Wahblo.com
I get very excited when i hear of a new online that helps a good cause and Wahblo is one of my best. Wahblo is the brain child of Mike Kepple a 24 year old entrepreneur from London. Wahblo is a social networking website where you and a group of friends or colleagues can all donate £1 each until a certain charity goal has been met - and example is 15 friends may sponsor a child each month.
Matt had the idea while studying his Masters at The University of Birmingham. In 2003 as a 2nd year student Matt signed up to sponsor Angel Maradiaga, a boy growing up in Honduras, for £15 a month. Sponsoring a child was something Matt had always wanted to do; as his parents sponsored a couple of children when Matt was younger.
After a few months Matt couldn’t afford to sponsor Angel as he was a student and didn’t have a student job so he cancelled his sponsorship. Matt was very disappointed he could no longer support Angel and in his frustration an idea hit him: What if he got 15 of his friends to each contribute £1 a month towards sponsoring the same child? Matt knew that students could afford to give £1 a month and he knew that he could easily convince people to get involved.
Within a year later Matt had got some people together and launched the ‘Sponsor a Kid for a Quid’ scheme as an initiative to support children in the care of World Vision, an international development charity based in the UK.
Students paid money into the Sponsor a Kid for a Quid account by Standing Order and Matt grouped the payments and sent the money to World Vision who then sent him the child’s information which he’d forward onto the student donors. But because the scheme was offline and Matt had other commitments like academics and other societies, it took 2 months from someone giving Matt their completed Standing Order mandate to him sending them information about their child!
In March 2005 Matt entered a Channel4 competition and won their IDEASFACTORY Creative Class Award for PR & Marketing on account of the Sponsor a Kid for a Quid scheme. The award added fuel to the belief he’d been harbouring since Christmas 2004 that the idea had potential far beyond Birmingham and sponsoring children but that in order to reach its potential it would have to work online. So after graduating he got a job as an Account Handler at advertising agency DLKW and began working up ideas for Wahblo in his spare time while learning all he could about the world of marketing and branding.
In August 2006 he left DLKW to work on Wahblo full time while living at home with his parents. In December 2006 he won a National Lottery Big Boost Award from UnLtd, the foundation for social entrepreneurs, and commissioned True Clarity, a web development firm affiliated with DLKW, to design and build Wahblo.com.
The website launches in August this year and already several amazing charities including Educate for Life, AfriKids and PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools) have come on board.
Wahblo is Matt’s first online venture although he is also the founder of Gradulicious, an offline social network for recent graduates living in London, and co-founder of GraduateFlatmates.com which also launches this summer!
I will be following Matt’s Wahblo launch this summer and if you find me on there, then lets donate! Good luck Matt!