‘I work 60 hours a week and hardly even have time for my friends.’
‘I have three kids and no budget for a babysitter.’
‘I’m juggling a class schedule, a part-time job, and a social life.’
These are all common — and valid — excuses for not having enough time to give back. Not having enough time to volunteer. Not having enough cash to write a check to your favorite cause. But when your head hits the pillow at night, and you’re thinking about how you’d like to pay it forward in the world, coming up with your next excuse can be a thief of sleep.
My friends and I know this feeling well. That’s why a year ago we quit our jobs and founded AdWap — a company that’s changing the way people give back by fitting it into their daily routines.
The concept is simple. We built an app that takes something people do every day (watching advertisements) and turned it into a vehicle to help people do something we all wish we could do every day (donating money to a meaningful cause.)
For every ad watched, a significant piece of the advertising revenue is automatically sent to a charity of your choice. The app only lets you watch ads for a maximum of 5 minutes a day. Whether it’s during your 7:30 AM commute, or your 10:00 PM couch sit, AdWap is designed to fit seamlessly into your schedule. The point is that by using AdWap, your downtime is now an opportunity to give back — and a way to stop making excuses for why you can’t donate to that charity that helped save your mom’s life when she had breast cancer. Or that organization that built the gym where you played basketball growing up.
Your eyeballs on ads can now feed starving children, send money to Vets, and hopefully put a smile on a sick child’s face. But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. And this time it’s a good one. Using AdWap to fit ‘giving back’ into your daily routine is actually good for someone else too. You.
There’s a moment that happens right after you’ve finished a long day of volunteering, or a long morning of shoveling snow off your elderly neighbor’s driveway, or a long afternoon of teaching a free baseball clinic to underprivileged kids. It’s a moment where you smile to yourself, take a deep breath, and remember how good it feels to be selfless for a few hours. That moment is good for your mental, physical, and emotional health. And AdWap found a way to build that moment into your to-do list.
Life is messy. Excuses are easy to come by. But giving back as a way to be part of something greater than yourself shouldn’t be last on your priority list. AdWap is here to help.
Originally published at medium.com