How this platform made doing acts of kindness easy and automatic

Being a good person isn’t just about doing right or wrong. Sometimes, people want to do the right thing, but there are hiccups that make it difficult.

Take it from Vikra Ijas, CEO of Indonesian fundraising and donation platform Kitabisa.

Vikra Ijas, CEO of Kitabisa / Photo credit: Kitabisa

He found out that many people actually want to make donations on a regular basis, but for some reason or other wouldn’t follow through. To solve this, Kitabisa devised a way to help them fulfill their intentions.

Ahead of Ijas’ session at this year’s Tech in Asia Product Development Conference, we sat down with the CEO to learn more about his firm and how it aims to simplify doing good.

What do you do at Kitabisa?

I mainly focus on ensuring we have a clear vision and strategy and that we are effectively executing it. Coming from a product background, I am often still involved in product discovery work and enjoy it greatly. I love connecting with our users and ecosystem partners to listen to their feedback.

Can you provide an overview of Kitabisa’s overall mission and its impact?

Kitabisa started with the intention of connecting kindness at scale. It began as a crowdfunding platform where anyone can easily set up an online fundraising page, get verified, and raise donations online for their cause in a way that is transparent.

We then realized that not everyone has the ability to effectively fundraise. Therefore, to help more people, we need to gather and maintain a larger donor base. So we launched a donation app to help nurture giving as a habit.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Today, our app facilitates various ways of doing good together: donating on a daily or regular basis, paying zakat and qurban for muslims, participating in our volunteer trips, or participating in our new life insurance plan to protect your family.

Annually, we facilitate over 31 million transactions, which we like to say is akin to processing about one donation per second, as there are about 31 million seconds in a year.

Can you discuss your thought process behind Kitabisa’s automatic donation feature?

Some time after launching the app, we noticed a growing trend: Some of our donors were opening the app to donate every single day. We learned that many are inspired by Islamic tradition that encourages people to give regularly even if it’s a small amount.

We also found out that there is a sizable aspiration to donate regularly from our intermittent donors, but they often don’t have the time or the discipline to open the app every day and choose their cause.

Automatic donation facilitates this desire by allowing you to top up an amount to your donation wallet – for example, 100,000 rupiah (US$6.10) – and instead of channeling it all at once to a single cause, we will spread it out on a daily basis to multiple causes from the categories that the donor chooses.

What are you hoping attendees will learn from your talk at the Product Development Conference?

I plan to share some of our insights regarding what worked and what didn’t from our 10-year journey of product development, especially in the context of habit formation, product innovation, and trust building.

Can you give us a hint about one surprising element of user psychology you’ll be discussing in your talk?

We recently deployed something called a “streak recovery” feature which we think is a compassionate way to let people recover their broken donation streaks for a limited time. The high adoption rate surprised us – for a lot of people, it matters to have their streak unbroken, which in turn protects their motivation to give regularly.

Taking place from June 25 to 26, Tech in Asia’s annual Product Development Conference will bring together some of the top minds and organizations in the tech industry. During the event, attendees can expect to glean crucial insights, participate in networking sessions, get a glimpse of tomorrow’s technologies, and more. Sign up for the conference here.

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This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.