Vote for a Drexel LeBow Team in LiquidNet Impact Challenge!

Three teams of LeBow College of Business MBA students are competing against teams from across the country in the LiquidNet Impact Challenge. Each team has developed a strategy to increase giving to a nonprofit by enhancing donor knowledge and engagement via platforms that include mobile applications and social media. The competing LeBow teams are named: AppImpact, Easy Donor, and SP.LA.SH.

The competition offers up to $15,000 in prizes to the top three teams, with a portion of each team’s prize going to the charity of its choice.

AppImpact is comprised of MBA students Aditya Edakkoth, Duy Nyugen, Jesse Suthanaseriporn, and Saffet Atahan Agrali. The team’s website and mobile phone application will allow donors to track and measure the impact of their donations. AppImpact says: “The transparency in the flow of money will promote honesty and therefore will encourage more donations.” For example, if someone donated $5,000 toward a homeless shelter, the donor would receive a communication informing him or her of the total amount raised and the total number of people housed. If AppImpact wins, it will donate to Girard College.

Easy Donor, comprised of MBA students Jason Zola, Huilan Zhou, Sachin Sawant, and MS in finance student Mengsu Liao, “seeks to bring the efficiency of the free market to the field of nonprofits” by instituting an online bidding exchange for donations. It will group together small donations, and nonprofit organizations would then engage in silent auction-format bidding, where they would pledge to spend a percentage of the pool directly on their cause. This means, for example, if a breast cancer research foundation’s bid is 90 percent, than at least 90 percent of the pool must go directly toward breast cancer research and not toward administrative costs or other fundraising efforts. Through this bidding process, only the most efficient and effective nonprofit organizations will gather funding, they say. If Easy Donor wins, it will donate to Charity Navigator.

SP.LA.SH, comprised of MBA students Sean Giffels, Andrew Kennedy, Kate Late, and David Stern-Gottfried, is an independent website linked to social media sites that aggregates the information from existing websites that host reviews and ratings of nonprofits. It will present key metrics clearly, making it easier for donors to do research on nonprofits. If SP.LA.SH wins, it will donate to Jumo.

To vote for your favorite Drexel LeBow team, visit Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/liquidnetforgood. Voting ends Feb 15.