Now nominated for a BT Tech & Ecomm Award, CRUK’s new payment innovation in a select few highstreet stores is really awe-inspiring. Not simply for its immediate technological approach, but the start of the journey that this signifies.
Check out the YouTube vid at the bottom for the detail, but creating a customer interface (and brand new media real estate) with a contactless payment window display and interactive, rewarding user experience. Combined with the latest research from CAF’s UK Giving Paper, we’ve got a lot of awfully exciting and potentially powerful stuff to get on with in the Third Sector…
I love it for many reasons.
1) Its Instant. It requires simple System One thinking which is intuitive, its slick and quick. We need this more than ever in a spontaneity and impose rife generation.
2) I hope this is just the start of things to come. We’ve had interactive billboards and bus stops, huge advances in contactless and mobile payments, but now, please, lets do some good with all of this.
Some of the biggest barriers to giving are people not feeling like they can afford to give (71%) or that what they’ve already given feels about right for them (63%). But, a staggering 34% said they didn’t give more because they didn’t like the manner in which the requests were made. Considering UK giving sits at about 1.5% of GDP and about 44% of the UK population give in an average month (CAF UK Giving Report, 2014) there’s still a huge potential to increase the amount we give and how many of us engage in giving behaviour.
I think this is very possible. But we need open and varied channels of donations methods, and we need total transparency regarding data, fees and WHERE money goes before we can hope to unlock giving to its full potential. I think this is a really great step on the way to opening our minds as to what giving has been and is, and the wonderful thing it could be.
Its also pretty bloody terrifying that those aged 16-24 are the least likely to be involved in charitable giving or social action at only 42% having participated in a charitable activity in the previous month. I’d understand if this was limited to the purely financial contribution (and here I think FREQUENCY rather than DONATION SIZE should really be our metric of choice), even despite the fact the those on lower incomes statistically give a higher proportion of their income away (a whole other kettle of fish). This is quite terrifyingly demonstrated in the graph below. But I actually think it is social action that is more disturbing, as this encompasses everything from signing a petition, to volunteering time, donating old clothes or even protesting. Are we just not fired up enough? Do the daily headlines not stoke us up with enough injustice to go out and actually do something? Or are we a jaded cohort, disillusioned with what our efforts actually contribute… I don’t have the answer, but i know its not good enough. Particularly when giving toward causes that support children and young people are the second most supported type of cause in terms of proportion of donors at 33%. Lets take a leaf from ‘Pay It Forwards’?
Plenty of research has shown that compassion and charitable action towards those outside of kinship is almost non-existent in infancy and childhood (entirely understandable) but I genuinely call for more from our youth. But hand in hand with this, I also call from more from our charities, who, in the vein of this Cancer Research project, need to open up new methodology of taking action which is compatible with this cohort’s behaviour.
My dream is this.
Turn dead time on trains or tubes to beautiful opportunities to connect outside of our bubbles. Combine daily life with being able to take immediate responsive and meaningful action. Confront people with a whole new way of bringing other’s lives into our own and eradicate compassion fatigue by making true stories real ones, enmeshed with out own and proudly expose visible progress. Think of Tesco’s interactive shopping experience on the tube in Korea – shown in the image below – and lets explode that into the charity world. Replace gross margins on everyday goods with the chance to impact lives. Pick charities, use live news feeds and react as crises and humanitarian causes arise. Contribute to local or to international, connect the digital with giving in a more powerful way than ever before.
Powered, of course, by Givey 🙂 It might be a way in the distance, or just a digital dream, but something revolutionary on scale must be imminent. Imagine being able to open up different projects, read how they’re progressing and understanding what your donation could help provide. Imagine if you could glean the world for causes that are close to your heart and donate to anywhere in the world, instantly, in the moment. Gets me pretty excited…
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