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Gifting the power to do Good
Christine describes herself as person with a passion for trying new things, meeting new people and a creator of good change in the world.
Originally starting her career as a journalist, Christine moved into communications, gravitating towards social impact work. In June 2017, Christine left her permanent job as a communications manager without a plan. After a month or so of reflection an idea started to form. A social giving platform, to replace gift giving with donations to a good cause.
What was your vision when you first started your venture?
I left my job with Z Energy at the end of June 2017, had the idea for The Good Registry in August and we launched that November.
I have two co-founders. Tracy Bridges and Sue McCabe. When I told Sue about The Good Registry idea, she loved it and offered to help. I’m not sure if Tracy volunteered or if I twisted her arm.
The Good Registry is a way for people to donate to their favourite charities without having to dig into their own pockets. Instead of receiving unwanted gifts, that money goes to a good cause. Money is not wasted when it goes to charity. And you get the joy of giving from the experience.
We have 65 charity partners. We've been very conscious to choose a mixture of national and local charities. Currently, most of the donations are going to SPCA. People do like animals. Other popular charities are Kids Can, Mental Health Foundation and in terms of local charities, Wellington Free Ambulance. Many people have used or know somebody who has used the Wellington Free Ambulance. People do like to give to causes close to their own heart.
I try not to play favourites, but for Christmas last year, I chose the Common Unity Project Aotearoa. It’s a wonderful program based out in The Hutt. It started as a community garden providing organic nutritious lunches for children in low decile schools. It's expanded to create volunteering or employment at Rimutaka Prison. Growing produce, cooking then selling nourishing meals to the community.
So far we have raised $320,000 of donations, replacing about 8,000 gifts, allowing thousands of people to experience giving and how good it feels.
Of course every donation made through us supports the environment. We're taking all of the waste out of the unnecessary consumer purchases, manufactured on the other side of the world, shipped to New Zealand, packaged and wrapped. We're taking all of that out and just sending the money straight to charity.
I get excited about the waste we’re reducing as well as the charitable impacts. To think that people are rethinking consumerism around gift-giving or consumerism overall. There's an incredible amount of waste going into recycling. Of which a lot never gets recycled and just goes to landfill.
For the waste that is recycled, there's still energy consumption. If you were given a gift that you wanted or needed, that's cool. But if not, there are still environmental impacts. If we can replace those gifts with donations instead then we're doing a lot of good for the environment.
How did you deal with early setbacks?
By just continuing to stay conscious of why we’re doing this. Why it’s important to the three of us. Keep on going, finding our way, not sitting back and feeling like a failure. Knowing that this is a chance to try something different.
But also being realistic. In the early stages, there wasn’t time to stop and think. We just had to keep going. In August we decided that by building a gift-giving platform, it should be finished for Christmas. It should be launched in November, giving people time to discover and use it.
So the question became can we do this in three months? Yes, The Good Registry launched within three months with 60 charities signed up along with a crowdfunding campaign and all needed to create a social enterprise.
Was there a time that you wanted to give up?
There was a time when I learned what the phrase ‘cold feet’ was. I didn't know it was a real thing. It was during a conversation with a lady who had been through a similar journey, where my feet literally went cold. My body tensed up and my breathing stopped. It was a reality check about the challenges we were taking on.
I often enter things with a lot of optimism. But being told some really hard facts about the challenges of working with charities was grounding. Charity resources are generally really stretched. I was optimistic about how much energy charities have to help launch and grow our platform. It turned out to be true. The charities appreciate all that you do for them. But they can’t always help promote as much that would be ideal.
Both Sue and I already had a good understanding of charities across New Zealand. We ruthlessly white boarded our target key charities who we’d like to get on board. We wanted to make sure that we had charities that people would expect to see on the platform. When users come to sacrifice their Christmas gifts, they want it to be for charities they know. We also wanted charities who already had reach to help get the word out about The Good Registry.
We also ran a crowdfunding campaign through Pledgeme to allowed some people to buy the chance to choose some smaller local charities to go on the platform.
We were also warned about the cost of the technology. We'd already seen that. Our website costs were already blowing out. She made it clear that it wouldn’t be the end of it, taking up more than we could ever imagine. This also ended up being true.
Were there any traps that you fell into?
A lot of people warned about spending too much money on technology. Just build a minimum viable product.
We overspent building our initial website to discover that it wasn’t quite what we needed. It hasn’t been thrown out, but instead now runs adjacent to another.
The original website offered gift registries. This allows people to choose charities for their friends and family to donate to in place of Birthday or Christmas gifts.
After that first Christmas, we discovered that corporates were also interested in The Good Registry. They wanted to replace the gifts they would normally send out to clients or employees. This didn’t work using our registry structure. That’s when we created gift cards.
It wasn’t viable to keep adding to our original bespoke website. So we used the eCommerce platform, Shopify to very cheaply built the gift cards. That's now our main platform.
Now charities are set up as products on our eCommerce platform. People can choose their favourite and then purchase gift cards for that charity. This works okay, but we'd love to build a bespoke platform again. Integrating the gift cards and registries while providing the ideal experience for our customers. Those redeeming gift cards could be prompted to pledge their birthday via the registry.
We co-founders funded The Good Registry to start with. I was comfortable with that. I didn’t go to university. I saw this as the money I would have spent if I had. Instead, I used it to help build our website. Then I've been working pro bono for The Good Registry for the last two years.
There’s a lot of generous people helping us in lots of different ways. The BizDojo provides us with a free desk in their co-working space. Deloitte helps with all our financial services pro bono, which is incredible. We get free legal support from Duncan Cotteril. Many others like the good that we’re trying to create in the world who contribute services or time. It makes a huge difference.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve started to reduce my hours. The Good Registry is becoming self-sustaining. So for a day or two a week, I'm able to work as a communications consultant. For my clients, this means fully managing their communication function. Helping them communicate opportunities to their stakeholders. Working on their messaging and why, who they want to influence and the impact their communications should have. Then writing the communications and tailoring it for the different channels.
I'm consulting with companies focusing on social impact. I want to do work that connects with my heart. It's gotta be fun, with good people making a positive difference in the world. One company I consult for works with sustainable energy development through aid programs in the Pacific. That's fantastic.
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What inspires and motivates you?
I love seeing the good in other people. When children choose to create a registry with us for their birthdays. That they donate to a charity instead of receiving gifts connects with me. I'm also really inspired by businesses who are walking the walk. That they are no longer giving staff and customers unwanted gifts. Instead of using that money to donate to a good cause. I get excited to see how much good there is in the world. We are just giving people a simple way to tap into that.
We've seen parents register their children’s first birthdays. The child isn't gonna know any different. The parents are going to be saved a lot of stress and clutter in the house.
We’re seeing children choosing to do it themselves. Some as young as seven. At that age, they're becoming aware and identify as a child who cares. It's a nice experience for them. I don't know if we’ll have many children choose to do it year after year. But even if they do it once, it’s good to understand the importance of giving instead of getting. That celebrating their life can also include celebrating other causes.
Can you describe a breakthrough that you're particularly proud of?
The big breakthrough that I'm proud of was learning very quickly that the registry model didn’t give us the impact we wanted. Seeing the gift card opportunity and figuring out how to cheaply build that functionality in. It’s completely transformed the impact that we're able to have.
The first Christmas we raised, maybe $20,000. Last Christmas we raised well over $100,000. That's because of the businesses using gift cards.
Meaningless gifting at the moment is in the business space. Employers can't possibly give all of their staff the same gift and for them to be happy or use it. Even when businesses are choosing gifts like a KeepCup. It's not a sustainable gift if they already have one.
There’s a really good number of businesses customers. Kiwibank and the Co-operative bank have used us two years in a row for their staff Christmas gifts.
We put a lot of energy into connecting with businesses on LinkedIn. A lot of the businesses using us last Christmas had seen us posting about the businesses using us the year before. Or they had received gift cards themselves.
The feedback from businesses has been magic. The leaders of those organisations have said how right it feels to use their money to give back instead.
Their staff feedback reaffirmed this as well. David Cunningham, the chief executive of the Co-operative bank told me he'd been giving staff gifts for 20 years and never got feedback. But this year when he gave staff Good Gift Cards, his inbox was inundated with praise and telling him which charities they’d given to and why. A real heartfelt thanks.
Sometimes people forget to redeem the Good Gift Cards. So we allocate all that money to charity on their behalf.
What do you see as being your biggest lesson?
Done is better than perfect.
We could've spent a lot of time and energy trying to make things better. But we would have just wasted a lot of time and opportunities.
The website that we launched within three months was far from perfect. I'm so glad that we launched it anyway. We were able to learn so much from how people interacted with it. We then knew to invest time on gift cards rather than registries.
So, not letting perfect hold you back from getting stuff done. It’s something I’ve had to practice. I’m a shiny new thing kind of person. At the same time, I do have professional pride and I don't want people to look at what I've produced and think it’s crap. There's a fine line.
Also finding peace that not everyone is going to like what we’ve done. And that's okay. We're still making a difference in the world so far with the time and resources that we've had. So that’s good enough for now.
“Done is better than perfect”
Has your vision always been clear and how has it evolved?
Simplifying giving, helping good causes, and reducing waste.
But we started to find a way to do more good in the world. Giving the experience to people of feeling good while helping good causes. After the last two years, those three pillars are still core to our vision.
I've moved strongly to reducing waste and unnecessary consumption. I get excited about the waste we’re reducing as much as the good that we're doing for charities. That was a much smaller part of it when we launched.
To reduce my waste, I mainly buy secondhand clothes. If I do buy new, it’s sustainably made. Kowtow and Little Yellow Bird are great. There's also a screen printer at Shelly Bay who has quite sustainable T-shirts, sweatshirts and screen printing.
What would you do differently if you had to start again from scratch?
I don't want to say that we would do anything different. I talked about the investment and the website to start with. I'm still glad we did that. It meant that the website was built, launched and tested. We learnt so much from that experience and quickly. I believe it had to happen as part of our journey and we don't have any regrets.
Connect with Christine
If you have enjoyed this article and want to start a conversation with Christine, you can reach out by:
Website: The Good Registry
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/christinelangdon
Please don’t forget to tell Christine that I sent you.
Interview and photography by Wellington Headshots, Tim Morrison (all rights reserved)