From Counting Beans to Crowdsourcing Dollars: An Interview with CauseVox’s Rob Wu - By Care2 Trailblazers for Good
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From Counting Beans to Crowdsourcing Dollars: An Interview with CauseVox’s Rob …
I first met Rob Wu, the co-founder of CauseVox, last year in New York when we were both StartingBloc fellows. It didn’t take long for me to see that this unassuming professional beancounter & management consultant from Texas was actually a budding social entrepreneur sitting on a great idea, just waiting for the most opportune time to bring it to life. That time came shortly after when Rob left his well paying job at Deloitte to dedicate himself to his venture full-time. It’s been almost a year since then and I finally caught up with up Rob to see what he has been up to.
For those who aren’t familiar with CauseVox can you give us a short intro.
Sure. CauseVox is an online fundraising platform that lets non-techie non-profits design their own campaigns, get supporters involved in personal fundraising, and easily manage the whole process.
What was the inspiration for the platform?
A few years ago my co-founder and I volunteered for Action for Children(AFC), a Kampala-based NGO that serves children and families vulnerable due to HIV/AIDS and poverty, by providing pro bono marketing and IT support. Like a lot of pro bono projects, we had to raise funds to get ourselves there, but we couldn’t find a good way to make that happen online. All the choices out there required hacking tools together, were hard to use, or were very outdated; as a result, we built a prototype and used that to fundraise for our project. It was awesome. We were overwhelmed by the response from our friends and family through the prototype. After Kampala, we talked to dozens of nonprofits and decided to launch CauseVox.
How does CauseVox differ from other fundraising sites like Crowdrise?
There are a lot of great platforms out there. We’re different because charities can fully preserve their identity and brand through our page customization tools. In addition, it’s fast to setup and charities can start fundraising within 15-minutes. Charities that use us love the user experience too because we’ve made a complex process super easy.
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