Can an App Really Make a Difference?

Currently, there are more than more than 45 million people in the US living in poverty. However, only one quarter of Americans volunteered in their communities last year. Faced with those challenges, why are we convinced that our application will make a big impact on both?

In a recent survey of 135 countries, Americans were more likely than any other nationality to help strangers, with nearly four in five survey respondents having done so during the previous month. Compared to the level of volunteerism in the US, this finding suggests that there is a profoundly underutilized willingness among Americans to become more involved with community development. Fortunately, we increasingly understand the factors that make people more willing to participate in community-building activities:

• When people feel like they can make a meaningful impact; and
• When people have a personal connection to a particular cause, or to those supporting the cause.

We will be leveraging both of these factors with our application, and the opportunities for scaling are tremendous:

• More than 98% of Americans are “connected to high-speed wireless Internet — surpassing any point in our nation’s history.” In addition, there are more than 180 million smartphone users throughout the US. This means that there are millions of opportunities to increase participation in community development using a smartphone application.
• Furthermore, nearly three in four Americans have a social network profile. By integrating our application with some of the most common social media networks, we will be able to increase the scale and the rate at which our app is utilized.

For these reasons and others, we believe that a well-crafted smartphone application can increase community engagement and, in turn, help build stronger communities through the US. In future posts, we will be describing specifically what will be required to bring our application nationwide and how you can help make that happen, so stay tuned!

– Michael

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