For Apple: A simple plan that puts its values into action
Apple can be generous. The company and its employees frequently donate millions to various causes. It runs promotions (usually with Apple Pay) to raise millions more. It can do one more thing.
Create a service called Apple Giving
Apple has payments in the bag. It has its own fraud detection, payment handling and mobile payments systems. It even has its own credit card. Years running iTunes gave it a payment facilitation and fraud detection system second to none.
Apple also has its own server farms, its own solar electric generation facilities, runs one of the world’s oldest and most frequently visited websites. It has an online presence that’s second to few.
The company has its own hardware platforms and its own ecosystem of applications and services to support that ecosystem. It has the iWork suite, a neat way to create beautiful creative assets using iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
It has all these things and more. It even has Apple ID to tie all these services together, and iCloud to energize the whole thing.
But it doesn’t have a gifting platform.
The trouble with giving
If you are involved in any kind of charity, a grass roots community organization or are someone who has had to raise cash fast for one reason or another (and in the US, sadly, this is often medical), then you’ll have experience with existing gifting platforms.
I won’t name names, but while they are helping people do good things by empowering them to raise money, they usually charge a fee which means a percentage of millions of dollars being raised for charitable and community causes is not actually going to those causes. It’s going to support the gifting platform.
Now, I can understand why the platforms need to take a cut. They need to pay costs. Staff. Server fees. Payment processing. Legal. Software design, and everything else.
But Apple already has the technologies, payment tools, legal team, designers, staff, servers, and everything else it would take to create an integrated gifting system others could use to campaign for money to help with social and personal causes. It even has the fraud detection and Apple ID systems to partially ensure those using such as system are honest.
Think how it might work
Apple could simply assign time from some of its teams and dedicate hardware and payment processing resources to handle such a system, and wouldn’t need to charge. The cost of running an alternative gifting system of its own (tied up to an Apple ID, but available to anyone willing to set on up) would be negligible, so it would be able to offer a gifting scheme free of any charge at all. What it gained in good will would more than compensate, and the impact might be immense.
Apple could even integrate around it. It could offer templates in Pages to use to create an Apple Gifting page, including Keynote links or iMovie-made video. It could offer an Apple Community service in which curators selected some key campaigns while donors could explore for causes to support. Using WebKit, the system could be integrated within third-party apps – a dog care charity may choose to link directly to the page for specific groups or campaigns, and appeals could be made visible in Maps, included in iBooks or linked to from artist pages on Apple Music. Once it exists in the ecosystem the only limit is probably imagination.
For the most part, this would simply see Apple leverage its existing assets to boost social resilience and community business.
Turning values into action
And the impact of making such a move would both put Apple’s values into action while also generating potentially millions of dollars otherwise lost in fees to social good. A move like this would also give its vast audience a trusted intermediary through which to take and make charitable contributions, which may help generate many millions more.
A simple plan.
A big impact.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
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