“But where does the money go?”
It’s probably one of the most asked questions in the social enterprise, charity and not for profit sector. And it’s a fair one. At a time where giving rates are on the decline and there’s a growing scepticism around what businesses and charities do with the money they are given, it’s also an important one. Track Your Impact™ is our answer. We built it because we commit 100% of profits from our products to our impact partners and we wanted to prove it.
As part of my role heading up Digital and UX (User Experience) at Thankyou, I get to be part of the media management team that oversees filming and photography of our projects and also our Track Your Impact™ system. It’s hard to explain the surreal feeling you get when you see the solutions at work and the tangible difference you are part of making in someone’s life in some of the most vulnerable communities in the world.
Track Your Impact™
We made Track Your Impact together with our ridiculously hard-working impact partners and suppliers. The job of our impact partners to make it work is a detailed one — they provide us with high-level reporting, images, stories, project information, solutions and the GPS coordinates of each project. The projects we fund have varying implementation periods and can span anywhere from one year to upwards of three years.
Every Thankyou product has a unique tracker code (which is quite a task for our suppliers). Having a unique tracker code printed on every single product is the other half of the equation to making sure we can connect you to your impact that our incredible suppliers work. This unique code, when entered at thankyou.co/projects, shows you the exact project your product is assigned to fund, complete with GPS coordinates. Once the project has been completed, we’ll send you a Final Field Report.
Pictured: Christine from Kenya. Empowered by a Food For Now program, funded by the Thankyou Food range.
What are Final Field Reports?
They’re personalised reports we send you once a project you’ve tracked has been completed, and project solutions have been implemented.
Final Field Reports serve as proof of our promise to you. Complete with photos of the solution implemented, we aim to give you a similar level of reporting that you would receive if you gave away hundreds of thousands of dollars to most other development agencies. It’s an unprecedented level of reporting for consumers. It’s radical transparency.
We do this by equipping our impact partners on the ground with our Thankyou Field Reporting app — a smartphone app that field staff use to capture and send images of the solutions on the ground. We love that Final Field Reports are both an opportunity for you to feel confident that we’re doing what we promise and connect you to the impact you’ve helped to make.
Cindy (left) demo'ing the Thankyou 'FIeld App' to World Vision Vanuatu field staff.
Why we made them
Trust and Transparency
Trust is always important. In a sceptical world, it’s doubly important. We wanted to create something where we could be transparent with our supporters and connect them to the lasting impact they’re helping to make. But showing you where the money is going is only one part of it.
Connection
We’d love to take everyone to visit the projects, but until the day teleportation is invented, Track Your Impact and Final Field Reports are our way of connecting you with the impact you’re making to help end global poverty.
We’ve been working on Final Field Reports (with our good friends at Yump Digital) for a couple of years and wrestling what would be the best way of condensing what would normally be a 90-page donor report into something that can connect with and empower you. We started with an email report (which some of you may have already seen!), but email as a medium is limited and we felt we couldn’t effectively show you your incredible impact.
So, Final Field Reports now live within Track Your Impact — this means you now get a more connected experience, which drops you right on the project you’ve helped to fund.
Transparency For All
We also realised that this unprecedented level of transparency couldn’t only be reserved for those who had tracked that particular project. So, Final Field Reports are now also available to everyone who has a Track Your Impact profile, not just trackers. It’s a feature that we’re incredibly proud of. It not only allows a tracker to see their complete impact, but also demonstrates to everyone the potential impact they could make by switching to Thankyou products.
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Track Your Impact and Final Field Reports are just one way we hope to connect you to the change you’re making because you made the switch to Thankyou.
I titled this post ‘radical transparency’ because when I think of what we have built in Track Your Impact, that’s the best way I can describe it. To me, it’s a tool that binds, connects and empowers you, our impact partners and the communities we serve. And this is just the beginning…
Head here and create a profile and check out a Final Field Report for yourself.
Photography: Kim Landy
