Introducing Donorpedia — Hong Kong’s First Donor Directory Created by Time Auction Volunteers
The Challenge — Finding donors is difficult
71% of nonprofits say finding donors that may be interested in their cause is difficult.*
The reason why? There is no centralized directory of active foundations and grants in Hong Kong. 66% of nonprofits find HK’s funding landscape to be untransparent. This presents a great challenge as 76% of nonprofits say finding new sources of funding is extremely important.
The Solution — HK’s first donor directory
With a talented volunteer community, we posted a Fundraising Researcher project on Time Auction and recruited volunteers to conduct a landscape study of donors in Hong Kong, with a goal to help every non-profit discover potential donors more efficiently.
In just two weeks, we successfully recruited 21 volunteers to embark on our research. Each volunteer selected a cause (eg. animal welfare, environment), and looked for 20 nonprofits’ voluminous data in the open domain, including their websites, annual reports, audit reports, event publications and acknowledgement pages, retrieving information on their past donors to put in a shared Google spreadsheet.
By day, these volunteers include a student, a teacher, a civil servant, an investment banker, a financial analyst, a PR officer and many more. By night, they all transformed into “keyboard warriors”, hunching before computers as they carried out detective-like work to uncover active philanthropists out there. A Whatsapp group was set up, filled with conversations as we shared the difficulties encountered and tips to overcome them. Coupled by intermittent Zoom meetings, our collaborative effort finally took off, with a hefty Google spreadsheet emerging.
To ensure accuracy, we engaged 10 additional volunteers to cross check the data. A former consultant took the lead to coordinate. A developer advised us on how to use no-code tools to create a website easily. A growth marketing manager and a PR professional also joined to strategize and execute a launch plan.
620 volunteer hours later, Donorpedia was born!
Meet Donorperdia, the first crowdsourced donor directory in Hong Kong, a one-stop guide where you can browse 540+ entries of established philanthropic institutions, low-profile family foundations, government grants and other funding sources for non-profits and social enterprises!
"Hope our small efforts can help you make a more powerful impact on our community!" - Debbie Wong
With a donor directory at hand, 85% of nonprofits say this would be helpful to their fundraising work. This shows how volunteering can be so impactful — By bringing together awesome, kind-hearted people together in this project, we co-created a much-needed donor directory from scratch.
Head over to Donorpedia to discover potential donors today! With the cost of 4 cups of coffee, you can gain access to our volunteers’ 620 hours of collective hard work, and save valuable time to effectively fundraise. All proceeds will go to maintenance of the website, updating the directory, and future initiatives to empower NGOs/social enterprises in fundraising.
We’d love your input
As Donorpedia is a volunteer-run grassroots initiative, we’d love to hear from you if you have any source of active donors in Hong Kong that we might not have come across.
If you’re a donor in search of trusted partners for your philanthropic endeavour, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us to connect with our community of impactful nonprofits dedicated to making Hong Kong a better place!
Get in touch with us at [email protected].
*Data from a survey conducted with 118 NGOs and Social Enterprises in July 2021
