Dear friends, users and partners of betterplace.org,
This year, betterplace.org celebrates its tenth anniversary. From the beginning on, it was our vision to make the world a better place - with technical solutions that make it easy for helpers to collect donations. Less complexity, less costs, easy solutions for the good people out there - that is our goal.
More than 20,000 social projects have used our solutions since 2007; more than 43 million euros have been collected for the social sector. We are especially happy about the growth of the recent years: More than 13 million euros were donated in 2016 alone.
But this gratifying development also has its drawbacks: our own refinancing as a charitable organisation and a social enterprise. With every new organisation that uses betterplace.org and with every donation that we enable, our own costs rise.
Up until now, we have relied on two solutions in order to finance those organisational costs: With betterplace solutions we market digital solutions for corporations that want to make the impact of their social commitment visible and more effective. Also, in addition to their donation to a social project, we ask our donors on betterplace.org for a voluntary contribution towards the operation of the platform. In both areas we registered important successes and growth. In the past 9 years we have therefore been able not only to forward 100% of all donations to social projects, but also to cover all external and internal transaction costs. That way, we provided an additional 1 million euros for the social sector.
While the use of betterplace.org has grown in a positive way, the growth of those pillars of our refinancing has its limits. The transaction costs incurred with each donation have risen to an amount that is no longer feasible for us.
In this light we have decided to put the refinancing of betterplace.org on a broader base. Our solutions for corporations and the voluntary contribution towards the operation of the platform will remain in place. In addition to that, betterplace.org will start retaining a portion of any donation to finance the transaction costs. In the long run, just 2.5% of each donation will help us to cover these costs sustainably as a non-profit organisation. Exempt from this are donations which are collected via external donation platforms operated by betterplace.org. Our partners, sponsors and companies involved bear the costs for these portals thereby making it possible to forward 100% of all donations.
With this new contribution betterplace.org will be ready for many years of further growth and millions of donations for the social sector.
Our mission will not change in the future: We want to make donations easier, more efficient and more effective so that social organisations can concentrate on the important work they are doing. For this purpose we are going to develop unique new solutions over the course of 2017.
We are looking forward to turning them into action together.
Sincerely,
Björn Lampe, Carolin Silbernagl und Timo Kladny
Management Board gut.org gAG