BeHere-BeThere Project

Christoph Nann, Alex Schill, Maik Kaehler and a team from Serviceplan in Germany will test a simple and modern method for generating donations to developing countries. They will use location-based network applications such as Foursquare, which has over 25 million users who record their locations in cafés, shops and restaurants. By setting up collaborations with local retail partners in Germany, they will label their stores on Foursquare with charity projects in developing countries, such as building water pumps, to promote visitors to the stores. Once an organization has been found that can handle the donations, they will launch the locations on a website. When a Foursquare user visits one of the project-labeled stores it will trigger an automatic donation of an agreed amount from the store to that project. The aim is to spread the approach to other cities.