Givey: New business platform set to revive corporate giving
Howard Lake | 9 September 2013 | Newswire
A recent report by the Directory of Social Change has highlighted the shocking statistic that company giving has fallen 27% in the UK, compared to last year. This comes just two months after research by Give as you Live revealed that 50% of the UK’s workforce think their employers should do more to support charities.
Help is at hand, however, in the shape of some clever new tech from the social giving experts at Givey. Their new Givey for Business platform has only been out of the development labs for a couple of months, but is already attracting the attention of some pretty big employers in the UK, as well as a host of diddy ones.
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At the platform’s core is a powerful matching engine – enabling employers to automatically match any money their team give and raise for causes that they care about. This matching act also creates a piece of social content, showing all the people and brands involved in the giving moment. This gets shared in the company’s activity stream, and across the web via social networks – building an authentic social story about the great work being done by employers and employees to help good causes.
Dave Erasmus is founder of Givey, and also a member of the current Parliamentary Enquiry into Giving. “There are loads of ways for companies to support good causes, but there’s also a critical need for innovation.”
“We need to make giving a social, relational activity for companies, rather than just a transactional act. Giving should be something companies should do in collaboration with their employees and customers – something that helps show the world they’re one of the good guys. If this is good for business, that’s great – more of them will do it!”
Givey for Business is free to trial, with companies then paying a variable amount for each matched donation. The platform takes no commission, so 100% of money raised goes to the selected charities – with gift aid automatically added for UK tax payers.
With the launch of the business matching platform, everyone using the main Givey platform for fundraising are also being encouraged to ask their bosses to match them, so the company expects to double donations through the system in the coming months.
The matching platform is also set to expand into consumer-matching, something the team believe will really see corporate giving rocket. A trial is already underway in the this space with fashion brand, OnePiece, but the service won’t be widely available until 2014.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.