Every morning I take a bus which is always full as an egg, while outside cars are always empty with one or two people. Apart from the awful experience in a filled bus, the problem is that the same bus is slowed down by the traffic flow, which is made mostly by the above single-occupied cars. Not to talk about increased pollution and risk of accidents.

Is there any solution for this problem?

Many have tried, but nobody has provided a viable solution so far. UBER is intended to be a ride-sharing solution, but it is after all, a new taxi company that is dumping rides fares. I like the Uber idea, but drivers are no longer occasional ones, they are "hired" by the company. See also how UBER is advertised to prospective drivers: "you can earn up to $$$ per night!". This is not in the spirit of sharing economy.

I believe that sharing economy is about sharing UNUSED resources and get rewarded for that sharing. Yes, in a sense, unemployed people can share their time and be rewarded for that... but this I call a JOB!

Anyway, apart from philosophical questions about what is the sharing economy, if you look at UBER prices, they are not so different than taxi fares. They are cheaper, but still taxi fares.

My idea is to let drivers that are already driving alone to share their free seats along their trip. They will be rewarded for that, but not as a taxi fares. Additionally, they should be motivated in sharing for NOT WASTING the free seats and CONTRIBUTE to reduce C02 pollution. 

In this last post of 2014, we would like to review 6 websites who already launched initiatives for rewarding acts of generosity. They are based on different business models, but they endorse the same spirit as Karmly. Karmly will be different than those and will not be in competition with them. We believe that generous people should receive larger choice for donating and being rewarded for that.

Oxfam, the leader in UK of collecting and retailing second hand items whose profits are donated to causes, decided to reward the donors of used items by rewarding 2 Nectar points for each £1 raised by the the sales of the donor's items.

This Swiss startup created an innovative way of motivating people to add $1 to their online bill in order to participate to weekly lottery with the chance of having their bill fully cashed back.

This Canadian startup decided to launch a CrowdFunding website where supporting local causes will be rewarded by perks from local businesses. 

Reward for Causes is very similar in spirit to The Greedy Giver, but it is not based on crowd-funding. It is basically a deals website where you can unlock deals for a price. Half of what is paid to unlock the deal is given to the causes you have chosen.

This is three-sided marketplace intended to intermediate between Charities and Merchants in order to create partnerships. Charities will promote Merchants' businesses and in exchange Merchants will reward Customers who have made donations to Charities partners. The service is B2B and it has as its mission to be the clearing house for the partnerships. 

Causora is the last, but not least of our list of Karma-oriented websites. Its goal is to reward donations with currency that can be used to redeem vouchers or perks. In a sense Causora is the closest to our initial idea for Karmly. 

This video is a nice explanation of how Causora works:

If you have read this blog post up to this line, you deserve a reward! 

Karmly wishes you all the very best for the New Year 2015. Be all the good you have done and will do, rewarded with everthing you wish for yourself and for your beloved ones, together with plenty of health and happiness, which of course you can never buy and that everybody should always have in full supply!

These three concepts, Virtual Currency, Loyalty Programs and Incentive Programs are strongly related. In brief, let's look at each of it shortly:

Complementary (or Virtual) Currency, not to be confuses with Digital Currency (i.e. Bitcoin), enables Alternative Markeplaces or Virtual Economies, namely marketplaces where goods or services can be paid with the alternative currency. Money in complementary or virtual currency can be purchased with real money, but also earned by selling artifacts and services to the community associated to the marketplace. It is very common in Virtual Words such as Second Life or in Internet games such as World of Warcraft or those linked to Facebook. In Switzerland, there is a well-known complementary currency called WIR franc ("we" in German). WIR was created to face post World War I economic crisis but it was never dismissed. In use still today, it was meant to be used between Swiss companies to deal with money value fluctuation. What is important to understand with complementary currencies is that once money is purchased it cannot be changed back to other currencies. The money has to remain in the community. 

Loyalty Programs, allow people to collect points or credits when they make purchases on associated retailers or vendors. The points can be exchanged for selected goods or services from a catalog. Usually, the monetary value of points correspond to a fraction of amount paid, i.e. 1 point for $10 paid. In some cases, points can be turned into money to purchase items in the associated retail stores or vendors (usually for the nominal value, i.e. 1 point = $1). Similarly to complementary currencies, the points collected cannot be exchanged for cash in another currency. However, they can be used "as if" they were cash to purchase items sold by the issuer (e.g. one can use point to buy items sold in the related loyalty program's retail store). 

Incentive Programs, although very similar to Loyalty Programs, they differ in purpose. Incentive Programs promote the purchase of additional items. Loyalty Point can be part of an Incentive Program as a reward of particular behavior. In a sense, Loyalty Programs can be seen as a type of Incentive Program that rewards recurring purchase within the same retail store or from the same vendor. However, it is not the only way to reward a particular behavior and many other behaviors can be rewarded. A very common Incentive Program is the Sales Incentive Program (SIP), namely rewarding people or organizations that drive sales. A special case of SIP are Affiliate Programs (or Referrals) where an organization sells items from a vendor and gets a commission on the sale.

Why do we talk about the above topics? Because we believe that Karmly can leverage these three concepts to drive generosity and sales at the same time. How is it possible? 

Karmly is essentially an Incentive Program for making donations to Charities and Causes, where generous behavior is Rewarded through Loyalty Points. These points are actually a Virtual/Complementary Currency that the users can use to bargain products and services in a Marketplace.

Since it's a Marketplace, anything can be sold and purchased. We will make our best to let our users to find exactly what they are looking for and for the best price on the market.

A simple query on Google Trends shows that people are more likely to be looking at deals than donations/charity/fundraising. My (preliminary) conclusion is that there is a substantial number of people who could be convinced to do donations when they are seeking for a deal. At least this shows that people are more motivated in seeking for deals than donations. If I could bridge these two worlds, I'd be very happy (and charities too).

This is an example of how companies support charities by establishing partnerships with charities such as P&G and UNICEF. It's a great marketing tool and a way to support large impact causes.

Although I believe that this is remarkable and very useful, I see some limitations:

1. It cannot be done too often. Otherwise, it is perceived as a truly marketing tool and people might even doubt about its effectiveness.
2. It does not provide a measurement of the progress of the campaign and if its expected impact has been achieved.
3. It must be "relevant" to the product. If the company sells, for instance, shoe-shine cream, what could be the the counterpart donation?
4. The customer does not choose what charity to help. In the case of Pampers, UNICEF is of course a great and probably obvious choice. But it is this always the case? What if the customer would like to support other causes?
5. The same type of campaign cannot be done by competitors. Suppose that both Pampers and Huggies would do the same? That would be great for UNICEF. But the customer would see this as "matching" a product-feature by the second arrived.

I believe that these initiatives should remain, especially for very large scale projects. But companies should think about alternative ways to perform CSR, for example, by supporting the causes that their customers have chosen to support. 

From the study presented in this blog post, it seems that donation is a form of repayment for something one has received in the past.

I wonder if people are interested in donating for a repayment that will occur in the future. We can all afford to make donations when we are in a good economic conditions. 

But what if we could save money for harder times by doing donations?  

What if I can be repaid for my donations when I really need it?

We all know "frequent flyers" programs. You travel and accumulate points that you can redeem as money to buy other tickets or to buy items in the airline shop. 

I found "frequent donors" program only for blood donations, like this in Virginia. In exchange of a blood donation, the donors get points that can be redeemed for getting some gadgets. 

The idea of redeeming points for some reward is very interesting, but does just "gadgets" get enough motivation to become frequent donors as it does in the case of "frequent flyers" programs?

What do you think a reward for charity donors should be?

Crowdrise is one of the several donation-based platforms that allow people to get support for causes and for-benefit projects.
It seems to be a very effective way to spread word about good actions and support them. 
Reward for supporting the projects is receiving a public "Thank you" and being mentioned in a leader-board in the project's page.
  

The question is: is a simple "Thank you" enough to motivate people in donating? Can we give more than that? What do you think?