Instagram’s fundraiser stickers could lure credit card numbers

Published February 18, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that commerce is a huge part of the 2019 road map for Facebook’s family of apps. But before people can easily buy things from Instagram etc., Facebook needs their credit card info on file. That’s a potentially lucrative side effect of Instagram’s plan to launch a Fundraiser sticker in 2019. Facebook’s own Donate buttons have raised $1 billion, and bringing them to Instagram’s 1 billion users could do a lot of good while furthering Facebook’s commerce strategy.

New code and imagery dug out of Instagram’s Android app reveals how the Fundraiser stickers will allow you to search for nonprofits and add a Donate button for them to your Instagram Story. After you’ve donated to something once, Instagram could offer instant checkout on stuff you want to buy using the same payment details.

Back in 2013 when Facebook launched its Donate button, I suggested that it could add a “remove credit card after checkout” option to its fundraisers if it wanted to make it clear that the feature was purely altruistic. Facebook never did that. You still need to go into your payment settings or click through the See Receipt option after donating and then edit your account settings to remove your credit card. We’ll see if Instagram is any different. We’ve also asked whether Instagrammers will be able to raise money for personal causes, which would make it more of a competitor to GoFundMe — which has sadly become the social safety net for many facing healthcare crises.

Facebook mentioned at its Communities Summit earlier this month that it’d be building Instagram Fundraiser stickers, but the announcement was largely overshadowed by the company’s reveal of new Groups features. This week, TechCrunch tipster Ishan Agarwal found code in the Instagram Android app detailing how users will be able search for nonprofits or browse collections of Suggested charities and ones they follow. They can then overlay a Donate button sticker on their Instagram Story that their followers can click through to contribute.

We then asked reverse-engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong to take a look, and she was able to generate the screenshots seen above that show a green heart icon for the Fundraiser sticker plus the nonprofit search engine. A Facebook spokespeople tells me that “We are in early stages and working hard to bring this experience to our community . . . Instagram is all about bringing you closer to the people and things you love, and a big part of that is showing support for and bringing awareness to meaningful communities and causes. Later this year, people will be able to raise money and help support nonprofits that are important to them through a donation sticker in Instagram Stories. We’re excited to bring this experience to our community and will share more updates in the coming months.”

Zuckerberg said during the Q4 2018 earnings call last month that “In Instagram, one of the areas I’m most excited about this year is commerce and shopping . . . there’s also a very big opportunity in basically enabling the transactions and making it so that the buying experience is good.” Streamlining those transactions through saved payment details means more people will complete their purchase rather than abandoning their cart. Facebook CFO David Wehner noted on the call that “Continuing to build good advertising products for our e-commerce clients on the advertising side will be a more important contributor to revenue in the foreseeable future.” Even though Facebook isn’t charging a fee on transactions, powering higher commerce conversion rates convinces merchants to buy more ads on the platform.

With all the talk of envy spiraling, phone addiction, bullying and political propaganda, enabling donations is at least one way Instagram can prove it’s beneficial to the world. Snapchat lacks formal charity features, and Twitter appears to have ended its experiment allowing nonprofits to tweet donate buttons. Despite all the flack Facebook rightfully takes, the company has shown a strong track record with philanthropy that mirrors Zuckerberg’s own $47 billion commitment through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And if having some relatively benign secondary business benefit speeds companies toward assisting nonprofits, that’s a trade-off we should be willing to embrace.

New York on Tech is helping under-resourced students become future tech leaders

Published October 17, 2018

Image: Getty Images/smartboy10/DigitalVision

Jessica Santana and Evin Robinson were riding the subway home from a college leadership conference when they realized they were getting off at the same stop. It turned out, they had grown up in the same neighborhood, no more than 5 blocks apart.

Years later, both Santana and Robinson were working six-figure jobs in the tech practices of elite corporations but were disheartened by the homogeneity of their surroundings.

The tech industry is the primary generator of new jobs in the US, but the inaccessibility of resources and practical education left students in neighborhoods like Jessica and Evin’s unprepared and unqualified in the eyes of recruiters.

So the pair met at a local Starbucks and on the back of a napkin, they outlined what would become New York on Tech (NYOT).

By offering comprehensive computational courses and a broad professional network, NYOT hopes to provide under-resourced students in New York City with the skills and infrastructure needed for a successful career in tech.

Real skills have led to real results

What began as a passion project with just 20 students has blossomed into an organization helping more than 1000 students across the city.

Unlike the higher-level computer science classes Santana and Robinson saw offered in schools, NYOT aims to focus on more functional skills that are applicable to the day-to-day work of tech professionals.

The program caters its curriculums specifically towards areas it believes are in high demand from today’s hiring managers, including front-end and back-end web development, mobile development and UX design.

Classes are located at the offices of corporate partners, where students get direct mentorship from engineers and observe how technical skills are actually implemented in various roles.

Graduates of NYOT are then given the opportunity to interview for internships at each partner organization, where they can gain practical experience and bolster resumes to be more competitive for future recruiting.

The organization points to successes both inside and outside the classroom, noting 100% of graduates in 2016 received admission into four-year colleges, many with scholarships to top engineering programs.

NYOT students have also landed paid internships and jobs with major companies that include Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and others. And while the organization admits corporate partners were initially hard to come by, NYOT’s partnership roster now includes some of the most influential names in tech and business, such as Google, NBCUniversal and FactSet.

To date, NYOT has been built largely without city government sponsorship, funded mainly by corporate partnerships, schools, and philanthropic donations.

The company offers its programs for free and partners with schools in high poverty areas of New York City where 50% of students or more are eligible for free lunch.

But NYOT thinks of itself not just as a non-profit providing educational training but as a deep-impact talent accelerator, supplying already capable students with the key resources they lack.

“People automatically think these students are disconnected youth because we say low income and people of color. They think they’re uninterested in the technology industry”, said the founders. “That is not true. They come from areas that are low income or under-resourced but the population of students we work with is super smart, driven, hungry, and motivated.”

Offering more to more people

Going forward, the company plans to add curriculums that it believes fit the future needs of employers, including classes centered on cyber security, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

On top of serving more students in the New York metropolitan area, Santana and Robinson hope they can bring what they’ve done in New York to a national scale and expand to communities across the country.

However, the founders emphasize that they will focus on slow effective scaling, crafting curriculums specific to each locality. “The work we do is really embedded in community. We’re not designing for that community but designing with it”, said Robinson.

Santana and Robinson’s broader goal is bigger than “diversity” and inclusion.”

“In the industry, we use words like diversity and inclusion. While we and our work value diversity and inclusion, this is about economic justice”, said Santana.

“Think about job automation and job displacement. If our students aren’t getting the most critical training, how can we expect them to compete for the jobs of today and tomorrow? This is not just about diversity or inclusion, it is about positioning our country’s talent strategy.”

NYOT is now seeing extremely high demand for slots in its programs. With more qualified applicants than they can actually accept, Santana and Robinson hope to bring on more volunteers to help them break down the barriers of access for as many kids as they can.