Seattle startup makes it easy to donate on #GivingTuesday

Retail analysts say shoppers spent $80 billion between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and now that all that consumption is in the past, it’s time to settle in for #GivingTuesday.

A slew of apps make it easy to give, including Hopela, made by a Seattle startup.

“We always say that nowadays there’s an app for everything. Hopela is an app for charitable giving,” says CEO and founder Irina Menn.

Its specialty is helping users donate locally. You open a map in the Hopela app on your smartphone to find all the charitable organizations near you.

It’s still new. Menn says the more users who come online and suggest charitable organizations, the better the app will be.

Menn says she started Hopela because she found donating to charity way too cumbersome.

“I kinda started this business for myself, being a giver and giving to quite a few local organizations,” she said. “I wanted to give easily and quickly and also keep track of my charitable giving.”

But as Menn got started, she says she was blown away by how much help charities needed on the back end.

“I mean they’re operating with tools that are [outdated.] You have Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and paper &#8212 literal paper,” she said. “I think we can do better.”

So she made Hopela help streamline their processes too.

Organizations can create a Hopela flower with a bar scan on it for placement at events, on napkins &#8212 anywhere. Anyone who wants to donate can quickly scan the Hopela flower.

Many other apps facilitate the giving process, like the United Nations’ Share The Meal and another called Charity Miles, which allows others to donate while you exercise.

Also, Crowdrise has launched its second annual Giving Tower &#8212 a virtual reality app that lets you into a city landscape where you can watch a tower of bricks grow and grow, and potentially zoom past other buildings you see around it, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Statue of Liberty.

Each brick represents a donation.

So feel free to build, and donate, far beyond Giving Tuesday.