starting in 2018 and this project is very useful if you don’t know where is the nearest place to leave your used Li-ion batteries for example.
It didn’t take long time to find a problem that needs volunteers. It was enough to touch the cats sleeping on the sofa. These two:
Together with my wife we decided to build the website for local pets shelter.
“Barbos” organization and the shelter
The shelter title is “Barbos” (common name for a dog here, something like “Buddy”) and the shelter is a primary focus of local non-profit organization with the same title. The “Barbos” shelter and the organization aren’t sponsored by the city council on a regular basis. City council helped a lot with constructing the shelter itself, but now volunteers do everything on their own and are supported by citizens’ donations.
“Barbos” main need is to share the information — announces about new pets, their needs, invitations to charity events. They were using Facebook, Instagram, and VK.ru for sharing. It was quite time-consuming and boring to post the same information everywhere.
Also the organization would like to have a single place with most recent information about the pets. This web page could possibly help anyone interested to look for the new best friend so the occupation of the shelter could decrease.
Achieving the goal
With this idea in our minds we started to work on the plan:
- Talk with volunteers to understand their needs and gather the requirements
- Find and buy proper WordPress theme
- Set up WordPress
- Upload content
Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it?
But easy doesn’t mean fun at all. I remember that Marian Shtymak did a cool presentation “Preparation for Kickstarter and other alternative sources of funding” on one of the Uzhgorod Developer Meetups so we decided to try ourselves in crowd-funding.
First thing that comes to mind when I hear “crowd-funding” is Kickstarter, but Kickstarter is more about products, projects and businesses that supposed to be highly used. As an opposite to that, Barbos’ website is local charity project, so we need more specialized platform.
After some research I landed to Generosity, crowd-funding platform for charity, social and personal projects developed by Indiegogo.
Our goal was to get $87 (~$77 for Pets Club Wordpress theme with 12 month extended support and $10 for the site domain). To achieve this goal we created the project page on Generosity.
We read all guides and FAQs that Generosity provides and used few cool ideas to create a page:
- We wrote the text as a story of the young adopted cat that would like to help his mates which are still in the shelter.
- We added a lot of pictures of the shelter and pets to convince bakers that shelter is real and this page is not a scam
- We clearly defined the goal of the project
After preparation was completed we launched the page…
24 hours later we refreshed the results page and we got $0. That’s right — little bit less than nothing. Even worse — project has disappeared from list of popular projects on Generosity, which mean that nobody could find it without the direct link.
We needed an urgent solution. I’ve donated $5 to the project and it popped up in the list again. And it was good learning — we realized that there is nobody sitting at the Generosity site waiting for new projects to throw money into it. You have to promote you project. Even Generosity says — share it as hard as you can.
We shared the project page in our feeds, wrote few dozens messages to our friends and I promoted it on next Uzhhorod developer meetup. And finally it worked. We got $165 in next few days and little bit more in following week. Project was completed with total of $195.
After you got the money you aimed to gather, you have to withdraw it from Generosity account. And that step completely felt out of my mind during the initial planning. Generosity is US based platform and it costs $25 to make a SWIFT payment to any other country. $25 is not a big deal, but when the total is $195 you definitely don’t want to give away a part of it. You can feed a lot of pets with these money. Fortunately I have few friends in US which were ok to withdraw money to their bank account and give me the cash back. I contacted Generosity support and they said that this way of withdrawing doesn’t break any rule of the platform. Generosity requested little bit more information:
- an email address or a phone number for your campaign beneficiary
- your campaign beneficiary's legal address
- a scanned or photographed copy of the beneficiary's photo identification
After verification process completed (it took about 3 days) money were successfully transferred.
Implementation and Results
Here it is: https://barbos.dog !
It took 1.5 year to completely finish the project. 80% was done in first 2 month. Exactly like the Pareto principle. And not because it was hard from technical point of view, which deserves another post, but rather because of procrastination and lack of energy. It’s pretty hard to sit down at your machine and work on a side project if you spend 8 hours per day at full-time developer job.
But the built website and feedback from volunteers totally worth it:
Summary
Here is my list of take-aways from this story:
- Use your skills to make the world around you better.
- Look for a learning opportunity everywhere. Somebody said that $87 shouldn’t be a big deal for me — i should be able to put it out of my pocket and stop wasting time. Of course, that’s the option — but i don’t see any new experience in this way.
- Promote your project. Maybe there is a person that would like to give you money. But you have to work hard to reach out to that person.
- Read Terms and Conditions before money comes in to avoid the situation when you can’t withdraw or have to pay high commission.
I’m totally happy that I participated in this project. It took a lot of time and many things could be done better, but I’m sure that volunteering is a must-have part of everyone’s life. Go ahead and dedicate your time and skills for it. It is possible even if you are a developer, especially when you’re developer.
