But now, Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen is back with a new startup called Dollar A Day that will presumably help to fill this non-profit funding gap. Launched earlier today, the company is about as simple as it gets. Every day, it sends out a brief email newsletter to all of its subscribers that features one non-profit organization per day. At the most basic level, all you get is the newsletter, but if you sign up to be a donor and provide some payment information, you agree to send a single dollar every day to the featured non-profit. Then, Dollar a Day (which itself is a nonprofit) gathers up all the individual donations and sends the money to the organization of the day.
Related: How to successfully crowdfund your project on Kickstarter
Structurally, the startup is about as lean as it gets. The company’s two full-time employees rely on off-the-shelf technology to run the entire operation: Mailgun to handle the daily email blasts, Network For Good for processing the tax-deductible donations, and a couple hours of research on sites like Guidestar and Charity Navigator to gather the information for each newsletter. It doesn’t get any simpler than this.
The Dollar a Day network is admittedly rather small at the moment, but it’s quickly gaining steam. Since launching earlier this morning (just 5 hours ago at time of writing), the site has amassed nearly 300 subscribers, and dozens more are joining each hour. Assuming it keeps the pace up, Dollar a Day could very well become a force to be reckoned with. As Chen points out, the formula adds up quickly. A dollar a day might not seem like much, but a network of just 3,000 donors would effectively raise over a million dollars for non-profits in the course of a given year.
