Don`t be commercial. Do it your way.

This is blogpost about the ice bucket challenge.

Just kidding!

This post  is about sharing thoughts and gained experience about charity.

I admit it - it is the ice bucket challenge that raised the public attention to the people with ALS and provoked discussions about the ways of promoting charity. This challenge paved the way for questions about the future of philanthropy and the modern but still ethical way of doing it. Undoubtedly, the future is up to us to shape, so for a case in point let me tell you how we in Dreamix try to do it.

On topic

Lets start with the common belief  that I share - most mentally healthy people experience empathy and are willing to help others when they identify a problem. Many careers pay a hefty wedge of cash, but it’s personal growth and satisfaction that moves people and make them love their jobs. Given the free time they have, if you offer people reasonable cause and challenge them to do it their own way, your employees will get this so desired fulfillment in their lives and will see the positive impact on the world around they made. Agree? When I started working for Dreamix I noticed that my colleagues already had some traditions in helping. At the beginning they did this independently by collecting the garbage separately, donating clothes and toys, participating in volunteer initiatives and charity campaigns. But after a while we decided it would be more fun to take some actions together as a team. Excuse me, not ordinary one - a team of programmers, Dreamix team. We started from the basis, with the thing we do best - software. And this is how we created our own charity platform - give.dreamix.eu.

Dreamix way

It`s all about engagement on a personal level. We encouraged our colleagues to create new goals on the web platform. Their suggestions varied from buzz causes, international organizations, to causes for particular people in need and newly established movements of their friends. What matters is that our colleagues initiated the creation of the goals. No vision for the charity campaign is imposed and everyone has freedom to create and support goals. People are fully engaged because they have to fill in a “description” field and explain why the cause is important. They also have to apply additional materials and share their experience with the organization. As for the money - our employees automatically received certain amount of money that they could distribute between all goals or support only one. Extra donated money were doubled by Dreamix.   The idea behind give.dreamix is based on a functional and creative HR platform developed by our team called A$4. You can read more about it here.

The upgrade

This year we got it: “Hey, this is just too good to keep it for ourselves”. So, we went one extra mile everyone should go - sharing and building a community. In the invitations to our traditional Christmas party we told our partners and friends for our charity campaign and the give.dreamix platform. Accounts were created for all of them in the platform. Thus our guests and we as corporate users were equal. They could create goals, support already existing goals and donate money which we automatically doubled. At the party we invited representatives of the organizations that our colleagues already knew from the platform. They told us about their current projects and people got to know the personalities behind the organizations. In this way people understood how their money will be spent. We created positive atmosphere of trust for our community. What about the results? You can check them on  our page.   And here comes the conclusion: philanthropy is meant to connect people. So, do it wholeheartedly, do it transparently with reliable organizations. Do it with the idea for positive change in your community. Just do it your way.

I welcome your thoughts and comments on the topic.