Charity, Click - BOOM!

   Joshua Fanning finds four young men who are blowing up charity.

Charity is dead, and consumer whores are the only hope poverty-stricken people have of getting out of the rut. This unbelievable scenario is increasingly becoming the reality, although slightly played out here for dramatic effect. Living costs more and more each year but with the spike in oil prices, inflation has been given a huge jump-along as citizens around the world feel the crude pinch on their purse strings. After twelve years of solid growth Australia too is about ready to clench up. This has left charities out in the cold as far as donations go – the African child still needs food and shelter but Australians still need their cars you know?    
 
Enter the social entrepreneurs and their crazy ideas of buying shit to save the world. The idea of “clicks for charity,” isn’t an especially new one (www.freerice.com is one of merge’s favourite websites) but a gang of ex-Melbourne Uni guys are rethinking the concept on a scale which has the capacity to effectively alter the way everyone does charity. Feeding African children and blatting along in our commodore - you beauty!
 
It all started eight years ago. A young Matt Tilleard was vacuuming floors, dusting shelves, cleaning toilets and devising a system where people were able to donate to charity without ponying up the dosh themselves. Matt’s idea was to capture what everyone in the whole entire world is, (a consumer) and turn them into givers. Now, in 2008, Matt’s idea takes shape on the clean, white cyber-pages of ripple.org.
 
 
Instead of resting a wreath at charity’s grave, ripple is working on resurrecting charity. “The key thing about ripple is making money for the charities so they can do their work,” says Matt. “Every dollar is another dollar Oxfam Australia doesn’t need to spend.” And how does ripple do their thing? Well, basically by thieving advertising off commercial sites, putting it on its own, and then charging the advertiser 2 cents for every click/view they record. It’s all totally above board of course, but the four cyber pirates who run ripple, Matt Tilleard, Simon Griffiths, Jehan Ratnatunga and Mack Nevill are a motley mix of consultants, academics and IT gurus hell-bent on plundering the $15+ billion bounty advertisers pump into internet campaigns each year. Matt says ripple’s mandate is simple: “take some of (that $15bn), Robin Hood style, and redirect it back into this pool of money that’s available for doing good work.”
 
The concept’s success has been derived from the viral nature of the Internet. Jehan explains the concept simply. “The idea is that the power lies in the numbers. It’s about lots of users (who we call ripplers) clicking only once a day, and as a community, making a significant impact.”
 
Indeed ripple.org is going along quite nicely; it’s raking in a bit of cash for its charity partners Oxfam, WaterAid, Grameen and Oaktree Foundations. It’s connecting people around the world and giving millions of bored office workers the chance to create a little purpose in their Facebook lives. But it’s not, at this stage, saving the world. And this is something the young directors of ripple are working on.

Ripple.org is just the first ruffling of the water’s surface. Talking to Simon at ripple HQ and Mack by correspondence, the message is that ripple is moving on up – and out. But expanding takes cash; and lots of it. The next generation of features on the site will mean that ripple will rival social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook as far as functionality go. Mack, the group’s IT genius, puts the cost of developing and implementing at around $30-$40,000. “At the moment we are looking for a sponsor to partner with to fund additional site development,” says Mack. No shit, says Merge. But rather than get bogged down with funding issues, the directors are branching out.
 
Beyond the cyber realm, Simon is looking to extend a ripple-type concept into Melbourne’s bar scene. Called Project Bar, the idea, as Simon explains it, is simple: “we sell drinks from developing countries, and the profit from each drink we sell, supports a development project in the country where that product comes from.” Project Bar will be like any other bar, in that you come in, throw your head back a couple of times, end up on your arse and wake up wondering how you got home. The difference is that your hangover will be tempered by the fact that some of the money you pissed up against the wall last night will trickle down into the mouths of those who need it.
 
Bad analogy but you get the idea.
 
Ripple is all about providing social enterprise options for consumers. Instead of asking for cash donations, ripple provides their products, either online or at the bar, to support charity. Simon says ripple is a way for everyone to be supportive without changing their financial situation. “It comes down to human nature, in terms of people not having time or money but generally having interest in supporting these things if they can,” says Simon.
 
The ripple brand is blowing up charity, to a scale much grander and far more effective than it has previously operated on. It works because it’s good, cheap and fast. Set ripple as your homepage. Tell some friends. That’s it, and then Click, Boom! Suddenly hundreds of millions of users are viewing ads at 2 cents a pop. And advertisers are clambering over each other in an effort to align themselves with the ripple revolutionaries, ie: you! And this is the sweetest thing – none of it costs you a single Queen Liz! All it costs is choice. Choose ripple - save the world.
 
Ahem… sort of.

 

 

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