Charitabl. The name of this app tells you what it is on about. It helps you give. Mike Gore has been an innovator working for Christian organisations from Koorong to a term as CEO of Open Doors Australia. He tells The Other Cheek about his latest brainchild.
The Other Cheek: Mike, I’ve got simple questions to ask you about your new venture. Mike, after serving as CEO of a nonprofit Christian organization, you’ve founded a new app, Charitabl without the E. What is it and how does it help?
Mike Gore: My hope is it’s an answer to so many problems that charities face. In the 12 years that I served with Open Doors and Seven as CEO, I had many people ask me to build an app. But one of the things I realized, looking back as a leader of a not-for-profit, one of the greatest areas of financial wastage was technological expense.
Now, it wasn’t wastage in the sense of an abuse of income or funds, but more trying to stay technologically relevant in a rapidly changing environment costs so much money.
And so what I saw was different charities were building their own apps, and, to be honest, an app can cost tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so rather than build an app for Open Doors, knowing that it would be underutilised because individual users and donors actually don’t want a different app for every charity, I had a dream or a thought – what if we build a platform or owned a platform?
And so Charitabl was born, the menu log of giving.
An app that hosts 39,000 of Australia’s charities.. To be on the app, you must be registered with the ACNC, the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission. Your reporting must be up-to-date and accurate. If it isn’t, you are not featured on the app.
We wanted to create a place that reduced the wastage of expense on technology, reduced administration costs for charities, and in doing so, increased the impact of every dollar donated by individuals.
And hopefully, throughout that process, restore trust in the sector.
Because I think the latest McCrindle research suggested eight out of 10 individuals had a, had a belief that charities wasted money. And so John, we wanted to create a platform and app-based platform that, in part, helped reduced wastage, increase impact and restore or rebuild trust.
The Other Cheek: So I’m a user – I discovered this thing called Charitabl. How do I use it?
It’s an app. So what we’ve done is an app that will be on your smartphone. You would download it from either the App Store or Google Play.
And now, some of the details that are really important for users: we’ve built it as what’s called a native app. So there are two types of apps. There are web-based apps and native apps.
A web-based app is one of those ones that looks like an app on your phone, but when you click on it, it sort of kicks you off to a website. They’re fine, they’re legitimate, and they work. But from a security perspective, the greatest vulnerability is when you go from the device to the website.
And so what we wanted to do in a world of increasing data breaches was build something that was protected by either Apple or Google Security in a native environment. And so in Charitabl, as Australia’s first native app-based donation platform, you can play through Apple Pay or Google Pay. The user is in control.
So you would download it from the app store. You could either link a credit card or you could use an Apple Pay way of payment. And you are in control if you’re giving.
The Other Cheek: Now, um, you’ve obviously had some early adopters for Charitabl; who were they?
Mike Gore: well, we’re six weeks from launch now. We’ve had 350 users on the app. Um, we’ve had one user make over 40 donations now. And so the early adopters from a user perspective, we’ve done some sort of demographic study on those. One of them’s a mother in her mid-forties from Newcastle. We’ve had a 76-year-old, download and use the app and reach out to us with an endorsement.
We are, seeing that it’s an antiquated view that people say apps are for young people, Covid has forced a hyper kind of acceptance and comfortability with digital technology. And so what we’re finding is across the breadth of age groups, mid-seventies through young people, young married families, time-poor business people, um, are using the app.
Our revenue model is based on sharing the costs of technology between charities. So donations are essentially free other than the bank fees. We don’t take a commission; we pass it on in this entirety to the charity.
Where and how we would make our money is that charities pay a monthly fee. We have a three-tiered pricing: under a million dollar revenue, under 10 million, over 10 million. That gives them access to their own app, essentially. And we have a monthly subscription fee, like a software subscription for charities. And so we’ve had several of those come on board in the last six weeks.
The Other Cheek: I like many Christian people, donate to Christian things as well as to non-Christian things. You are planning to have a wide spread on your app.
Mike Gore: We are a Christian-valued company, albeit not Christian. So we have 39,000 charities on the app at the moment. The breadth of society from, you know, as provocative as it is for some Christians, we have LGBTQIA people, we have other religions, we have secular organisations. We wanted to create a centralized platform where no matter inclusivity, no matter your race, your colour, your religion, your belief or your values, it is a central place to make your charitable gift. And I think that’s really important is that as Christians, we need to be promoting a sense of generosity, a company that has Christian ethos and values but isn’t only exclusively for Christians.
The Other Cheek: I noticed you talk about a Christian laziness in giving.
Mike Gore: I would say that there’s a general laziness in giving. I think for me personally, as a Christian; I have been lazy in my giving. In fact, in a world where everything’s competing for your attention, the heartbreaking reality is that I’m actually less generous. If I have to get off the lounge to get my wallet, if I have to go to a website and click all the squares with traffic lights, if I have to register for another account or a password, what I find is I just simply don’t do it.
So what we wanted to do was remove some of those barriers to generosity. And even me personally, with the app, I have been far more generous in the last six weeks than I have in the last six years. And it makes me feel good about myself, about the ability I have to help impact the world.
One of the other really important things of Charitabl is that it keeps all of your giving in one place. So the end of the tax year, you get an itemised giving statement that tells you what the total amount of your tax-deductible gifts is versus your non-tax-deductible gifts. I never have to search for a receipt again. It’s making, giving, tagline, “charitabl, the easy way to give.” We want to make it easy for Australians to be generous no matter what their race or religion.
The Other Cheek: Are you finding churches have signed up yet, or is that something that’s uh, uh, a next stage?
Mike Gore: Well, we’re only six weeks from launch, and so we haven’t actually started approaching churches, but if you are a charity, you are on the app. So one of the big opportunities would be the way that it could impact schools, in particular Christian schools. My kids attend a Christian school: mufti days, fundraising environments: those kinds of things you can all do through the app. Similarly, for churches’ missional giving, you remove the administrative burden of managing all of your congregations, donations and farming that out to different charities. And you can identify your missional partners for the year. You can still keep track of your giving; you can still see how well the church has gone. So yeah, that would be a huge opportunity for churches to explore, using Charitabl for their missional giving for their, um, fundraising and for their timing.
The Other Cheek: Now, Mike, I’ve been distantly following your career, noticing your presence all the way back from when you used to work from Koorong. That was a long time ago. I just wanted to ask you, what are the causes close to your heart?
Mike Gore: That’s a great question. A lot of people would probably have pigeonholed me to the persecuted church simply because of the work I’ve done with Open Doors. And one of the things I was really passionate about in my time with Open Doors was I actually wasn’t [simply] passionate about the persecuted church. I love God and I love people, that has to be my driving motivator. Because the reality is that if I don’t make it that, my identity falls into what I do. Now at Koorong, I learned that lesson. I am great friends of Paul Bootes [tge long time CEO of Koorong], but I learned that lesson the hard way because your identity gets caught up in being a music buyer travelling the world.
And so the journey has been one of releasing an identity based on what I do, and finding identity based on who I am. That is, someone who loves God and loves people.
What I’ve found in the last, um, last sort of six years of my life is what I would call “the moral unlearning of the gospel.” I’ve had all of these stigmas associated with things like, indigenous culture, LGBTQIA,, divorce, marriage, all these kinds of things. And so I’ve realized, my gosh, I, I hold some pretty rigid views on that. Charitabl has actually jumped me out of that narrow viewpoint and into a much broader world where there are people who don’t share my values but are actually doing unbelievably amazing things in the world from a heart of kindness.
And so what causes are close to my heart actually is broadening every day, you know, from things environmentally to things spiritually and religiously to things around mental health. And helping people manage, identity issues and young teens struggling with things like cutting or mental health through to gender and identity. So a really broadening thing where I’m allowed to able to love God, love people and realize that God uses the flawed Christian, not the flawless Christian. And so it’s, it’s a great journey. I’m loving it.
Find Charitabl in the Apple App Store or Google Play.