Non Profit Archives - Serious Startups

Considering Starting Your Own Charity? Here’s How

Many of us can get toa time in our lives where we have a situation we are faced with that changes us. It might be an illness, something you go through as a family, or a loss of someone too soon. Often that can give you the sense of determination to raise awareness for a subject, and this is how so many charities and amazing things are started from. You might be in this situation right now, maybe you feel like you want to have a voice. I thought I would share with you some of the steps you can take to start your own message and charity.

Know your vision and intention

One of the first things you need to think about would be to think about what your vision for the charity is, and your intention and long term goals about what you want to achieve. Knowing how you want to raise awareness, what message you want people to hear, and even how you might go about it is a great way to ensure you do things justice, if only for yourself.

You need a name

The next thing you might want to start thinking about would be the name of your charity. Perhaps you want to use your very motivation for starting the charity as a point to begin creating the name. Name itself can be a great thing to consider. People like to know what the charity is about, or who it is aid of perhaps, so if you do have a motivation that stems from someone perhaps using their name would be the ideal way to celebrate them.

Think of ways for contributions

There are so many ways people could donate, so you need to decide what areas you want to be associated with. There are just giving pages and even things like global faces direct monthly giving programs for non profits that could be worth looking into. You may also want to think of organised sponsorships where people do certain things for the charity. These can be small things or stem to bigger adventures such as climbing mountains. The world is your oyster for your charity and you just need to decide how far you want to go.

Write a plan

Part of your plan may have already formed in your head. You could have considered your visions and what is driving you to make a difference, your message and even how you want people to be able to get involved. But you also need to treat this in a business like manner and this is when a plan can be put into place to get things moving.

Create a website and register where needed

Finally, you can start by creating your website and social media platforms, which is a great way to get your message heard. However, you do also need to think about how you register your charity to be official and for non profit.

I hope that this has inspired you to take the right steps to creating your charity and to get your message heard.

Atlanta: Points Of Light, Starbucks & Village Capital Announce Social Startup Accelerator

Points of light, the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service along with Village Capital have teamed up to launch a social entrepreneurship focused startup accelerator in Atlanta.

10 social startup teams have been selected and are coming together this week in Atlanta for an intense 12 week accelerator bootcamp. The 12 startups will receive access to mentoring, education, peer support and networking. Along with that each team has received a $10,000 seed investment. At the end of the session, the 10 startups will choose two startups from their peer group to receive additional $50,000 investments to help bring their startups to life.

The 10 startups kicking off the accelerator’s first class are:

AltruHelp (Boston) is building a software solution and online community to increase volunteerism and millennial civic engagement.
Bould (Denver) connects students with the real-world experience necessary for green careers.
CareerVillage (Boston) helps working professionals provide career information and advice directly to students.
Generation Citizen (New York) empowers young people to become engaged and effective citizens.
GivKwik (San Francisco) is a social, mobile and web platform that inspires impulse philanthropy.
HopeMob (New York) unites strangers to rally behind people with pressing needs.
Moneythink (Chicago) makes financial literacy relevant and fun for urban 11^th and 12^th graders.
MyMaryland (Silver Spring, Md.) is democracy’s first 24/7 online town hall.
Smallknot (New York) is a community crowd-funding platform for small business.
UBELONG (Washington, D.C.) provides high-impact, affordable international volunteering opportunities.

PwC Charitable Foundation and the Starbucks Foundation are also supporting the socially driven accelerator.

“Supporting productive and disruptive innovators in the research and design of sustainable, scalable programs that drive charitable endeavors is an important part of our giving philosophy,” said Chris Simmons, president, PwC Charitable Foundation, Inc. “We congratulate the 10 start-ups selected for the accelerator and look forward to seeing their individual plans to catalyze social change through innovation in the areas of education and humanitarianism.”

“At Starbucks, we believe strongly in the power of the entrepreneur and the opportunity for businesses to be the catalyst for change in their communities,” said Adam Brotman, chief digital officer, Starbucks. “We are honored to support this program and look forward the success of these ventures.”

“Entrepreneurs are bringing new thinking and innovative business models to the critical work of helping others,” said Ayesha Khanna, president of Points of Light’s Civic Incubator. “We are pleased to help these 10 promising teams successfully launch civic ventures to drive social good in communities across the country.”

“Over the next three months, these enterprises will get the best support and the toughest criticism they’ve ever received from their peers,” said Ross Baird, executive director of Village Capital. “We’ll focus on everything from customer validation to board-building to fundraising to financials, and we expect that the collaboration of these amazingly talented people will be a force multiplier for their success.”

Linkage:

Find out about Points of Light here

Here’s more startup news from “everywhere else”

Several Atlanta startups will be here, will you?

New York Startup: DoGoodBuyUs Charity Made Products Marketplace INTERVIEW

Charitable organizations are producing products all the time with the idea to sell those products as fundraisers. Everything form tie-dyed t-shirts, bracelets, hats,ties, baskets, even custom fitted chair backs have all at one time or another been created for and by charities.

The problem was, until last year, that there wasn’t a central online marketplace to buy and sell these charitable goods. Sure churches, civic organizations, and social activist charities may have sold their wares on ebay, Craigslist or their own personal website, but that still meant only a finite number of people would actually see the products and the charities they support.

Enter Zack Rosenberg and DoGoodBuyUs. Last July when the site launched, Rosenberg told the mother nature network:

“Right now, nonprofts don’t have a central marketplace where they can congregate and maximize awareness,” says Co-founder Zack Rosenberg. “I’ve tried to find a functional ‘marketplace for social good’ out there for aggregating meaningful products, and there just aren’t any adequate commerce platforms for distinguishing nonprofits exclusively.”

DoGoodBuyUs organizes all of their charitable products by type of product and also charity. If you’re looking for something specific it’s easy to find, if you’re looking for a specific cause to support, that too is easy to find. They have a wide variety of products to choose from and an even wider amount of causes to back. One of the most interesting things we found was this hammock for every hammock someone buys, treated mosquito nets are given to families in Africa or a malaria research class is held.

With such an innovative socially conscious idea we had to interview Rosenberg. Check out the interview below the break:

Valley Based Samasource Hooks Up Women Living In Poverty With Microwork And Income

Samasource founder Leilah Janah works with refugees in Kenya (photo boingboing.net)

Women lead non-profit Samasource is tackling a great social issue while helping to get some of the menial grunt work of today’s biggest internet companies complete. Leilah Janah is the founder of this incredible organization.

Samasource has trained women living in third world countries with basic computer skills and outfitted centers in India, Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda, South Africa and Kenya. These centers have basic computers, internet and access to samahub which provides the trained women with microwork. Microwork can include meta tagging, light data entry and other small digital tasks that many in the big companies that utilize Samasource don’t want to do.

Some of the corporate participants include Google, Linkedin and Intuit.

“Outsourcing is a one trillion dollar industry,” Janah tells 7×7.com. “We train these women and then we bring them work. We are serving an entirely new demographic. These are people who would not get employed otherwise. They were earning less than $3 per day before Samasource. They are all from rural areas or from the slums.”

More after the break
Read More…