Sporting Karma

Sporting Karma came about after our team agreed that the current way money is donated to charity is broken.

When you are signed up to donate a monthly fee from door to door knockers, or people at the mall, 100% of your donations for the first year never go to the charity. The person who signs you up gets a large commission and the marketing company gets the rest. Only if you continue to give after the first year do the charities start seeing any money.

Current research by John List of Chicago University has found that we are approaching people all wrong when it comes to giving. We need to appeal to their self interest instead of the cause, givers are also more likely to donate if there is a prize involved, more likely to donate if they see a celebrity or friend donate and also if they see that their donation will be matched dollar for dollar by someone else.

We took this research and also thought about what we in Australia love doing. If we could combine everything then we might create a brand new way of giving that is beneficial for all.

We already knew Aussies were generous (giving $315 on avg per year to charity). We also know that sport is a massive part of our culture and we just love to gamble (avg loss of $1,080 per person a year).

Taking this data and the recent research we created Sporting Karma.

It allows people to donate to charity based on statistics in sporting events. It's a simple IF THEN statement for giving.

example: I will give "set amount ($1)" for every "Event (point,ace,try,goal)" my "Team or Player (Hawks, Federer)" scores.

People then receive 1 karma point for every dollar donated to charity and use these points to go into the draw to win prizes related to the game they just donated too.

People can also watch the game with realtime scores and they can see how much is being raised from each teams supporters (we have karma scales). So not only are we now their favorite livescore app, we are also their fav charity and sports merchandising app.

Our first test is on the 13th of December at the Wollongong Hawks versus Sydney Kings NBL game. We took the idea to the hawks and they were on board from the get go.

We have a cause (#averystrong), the son of an ex hawks and kings player has leukemia and we are raising funds for a local charity (Kidzwish) in his name.

We have prizes. Signed and framed Hawks jersey, box seats to the next game, meet and greets with players.

We have "doubled up" on the gambling. Not only are they gambling on the amount they are giving, but also they are in a lottery for the prizes.

We also have local celebrities on board to tweet and post on facebook about donating to the cause (social proof).

Finally, we also found a company (Wollongong Coal) to match donations dollar for dollar. We also have pre commitments from a few companies to the tune of $40 per point.

We have brought all the research and Australia's fav pastimes (sport and gambling) together and created Sporting Karma.

Backend: PHP with laravel web sockets for real time updates download live xml feed from 3rd party provider responsive html5 framework