By Laura Bassett, Huffington Post
Apple has agitated the nonprofit world with guidelines restricting their applications’ use of “one-click donate” buttons, but at least one company has figured out a way to circumvent those limits.
Nadanu Technologies has developed a platform for an iPhone-optimized giving app (eCharityBox) with a “donate” button that can be downloaded outside of the official App Store, exempting it from Apple’s mobile-giving restrictions.
Many of the charities and nonprofits using Nadanu’s apps, from large organizations like the Salvation Army to tiny, lesser-known community organizations, reported an immediate uptick in mobile donations toward the end of the year and said they were able to reach a much younger donor base through the iPhone.
Eddie Zuchman, 28, opened one of those apps at the dinner table on Dec. 22 to make a one-time, $1,800 donation to Friendship Circle San Francisco, an organization that helps children with special needs.
Zuchman runs a diet-delivery company, and he told HuffPost that since winter is always the best season for his business, he decided to donate on a whim.
“If I would have thought about it, I may not have given such a large amount of money over the phone, but we were sitting there, and we were in a good mood, and I just went ahead and sent it over,” Zuchman said. “It was a good experience for me. If you make it easy for people to give, it helps everyone out.”
Rabbi Peretz Mochkin, the developmental director of Friendship Circle San Francisco, said he signed on to use Nadanu’s technology in order to reach a generation that simply isn’t in touch with older ways of giving.
“In the old days, everyone had a charity box at home, and that’s completely lost now. Most homes don’t know what a charity box looks like,” he said.
“Because people can donate on their phones now, and it’s available to them any time, we have a steady amount of 50-plus people using it for daily contributions or inspirational contributions, and almost 80 percent of those people weren’t giving to us without it. And we have definitely seen a pickup in the demographic of young adults.”
Last year’s Haiti earthquake disaster marked a major turning point for mobile giving, as organizations like the Red Cross raked in between $30 million and $40 million over the phone, and app developers across the country seem to be taking notice.
Nadanu CEO Getzy Fellig said the company saw a tremendous uptick of Dec. 31 donations through its apps on Facebook and iPhone, including one $10,000 iPhone donation to a New Jersey day school.
“The fact that people are actually pulling out their phones and making $10,000 donations is just nutty to me. We literally fell off our chairs when we saw that,” Fellig said.
“As we started to break down the end-of-year rush, we saw that there were tremendous amounts donated through Facebook, iPod Touch and iPhones.”
The smallest donation made via iPhone was for $180, he said, adding, “The dollar amounts were just extraordinary.”
Unfortunately for many app developers, while the mobile giving market is growing exponentially, Apple’s guidelines prevent charities and nonprofits from simplifying the process with a one-click donation button tied to PayPal or a credit card.
BTP FOR LIFE
wishing you hatzlacha , mazal and bracha
The Eddie Zuchman? Any relation with Jerry Beleive?
Zuchman and Duchman both own diet delivery services…….pretty cool. I hope zalmy reads this one.
Getzy will rule!
Eddie Zuchman, is he related to Eddy Duffman, or edy Sharfstein ?
Try swapping the two D’s and the Z and you get one of the Jewish star contestants.
u rock!
hurray for Alisa and Getzy may you go from strength to strength