DoGood and Tonic join hands to bring a synergistic partnership that will make this movement bigger, better and make the world much more socially responsible, directly from your handset.
Since launching in June 2009, DoGood has come a long way. With zero publicity, DoGood has grown only due to its very supportive doers. They’ve championed our cause on Twitter and Facebook every day and even helped in moderating our comments for us. Such is the power of DoGood that it unifies people from across the world to come together on their iPhones and bring social change. We are seeing an unprecedented growth in the social responsibility sector and we’re proud to be a part of this movement. With the advent of easily accessible mobile internet and the unifying platform of the iPhone, DoGood has leveraged crowdsourcing to make random acts of kindness second nature for our doers. The #DoGood hashtag is a regular feature on Twitter and attracts hundreds of users to shout out to the world, not only the ‘DoGood of the Day’ but also in turn begins a chain of events that translates into more users discovering DoGood.
Over the past ten months, DoGood has grown steadily to over seventy thousand users. Over 430,000 DoGoods have been done by our global doer audience and touched peaks of 3,000 - 3,300 users in a single day. Our stories feature has attracted numerous comments and every DoGood offers other users; ideas, ways to act and personal experiences. These comments have given the movement an emotional voice. Though indistinguished by name, our doers are connected through one common thread - to do good in the world, no matter where they are.
Ever since the movement took off, the Mobil33t team has been pre-occupied with personal engagements and maintaining DoGood from day to day. However, we’ve always been open to a strategic partnership that affords us the opportunity to take this movement to the next level. Enter Tonic Inc., a social responsibility news aggregator and a pandora of all things good. From our first communications with them, we’ve found in them, like minded individuals who understand the significance of DoGood and its ease in crowdsourcing social responsibility activities. Today, we’d like to announce that we’re joining hands with Tonic in making DoGood a bigger, better and more comprehensive solution for doing good easily and anywhere. We’re extremely excited about the opportunities this synergy will afford us and also add value to Tonic’s public identity. So watch out for more updates as we gear up to take DoGood to every person and make this movement truly global.
To learn more about Tonic Inc., please visit www.tonic.com
On Saturday, July 18th 2009, the world will come together to support and pledge time to Mandela Day. In honor of Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa, DoGood will be partnering with Mandela Day to assist them in spreading their message further. We love people like Nelson Mandela - a man who fought injustice for 67 years. He is a true champion of racial equality and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and across the world.
We are proud to be a part of Mandela Day and hope that in his honor, we too take up a cause in our communities.
To participate in Mandela Day, please visit mandeladay.com
Starting your first real design is quite daunting. On one hand we were afraid of doing too much and on the other, terrified of over-simplifying it. I stuck on and with the insight of the team, testing on friends and the awesome local Ann Arbor folks, we achieved a simple design that is hard to re-think anymore.
The Mockup Process (finding the right look)
Seven iterations led to the current DoGood design. Some may find that to be a lot, however we worked on a process of reduction. The basic design principle of such a deed system has not been touched much. The standard title takes prominence. There is a done button to mark your interaction. All pretty basic framework but how does one keep it simple and be visually different?
I enjoy good print and one of the beauties of print is well-written copy. We strove for the same with DoGood. A beautiful copy set in a clean sans-serif - on the iPhone, we made do with Helvetica - especially the Akzidenz Grotesk on a gold bar was too good to give up. A couple of alternative color themes from the Facebook Blues to the Ning Greens were also considered.
The color scheme changed a few shades to be what it is here. This however, only experience will teach a person. What we see on our desktops/laptops is usually a screen with a 72dpi resolution, almost half in comparison to the iPhone’s much smaller but dense 163dpi screen. Having an iPhone is not completely necessary if you’re in a team but save yourself the trouble and get it. Recognize the device for its strengths and cons. The darks on the iPhone get amplified so lighten things up during design. These things seem small but they can be that slight difference in what our design should look like but it doesn’t.
Having a color scheme and content is crucial because they are the visual and mental interactions with the app. But how do we make it social. Don’t re-invent the wheel, another simplicity principle kicked in. We wanted it to grow organically. Adding a connection to Twitter & Facebook was the simplest thing to do. A connected audience of about 200million out of which there is a subset of a 40million user iPhone audience. It only seemed like the natural thing - this too is a lesson we learned at FOWA & BarCamp earlier this year in Miami. Gary Vaynerchuk’s H-U-S-T-L-I-N-G and Daniel Burka’s ‘Realign, Don’t Redesign’ had left a will to push out a simple yet well-rounded app using the social networks easily available.
How does one feel connected to the movement?
We had merely been giving out a task for people but there was no imprint of a DoGood sentiment. The Stories feature was a simple way to give people the chance to share their thoughts with the world. A simple location stamp, marked their involvement to show the global reach of the movement. We had seen other comment systems and most used callouts or boxes. It seemed natural that people got this format instinctively so the design was done to accommodate the engraved tabs with simple quotes. On a side-note, we have been working on getting a comment moderation system out in the next update. Be patient with us as we try to fight the trolls.
The (Quantifiable) Impact of the Movement
Its hard to gauge the impact of an anonymous audience. A counter helped add numbers to the movement. A visual dashboard to display the statistics was a tough one to design. I almost always overdid it. Perhaps it was the little child in me wanting to make it too beautiful. A point where utility is forgotten over beauty. A simple recessed counter came in as a surprise but I’m glad it did.
A global counter gets prominence at the top. We opted to keep the full counter with the zeros to show our optimism for the potential of numbers we wanted DoGood to impact.
To tie it all up…
DoGood is our first project and at many times we felt we needed to do much more. Our goal for perfection was coming in our way. So when does one know its the time to stop? Well, you don’t but do one thing - show it to people. Ask a complete stranger to interact with it at a local restaurant or bar. All those things you assumed were buttons and arrows aren’t actually that to the end user. In the mode of design, one may get too absorbed in it. Having an outside perspective is tangent altering, better; if you can find both iPhone & non-iPhone users.
Designing DoGood has taught us a lot in tackling interface design. We only hope to make DoGood much more enriching yet always maintaining it’s simplicity.
Mayank Garg is a UI & Print Design nut and a tad too serious about his work. In his spare time, he shoots banal things.
A big THANK YOU to all of you for actively participating in the DoGood movement. We’re extremely excited to see that after a little over a month, 50,000 dogoods have been completed. That’s over 1,500 dogoods a day on average, which is fantatistic!
This has been a learning process for each one of us, and while we’re thoroughly enjoying it, we’d really love to take it to the next level. We’ve had about 25,000 downloads since app launch. To put things into perspective, with 40 million iPhones out there, that’s a mere 0.0625% of the iPhone and iPod touch userbase that the dogood movement has touched. Needless to say, a lot more work needs to be done. And yes, we need your help!
In all honesty, while we’d love to see DoGood on every iPhone and iPod touch out there, we’re more passionate about facilitating a highly interactive and engaging DoGood community. Then, the movement will strengthen itself.
From the very suggestion of a DoGood to the act of doing each one of them, this is your movement. We want YOU to be involved in every aspect of it.
While the 3 of us could very well go ahead and continue to come up with DoGoods every day, we feel that defeats the purpose of a movement or one voice that represents the DoGood community. Hence, we’re going to hold a live chat session for you to engage with other fellow DoGooders. Our hope is that the chat session serves as a forum for discussing different ideas, DoGood suggestions and even ways in which the movement can grow to reach every individual - anything you want to talk about!
Here are the details of the chat session:
URL: http://tinychat.com/dogood
Time: Sunday, July 12, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)
We really hope you can make it, cause we’d love to hear from you :).
Let’s DoGood together.
What a day it has been for the DoGood movement! We just crossed the 1000 mark for the number of dogooders in a day. The movement has grown from strength to strength, and we hope to see the number of people participating sky rocket into the thousands with every day that passes by.
Every day, hundreds (and now, thousands) of dogooders devote their time to do the daily DoGood, and some even leave a story behind. Each such act plays a vital role in inching towards a fulfilling moment, a happier day, and eventually, a better world. We really believe so.
Here are some of the stories that dogooders have left behind:
DoGood on June 9 2009: “Connect with a family member”
- “I called my sister who I only speak to during holidays. The out of the blue conversation was a pleasant change for us.”
- “Contacted my estranged brother… after more than 2 years of silence. Used LinkedIn! I guess we truly are a technology driven society ;-)”
- “Called my estranged farther and we talked for an hour!”
- “Called my dad and he is on his way over. Love this app”
DoGood on June 11 2009: “Leave an inspirational message in a public place”
- “Left in doctor’s waiting room: to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to change you is the greatest accomplishment. RW Emerson”
- “Left note in cafe: The world is beautiful. You are a tiny but elemental part of it, an individual in a web of individuals and you are never alone.”
- “Left a post it note on my work bathroom mirror: You are awesome”
- “Everyone’s a star & deserves the right to twinkle. - Audrey Hepburn. Left it in my stockroom at my store.”
DoGood on June 12 2009: “Beautify your world today”
- “Spelled love on the ground with sticks and leaves”
- “I made an area in our house with a lot of pictures from different things we did from the past 7 years. We have some guests over and they all loved it!”
- “I cleaned up for 20 people! And nobody felt responsible except for me. I feel good!”
- “Pulling up to work I saw fastfood trash on the ground. So, I picked it up threw it away. Then I sat down to look at today’s DoGood. Mission accomplished”
These are only a small percentage of all stories left behind. We’re working towards sharing each one of them with you on our website.
Each such story only fosters the energy in this movement. This is about your world; the few minutes that you share with us reaches thousands of individuals, encouraging each one of us to DoGood.
Let’s keep this movement going. Join it if you haven’t already and, let’s DoGood together.
It’s been 3 days since the launch of the DoGood iPhone application, and we’re all smiles over at Mobil33t! The application is experiencing phenomenal growth on the iPhone app store, but even more impressive is watching the #DoGood cause grow within the Twitter community. Our champions are both numerous and global, ranging from wonderful endorsements to hundreds of tweets from the in-app DoGood publisher. Awesome work everyone! This is your movement, and please keep up the great work to help it spread. And for those just tuning in, follow along with a realtime #dogood feed!
At the time of this writing, the DoGood movement has reached 1,345 DoGoods across the world! In a very short period of time (59 hours actually), the movement had made real change. Considering that the number of iPhone application downloads (and the number of “doers” therein) has been doubling every day, the movement is just beginning! Even if growth completely leveled off, in 365 days the movement will accomplish 216,000 global DoGoods! Pretty cool eh? (But we think it can be much, much bigger than that!)
Growth aside, we’ve been very happy with the stories users are leaving as they do each DoGood. Ranging from heartwarming to insightful to downright hilarious, these anonymous anecdotes really flesh out the movement. We’d like to share some with you:
Tuesday’s DoGood: Connect with a family member
- Talked to my uncle that I haven’t spoken to in 8 years. (Madisonville, Tennessee)
- Called dad up to “punch my clock” for some 40 minutes. He was glad to hear me from across the globe. Good vibes! (Waikiki, Hawaii)
So all in all, awesome job everyone! We think the next few days will be very exciting, so be sure to follow DoGood’s progress on Twitter: @mobil33t
PS, We’d like to highlight some awesome DoGood champions!
Our first release! It feels pretty amazing to finally introduce DoGood to the world. DoGood’s an iPhone application born out of a very simple idea - to empower the 40 million iPhone/iPod users to collectively do an act of kindness. Think about it, if every individual took a few minutes out of their day to do the same good deed, wouldn’t it lead to a pretty powerful movement? We certainly believe so and hope you will too :).
Our story so far has been a pretty interesting one. It began with an experimental “Mobile Development for iPhone and Android” course at the University of Michigan. The class was a hit, producing many great apps and quickly acclimating many students to Objective C. From this experience, we decided to try our hand at entrepreneurship. We formed an LLC and got invited into the TechArb, a business incubator for University of Michigan students.
That was only three weeks ago. And now we’re at Apple’s World Wide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) to launch our app and make it grow.
So, why did we choose DoGood? Well, while popular, the app store is quite saturated. Thus, we wanted to make something unique. An iPhone application that screams altruism; one that we hope stands out for its simplicity and ability to positively impact society.
So, world, meet DoGood - iPhone’s first altruistic app.
