Mpowered is a social media website that allows companies to promote their corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns while supporting charities that companies believe are complementary to their CSR campaigns. Mpowered founder Sunjit Khamba defines Mpowered as bringing together a company’s philanthropy goals with their customers, employees and marketing messages. The Mpowered website allows a company to submit a cash pool and select a number of their favourite charities to be posted on the website.
The RIC Centre has been involved from the start of the Mpowered website. Khamba approached the Centre through the Entrepreneurs in Residence program when Mpowered was only a Facebook application and was advised to attend workshops about how to model a business and conduct sales pitches to raise funds. Entrepreneurs from the Centre advised Khamba to
scale up his business and facilitated connections for Khamba to pitch his idea to a number of people that are helping him to find clients and charities to partner with.
Using the Mpowered website allows the public to vote for which charity they want the pool to go to at the end of the week. The percentage of votes that a charity receives is the percentage of the pool that the donor company will give to the charity. According to Khamba, he has set up the website so that “no charity will receive less than 10 per cent” of the pool.
Through RIC, MPowered has been introduced to an industry-academic regional alliance and a software domain expert, continuing down the path of on-target development and precise execution for a successful launch beyond its beta site.
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