Gary Pinagot, KEDGE graduate, takes over the digital...
This Kedger has founded a participative financing platform through the purchase of gift cards!
A 2011 KEDGE graduate, Pauline Tessonneau is now at the head of Hool - a startup that lets companies buy gift vouchers, not only to offer to employees, but ones that also make no-cost donations to help finance associations.
Financing Associations is at the heart of this start-up’s concept.
France has 1.3 million associations, and 70,000 new associations are created every year. However, the number of salaried employees in the associative sector is slightly decreasing in 2020, and almost half of the presidents of these associations would like to receive aid through financing platforms. We estimate the current number of Social and Economic Committees (SECs) and similar structures to be some 36,000. The gift voucher market in France is estimated to be 3 billion euros per year.
What is Hool.fr?
Since 2018, Hool.fr provides free funding to associations and non-profit projects in the spirit of crowdgiving through the sale of gift vouchers and cards on its website.
Hool is a new concept. It offers dematerialised/virtual gift vouchers to communities, SECs, CSOs (Civil Society Organisation), and CCAS (Community Social Action Association). The gift vouchers can be given to employees for any occasion, whether as end-of-year gifts or any other occasion.
The beneficiary receives the gift voucher by e-mail and uses it on the Hool website to by gift cards for brands such as Aubert, Auchan, Carrefour, Castorama, Cora, Cultura, Decathlon, Fnac Darty, Foot Locker, IKEA, iTunes, Lastminute, Maison du Monde, Oxybul, Okaïdi, Obaibi, App Store, Truffaut, Yves Rocher, and Zalando.
After selecting a gift card(s), the beneficiary makes a donation (at no cost to him or her) to the association or project of his or her choice. The donation is automatically generated, and the value of the gift voucher remains the same and it costs nothing more. Hool donates between 3% and 5% of its turnover to the association or project chosen by the user. The company has put this solidarity-based approach at the core of its operations.
How does it work?
Person receives gift voucher and visits Hool.fr to choose which gift card to buy
and to which association the donation is to be given. All done!
A team that wants to offer an alternative source of funding to associations.
Any association can have a presence on the platform. There are requirements as to its size or funding goal for the online collections. However, the Hool.fr team will verify the identity of associations and their
non-profit purposes. At the end of each campaign, the funds collected are transferred without charge or commission.
"Our vision is to make giving donations affordable to all. We have put ourselves in the place of project leaders and associations and we have looked for a solution that would allow them to collect money without soliciting the wallets of their members so that only the gesture of giving counts. We like to say that we are ‘liberating the donation’!" explained Pauline Tessonneau, General Manager.
"We are determined to support the social and solidarity economy by providing a service to associations that enables them to find additional funding by mobilising the private sector. The aim is to create a virtuous circle between companies, associations, and retailers," added Piérig Guénolé, President of Hool.
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