Dear friend,

The world is on fire but don't worry I'm not going to give you bad news week after week. Despite the shitstorm we're experiencing, some good things keep happening as well. This week, researchers from The Nature Conservancy released their research on Hawai'i's coral reefs and good news: the coral reefs that experienced a massive bleaching in 2014 and 2015 are now healing! They found that the corals that were healing the quicker were the ones with limited exposure to humans, shocking right. Read more about these wonders of nature.

Ever wonder how meat became such a staple in our lives and diets? Turns out Victorians are all to blame. The global mass-meat industry as we know it today took its first steps in Britain. It revolutionized the British diet and how the rest of the world consumed meat. Read about the fascinating story of how 'big meat' came to be.

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How Kinder helps charities become more impactful, effective and knowledge-driven

Company blogs

Written by
Deniz Gulsoken

on
26 March 2020

Just like their for-profit counterparts, even more so, not-for-profit organisations need analysis and consultancy. However, unlike for-profit companies, charitable organisations often lack the resources to be able to afford external entities conducting research for them and giving them advice on how to improve. Especially for smaller organisations with not a lot of time and money to spare, making external research consultancy a regular practice can be very costly and can take away from other, more urgent needs.

Kinder is here to fill in this gap in the charitable sector. We analyse charitable organisations based on the Kinder Vetting Framework we’ve built with the help of Impact Center Erasmus and give them bespoke advice on how to improve based on their results. We don’t charge organisations for this service, all an organisation needs to do to start using our services is to sign up to our Charity Zone.

We analyse charitable organisations using our own vetting framework for four reasons: to provide the organisation with an outside perspective on their efforts, to benchmark them against others working in the same area, to advise them on how to improve, and to inform the public about the efforts of these organisations. We see research as a big catalyst in improving the charitable sector and people’s trust in it.

Our vetting is done by a dedicated team of specially trained volunteers and overseen by our research team, professionals with an extensive background in research and the charitable sector. Our team vets organisations on a rolling basis to keep up with both their efforts and the improvements in the sector. All of the insight that we gather from our continuous analysis, we share with organisations.

For example, if we can’t find evidence that an organisation has employed a strong thinking model for strategic planning, that organisation would score low on the ‘Causal Chain’ section of our analysis. When they go to their profile to check their results however, they won’t only see their score but also our advice on the benefits of using a thinking model. On top of the advice, they will get access to Kinder’s step by step guide to the Theory of Change model.

The nature of our analysis is to make charitable organisations’ work as efficient as possible, their fundraising as cost-efficient as possible, their image in the public eye as excellent as possible and their projects as visible as possible.

We have already vetted over 2000 organisations. This means we have insight into a lot of them. We use this insight to benchmark each organisation against others in the same field they are working in. This information, just like their results, is shared with the organisations so they can develop an understanding of their place within the sector. In the future, we are going to connect organisations with each other so they can share their expertise and lift each other up.

If you’re a charitable organisation and want to get a free analysis, custom advice, innovative donation tools and extend the reach of your stories by joining the Kinder ecosystem, all you have to do is sign up to our Charity Zone. Let’s make the world a kinder place.

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Stories that matter: Kinder employs storytelling for impact

Company blogs

Written by
Deniz Gulsoken

on
26 March 2020

Kinder started off with a simple idea: I want to donate but I don’t know how to or to whom.

Making the world a better place, helping others that are less fortunate, saving the planet, these ideas are present at our current stage more than ever. People want to do good, they want to help out organisations that are doing good. Yet, they don’t know where to start or who to trust.

Purposeful storytelling is the future of philanthropy and one of Kinder’s three pillars. Transparency and accountability are what we ask of all the organisations in our system. We don’t just analyse charitable organisations and help them improve, we also share their stories with the public. We want to make sure people who are looking to contribute to a kinder world have all the information they need, to make decisions they are proud of.

We use our in-house media platform Kinder World to turn the insight from our research into impactful stories that drive people to donate to causes and problems they are reading about. Every organisation that signs up to Kinder’s platform charitable organisations Charity Zone, gets direct access to our editorial team.

We’ve got a team of writers working alongside our researchers who are deeply knowledgeable about the sector and guest writers, each an expert in their subject. Using the same insight, we make sure organisations who are doing great and score amongst the highest get the attention they deserve by actively promoting them and helping them reach large audiences.

We work alongside organisations, and other media outlets and big brands, to make sure their stories reach people who are concerned and who want to help.

We read about catastrophic crises, like climate change, or disasters, like Australian bushfires, but too often it is just the problem that gets the spotlight and not the solutions. When it comes to the big problems the world is facing, Kinder provides much-needed knowledge about the problem. Yet, our editorial focus is solution-based. So, we don’t just write about the problems, we direct our audience towards solutions to those problems in the form of charitable organisations that are solving them, helping organisations raise funds along the way.

Whether someone cares about saving the Borneo orangutans, preserving rainforests, or decreasing the meat industry’s climate impact we’ve got a story and an organisation they can donate to help solve the problem.

Stories become more powerful the more they are shared. We don’t want to stop at our own platform when it comes telling the stories of organisations who are doing great work. That’s why we’re working on several partnerships with big media brands so that these stories can reach every corner around the globe.

In a sense, Kinder is a PR agency for the charitable sector, we work hard to extend the reach of organisations’ visibility. The difference from a regular PR agency, however, is that profit is not the purpose of our storytelling. We don’t work for a big conglomerate trying to greenwash their name, or a company trying to sell sustainable branded products. Our main client is the planet and its inhabitants: humans, animals and all living organisms. The only reason we want our stories to make noise is so that they can make an impact.

We’ve already vetted over 2000 organisations and started asking them to join us in the Charity Zone. Register to join them, start telling your stories and raising additional funds.

Together, we can make the world a kinder place.

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The future of fundraising is online with Kinder

Company blogs

Written by
Deniz Gulsoken

on
26 March 2020

Gathering data on global giving is quite the feat, giving trends change from region to region, they change with world events (i.e. natural disasters, humanitarian crises), and they change from one demographic to another. However, across all of the reports we’ve had a chance to examine, there was one common element that was impossible to miss all over geographies, times, and demographics: the fact that online giving is on an extreme increase.

It became clear to us that the majority of people from all over the world no matter their age, the causes they care about, or the size of their donations, prefer to donate online and are more likely to actually go through with their donations when given easy to use donating tools. We do so much of our daily tasks online, it only makes sense that we would want to do our giving the same way.

Numerous organisations have the option to donate through their website but too often it’s confusing and clunky. Media platforms talk about the needs of the charitable sector but their audience doesn’t know what to do after reading about the problems. People want to start fundraisers for causes they care about and move others around them to join in, but there isn’t a central place they can all of it. We developed our smart fundraising tools to satisfy this exact need in the sector.

The first of our smart fundraising solutions, allows people to follow the development of charitable organisations, get information about their projects and contribute to their efforts with recurring or one-off donations. All charitable organisations who sign up to our Charity Zone and pass our basic analysis get to publish their profile and start receiving donations.

Another one of our fundraising solutions is the Kinder Widget. The widget is a smart tool anyone can easily add to a website, article, blog-post or a news story. Using the widget as simple as adding a YouTube video into your article, anyone can use it to start raising funds with no technical experience necessary.

With the Kinder Widget, news publications, magazines, even personal blogs will be able to connect the stories they write to organisations their audience can donate to help out. The widget is easy-to-use for organisations and publications, but more importantly, for the potential donors. It offers them a simple and safe way to contribute to bettering the world.

Following the Charity Profile and the Kinder Widget are more smart donation tools. My Kinder World is a platform for donors where they can have a donor profile, get detailed insight on charitable organisations and follow their progress, connect to other donors, organise fundraisers and find many other ways to support the organisations they care about.

To join Kinder as a charitable organisation and get access to our smart fundraising tools, as well as our free analysis and editorial efforts, all you have to do is sign up to our Charity Zone in three simple steps. Let’s make the world a Kinder place together.

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About Kinder

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No Nemo without corals

Dear friend,

More Stories

How Kinder helps charities become more impactful, effective and knowledge-driven

Stories that matter: Kinder employs storytelling for impact

The future of fundraising is online with Kinder