Stores and consumer products saw a one-two tradeshow punch in January from CES in Las Vegas and the National Retail Federation's Big Show in New York City this week. The Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit Good360 showed up at both—and even took home an $850,000 grant from Verizon in Vegas, winning the Sustainability category in the telecom giant's Powerful Answers Awards.
The money and resulting partnership with Verizon will help Good360 to develop its Disaster Recovery360 platform, a portal with tools for optimizing donations in disaster relief situations. Retailers are natural and frequent partners for Good360, which facilitates donations for relief efforts when disasters occur across the world from Joplin, Mo., to the Philippines. The organization has partnered with companies including 3M, Home Depot, PetSmart and numerous others over its 30-year history, and it came to the NRF's Big Show this week to continue to build on that legacy.
Retail Dive dropped by the group's booth on Monday to find out some more about what will happen next for its portal, as well as what all of the new help from Verizon will accomplish.
GETTING STARTED
"Essentially, right now we're launching the first phase of technology, so we're integrating our e-commerce site with a crowdfunding platform in which companies donate the goods and individuals actually can help crowdfund for the logistical costs of these goods to get it from one place to another," Good360 Director of Strategic Development Di Yu told us.
The rollout of the new features will take place in stages, and Yu explained how the organization expects the portal to grow. Ultimately, the new tech should expand upon Good360's current technology platform and expand the group's capabilities.
"Right now, we are about to launch this phase of the product around the end of February," she said. "Immediately afterwards, we are launching the disaster relief portal as the offshoot."
WORKING WITH VERIZON
As new launches arrive, the award from Verizon will mean more than just funding for the project. The win will mean technical expertise and resources from Verizon to complement Good360's experience forging relationships and responding to needs.
"We're able to leverage their technical expertise and have their Verizon Innovation Lab help us incubate the technology," Yu said.
The partnership is still in its first month, so the relationship is still taking shape, but she expects to see the fruits of the of the collaboration as Disaster Recovery360's new features appear.
WHERE THE MONEY WILL GO
"Right now, we are funded in terms of our phase two technology," Yu explained. "However, for the disaster portal this is all going to go into the evolution of the phase two technology to make it disaster-specific."
Initially, the project's team will be building out how users interact with those disasters on both desktop and mobile devices. And Yu hopes to see those efforts pay off for donors, as well as relief workers.
"One major part of the portal is the mobile feature," she said, "because when you're out in the disaster you really need to use the cell phone technology."
Moving forward, the project's evolution will encompass donations as well, and Yu said that those features are on the way. Eventually, however, the app will collect more than just money.
COLLECTING STORIES FOR DONORS
Corporate donations commonly come with expectations of reports on progress and accomplishments, and key component of the expanded portal's menu will be the ability to track events and responses in a meaningful way for the companies and individuals providing the resources.
"So the retailers—they're getting a lot of publicity through this app, and they're able to directly see what occurs on the ground and where they're efforts are impacting," Yu said.
The expectation will be that the portal can simplify how donors understand and analyze results after they give, making it easy to see where the money is going. If the portal can do that, it may even provide further motivation for repeat donations down the road.
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