Pennies4Progress among those competing for SECU Emerging Issues $50K awards
Poole College undergraduate student Ryan O’Donnell and his partners in Pennies 4 Progress, their social start-up, are in a competition this week for one of four SECU Emerging Issues $50K Prizes for Innovation. The funds will enable their non-profit, Pennies 4 Progress, to help raise money for underfunded classrooms.
“Pennies 4 Progress is on a mission to fund classrooms in need, one penny at a time. If you're new, welcome to the team! Thanks for your support to help my start-up win $50,000 to get started,” O’Donnell said.
Following is the team’s summary on the competition website.
“Pennies for Progress is an innovative funding platform for social good. We use emerging point-of-sale and payment processing technologies to provide a solicitation strategy for small businesses. Our program is simple: each time a customer makes a purchase they can round their bill to the next dollar and donate the difference. We target donations that are less than one dollar and locate high-volume transaction locations. Our goal is to decrease the barriers to entry for donating, which increases total donations at the point of sale. We provide businesses with a subsidized point-of-sale system running on an iOS based cash register, so whenever a customer makes a purchase they can round up their bill for schools. While this may seem like a small amount of money, implementing the system at high transaction-volume retailers in large scale can quickly raise a significant amount of funds. A popular coffee shop could raise $10,950 a year. Multiplying a single business’s contributions across North Carolina’s small businesses and retailers generates significant revenues for local schools. If half of North Carolinians donated just ten pennies each week, we could raise $50,000,000 to support local schools.”
View the team video, learn more about the competition and vote at the SECU Emerging Issues $50K Prizes for Innovation website.
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