Click here to save the world

• Interview by Rosanne Bersten
• 19 August 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Matt Tilleard, Simon Griffiths and Jehan Ratnatunga originally came to my agency, Evolution7, with a concept for a click-to-donate site. I was aware of the Hunger Site; freerice wasn’t around at that stage. They had a rough sketch of how they thought it would work. They had a lot of energy and enthusiasm, I was pretty struck by the idea and we developed a rapport. We each bring different skills and experience to the equation and there’s a great energy between us that drives Ripple. I did a fine art degree at the Victorian College of the Arts and that led me into the creative field. I freelanced as a creative for a number of years and then I started Evolution7 in 2000.

Matt and Jehan work for Boston Consulting Group, so they’ve got more of a business background, but they both have a very strong social conscience. This is their way of giving back. Simon is tutoring and researching in economics at the University of Melbourne and working on a new non-profit project launching later this year. Again, he’s someone with a very strong social conscience.

Visionary

We wanted to select top-tier charities that were recognisable, that people could instantly feel some kind of connection with. So that’s why we’ve got Oxfam, Wateraid and, perhaps not quite as well known, Oaktree and Grameen. They all contribute to community aid. We are trying to combat some of the bigger picture issues: world poverty and inequity in developing nations. We’ve had a lot of demand to address the environment and we are in talks to introduce this with a suitable partner, so stay tuned.

In terms of the user experience, we want to keep it as simple as possible. You’re trying to differentiate in a society where everything is competing for everyone’s attention: images, advertising, billboards, TV, internet, MySpace, Facebook, whatever. What we wanted to do with Ripple was have a clear signal that was simple and pure, and that could easily be distilled into a simple idea. I think part of the reason people respond to the program so well is that it’s uncomplicated; people get it.

Revenue raising

There’s an enormous amount of money that flows through the internet everyday in the form of commerce, sponsorship, syndication and advertising.

Ripple is essentially tapping into some of that revenue for a good cause. It’s also about capturing the power of the individual to make a positive affirmation. Everyone can make a small difference and the cumulative effect of that is we make a big difference. The advertisers love the site. There are certain types of advertiser we won’t take — tobacco and gambling, to name a couple of obvious ones — but there are others that we would bar on ethical grounds. The charities also have the power of veto. They have their own mandates about what kind of advertising sponsorship they can support.

A click a day

With each charity, we have worked out what it would cost to provide aid. The charities have already worked out their costs and they give us their figures. Then that’s divided by what we raise for each click. We can sell ads in the thousands and so we know that we might make, for example on average, one cent per click. It’s quite surprising how much that equates to when you break it down into those bite-size figures, that it does equal two days of water. ‘Your click has helped somebody to plant a garden in Africa’. It’s connecting that very small action with a concrete difference for somebody else who might be very far away.

We haven’t done the final figures for the last 12 months so I couldn’t give you an exact figure for how much we’ve made so far. We would have liked it to have been in the hundreds of thousands but at this stage we’re looking at the tens of thousands.

Everything that is raised from this site — and we’re a bit unique in this way — every cent goes to the charities. At the moment it’s sustainable. I can’t rule out changing in the future but that is definitely our very strong goal. We want to keep that as pure as we can. None of us is taking any income from this site. It is a contentious issue with every charity and you often see figures as high as 30 – 40% being spent on administration – we wanted to avoid that.

Different strokes

There is a Facebook application which is like a mini version of Ripple. It works a little bit differently, as everything on Facebook does.

The search function was something that was introduced to help make the site more sticky. Very early on we felt that just having click-to-donate buttons wasn’t enough to make people set it as their home page. Around that time I was aware Google had introduced a feature called custom search engines. So we created the Ripple-branded search engine. You can rely on the accuracy of Google results, and at the same time you’re doing something good and helping Ripple. Overall you’re searching as you normally would but the proceeds are going to charity – it’s a win-win for little effort.

There’s a kind of unanimous good feeling about the site and that’s fantastic; people say ‘I just want to say what you guys are doing is fantastic, using the site just makes me feel good’ and that’s precisely what we want to achieve.

It really is about positive action. We have taken the approach of not showing pictures of people in appalling conditions and desperate poverty, which are more about shock tactics. That has been done, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re about a positive message of change. There’s unlimited potential for change in the world. You’re seeing things such as social networking becoming the norm. This is the age of Facebook, where people are connected in a way they never were before. People are slowly realising they can form groups, network, get together behind causes and mobilise in such a way that they never had the power to do before. I think that’s very empowering. So the more people who realise that and the power for collective change — the sky is the limit.

Personal responsibility

My philosophy is that we’re not going to solve the world’s problems overnight and to try to do that might be too lofty a goal. But on the other hand to sit back and do nothing is unacceptable. There are some very interesting and encouraging things going on, such as the One Laptop per Child project. It’s been criticised but it’s a pretty remarkable effort in a lot of ways. I’m sure those laptops end up in all kinds of people’s hands, but at the end of the day it’s still providing access to information and technology to many who wouldn’t have had it otherwise.