New Charity donation option for students on RateMyPlacement.co.uk
Posted by Ollie on 24 Feb 2021
Charities have been significantly impacted by the pandemic through a significant reduction in fundraising opportunities.
Co-founder of RMP Enterprise, Ollie Sidwell outlines a new feature we’ve built to support charities through review voucher donations.
Since the early days of RateMyPlacement.co.uk, we’ve always offered a £5 Amazon voucher incentive for students to submit a review. We consider it as a thank you for their time for completing their feedback and sharing the experience they’ve had to educate and inspire those following in their footsteps.
With 70,000 reviews on RateMyPlacement, around 50% are eligible for a voucher. To be eligible for the voucher, students need to write over 75 words within seven or more questions.
This ensures quality content and helps students reading reviews have the detail to educate themselves on whether a role or employer is right for them, or just as importantly, whether a role or employer, isn’t right for them.
With a £5 Amazon voucher for 50% of 70,000 reviews, the mathematicians will work out that we’ve invested £175,000 in Amazon voucher incentives. £175k?! Written down… That is a lot.
New charity donation option!
With 90% UK consumers having an Amazon account, if you’re anything like me, you begrudgingly but extremely gratefully, did 95% of your Xmas shopping through Amazon.
In 2017, Amazon launched AmazonSmile in the UK, which allows users to donate 0.5% of their purchases to a charity of their choice. As of June 2020, Amazon has donated over £3.6m to UK charities through this fantastic initiative.
We saw this and loved it.
As 43% of 16-24 year olds in the UK did something charitable recently too, we were inspired to redevelop the review process to enable altruistic students to donate £5 to charity instead of accepting the £5 voucher themselves.
How much will this contribute to charities?
We’re not quite on the same scale as Amazon… well, not yet anyways…. But having launched new review questions on RateMyPlacement for 2021, we’re anticipating our annual volume of reviews of 5,000 each year to increase to nearer 7,500 with the more streamlined process.
If a third of students reviewing use this feature, we’re hoping that’ll see us donating £12,500 to charities through this new feature.
In fact, we love this new feature so much, that however much has been donated in 2021 by students, we are committing to match that donation ourselves. So it's a double bubble for charities, from both students and RMP :)
There are three charities to choose from initially, a charity I am very fond of and do a lot of work with personally WWF UK, alongside Children With Cancer and Dream Big Ghana which were chosen by students, universities, employers and the RMP team internally through our new voting platform, which saw over 3,200 votes.
Thanks for reading, and we welcome any feedback on the new feature!