Givey hosts giving frequency experiment
Howard Lake | 14 November 2014 | News
What matters is not how much you give but how often. That is the idea behind a new social experiment launched by British entrepreneur Dave Erasmus, creator of the Givey donation platform.
He, like many fundraisers, wants to understand how we can replicate the rapid outpouring of charitable giving seen in the #ALSicebuckethchallenge in August. But he is not thinking of how to replicate it in the form of yet one more hashtag-driven viral campaigns, or even 100 of them. Instead he is asking: “How can we make this happen every single day?”
Giving Frequency project
His Giving Frequency project is testing his belief that giving is good for us, and that social platforms now provide sufficient incentive and reward for giving to become a normal part of our everyday lives. By understanding the online giving culture more he is working to to identify factors that could encourage people to develop an ‘every day giving habit’, so that spontaneous social giving becomes a normal everyday activity not a difficult to replicate one-off.
The project opened this week with a series of video interviews with leaders in the world of charitable giving, philanthropy, economics and neuroscientists. These are designed to present the current understanding of what ‘state of the art’ giving looks like right now. The first interview is with Roots & Shoots founder Dr Jane Goodall.
Dave Erasmus, founder of Givey
Givey redeveloped to showcase giving frequency
Erasmus is using his Givey platform to host the experiment. His team have redeveloped the platform with some changes that will help test his ideas.
From now on, the 16,000 users of the platform will not be able to disclose the amount that they donate. Instead, the value of their contribution will be represented by the frequency with which they donate. The frequency will be a mandatory and public feature of an individual’s Givey profile.
Social interactions and sharing have also been enhanced to encourage a stronger peer to peer influence, and to map the impact of this.
To help boost giving, Givey has reduced charges for business clients, to allow more employers to incentivise workplace giving by matching employee donations.
Advertisement
Six month experiment
The Giving Frequency project will run for six months, with live analytics of user behaviour on the revised Givey platform available on request. The results will be published in a book due to be published in December 2015.
Erasmus welcomes contributions and feedback on the videos and the project. Contributors will be rewarded with a reference in the published book.
[message_box title=”Givey statistics in 2014 to date” color=”blue”]
569 charities have received donations
Donations total £350,000 since 1 January
Top 100 charities on the platform have each received £1,000+
[/message_box]
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.