LikeFunding.Me Is Turning Facebook Likes Into Donations
We talk a lot about slacktivism these days – being very charitable and active when it comes to liking and sharing content related with different causes on Facebook, and completely failing to lift a finger offline. „Likes won’t feed the poor“ we tend to say, but apparently – they just might. A Hong Kong based startup has decided to use our trigger-happy nature when it comes to likes and harness it as a way of getting valuable donations to worthy causes and building cororate cred for social awareness at the same time. LikeFunding.Me is trying to bring good stories and good deeds together and create a win-win situation for corporations and charities alike. Its co-founder Kelly Yim left her job as an actuary in a major bank tu pursue social enterprise projects, according to CNN:
We know creative projects have the capacity to go viral — just look at the potato salad project. We want to devise a system that allows people with these kind of projects to monetize their media exposure, What we do is match-make creative projects with corporates. We have a database of different projects currently from Hong Kong and then we have contact with the corporate sponsors. After we match-make them based on their corporate social responsibility objectives, we provide a web link for the creative projects, which is for their supporters to share the story with a different Facebook circle.
Advertising – Charity Platform Crossover
The goal is to make it like an advertising platform, where corporates can come and find the projects they want and then supporting interesting initiatives, consistent with their company philosophies. And since advertising is all about story-telling these days, the companies could benefit from such public exposure more than from any paid campaigns. Just compare a digital campaignyou could get for $2,000 and the impact of viral content spreading through social media like wildfire. On the other hand, small charities could wildly benefit from such corporate engagement and even form long term cooperation. This new kind of fundraising/corporate advertising will take some additional work, at least as far as changing the attitudes and habit sin the industry is concerned: It takes a lot of perseverance to get corporations to invest in this type of creative project — it’ll at least take a year to educate them. The LikeFunding.Me will take a percentage of the funding, and they are looking to break even after next year.
