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Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

watsi.org

41–50 of 190 posts

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#41
Just got an email - "Thanks to you, Sushil's medical treatment has been funded!"

Now that's CRM! I can't think of a single possible better way of making a customer happy. I'm telling everybody I know about this.

The payment process was seamless, the design is lovely and the cause, well, of course.

You guys are amazing.

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#43
I'm typically against organizations that need to live off donations. I think it's an impractical and unsustainable model. Your cause is very close to my heart and I would love to support it, but I'm a creature of convenience. I could make one donation now, but would fail to continue making donations. The two solutions I have seen that are successful at solving this problem are:

1) Automation. E.g. in the movie Office Space they take shavings off transactions (amounting to a few cents or less at a time) and pool them together. Another example: Auto-rounding up my grocery receipt, etc.

2) Recycling funds. I don't see how this would work in a donation based system where cash-flow is one directional, but it works really well for something like Kiva where funds are returned and the option to recycle is extremely easy.

If any non-profit is to be sustainable, they must put in a HUGE amount of effort to obtain large enough recurring funds or make it really easy to provide funds. Since you are targeting individuals, it's going to be difficult to do the former. The latter will take a little more thought.

All this said, I wish you the best of luck.

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#46
post #41

Just got an email - "Thanks to you, Sushil's medical treatment has been funded!" Now that's CRM! I can't think of a single possible better way of making a customer happy. I'm telling everybody I know about this. The payment process was seamless, the design is lovely and the cause, well, of course. You guys are amazing.

Haha. Thank you~!

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#47
post #35

The one thing you need to focus on above all else is transparency and preventing scams. Video of the actual person who needs the treatment would go a long way, as would video updates along the way. I'm thinking an Android app that the locals could use to document the process. If you solve that properly, this will really take off and do a lot of good. Also, you're going to eventually need to take a very small cut of t…

> I'm thinking an Android app that the locals could use I have no data to back me up here but I'm not sure whether people in countries like Ethiopia (just an example 'cause it was on the OPs front page) are rich enough to possess the necessary hardware to run Android apps.

Travelling around India, Indonesia, Laos, and so on, I found that even if someone lived in a shack, there was still a good chance they owned a cell phone. Now, that's just anecdotal obviously, and typically not smart phones, but still, it may the number may be higher than you expect.

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#48
Awesome guys, really nice and fast funding process (though if payment fails you are stuck with plain red message in blank page, you could improve on that one). The advice I can give you - steal best parts from Kiva, they have great and successful site. One of the things I missed was "tip" donation along with the treatment donation.

Re: Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your operation could maintain 2 sets of cash flow: one for patient care, and one for administration. Maybe you could qualify for NGO status and get some government to fund some of the administration side. This would be somewhat similar to Costco's model, where most (all?) of employee wages come from membership card fees, not product revenue. With this model, you could still let people donate 100% of their funds to th…

You could even make a slider with an animation that displays the percent which goes to each part of your business - so 10% or 15% of the donation could goto administration. This is a great idea. Check the Humble Bundle's ( http://www.humblebundle.com/ ) sliders at the bottom of the page to see how they handle their "Humble Tip", maybe you guys can do something similar.

Wow, that's an incredible UI
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