CommuniGift: giving in the digital age
A group of students at UNC-Chapel Hill have taken the process of buying gifts for families in need entirely online through their web platform CommuniGift.com.
The long days and stressful workloads for most Carolina students ended with final exams on December 12, but that hasn’t been the case for juniors Thomas Doochin and Taylor Sharp. In addition to being full-time students in Chapel Hill, they’re entrepreneurs, and their business doesn’t let up much until later in the month.
December 25, to be precise.
Doochin and Sharp – along with fellow Carolina students Jake Bernstein and Jack Wohlfert – are the creators of CommuniGift.com, which has helped bring charitable endeavors like the Salvation Army’s Christmas ‘Angel Tree’ program into the digital age.
“We realized people love shopping online, they love giving products, they want to give back,” Sharp said. “We thought, ‘Let’s connect these already existing programs, where non-profits are receiving products, and let’s incorporate that online.’”
CommuniGift works much like other web-based commerce sites. Visitors have a chance to select items, add them to an online cart, make a payment and check out. But instead of arriving on front porches, the purchases are sent directly to non-profit organizations like the Salvation Army, Toys for Tots and First in Families of North Carolina to be distributed to families in need. Because CommuniGift receives revenues from the online retailers it partners with like Target and Amazon, it is free to use both for donors and the non-profits they’re serving.
“You can go on our site, you can read about a host of different families, add products to your cart and be done in under five minutes,” Doochin said.
Though it may not have the same initial feeling as choosing a family’s name and requested gifts from a physical list, the CommuniGift founders designed the giving process to be meaningful.
“We still have the family descriptions, we still have the feedback from the families, because we don’t want to lose that connection, that emotional piece,” Doochin said.
After trial runs last Christmas and this fall, CommuniGift has quickly expanded its roster of partner non-profits including large organizations like the Salvation Army of Southern California and the Wounded Warrior Project. As the number of non-profits CommuniGift assists grows, so does its workforce. The company has added seven employees this semester, all of them Carolina students.
So far, nearly 500 families stand to benefit from gifts purchased through the site this holiday season.
“Donors who have used CommuniGift have been very positive,” said Lizzy Adams, Director of Public Relations for the Salvation Army of Wake County. “They tend to actually give more, because it’s right there at the click of a button. Instead of adopting just one child, they have adopted two, or they’ve added an extra item they normally wouldn’t have purchased.”
Like many tech start-ups, CommuniGift’s roots are in a college dorm room. But for Doochin, Sharp and Bernstein, helping people has been far more important than making money from the very beginning.
“All of the co-founders of CommuniGift have always been socially-oriented,” Sharp said. “It’s that moment when we get an email about a family that really needs some help and a donor comes in to support them and a non-profit that says ‘thank you, your service is helping out so much this season. It’s those types of moments that make it all worth it,” he said.
