Gold Coast startup Little Phil cuts out charity middle men

GOLD Coast startup Little Phil has a clever idea for helping charities to raise funds without third-party fundraisers charging huge amounts for their services.

Matt Sayed and Josh Murchie, of Little Phil. Photo: Ashleigh Lawrence

A GOLD Coast start-up has developed an innovative ­platform designed to bridge the trust deficit between charities and millenials ­seeking to donate.

Little Phil is the brainchild of a group of clever Griffith University graduates, seeking to cut out third-party ­fundraisers “creaming” the charities, and put the power back into the hands of the ­donors.

The company has already raised $500,000 and is looking to launch its platform in August to coincide with an initial coin offering (ICO).

Co-founder and CEO Josh Murchie said Little Phil, which stands for Little Philanthropy, evolved out of seeing how charities raise funds now, and analysing how they could use technology to ­improve efficiency, transperancy and decrease fraud.

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“What charities do now is use third-party fundraisers who deploy very old-school tactics, such as approaching people to donate outside of a supermarket,” he said.

“However, if you put money into a charity, you will never know where it goes.

“We wanted people to be more involved and want to give.”

The Little Phil team, pictured at Griffith University. Photo: Ashleigh Lawrence

Mr Murchie said he ­analysed how third-party fundraisers operated and was appalled.

“They will take up to 90 per cent of every dollar,” he said. “We thought ‘that is disgusting. What can we do to change this’?”

Mr Murchie said the first step involved surveying why millenials were often reluctant to donate to charities.

“The biggest issue is trust. They don’t want to donate to a charity where they do not know where the money goes,” he said.

“One of the issues we kept coming up against was, if we wanted to tell users that they could donate and see where it was going, how do we enforce that?”

That is where Little Phil decided to capitalise on the benefits of blockchain.

Blockchain engineer Matt Sayed said Little Phil was originally designed not to use blockchain — a digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.

“However, we found that by using smart contracts we can take funds from a beneficiary, lock that in a smart contract, and release the funds when the end point is reached,” Mr Sayed said.

Donors convert their money using Little Phil’s blockchain technology into a Little Phil “coin” allowing them to track their donation from start to finish, ensuring transparency and efficiency.

Mr Murchie said he hoped the platform was ready by August.

“Everything is in development at the moment. We’re confident we will have it ready to go by then. We have BETA charities on board helping us to design the back end. We also working with partners out of Singapore and Hong Kong.”

He said they planned to charge a 6 per cent flat-fee rate per transaction, with no administration or set-up costs.

“Our end goal is to provide the maximum impact,” Mr Murchie said. “We don’t need to make billions of dollars. We think we can scale this worldwide — given it is a half-a-trillion dollar industry.”