Bitcoin donations, VR fundraising and aid delivered by edible drones - London is leading the way for a different kind of charity

Not just giving... 
Amnesty international
Alamy Stock Photo
Kate Wills6 June 2018

One minute you’re walking down Oxford Street dodging tourists, the next you’re in Aleppo, dodging barrel bombs.

As far as fundraising techniques go, it certainly beats a chugger with a clipboard. So it’s no wonder tech-savvy charities are now using virtual reality headsets to parachute potential donors directly into the worlds of those they could help, whether that’s a 12-year-old Syrian refugee or a grandmother living with Alzheimer’s. ‘Virtual reality is a really innovative way for us to engage new audiences and give them a sense of what’s happening inside Aleppo,’ says Kristyan Benedict, crisis campaign manager at Amnesty International, which has been giving its street fundraisers £14 VR headsets and smartphones as part of its #360 Syria project. A threemonth trial saw 1,935 new donors sign up, worth £170,000 a year.

‘We now have a specialist tech and human rights unit, which is using real-time satellite technology to show forced displacement of the Rohingya in Myanmar, heat maps to show where a bomb has landed even if authorities are saying nothing has happened, and using geolocation and crowdsourcing to track incidents, such as chemical weapons attacks in Sudan. This technology isn’t new — advertising and marketing companies have been using it for a long time — but from an NGO perspective it’s early days.’

Amnesty international

Whether it’s the recent revelations about the use of prostitutes by senior Oxfam staff in Haiti, the collapse of Kids Company amid allegations of financial malpractice and sexual abuse, or the recurrent controversies over fundraising websites such as JustGiving taking a cut of public donations, trust in the charity sector is at an alltime low. In March, a survey by the not-for-profit research consultancy nfp Synergy found that only 54 per cent of people in the UK said they still trusted charities. Which is why innovative organisations are using technology to win back the support of digital natives who have little time for — or feel cynical about — charitable giving.

‘I call it “dev-tech” and it’s especially happening in London right now,’ says Rohan Silva, co-founder of the co-working space Second Home, where a number of the charities in question are based. ‘Geneva has the big NGOs headquartered there but barely any tech, whereas San Francisco has a global technology scene without the charities. London meanwhile has the technology, it has the big charities and it also has a community of small non-profit start-ups who are able to use that technology in a really efficient way.’

At Second Home there is Videre, a ‘21st-century Amnesty International’, which gives human rights activists cutting-edge hidden recording devices so they can testify to abuse; and Spring, which helps technology companies empowering women in Africa and Asia, such as Safe Boda, an ‘Uber for girls’, which organises safe motorcycle taxis for young women in Uganda. ‘The big names in this sector have tended to be notoriously slow on the uptake when it comes to innovation,’ says Grant Morgan, CEO of Louis Kennedy, a corporate social responsibility marketing consultancy.

Safe "Uber" style Motorcycles for women are launching in Uganda 

‘However,the landscape is changing. We’re currently developing a piece of technology using cryptocurrency, which will change the way we give globally — not just giving users the ability to track their donations, but to choose exactly what their money is spent on.’

‘Blockchain is having a huge impact on the third sector,’ agrees Federico Malvezzi, project manager of AidCoin, a cryptocurrency specially designed for charities. ‘No record can be erased on the blockchain, meaning traceable accountability and zero fraud, and there’s no need for middle men or transaction fees. Plus, smart contracts could mean that if certain predetermined conditions aren’t fulfilled, donors would receive their donations back or be able to redirect them towards more deserving or pressing causes. In 2010, for example, the Red Cross raised $500 million (£370m) to provide homes for 130,000 people in Haiti. What would you have done with your donation upon realising that, five years later, only six homes had been built?’

Both the Red Cross and Save the Children have been trialling bitcoin donations, which have zero per cent processing fees. But some forward-thinking non-profits are going one step further. Charity: Water, founded by New York-based former nightclub promoter Scott Harrison uses real-time video, GPS mapping and slick online slideshows to allow donors to follow every (virtual) penny. ‘I wanted to reinvent charity. I thought it had become broken and stigmatised,’ says Harrison, who has the support of the tech world’s glitterati, from Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to Spotify’s Daniel Ek. ‘Harrison runs Charity: Water like a great start-up,’ says Ek. ‘He’s disrupted the whole charity model.’

Bitcoin donations becoming more common

Vinay Nair is the co-founder of Lightful, a digital consultancy that helps smaller charities use social media more effectively. ‘We recently held a hackathon for Comic Relief, worked with the charity Climate Reality using chatbots to answer people’s questions and did a project for Parkinson’s UK where people affected by the disease could upload footage of their symptoms to Facebook. Today it’s about more than just rattling a tin and saying, “Please donate now” — it’s taking people on a journey and telling them a story.’

Indeed, the days of a teddy shaking a bucket at the Tube station might be numbered — research from YouGov indicated that one in seven people fail to donate because they no longer carry cash. Charitable donations through websites, social media and apps now account for £26 in every £100 donated in the UK and a recent trial of ‘tap and go’ contactless collection boxes found that supporters making contactless payments parted with three times as much as those fumbling in their pockets for change, potentially earning charities an extra £80m a year.

But it’s not only money being drummed up via social media. In 2015 the charity Help Refugees used a Twitter hashtag to mobilise grassroots support, and in just a few months went from being a group of friends with no experience in the charity sector to one of the biggest providers of aid in the Calais Jungle. ‘At the start we were raising money and co-ordinating donations and volunteers entirely through Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp,’ says Philli Boyle, a director at Help Refugees. ‘We were aiming for a grand and within a week we’d raised £56,000 and were getting 7,000 donations a day. When we got to the camp we were amazed that none of the big aid agencies were helping. They said that the camp wasn’t legally recognised or it wasn’t in their three-year budget and that kind of bureaucracy was really frustrating to see.’

Poster in solidarity of refugees

Three years later and Help Refugees — which is volunteer-run and almost entirely crowdfunded — has helped more than 722,500 people, galvanized more than 25,000 volunteers, raised over £10m and works with more than 80 projects across eight countries. ‘We’re trying to fill in the gaps that governments or large NGOs can’t,’ says Boyle. ‘It’s about common sense and taking the initiative, whether it’s setting up a refugee info bus with wi-fi in the camp or giving phones topped up with credit to unaccompanied minors.’ One of those phones led directly to 15 lives being saved, after a seven-year-old Afghan boy called Ahmed sent a text to one of the charity’s children’s workers to say he was trapped in a refrigerated airless lorry running out of oxygen. Help Refugees and local police tracked the phone and found him, along with 14 adults, all still alive, near a motorway service station in Leicestershire. ‘That was down to every person who shared our status updates, followed us on social media or donated to our fundraising pages,’ says Boyle.

In a 21st-century update of the aphorism, ‘give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’, Help Refugees not only gives refugees phones, but teaches them how to code. It funds Old Street-based Code Your Future, founded in October 2016 by Germán Bencci who was working at Samsung at the time. ‘I really felt like the tech industry should be doing more to help people, so when the refugee crisis happened I reached out to my contacts,’ says Bencci. Mentored by volunteers from the tech industry, 80 per cent of Code Your Future graduates get employment within a year of graduating. As they train, students work on projects for NGOs, such as developing a searchable database of the local services available to asylum seekers and refugees, from English lessons to sanitary towels. ‘When a student graduates from the course and gets a job, you feel like the trajectory of their life has been changed,’ says Bencci. ‘It certainly beats my old day job.’

The feel-good factor means that some of the tech scene’s brightest minds are moving beyond algorithms to make a bigger impact. Drones transporting medical aid are currently being tested in Malawi, and UK-based start-up Windhorse Aerospace is developing an edible drone which can be consumed along with its cargo. ‘We’re experimenting with a variety of food to make the body of the aircraft, such as dehydrated meat, honeycomb or pasta,’ says Nigel Gifford, founder of Windhorse, who sold his drone company, Ascenta, to Facebook for £12.5m in 2014. ‘I’ve always been attracted to the art of the impossible. When people say, “Well that can’t be done” — why not? If you push and push, very often it’s never been done before