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These three young women are determined to change the world, one dollar at a time, with a simple app

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one7days, a new micro-donation app available on both iOS and Android, allows users to give $1 per week to a different charitable cause.

Three young women from Melbourne, who want to pay it forward and do something to make a difference, thought of the concept of micro-donation in its simplest form ($1 to a different charity every 7 days, hence the name).

“The point is to make it possible for people who don’t have much disposable income to donate, but want to! There are a lot of good and generous people out there that this concept will be perfect for, and it will have long-lasting effects on the world,” says one7days co-founder and CEO, Amy Eade.

How does one7days work?

The app is free to download, and there are no annoying in-app advertisements.

Each week, they send a notification letting the user know about their charity of the week.

one7days has a diverse range of causes they feature, including humanitarian aid (like poverty, homelessness, water sanitation etc.), animal welfare, environment, medical research, medical care, human rights and natural disasters.

You read a brief description of the cause, and if you want to, you can give $1 at the click of a button. You are not locked in to give every week; it’s your choice, but the maximum is $52 in a year.

The app is intelligent so after the first time you enter your payment details it remembers them so the next time you simply click to give. Or if you want to, you can give $52 up front and it will automatically allocate $1 to each cause for a year.

The total amount raised will be reported as well as what the funds were used for, so users can see how their gift combined with others has made a difference.

One7days gives their charity partners exposure to different audiences who they hope to turn some into new additional supporters for them, so the flow-on affects are two-fold.

one7daysHow did one7days come to life?

Amy, with her husband co-founded Lifebroker; Australia’s largest online life insurance broker.

Kate Atkins worked with them from the very start, helping to grow it over the course of about 12 years from a small business to a large, market-leading and extremely innovative company.

Sarah Simeon also worked at Lifebroker for several years and due to the collaborative nature of the business, they each developed a broad professional skill set through being involved in many different aspects of business operations.

Lifebroker was sold to TAL in 2013, and after a well-earned break to spend more quality time with her two young children, Amy’s focus and priorities shifted to what is most important in life.

She decided to start a private consulting company; Miniscule, where Sarah and Kate joined her as project consultants working on a broad range of specialised projects lending their expertise to help other businesses improve operational efficiency. They had also been learning a great deal about app development as an independent project; Green Honey.

In late 2014 Amy mentioned to Kate and Sarah she had been thinking about doing something more meaningful to ‘give back’. Her idea evolved into developing their own app for charitable giving, which they all quickly became very enthusiastic about.

What inspired Amy, Kate and Sarah to start one7days?

All three women have been regular supporters including monetary donations and volunteering for various charities over the years.

“We all have different personal reasons, with life experience such as having children of our own, the sorrow of losing friends/family to incurable disease, travelling to third world countries, adopting pets from animal shelters, hearing grim stories on the news of people affected by war, poverty or natural disasters,” Kate told Anthill.

“It becomes painfully clear that there are so many worthy causes in the world, but with the rising cost of living and increasingly busy lifestyles trying to balance work and family, it’s impossible to make a difference to all of them.

“The average person has to choose which charities they can afford to support, if any.

“With one7days, we want to remove the sense of guilt associated with one; wanting to give to charity but not being able to afford to and two; not knowing which cause to choose if you can only afford to support say one or two each year.

“We make it easy to access information about a range of causes, and be a part of a larger global community. Through power in numbers, one7days enables you to make a real difference with very little individual time, effort and money. Which means everyone can do it!”

What exactly is one7days aiming to achieve?

The trio is aiming to inspire people who don’t currently support any charities (as well as those who do), to get involved, especially young people who are socially conscious and looking for a way to make a difference, but often short on disposable income.

Amy highlighted that statistics show that younger people (especially those aged 20-40) are the least generous when it comes to charitable giving because they can’t afford it, or don’t know where to start. “This app solves both, because most people with a smartphone can afford up to $52 in a year – and that’s all it takes.”

“It is not much for one person but if thousands, or hopefully hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world do the same; suddenly you have this incredible impact where thousands of dollars are raised through crowd funding and given to charities who are doing tangible things ‘on the ground’ to improve the lives of those less fortunate,” Kate went on to explain.

“Collectively this will make a real difference to 52 different causes every single year. It’s a very simple concept, but one that will work if enough people get on board.”

In fact, the app is almost entirely self-funded. “We did run an initial crowd funding campaign with Indiegogo, which wasn’t all that successful to be honest,” Kate revealed.

“But as we are all so passionate about one7days and genuinely believe it can make a difference in the world, we have invested our own money and resources into developing and marketing it.

“We are changing the world one dollar at a time. One small gift. One big change.”