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.
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.
@Taimoor thanks for the post. Really informative. Are these apps only for US audience, do we have any apps which caters to the Asia region ?
Taimoor, charity is good and a way of showing humanitarian concerns. We know most of the banks (SCB, Citi etc) and other outlets like (KFC, Pizza etc) are collecting an additional small amount through the bill, for charity donation. But whether they are using this money for charitable purpose is a big question. How much they collected and how they are spending that money are big questions.
As far as my knowledge, nobody had announced such collections and expenditures. Similarly now apps are using for charity purpose, this is an age of internet frauds, so where this amount is going has to be also tracked.
Charity is the best way to show you care. The best way to make someone happy. But with my i know there are lots of fake sites collecting money. Governments should try to stop them. But as you said. this is an easy way to service
Thanks for the post, Taimoor, and for continuing to keep us updated on innovative ways we can leverage smartphone apps for good causes instead of just for silliness.
Regarding "Touch to Give," I am wondering two things: 1. If they're donating 100% of their ad revenue to charity, how are they staying up and running? 2. While it sounds good in theory, I have to wonder how much info the advertisers are collecting about these users and how they're leveraging it. It sounds like by following this model users could easily be giving into having their data abused.
Also, do the users have any say about which charity their ad $s go to? And do you know how much money this app has managed to donate to charity as of yet?
Do you happen to know if Touch to Give is only on the iPhone or if they are going to do an Adroid version of it?
I've always been kind of leary about 'charity' apps that request/require money using an app - I have no faith in the security of smart phones and the tranmission of financial data. But these are things that have a great benefit without the risk. Thank you so much for sharing them.
Great questions Nicole, great minds think alike. These days, sponsorships and advertisers may appear to doing charitable work and I'm sure many are, however, it comes with a price and that cost falls on the donators data.
Gigi, i agree with you on that note. It is an age of internet frauds and there is a possibility of a few bad people taking advantage of a good idea. Probably there needs to be a body that verifies and certifies these organizations/owners of apps as charitable ones. To assure members of the public that they are not being cheated.
Exactly, Chris. I'd love for that to not be the case here, but I see great potential for end-user abuse. You know what they say about things that seem too good to be true...
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