The Hyperlocal Fundraising Platform Matching Small Charities with Like-Minded Donors
We sat down with Micah Leitch at CIC headquarters in Peckham to hear the story behind his new fundraising platform Donup, and discuss the work we’ve been doing together to prepare for its launch.
Donup Founder: Micah Leitch
CIC: Welcome back, Micah! So to start off, could you just briefly introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your business and what it does?
Micah: Yeah of course. So I’m Micah, and the business is called Donup. It’s a platform for donors and charities to be able to find each other. It makes it easier for donors to find smaller, local causes that they align with, and for smaller charities – maybe that don’t have much of a marketing budget or big fundraising campaigns – to be able to get their name out there.
“DONUP MAKES IT EASIER FOR DONORS TO FIND SMALLER LOCAL CAUSES THAT THEY ALIGN WITH, AND FOR SMALLER CHARITIES – MAYBE THAT DON’T HAVE MUCH OF A MARKETING BUDGET OR BIG FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGNS – TO BE ABLE TO GET THEIR NAME OUT THERE.”
Often, especially if they’re a smaller team, a lot of their time is obviously spent on the impact rather than fundraising and marketing.
CIC: Right, so Donup is about helping them find that funding so they can actually get on with doing the impact work.
Micah: Yeah, yeah exactly.
CIC: So we know you’ve worked in innovation consultancy – how did you come from that to being interested in this as a problem and a cause, and get to the point of wanting to found something yourself?
Micah: Yeah so I’m an innovation consultant, working with startups and helping them grow essentially, but I’ve always been interested in certain charities. And where this idea for social impact has come from is to do with how everyone has an affinity with different charities – often medical charities, say if there’s a condition that’s affected someone in their family. So there’s that side of things. But also, when I was younger, I visited Senegal with my grandparents and they would take us round a couple of different initiatives that are going on there, like providing clean water in small, remote villages. So I think that’s where this idea of trying to help small charities has come from. And the clean water initiative in Senegal, it’s a husband-and-wife charity, is actually one of the charities that has helped spur this solution along and that’s kind of where it’s come from. So I’d say being very interested in startups, and also being interested in how charities are performing and how we could help them where they might need some help, is what has spurred this on.
CIC: So in some ways, it’s all been created from the starting point of this charity in Senegal. The whole journey has always had them at the heart.
Micah: Yeah they were actually the first conversation we had. I mean, they’re doing incredible work and we’ve donated to them to install these water pumps in different parts of Senegal. They do amazing work in terms of the impact feedback as well, they send us what3words postcards of where things are and what projects are finished. So yeah I was chatting to them just casually, asking them about the challenges of the moment, and obviously fundraising is just top of their agenda, as it is for most charities. But we truly realised the pressure of that through talking to lots more charities and looking online at the research, seeing the statistics that small charities make up 96% of the 160,000 or so charities out there, but only account for 17% of the total funding that’s distributed across all of those charities. So there’s clearly a disparity, and for so many to be struggling but doing such great impact work that essentially isn’t being heard about – that’s essentially what we’re trying to help solve and support.
CIC: That’s great. So talk us through the platform a bit, what stage of development is it in at the moment?
Micah: We’re still super early in the journey. Donup is very early on, but we’ve basically got the prototype MVP-ready and we are processing donations, which is great, to a handful of different charities. The whole point of Donup is to enable people to find charities that they're interested in and then donate to several of them at once, and we’re now able to do that through the platform. So, very early on, but technically we’re able to perform that function – so now we just need to bring more charities on, bring more donors on, and allow that community to grow.
CIC: And that’s the next step isn’t it, finding that community?
Micah: Yeah exactly! So we’re going to be doing a launch on the 6th of Feb, actually here in CIC’s offices in Peckham, in Bussey Building. The whole point of that is to bring local charities together, as well as local businesses, individuals, and residents of Peckham, Southwark, to essentially just connect and grow that awareness – and then hopefully if they can, they’ll donate to several of those charities in one go through Donup. They’ll be able to see their historical giving, then at some point we’re going to introduce impact feedback through the platform too, so they’ll be able to see what the charity has done with the money that’s gone to that project.
CIC: Amazing – very exciting times!
Micah: It’s really exciting, yeah.
CIC: And can you tell us about some of the challenges you were facing before you came here?
Micah: I think, coming back to the fact that it’s so early, a lot of different challenges in different areas. So, figuring out how to articulate the problem was one of the biggest things. We know what the vision is as far as what we want the solution to look like further down the line, with helping charities find donors, but I think articulating that to people – it doesn’t sound very technical but it is quite difficult. So we’re still trying to figure that out, alongside the communication aspect there’s the technical aspect – I’m not the most tech-enabled guy, so I’ve had to reach out to people that are that can build the platform, and they’ve been incredible in helping figure out how we can benefit donors and charities, and we’re still trying to tweak that every now and then to get it to perform at its best.
CIC: Amazing. So casting your mind back, do you remember how you first heard about the help we could offer through the Impact Awards?
Micah: Yeah so I’m a Peckham local myself and I was actually in Tesco at the time, picked up the Peckham Peculiar, and on the back page of the local newspaper is just a big page of CIC Impact Awards. It was good timing because we were just starting Donup and naturally just wanted to get in touch to see what it was about – so came down to one of the welcome events and it’s just been great since then!
CIC: How did you find the application process?
Micah: Yeah it was pretty straightforward. Pretty quick response as well, so that was sweet.
CIC: Coming in, did you know what problems you wanted help with solving?
Micah: So the team helped us write the brief, because we had a lot of different problems early on, and CIC helped us narrow it down and gradually pick just a couple to focus on as priorities.
CIC: So what was it that we eventually agreed to do together?
Micah: We agreed to do a new brand toolkit, which involved the logo, the colour palette, the type font. The team also provided us with new designs that could potentially be used across social media and go onto the website. We looked at how it could be applied to engage the community through email campaigns and that sort of thing. So it was all to do with brand design and how that might look going forward essentially, which is a foundation of what we’re trying to do.
CIC: What do you think of the new brand toolkit?
Micah: Oh I love it, I think it’s great. Again it speaks to that problem of, we know what we want to do as a solution, we just don’t know how to communicate it – so having the support of CIC was absolutely fantastic, and just so aligned with what we’re trying to do and our values. It’s meant that we can now express through the platform what it is we’re trying to solve, a lot quicker than we could before. And I think that’s essential to getting our message out there effectively.
CIC: And finally, I know it’s not completely ready yet, but if someone’s looking to use the platform either to register their non-profit or become a donor, where should they go and what should they be looking out for?
Micah: So we’ve got everything ready now, roughly, to start bringing on charities, non-profits and social enterprises. They can now come onto the website at www.donup.co.uk, and go to ‘register non-profit’ – there’s a short application form to create a profile, and then we’ll just need bank details to connect to payment processing through Stripe, so we can send you donations.
CIC: Amazing, so you’re ready to go.
Micah: And come along to the launch event as well!
CIC: Of course! Fantastic. Thanks so much for speaking to us Micah and we’ll see you at the launch!
Donup is a localised donation platform which seeks to support smaller and less-visible local charities in their fundraising efforts. It does this by providing a free-to-use online space where small charities can create profiles that can be easily discovered by – and matched with – like-minded local donors who are also looking to make an impact in the areas they care about.
Website: https://donup.co.uk/
Instagram: @donup_uk