Play games, earn rice for the poor: JellyChip’s plan to disrupt charity sector

Melbourne-based startup JellyChip wants to “gamify social good”.

Early next month it will be launching a closed beta for its market research platform and has partnered up with World Vision Australia to help direct some of the profits it generates from that research to charitable causes.

The platform enables its users to answer survey questions in return for in-app points, which can in turn be spent on those charitable causes.

Co-founder Eric Chang says the old ways of charitable giving and traditional market research need to be disrupted.

“We’ve always wanted to do something with technology that would benefit people,” Chang says.

“So we talked about how we can leverage market research to do that.”

Co-founder James Downing has some experience creating a similar socially minded app, a trivia game which directed advertising revenue to help purchase rice for the needy in the developing world. The duo combined that idea with Chang’s own experience helping develop a market research app for PricewaterhouseCoopers clients and came up with the concept for JellyChip.

JellyChip also connects all of its users’ social media accounts in one place, Chang says, in the hope of becoming the first page its users visit when they head online. Users can earn points for logging on, interacting with others, and inviting new people to the platform. It’s similar to the manner in which Dropbox offers rewards and expanded features to its users for performing certain tasks. Those points can be spent in the JellyChip store which will go to the platform’s charitable partners. Between 25% and 30% of its profits will go to charity.

“We believe innovation, social good and business needs can all be met if everyone wins,” Chang says.

The startup has raised investment from private individuals, Chang won’t say exactly how much, but it’s a bit less than $500,000.

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