Hillel Fuld's Tech Corner: the social-impact tech company GivingWay
By HILLEL FULDUpdated: JANUARY 18, 2019 06:20GIVINGWAY WORKS with an education NGO in a Ugandan classroom(photo credit: BEAU OUTTERIDGE)
Company: GivingWayFounded: October 2015 by Gigi Levy Weiss, Orit Strauss Raz and Alon ElishEmployees: 7Capital raised: $1.8MWhen it comes to impact technology, the kind that makes the world a better place, not many industries are ripe for disruption like the world of charity is.GivingWay is a social-impact tech company that has created innovative solutions for nonprofit organizations in developing countries to bridge the technological gap and effectively connect with volunteers, donors and supporters across the globe.The company was co-founded by one of Israel’s leading names in tech and a top investor who specializes in marketplaces, Gigi Levy Weiss. When Orit Strauss Raz, a lawyer by practice who had previously volunteered in the East, came to Gigi saying that she wanted to facilitate more volunteering in her local community and the world as a whole, Gigi proposed that they build a marketplace – volunteers on the one hand, and those who need the volunteering on the other.They built the platform, raised some initial capital, and now have hundreds of thousands of people who signed up for the opportunity to bring their skills and goodwill to the people and organizations which need them most.While this idea started with Volunteer Travel, it has since expanded to all types of volunteering even from the comfort of one’s home. Think of it like Fiverr, but instead of charging $5 for your design or web development services, you offer them for free to people and organizations in need.Speaking of Fiverr, GivingWay recently signed a partnership with Fiverr in which GivingWay will be fully integrated into Fiverr’s platform so that Fiverr’s massive freelancer ecosystem will be able to provide services to thousands of nonprofits, something the teams are very proud of.
Additionally, just this week GivingWay received a prestigious award from President Reuven Rivlin for its work in developing countries.GivingWay’s platform is already used by 2,000 nonprofits in 120 countries and is quickly becoming the leading platform in this field. With six million nonprofits in developing countries, GivingWay is disrupting a huge and untapped market and is driving global impact on a very wide scale.On a more philosophical level, we are all leveraging technology in our day-to-day lives in pretty much everything we do. We use it to communicate, we use it for transportation, we use it in our workplaces, so there is no logical reason we should not use technology to do good.One of the many perks of innovation is how small it makes the world, how interconnected it makes us all. Things that we in the Western world take for granted can be real lifesavers in developing countries. Using technology, we should be able to offer those things, those services or resources, at scale. That is the foundation of GivingWay, making the world a better place one nonprofit at a time.
