Data-Driven Kindness: The Story of GO-GIVE

By Meredith Peng

Do you ever consider the potential of technology in scaling up social impact? Not in a buzzword-y kind of way, but in the most fundamental sense of the term: one person helping another. The act of doing good.

This Ramadan, GOJEK’s Third Party Platforms (3PP) team tackled just that question. GO-GIVE — GOJEK’s online donation platform — went from piloting one or two campaigns per week to the same number every day. During the month of Ramadan, GO-GIVE helped raise over Rp 5 BILLION (about US $350,000), peaking at ~20,000 donations in a day.

This post seeks to answer one simple question — how did we do it?

The Journey to Ramadan

When Third Party Platforms (3PP) started building GO-GIVE in November 2018, it was very much a startup within a startup. 3PP is a new team that scopes out third-party partnerships and integrates them as products into the GOJEK platform.

Currently, 3PP is piloting and building eight new products including GO-GIVE, GO-MALL, GO-TRAVEL, GO-NEWS, and more.

GO-GIVE is GOJEK’s own donation platform. Partnering with Kitabisa — Indonesia’s largest crowdfunding platform — GO-GIVE aims to simplify the donation process by displaying curated and verified donation campaigns. Users can donate to campaigns of their choice via GO-PAY — all within the GOJEK app!

Campaigns are selected on the basis of verified status organizations or campaigners, urgency of the campaign, and scope of impact, among other factors. Donations begin from just Rp. 1000 (about US $0.07).

Initially, our team experimented and tested different wordings, campaigns, and communications to see what resonated most with our users. It turns out that the appetite for a donation product was huge with GOJEK users; even in the early days of GO-GIVE.

We figured that GOJEK users are a pretty generous bunch, after all, Indonesia is ranked the most generous country in the world. With months of experiment data under our belt, we felt ready scale up and lead GOJEK’s direct donation efforts during Ramadan.

The Ramadan Strategy

GO-GIVE’s Ramadan strategy was two-pronged: we launched a comprehensive GO-GIVE-specific Ramadan strategy while also participating in GOJEK’s own Ramadan campaign #CariKebaikan.

Each week was assigned a theme: Family, Opportunity, Joy, and Home.

Campaigns relevant to the theme were selected and fed to GO-GIVE. We introduced time-specific push campaigns to coincide with the five Muslim prayer times. There were also Ramadan-specific campaigns for Bukber (breaking fast together), Mudik (homecoming), Sholat Jumat (Friday prayer), and Zakat (Muslim charitable donations). During the last week of Ramadan, we participated in the first ever Hari Donasi Online Nasional (#HARDOLNAS) where donations were doubled.

At this time, we also rolled out a new GO-GIVE landing page for users to easily access and find campaigns. This, combined with our GO-GIVE Tile release on the GOJEK homepage, improved discoverability and convenience.

Now, our users can donate whenever the charitable bug bites them!

The Impact

From May 6 to June 5, we ended up raising Rp 5 billion, of which over one-fifth went to help families of GOJEK driver partners.

Each day yielded thousands of daily donations for over 100 total causes — definitely a product milestone to be proud of.

These are just numbers, but how about the real world impact?

A Helping Hand

Bang Tabrani & Dalisha

Background: Bang Tabrani is a GOJEK driver partner in Bekasi who has a lovely daughter named Dalisha, a three-year-old born with both spina bifida, a spinal abnormality, and hydrocephalus, the life-threatening build-up of brain fluid. She has already undergone five surgeries but needs more medication and care to survive.

Result: Through GO-GIVE, we’ve given IDR 25,000,000 to Bang Tabrani and his family. Dalisha can continue her medication and afford special supplies such as special shoes supporting her growth, a toddler wheelchair, milk, medicine, and diapers.

Bang Asep & Bintang

Background: A CT Scan and MRI found that little Bintang, who had just turned eighteen months old, has both hydrocephalus and a brain tumour. With these conditions, he needs continuous medical treatment. Bang Asep, his father, needed support to provide for Bintang’s daily needs and continuous medication.

Result: Through GO-GIVE, we’ve raised IDR 25,000,000 to help Bang Asep pay for Bintang’s medical bills. The donation will also be used to buy daily needs for Bintang such as nutritional enhancer milk, diapers, accommodation, and transportation fees during Bintang’s treatment in the hospital.

“Thank you #OrangBaik and my GOJEK driver colleagues in all around Indonesia who are willing to spend the money to help & support Bintang’s health” — Bang Asep.

What’s next for GO-GIVE?

GOJEK’s mission to facilitate impact doesn’t stop at Ramadan. 3PP has planned some fun and exciting new features for the product. There will be further product integrations with the core GOJEK app, each of which will build upon existing features and make it even easier to donate to your favorite charities and causes.

3PP itself is already planning to integrate even more partnerships, enhance our current eight products, and give users more choice and convenience in their daily lives through smart design and functionality.

The future of GO-GIVE and 3PP is limitless, as we continue to explore both scaling and deepening impact on our quest to create the ultimate Super-App. We’re just getting started.

Underneath the Super App ecosystem, the engineering principles, and the quest for automation, GOJEK is driven by a desire to create social impact. Products like GO-GIVE are built in service of this, and we’re always on the lookout for more impactful ideas and excellent execution. If you tick these boxes, don’t wait — head over to gojek.jobs and come work with us. 🤗