The idea of The Dollar Effect started with our CTO, Albert Padin.
“All I was thinking about was, well, people want to help. People generally want to help but sometimes it’s complicated to give because one, you think of other expenses so you can’t give much.” -Albert Padin
Albert had a few colleagues who were working for nonprofit organizations, and he saw that these individuals had to exert so much time and effort to raise funds. For these colleagues, they have to do this in a one-time-big-time manner where they organize a campaign, raise funds, use those funds to run their operations for some time, then they have to do that again when funds are almost consumed. It’s a cycle. This distracted them from doing the actual work that fulfills their mission.
This sparked an idea from Albert to create something that allows people to give continuously. It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be recurring so it gives a stable, predictable cash flow to these nonprofits.
“The idea came out like, what if we make this so that the amount is actually small enough that it’s the last thing you would consider cutting off? So you would have a smaller amount but the drive was to get many people to do it so a lot of people are doing good to make a bigger impact.”
This was the idea, then our team members here in Symph volunteered to turn this idea into a reality. This reality came in the form of www.thedollareffect.com, a web application that allows people to subscribe to a nonprofit of their choice, and then set up their account to automatically donate $1 to the nonprofit on a monthly basis.
Nicole Padin (Project Manager), John Rey Evangelista (Developer), and Rose Tan (Designer) led the “The Dollar Effect” project, with the support work of many others from our team.
When asked about what made them want to work for The Dollar Effect project, Rose explained:
“I was so on-board with the idea. I and my family also supported an organization that helped the less fortunate kids who lived in the slums. They are all reliant on donors and I could feel the struggle in their part to sustain funds for their cause. It (The Dollar Effect) was a good idea.”
As the designer, Rose initially looked into different donating sites and studied their design, features and other components, and then compared these with each other in order to come up with our own for The Dollar Effect.
We created a release plan once the designs were finalized, then development started by John Rey together with other developers like Jhong Paigan, one of our full stack developers.
Nicole managed the project which ran for about one month, then we launched the web app to the public last April.
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According to Albert,
“I’ve done it (subscribed to The Dollar Effect), a lot of people in the (Symph) office have done it, and I seriously have forgotten about it (that he has been giving monthly donations). It’s so small that you forget about it but if a lot of people actually do it, it could really make a great impact. That’s what we call ‘The Dollar Effect.’”
If you wish to be part of this cause, whether you want to donate or want to sign up as a nonprofit, click here.
