Erstellt am: 12. 11. 2015 - 16:30 Uhr

Fundraising for the Future?

The World Food Programme launches a new app today to help people easily donate to feed hungry children. But apps can be fickle friends.

It sounds like a failsafe idea: an app that allows you to send a donation to feed hungry children in two simple clicks. That might be why the World Food Programme (WFP) is expecting quite a lot from ShareTheMeal, a new app that it launches today. After all, quite a few of us have had discussions around the dinner table with friends about how we could improve the world, and here’s a small difference we can definitely make.

The new app is very simple to use. Once downloaded, users can link it to their credit card and then, whenever and wherever they are, they can choose to donate a meal for a day, a month, several months, or a whole year. Once the donation has been made, a profile of a child appears as an example of who the money is helping.

ShareTheMeal

It’s a very quick way to warm your heart, which is what the app is hoping to play on. The name ShareTheMeal comes from the idea that, whilst you sit down to enjoy your lunch, you take time to think of the poor children who can’t afford theirs.

One of the goals is to raise enough funds to give 20,000 school meals to Syrian children in refugee camps in Jordan. Using the app’s calculations that it costs 40 Euro cents to feed a child for a day, and assuming the children will receive a school meal every single day, the app needs to generate just over €2.9 million. On the first morning of the launch, they were three percent of the way there.

It seems doable, especially if the pilot trial is anything to go by. In June the app was rolled out across Austria, Germany and Switzerland and using the funds raised more than 1.7 million meals were provided to schoolchildren in the African country Lesotho. A pat on the back for German-speaking Europe, please. Now with contributions coming in from across the globe, you can see why the WFP is excited about future possibilities.

Yet app users can be notoriously fickle. Great apps fail. It’s one thing to persuade people to download an app to try it out once, but it’s another thing entirely to keep people using it regularly. Most people who download an app either do not use, or try it a few times then promptly forget about it. We very quickly develop app-athy, if you will.

The developers at the WFP have a few tricks up their sleeve to keep coming back, showing you on the home screen how many donations have been made and on your own personal profile how many days in a row you have donated for. But even little reward symbols can only keep people motivated for so long.

ShareTheMeal

Think about how many times people walk past beggars without offering money, or how many times you’ve ignored a charity’s pleas for donations in a television advert. It happens all the time. Suddenly the WHP’s incredible figure, that there are 20 smart phone owners to every one hungry child in the world, begins to sound like it might not be enough.

This app clearly has a fantastic aim, and we can only hope that it succeeds as the WFP’s newest form of fundraising. But to do that, they’ll have to overcome people’s fleeting relationships with apps, and hope that every time we set the world to rights at the dinner table, we don’t forget the children.