TL;DR / Summary
My friends and I have built a very early MVP of Good Wallet, a platform that lets anyone set up a public page where supporters can “tip” them into a dedicated wallet. The page‑owner can later direct those accumulated funds to effective nonprofits of their choice—think “Buy Me a Coffee,” but the cash stays in a personal, donor‑advised‑fund‑like pot until the owner donates. We’d love the EA community’s help pressure‑testing the concept.
If you have <5 minutes, please:
- Take our short survey here
- Kick the tyres by visiting my own Good Wallet page and exploring the donation flow here
All feedback—positive, negative, or nit‑picky—is greatly appreciated!
Where we are
We’re in an exploratory phase: we have an MVP live, and would like to get feedback on its real‑world value, trust dynamics, and product direction. We’d love honest critiques before investing more engineering and outreach effort.
Why Good Wallet might be useful?
- Lower friction for small donations. Many people happily toss a few euros to creators they follow; we want to channel that impulse toward high‑impact charities. Owners decide when and how much of their balance to grant.
- Introduces a new way to show appreciation or support someone beyond monetary transactions.
- Mini‑DAF functionality for everyone. Today, donor‑advised funds typically require large minimums. Good Wallet aims to offer flexibility at any scale: supporters donate now; creators batch‑grant later.
- We plan to follow GiveWell’s recommendations for the charities we offer, so supporters can be confident their tips eventually reach high‑impact organisations.
- Our long term vision is to offer a public API that enables the use of the Good Wallet as a payment system. With that, any platform or service (think loyalty cards, marketplaces, etc.) can integrate charitable giving as a means of “payment”.
Again, this is at a very early stage, and we are hoping to get any kind of insightful feedback. Don’t hold back and let us know what you think.
My first thought is, "is this money going to the person being tipped, or to a charity? If the latter, which charity?". After a minute of poking around the site and thinking about it, my next question is who's the target audience/donor? Is it somebody who doesn't know where to donate their money, but trusts somebody else (whoever they "tip") to donate it well?
Thanks for the feedback! Very generally the two sides we envision as users are:
Givers: People who wanna show love or support, maybe for something free or a favor, and want that their money does good instead of just being a simple payment.
Receivers (using the wallet): Basically anyone who gives informal support or provides free stuff – creators, people doing favors (couch surfing thanks, splitting a bill nicely), selling old belongings, or people that want a seamless way to channel gifts or small debts into charity instead of relying on cash. Basically, anywhere there are implicit costs but social norms mean you don't ask for money.
There was a recent post here that is very related: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/rCvaLdjefLoxtfcrv/small-simple-way-to-promote-effective-giving-while-making#:~:text=recommended%20%C2%A0charities
Our initial target group would be impact-driven creators that have a big crowd and community. By convincing only a small fraction of their supporters to donate a small amount, they could accumulate a significant amount which can be channeled towards donations.
Our future vision is bigger than the above and aims to establish a public API for anyone to use in their products. Think of a marketplace where people "pay" with the GoodWallet, or loyalty/cashback cards where the money goes into your GoodWallet (or pre-selected charity directly), etc.
I suspect that a delayed-allocation model is going to add a lot of complexity (and potentially create user-trust issues). It seems to me that such a model would require significantly more engineering and legal/operational work than a model in which GoodWallet transfers money directly from the donor to the creator's preselected charity ("immediate model"). It requires the user to have more trust in GoodWallet as custodian of the funds, [1] and is likely to either cost the donor a potential tax deduction or require GoodWallet to jump through some hoops to qualify as a proper charity in its own right. And I think would-be donors do consider the tax-deductibility of a donation as a signal that things are on the up and up.
The advantages of such a delayed-allocation model over an immediate model are not clear to me. In particular, even if the universe of eligible charities is drawn from GiveWell's recommended-charity list, the possible choices are not that different from each other and I suspect few creators would place much value on the ability to defer a decision on which one to point their supporters to.
As for "mini-DAF functionality for everyone": as I understand it from a US perspective, the classic reason for DAFs is to allow donors to take the tax deduction now while letting the donation grow for a while and deferring the choice of charity until later. Especially with changes to the US tax code a few years ago, people with modest sums to give aren't generally in a position to itemize donations anyway, and I didn't see anything about offering investment opportunities. So I'm not sure who the target audience is for this functionality.
As a potential donor with limited knowledge of anyone involved, I'd be relatively less worried about GoodWallet's leaders being dishonest but relatively more concerned about whether those leaders had structured things in a way that protected funds intended for charitable purposes from GoodWallet's potential creditors.
Hi Jason! Benjamin here, co-founder and responsible for the technical side. This is exactly the kind of feedback we are looking for so thanks a lot for commenting.
The delayed-allocation model is mostly a feature of us being in the prototype phase. The main reason is rather technical, because public APIs are missing to directly set up the payment flows from external donors to different charities via the GoodWallet.
There are two other minor arguments for at least having the option to accumulate funds first: One is emergency relief. We believe that having a social fund that can easily be directed to emergency relief when needed can be valuable. The second is privacy. Even among highly effective charities, people still have preferences, and we've heard people say they would appreciate an option to choose and switch between charities in private.
Having that said, we totally agree with you. Giving GoodWallet users the chance to pre-select a charity to which incoming payments are directed to is something we will certainly add to the platform.
In general, our current situation is mostly resource limited. This is the reason why we kept things as lean as possible. However, we are starting to see interest and would like to drive this forward. Our goal is to register GoodWallet as a non-profit itself and then decide on further product directions. The mini-DAF functionality is something we see fit in perfectly into the overall concept, but we definitely need to explore its practicality further.
Agreed. For what it's worth, I would probably use (as a creator and/or donor) the platform if it went straight to a charity (e.g. one of, say, three that the creator offers, and the donor chooses from) but not if it went to a delayed allocation pot.
Good idea to allow the user to pre-select multiple effective charities and let the donor decide. We would just need to set up the payment flow to the charities directly.