Charity begins at home, but in the age of Internet and mobile technologies, it begins right on your smartphone. I recently came across a few apps that are catering to social responsibility in many ways. From helping collect donations to assisting in locating volunteers, these apps are a vital tool in promoting social causes and in helping people do good for their societies.
Touch To Give is an iPhone app that lets you make a free donation to your favorite causes simply through a touch. Developed by GreaterGood Network, the app allows you to help in providing hunger relief, funding breast cancer research, and feeding sheltered animals. The user simply has to tap a button on the app once a day to support the causes.
The app donates 100 percent of the revenue from sponsors’ ads to the causes. To help the causes further, users can share the app with others over social networks to encourage more people to use it.
Touch To Give is freely available to download on the iTunes App Store.
Volunteering and community service is a great way to fulfill your social responsibility. With the All for Good mobile app, you can find and participate in service opportunities near you.
The Android app allows you to search for opportunities posted by local and national organizations and find those that fit your time and match your interests. With over 150,000 service opportunities, All for Good is the largest database of its kind.
If you are part of a nonprofit organization and are looking for volunteers, you can also post your opportunity on All for Good’s Website.
This app is targeted primarily at a US audience, but it does allow postings of opportunities in other parts of the world.
Ever wondered if you could do something useful in the little time slots you get while sitting at the airport, commuting to work, waiting at the dentist, or being stuck in traffic? Sparked gives you a chance to “microvolunteer” through its app by performing tasks posted by nonprofit organizations.
The app lets you choose from a variety of tasks that you can perform instantly on your smartphone. It caters to a range of causes, including the environment, poverty, animals, civil rights, health, and even religion. There’s a broad spectrum of skills users can have to volunteer, including designing, marketing, research, blogging, fundraising, and copywriting.
Nonprofit organizations can put up challenges to attract volunteers. Sparked even engages corporations to collaborate through employee volunteering programs.
With a network of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of challenges posted each day, Sparked has certainly utilized the power of crowdsourcing in a highly effective way.
Smartphone apps like these are certainly ingenious ways of doing social good and have given a new meaning to charity. Using these apps just might make the world around us a better place.
— Taimoor Zubair works as a software engineer at a leading BPO solutions company in Pakistan.
I wish there were more solutions to donating over SMS. I know that companies buy and sell "short codes" to organizations, but these costs are so incredibly expensive in some markets, especially here in Canada. Whereas one could offer an app with a web-interface that connects a customer to a site which sends an SMS to the phone number @ carrier to bypass short codes, i.e. 14165551212@pcs.rogers.com. The only drawback being the person has to choose their mobile carrier or it doesn't work. But it's free and could cut the costs of short codes completely out. Thus freeing up more overhead money for recipients of the charity. It's possible to do, I've done it before with an App I had a part in (sends precious metals price alerts to cell phone using the mobile phone e-mail address instead of sending via short code; helped us profit!).
Optimizing an entire web site for mobile visitors can be expensive and time-consuming depending on the existing content management system. An ideal place to start is with the donation form - a link typically included in charity e-communication pieces. Many third-party donation providers have already built secure forms allowing their clients to capture donations through the mobile web. Quick Response (QR) codes are another cost-effective and creative way for charities to reach out to supporters wherever they are.
I am a participating member of my town's bicycle advisory board and lend a hand with efforts to promote and use bicycling.
Recently, I was part of WADOT (Washington Department of Transportation) and the Cascade Bicycling Clubs annual pedestrian and bicycle census. They sign us up and we go out for two hours and record the bicycles, walkers and other non-motorized travellers who pass through an intersection.
While over time they have been automating the process from a mailed paper form and clipboard to a website for tracking, there was still no technology for recording the cyclists...until I discovered a fantastic Android App called Advanced Tally Counter.
Using this app, I was able to stand at the corner and pull up my Optimus V and simply click with each new person riding through. This allowed me to spend more time watching and less time fumbling with pencils and paper. It also allowed me to send the results by email to myself for transfer to the website. (Yes, I know, ideally I would have this interface direct to the backend...but for now...).
I was thinking...people could do this for all sorts of counts at any time. Sitting in Starbucks with no one to talk to...pull out your counter and see how many bikes roll by...or how many cars enter the Safeway parking lot...all voluntary.
Small towns such as mine (Kent, WA) are often strained for budget. They can do projects but have little resource for monitoring the community or tracking needs. With this simple app you can make cases for what is being used by whom...or not!
In the end, yes, we'd love to have traffic webcams set up with pattern recognizers to do it all automatically, but for now, you can use this small app to make a small difference.
@kq4ym: That's a good suggestion, but I guess this can be a bit unfair to new organizations who are genuine. I think once any user identifies an app to be a scam, he/she should report it immediately to the relevant app store and even spread the word about it over social networks. I believe this is part of social responsibility to prevent other users from becoming a prey to the scam.
Good point....certifying organization would be a necessary process. There are lots of folks out there masquerading at charities, and individuals asking for funds to "help" some less fortunate, or an unknown organization, whose beneficiaries may be in question.
While, it's maybe nice to use an app to find charities, I would think most legitimate ones are already pretty well known, especially in the local community.
So perhaps, the new "charity" apps are only going to encourage "scamsters."
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