Another smartphone app has stepped onto the micro-donation platform, but with a twist that allows donors to make charitable donations based on their spending habits or other real-world events, such as sports results, celebrity tweets, or a friend’s workout routine.
The app is Momentum, from Oakland-based Better Good. With its soft launch this month, Momentum joins a small but growing number of apps that are trying to get consumers to give regularly, even if only in small amounts. Several apps are already available that allow users to link their credit-card or debit-card purchases to spur charitable micro-donations, with RoundUp among the most prominent.
But Momentum’s creators say theirs is the first that allows users to link their charitable giving to a wide variety of actions that aren’t necessarily financial in nature. Using streams of data from a variety of social-media channels, sports leagues, exercise apps, and news events, the app allows users to designate triggers that will fire off a donation to a given charity.
So, for instance, users could set up their account to send out a donation to a clean-water charity whenever they buy a cup of coffee. Or send a dollar to the ACLU whenever President Trump issues a tweet. Or send money to a women’s empowerment fund whenever Beyoncé posts on Instagram.
While users are able to direct their donations to any IRS-qualified nonprofit in the country, the app’s creators also worked with GiveWell, the Open Philanthropy Project, and other independent nonprofit evaluators to assemble curated events to trigger a charitable donation. In the future, the company plans to offer more personalized donation plans.
“Coming up later in the winter and spring, we’ll be building a portfolio system where you can tell us a bit about the causes you care about and we’ll build a donation portfolio that reflects your values,” said Nick Fitz, founder and CEO of Better Good. “But for now, we are keeping it pretty simple”
Once a user has established donation triggers, the app keeps track of the events, and once a month, to keep the number of transactions low, the accumulated total is charged to the donor. From there, the money goes into a single donor-advised fund that Better Goods has established with the Social Good Fund, a six-year-old nonprofit that has historically focused on nonprofit fiscal sponsorships and donor-advised funds. The money then flows from the donor-advised fund to the chosen nonprofits, also on a monthly basis.
The app and others like it are part of a growing wave of efforts to explore human impulses and behaviors that can be harnessed to encourage people to give more to charity.
