Proud week @SocialEffort - We launched the NYC Services Volunteering App for the Mayor

It is a proud week for us at SocialEffort, a technology platform to Enable, Measure and Monitor the impact of the Giving Economy, that I co-founded with Alim Williams and his team in mid-2014. SocialEffort built New York City’sNYC Services mobile app. It was launched early this week. It stems from theapp SocialEffort launched last year. What is compelling about the SocialEffort story is that we built a company, where its founders and ‘employees’ (Danielle Leong, Raymond Acevado, Thomas Santos, Sean Murphy, Martin Caba, Jerome Allen, Vincent Ngo, Luciano Medina, Edward Cercado, Alex Krush, Denzel Charles) volunteer their time over weekends, at the NYU Poly Engineering School Incubator at Varick Street - we did eat our own proverbial dog-food.

Full Press Release

SocialEffort’s app is not just about finding opportunities that match the causes you are passionate about, but the idea of making your volunteering time deliver a dollar value impact.

Genesis

I met Raymond Acevado when I was teaching ‘Design Thinking’ for sixth graders at the Isaac Newton Primary School in East Harlem in early 2014 - a fine volunteer program run by Citizens Schools. Soon after we finished our 13 week teaching program at Isaac Newton, Ray urged me join him on another adventure - he introduced me to Alim Williams at the NYU Poly Engineering School’s Incubator on Varick Street, NYC.

I vividly remember our first meeting on a mid-summer Saturday, when we spent a good 4-5 hours talking about how there was a serious dearth of impact tracking and measurement tools in the GIVING eco-system. The problem was not just about volunteers (givers) finding the right causes and making every minute of their effort count, but also for non-profits (benefactors) to measure the impact of every dollar they spend on their programs. It doesn’t stop there - government authorities do not have enough data to deploy funds for the right causes (be it healthcare, housing, nutrition or education) given a zip code or a county.

That first meeting got me psyched about building a platform from scratch. We went about building the foundation layer - the GIVERS PLATFORM. This resulted in the SocialEffort App for volunteers.

We are currently building the BENEFACTORS PLATFORM for non-profits. This includes a cloud based service that will monitor programs based on the annual budget outlay and the operational expenses required to support every program. The purpose of this platform is to help non-profit organizations maximize their investments for the actual causes and reduce operational expenses. 

In early 2016, we will be building the philanthropists and government platforms. This will help them make informed decisions about deploying monies to the right causes in their constituencies.

So, so stay tuned for our big announcements and don’t forget to download theNYC Services mobile app.