Thanks for sharing! Want to make sure we mention that thanks to the founders of Teespring, donations are matched for the first 1,000 people to sign up. Let us know if you have feedback!
Yeah! Every month, donors receive an email introducing them to the patient they supported, which serves as a tax receipt for that month's contribution. We also aggregate tax receipts for every Watsi donor and send them out at the end of the year for easy reporting.
I'm a little confused. For many months now, Watsi has charged my card each month for the amount I specified whenever I first signed up. Each month, I get an email explaining which patient my recurring donation was directed to that month.
What is different about the Universal Fund? Is this just the formal announcement of what was already in place? Also, will Teespring be matching the recurring donations that were already in place before this announcement? Thanks!
The Universal Fund is a rebrand/official launch of monthly donations. Your next month's donation will be automatically matched because you were one of the first thousand to join (thanks for being a Universal Fund OG!).
You'll get an email about this tomorrow morning (we didn't intend to launch today, but it got out on HN a little early :)
Great idea for people who want to stay involved. Sometimes its easy to forget to give especially with a busy job and so many other things fighting for our attention.
When I fund a watsi patient, I usually post it to my facebook and try to herd a whole bunch of my friends into giving to the patient.
Yay Watsi! I think this is a great extension to what you do.
For people who haven't tried the normal funding flow for Watsi - https://watsi.org/fund-treatments, directly funding someone's healthcare is an amazingly personal experience.
It literally costs you $10 to be part of changing someone's life and sometimes $100 to be the difference between them getting treatment or not. Making the donation recurring lowers the friction for someone to keep helping people if they had a good first experience.
This is absolutely great. Very impressed by the team, website, idea. Its so amazing to see non-profits bringing transparency and reducing/removing marketing.
Something to think about: How does a funder know if the partner is not giving raised prices the operation. How well do you guys trust the partners and how close are your relationships?
Glad you found your answers! Feel free to shoot us an email with questions anytime. I'm grace at watsi.org and the person leading our medical partner program is dan at watsi.org.
Thomas from Watsi here! When we were initially building the recurring donation feature, we experimented with using Stripe's recurring billing functionality, but we ended up building our own monthly charging (still through Stripe's API). Stripe's feature is more designed for fixed-price "plans" that folks can sign up for - i.e., SaaS products, rather than the Universal Fund's pick-your-own-amount recurring charge.
I was wondering how you select which patient will receive the donation each month ? Optimise impact ? Try and top up a maximum number of patient funds ?
Your donation will go to a patient who's fundraising on our website but hasn't had their treatment fully funded yet (like these folks: https://watsi.org/fund-treatments).
Have you thought about teaming up with eBay or some other giant like that? I know they ask me to round up/add a £1 extra to give to charity. Although i think the monthly subscription is hassle free, you'd get much more pocket change like that, which would compound. I'm not sure how you'd get listed there though.
Edit: i see the tip option while subscribing which is better than nothing
People are generous with tips, which is awesome and helps a ton. At this stage, we're 100% focused on raising money for patients. But down the line we'll likely start optimizing more for tips as well, in hopes of becoming self sustaining (https://watsi.org/faq#how-do-tips-work).
Bold move to put the number of members on the website while it's so low. It's professional looking, but the low member count immediately makes me wary. I would have waited until it was higher. :/
How is this different from the typical charity/NGO donation drives of "donate 39 cents a day" ad? I saw how introducing personal connections to individual medical treatments was different from the norm, however this now seems to reverse that by going right back to the old school, typical, individual international aid style of monthly monetary donations.
They're not reversing anything... They're just providing a way for people who want to donate to Watsi, but don't care to spend the time to find a particular patient.
They aren't doing away with the old 'pick a patient' method, they're just adding another option.
To be more clear: I'm not saying that they are reversing their "pick a patient" method. I'm saying that I saw how the "pick a patient" powered by the web model was an evolution among international aid / charity models. The "big generic fund" model however clearly is not. I'm not saying it's not convenient, I'm saying I don't see how going back to a model that's been used for decades is useful when such a model is arguably ineffectual at building deeper cross-cultural relationships. Not to mention that neither of these models of international aid or public health build anything sustainable.
A quick clarification here: joining the Universal Fund doesn't mean that we charge your credit card an amount every month and you have no idea where or who your donation is going towards. Every month, we automatically pick a patient your donation goes towards, and you get an email with the patient's story, and an update email after the patient's medical procedure.
