We’ve written about many ways to help relief efforts for the Japan earthquake already, but here’s one that caught our eye today. Todoke.org (Japanese) is a new service established to address the problem of delivering individuals’ donated goods, which has become an inconvenience for a few local governments without the resources to process and distribute them.
The website says that it would be far easier to receive bulk shipments from larger specialized companies instead of single donors.
Todoke lists a number of items on its homepage (such as water, diapers, or boots) along with a company that could provide them, and then Twitter users can click a button to Tweet support for that product thus urging the associated company to get involved. Todoku also encourages users to buy that company’s goods as well, as a sort of donation that would ostensibly encourage a company help the relief effort.
The Todoke team tells us:
One and a half days after the quake, we started talking about how we could help the stricken people . . . At first we were talking about donation system using SNS ad twitter, but thought it wouldn’t affect [the situation] so much because we were [doing] nothing to making other people to trust us and donate. The biggest point was gathering good will on web and make it visible, so we got the present idea, which is gathering RTs [retweets] and showing them to companies.
A number of companies have already sent supplies, and there are reports of deliveries that have already been made. This is a huge help to those struggling in areas affected by the quake and tsunami, but it’s also great moral capital for any company who joins the cause.
Todoke is a very elegant win-win solution to a very real-life problem faced by disaster victims. Japan is going to need even more creative thinking like this to help the recovery effort move forward.
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