South African online platform forgood has gone live, allowing those that want to make a difference to connect with non-profits and corporates running social responsibility campaigns.
Disrupt Africa reported last week on the imminent launch of forgood, which is headed up by Andy Hadfield, founder of failed social discovery app for wine Real Time Wine.
The site connects people to approved non-profit organisations (NPO’s) and allows them to respond to existing needs and campaigns, while also allowing users can create their own personalised offers.
forgood is also targets businesses that are aiming to improve the efficacy of their corporate social investment (CSI) programmes.
“There are over 85,000 registered NPOs in South Africa, but very few technology platforms that connect people who want to do good to the organisations that need their help. There are even fewer platforms out there which provide this service to business,” said Hadfield.
“In the short term, we want to connect 100,000 people to causes and bring on a group of forward- thinking businesses that would use our platform to help with staff volunteering and community engagement projects. That’s going to teach us a lot about this industry and we have some big ideas to come.”
Hadfield said forgood was aiming to build the digital ‘glue’ underneath Africa’s NPO industry.
“Many people don’t know this, but South Africa was the second biggest climber in the CAF World Giving Index 2014. That’s largely because last year, 4.5 million more South Africans gave up their time in some way to help a good cause than in 2013. That’s a huge number of people and a big trend – something we’d like to build technology around,” he said.
“We’re trying something different. The temptation might be to work inside the NPO sector as an NPO ourselves, but we’d like to bring a bit of startup hustle, automation and urgency to the space – so forgood is actually registered as a for-profit – it’s a social enterprise. We’re a company that wants to make returns for our investors – but we’ll do that while we’re making the world a better place.”
forgood aims to make revenues by selling the platform to businesses as a white-label hosted product, with licence fees allowing businesses to customise data sets, plug their staff in and gain access to reporting tools to measure the impact they are having.
