Social Impact for the Rest of Us

Helping You Help Others

We at Philance are committed to bringing social impact work to the mainstream of society so that it is not left just to volunteers or individual non-profits / NGOs / social enterprises to address some of the most critical challenges facing humanity today. We also want to create a large number of new jobs in the social sector so that people displaced from their jobs due to automation in future, can engage in work that gives them meaning and purpose.

Our solution proposes the creation of an online platform that can be used by individuals and organizations to perform social impact projects. Through the platform anyone can: (a) Join an existing team working on a social impact project as a freelancer or volunteer, or create a new project, if none exists to address the social problem they are interested in solving. (b) Recruit freelancers and/or volunteers for their project from their local community or from across the world (c) Manage project deliverables and collaborate with the project team. (d) Raise funding for the project, if required. (e) Publish the results of the project and share with other project teams, contributing to the knowledge base of best practices and lessons learnt.

This would be the first freelancing platform dedicated to social impact, creating a marketplace for social good. Although components of the solution proposed here exist in other platforms, the Philance platform would be among the first to bring together the features of volunteer matching, freelancer recruiting, project management, real-time collaboration, fund raising and knowledge dissemination under one umbrella, making it a one-stop solution for taking an idea for social impact from conception to completion. The overall impact of this solution would be to greatly increase the number of people working on social impact across the world, create a large number of freelancing jobs and provide solutions to some of the critical challenges faced by our society.

The solution we are proposing is a new application of existing collaboration and project management technologies applied to the field of philanthropy. As the platform evolves, there will be opportunities to add technologies such as AI and blockchain. For instance, AI may be used to automatically match freelancers/volunteers with projects, so that there is a better match. And blockchain-based cryptocurrencies may be used to fund projects on this platform and serve as payments to freelancers. Another feature is that our platform is built upon open-source software enabling others to expand the feature set based on future requirements.

Our solution aims to bring together groups of people from across the world on common social issues. Technology will play a key role in this solution to facilitate real-time collaboration between the team members and enable them to manage complex projects. Audio/video conferencing, email, chat, file transfer, calendar and project management capabilities will be built into the platform. There will also be reporting/analytics features as well as links to crowdfunding and payment processing applications. The platform will be available both on laptops/desktops and handheld devices.

The 12-month goals are (i) Get 5-10 nonprofits/NGOs to run at least one social impact project each on the platform. This will allow us to validate the project management and collaboration features of the product. (ii) Deploy the platform in 4-5 local communities to pilot the social media features of the product, such as ease of use to post philanthropic projects, recruitment of freelancers/volunteers to work on projects, collaboration, and sharing results of projects with the rest of the community. (iii) Form strategic partnerships and (iv) Grow the open-source community contributing to the source code of the product.

In the next 3-5 years we would like to: (i) Make the solution globally available so that people from communities all across the world will be able to join the platform and post and execute social impact projects on this platform. (ii) Partner with a number of non-profits, NGOs, social enterprises and government agencies to get them to adopt this platform for running their social projects. (iii) Have a large open-source community expanding the product in a number of different areas. (iv) Partner with impact investors and foundations so they fund many of the projects posted on the platform.

The solution will be deployed as a Software as a Service (SaaS) application on AWS and people will be able to access it through their internet browsers on a laptop/desktop. We will also build a native app to access the application from IOS and Android devices. Our customers will consist of individuals who want to post projects, as well as organizations wishing to run social impact projects on our platform. We will reach them through ads, partnerships, social media and inside sales.

Prototype is in development and we are not serving any customers at the moment.

In the next 12 months we expect to have about 10 social impact projects concurrently running on the platform. We will select projects that impact a population of 1000 or more people, so we hope to be serving about 10,000 people by then. In 3 years we hope to have about 500 projects posted on the platform, serving a population of about half a million people. We also expect the 500 projects to provide job opportunities to about 2,000 freelancers plus volunteers. The population of people impacted by these projects will span age, gender, locality, country and socio-economic domains.

Our team has the necessary skills of entrepreneurship, product development, business development, sales and marketing, and partnership development that will enable us to succeed. Some key members of our team include: Founder and CEO: Ajay Kapur(https://www.linkedin.com/in/aj...), Director, EU: Raman Sailopal (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ra...), Director, Business development: Stephanie Chan (https://www.linkedin.com/in/st...), Advisors: Kishor Thakkar (https://www.linkedin.com/in/th...), Amit Singh (https://www.linkedin.com/in/si...).

Philance is incorporated as a Benefit Corporation in Massachusetts. Our primary revenue streams will consist of the following: Fees charged to freelancers as a percentage (5-15%) of their earnings; Fees for value add services to customers such as project management, customer support and vetting of freelancers; Sponsored content (ads) in our application. We believe that the platform will see widespread adoption by individuals and organizations, resulting in sufficient revenue for long-term profitability and expansion.

We are applying to Solve primarily because we believe that our solution is a good fit for the ‘Work of the future’ challenge by promoting freelancing jobs that bring meaning and purpose to the people doing them, and helping society in other ways as well. We are also applying because working with the Solve community will open up many new doors for us through partnerships, mentorships and media exposure.

Some key barriers that we need to address are: (1) Adoption of the platform by social impact organizations as well as local communities (2) Increase in open-source community contributing to the software platform. (3) Obtaining seed funding for 2 years. (4) Having more advisors with relevant work experience. Solve can help with all of the above by introducing the Philance core team to appropriate partners and mentors, and by promoting the solution in the media.