Ramadan is a time of increased charity for Muslims around the world, and when it comes to crowdsourced fundraising, LaunchGood has grown into the platform for Muslims. It’s one of the largest platforms that feature charities where Muslims can connect with important causes. On LaunchGood, you can find causes ranging from sponsoring orphans abroad, giving the gift of education locally, emergency relief due to natural causes, and everything in between.

LaunchGood’s prolific reach has created two very welcomed challenges for the platform:

1. Because there are so many worthy causes and campaigns on LaunchGood, it may be tough to remember all the ones you’d like to monetarily support, or you may not be aware of causes that you are likely to support.

2. The rewards of engaging in charity during Ramadan are immense. How can we effectively do so every single day of this holy month? Wouldn’t it be great to automate your charity during Ramadan so that the platform itself takes care of making sure your daily charity is given?

Well, that’s exactly what the 30-day Ramadan Challenge from LaunchGood is. You can choose causes that are important to you or allow LaunchGood to choose the cause for you, and set your daily amount for charity. LaunchGood takes care of the rest.

The LaunchGood Ramadan Challenge is one of our featured charities this month, and I asked Chris Blauvelt, the founder of LaunchGood, to take me into a deep dive of the program, how it came about, as well as its impact on our various communities.

We started the Ramadan Challenge in 2015, [in] our second Ramadan ever [as LaunchGood]. The previous year, in 2014, we noticed a huge spike in donor activity [in Ramadan] and thought, “How could we lean into that further? What do donors want?” We talked to donors, thought about what we love at LaunchGood and arrived at a common goal: The opportunity to support so many incredible causes all across the world, every day.

We decided to try an “MVP,” or “minimal viable product,” by creating a daily-donation email list. Our goal was to get 100 donors, but we ended up with over 500. We knew we were onto something. The following year we built a proper product for the Ramadan Challenge and fast forward to today, we have over 30,000 donors across 100 countries giving together daily through the Ramadan Challenge.

It’s really quite simple – donors go to The Ramadan Challenge page on LaunchGood to sign up and begin by choosing how much you want to give daily (for example £5 or $10 or 20 MYR – whatever amount in your country’s currency), enter your credit card info, and you’re ready to go! You can either choose where your donations go [and fill] up your “Giving List” by hitting the icon on fundraisers, or leave it to us and we’ll spread your donations across the most deserving causes in the world. Every morning you’ll wake up to a donation receipt [in your inbox] showing where your contribution went.

No, you can join the Challenge at any point during the month.

Ideally the donor themselves chooses the charity from all we have going on at the time on LaunchGood by adding them to their Giving List. Otherwise [if we’re choosing for you], we look at the most deserving campaigns, including those who worked the hardest and got the most donors or donations on the last day, got sign-ups for the Ramadan Challenge itself, or maybe just needed that little bit of support to cross the finish line. In the future, we hope to incorporate machine learning that can intelligently choose causes that you’d love based on your donation history.

Since we’re always growing, the donations yearly are also growing. From our first year to last, it’s grown from $100,000 to four million. This year we’re hopeful we’ll get to six million!

LaunchGood is blessed to work with all sizes of charities, but it’s the new organizations that I get most excited about. In 2016 we had an amazing grassroots organization called Deaf Planet Soul raise a little money to launch the world’s first deaf-led humanitarian aid mission serving the deaf refugee children of Syria and Palestine.

They came back in Ramadan 2018 with a mission to expand their work, and through our Ramadan Challenge we were able to super-charge their fundraising. They ended up crushing their initial goal of $20,000 to raise $86,587! A year later I actually got to visit their facility in Lebanon and was so touched to see the donations in action. Our ummah may be scattered, but when we come together, even in little ways, it will have a big effect.

Masha’Allah, the LaunchGood Ramadan Challenge is making a huge difference world-wide for causes that we all love to support. Which causes would you add to your Giving List?