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You've Heard of Refugee All-Stars; How about Refugee E-Cards?
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Breaking news! We just launched online cards recorded by women, youth, and refugees in Africa and rural South Asia. I think these are the first of their kind -- they're sort of like UNICEF cards, except the workers who make them benefit directly from the sale of each one.
Here's a card we custom-designed for George Strombopolous, who interviewed me on his TV show The Hour last week.
Digital goods like e-cards are an exciting new possibility for bringing more work to our beneficiaries. Here's why:
1. They're fun to make (we built a simple back-end that lets people create cards by uploading their own images, adding audio, and creating their own text), especially compared to business-to-business services like data entry.
2. We can sell cards to consumers, rather than businesses, which helps us spread our message more directly and capture the extra margin consumers are willing to pay for socially-labeled goods.
3. I think this is part of a broader trend towards "digital handicrafts" -- the next-generation of fair trade products that get around the hassles of delivery and fulfillment that plague many companies selling physical goods in this space.
Any other ideas for digital goods made by our workers?
