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Name: Givey
Big Idea: Givey provides a free payment platform for users to easily donate to charities through Twitter and text messaging.
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Why It's Working: The service lets people make "on-the-fly donations" with short tweets and SMS that benefit charities. Givey 2.0, launching in August, will act as a record of all donations and rank users by their charitable acts.
Most messages on Twitter inform or entertain, but UK startup Givey wants some tweets to help charities.
Since launching in May 2011, Givey has pulled 6,000 charities onto its online platform, which allows people to quickly register for an account and then start donating to UK charities via tweets and text messages.
"We knew that the future was in mobile donations and engagement, so we had to think of ways in which we could never be limited by a single platform or a single device," Robert Haslam, spokesperson for Givey, told Mashable.
The service, which Haslam says will be available to U.S. charities by early 2013, links users' profiles with their PayPal accounts -- fitting because the service spawned from a PayPal hack day in 2010.
To donate via Twitter, users include two hashtags in their tweets: #Givey and a tag for specific charity, such as #ADVOCACYFI for Advocacy First) or the charity's Twitter handle and the donation amount. When donating through texts, users just send the charity tag and donation amount to 88008.
Givey CEO David Erasmus hopes his charity donation service will become the world's number one "giving platform" by 2014. To get there, Givey is revamping its website to become the digital record of its users' real-world charitable behaviors.
?By creating a way to keep a record of everything that users have done to help, they will be able to fully understand the impact their small actions have on the world around them."
"Givey 2.0 will bring a raft of new features, including logging the time volunteered to causes, stuff donated to charity shops, campaigning and fundraising capabilities," says Haslam.
The actions will earn users Givey Points and appear on Givey's site in real-time in a timeline and dashboard.
"This will be used to create league tables in a way that means a time-rich person can be on an equal level as someone who is cash-rich," Haslam explains. "It could also become a way for companies to identify future employees or leaders based on the glance of their Givey Score."
The remodeled Givey launches in August, and the startup plans to release its API so third-party developers can infuse Givey features into their apps or websites.
"By creating a way to keep a record of everything that users have done to help, they will be able to fully understand the impact their small actions have on the world around them," says Haslam. "Smaller charities have benefited the most from Givey. It?s really going to be the new version of Givey that will start to help charities achieve some brilliant things."
For now, people can sign up to be notified as to when the site construction ends and when the service will be released in their countries.
Givey recently earned funding from Nesta, an independent charity that disperses grants to UK companies, and signed deals with two big, unidentified companies to help with site remodeling and global expansion.
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Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, raywoo
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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