It’s not easy for nonprofits to advertise, particularly because of their tight budgets and often lean staff. It’s also not always easy to raise money.
That’s why one charity, Water Is Life, wanted to use Venmo to collect small payment donations. There was only one problem: Venmo doesn’t enable advertisements on its app. But the team at Water is Life found a loophole, a little one that they have now dubbed the “Venmo Micro Hack.”
And to be clear, the company did not hack Venmo. It simply found a creative way to get around Venmo’s non-advertising rules by using Venmo’s popular global news feed app to let people know how they could donate to Water Is Life on a specific day. To do this, the charity worked with a company called Deutsch New York to focus on getting their message out.
Deutsch then used the Fourth of July since it’s a high traffic time when users are paying back their friends for things for holiday gatherings and such, and the team created messages on the new threat that appeared to be payments between friends. The team would send a 1 cent payment with a message about that payments, that read: “1 cent can’t pay someone back for a beer, but it can help buy someone clean water for a day.” From there, users were guided to learn how to donate to the nonprofit.
As for how well it worked? The group was able to send out 250 messages for $2.50 and then got $400 in donations. Following the first day, they have sent out 1,000 messages for $10, which has now resulted in a total of $800 being raised.
“We expect to raise about $1,600 based on how it’s going,” Deutsch New York’s creative director Frank Cartagena said in an interview with Ad Week. “We have also monetized the video on YouTube and expect more donations once people see the video.”
The video of how the campaign worked can be viewed above.
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