The Owner:
A Glimmer of Hope helps lift women and children out of extreme poverty in rural Ethiopia. Our model focuses on four areas of development: water, health, education, and microfinance. We have spent more than a decade on the ground in rural Ethiopia. Our experience and the knowledge that we have gained from indigenous Ethiopian development organizations has shown us that the integration of these four sectors provides those living in extreme poverty with the best chance of improving their lives.
Tom Bisciglia, Director of MIS at Glimmer, will be attending RHoK in Austin in early June.
The Problem:
Glimmer seeks to raise money for specific projects in Ethiopia centered around a holistic village-by-village approach to aid. We desire to make it easy, fun, and intrinsically rewarding to raise money toward a fundraising goal and then to see the results of those funds in action through videos, photos, and written updates.
We wish to expand our fundraising efforts by creatign a Glimmer-branded fundraising challenge, by which fundraisers recruit their friends and families to endorse them as they endeavor to do acertain action or give something up for a 30-90 day period. Supporters would pledge a dollar amount per day that the Fundraiser does or doesn’t do the action they are committing to for the fundraising period. For example, an individual looking to give up smoking could have friends pledge $1 for every day that person goes without a cigarette; other applications include eating healthy,exercising daily, or group applications such as an office pledging to lose weight as a group, etc.
We see this as a two-part endeavor:
Webpage: Platform for Fundraiser to explain the challenge they are undertaking; “check-in” function for each day the task has or has not been completed; portal for Endorsers to pledge dollar amounts and leave comments; and upon completion of challenge, the webpage should have functionality to deduct the total funds pledged from endorsers’ bank account or other form of payment. Link to social media and “share” progress on appropriate social media pages.
Mobile App: Enables fundraisers to access their challenge home page, “check-in” to say whether they have or have not completed the given task on that day, track pledges and respond to comments, link to social media and “share” progress on appropriate social media pages.
The Impact:
We hope for this new fundraising tool to become the fundraising identity for Glimmer, enabling us to break beyond our current pool of fundraisers into a larger pool of people that want to movitate themselves to become better people and help other people in the process. If it goes well, Glimmer will make this tool the center of most of our fundraising efforts, coordinating with our existing fundraising website to help create a self-referring pool of donors that are motivated to make a difference.
After RHoK:
If we get this project off the ground and created, especially the mobile side (which we don't have any in-house expertise for), we will take over and own this project going forward and, as mentioned above, make it the core of our donor marketing and donation experience.