
Announcing Our $3.5M Philanthropic Growth Round - saltvedt
http://blog.watsi.org/growth-round/
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ycosynot
It is hard not to be overwhelmed by such sadness. I feel, the list of patients
shouldn't be so sad. There should be, at the right, a panel of patients who
have been treated, to make it more upbeat. And the goal, is to make patients
from the left go to the right. I hope you see what I mean. If it was less
depressing, we wouldn't shut out from the cause, from so much pain to deal
with. Because as it is, to help it means to accept there is so much pain in
the world. Whereas if we see also the treated patients, then we know at the
same time that there is help too, and it isn't so bad, so the reason doesn't
shut out. This is only my opinion. Maybe it works better like that. (edit:
nevermind, I saw there are fully funded people at the bottom. I feel like a
fool, now.)

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Splendor
Hey there. I see you've added an edit but I still thought I might be able to
add something.

I'm currently a Universal Fund[0] member on Watsi and I've found it to be a
very positive experience. Instead of feeling like I'm making a hard decision
between treatments for many sick people I just give a set monthly amount and
then each month I receive an upbeat email letting me know which patient
received my funding.

I also like that my Watsi profile page shows me how many different countries
my donations have reached.

[0]: [https://watsi.org/universal-fund](https://watsi.org/universal-fund)

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ernestipark
Awesome news, congrats team. For any Watsi folks here, do you all have any
plans for more development-type work for the long term, or are you more
focused on providing immediate relief as you are now?

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chaseadam17
If by development work you mean system level change, yes. The WHO reports that
up to 40% of healthcare funding (~$2.75T) is lost to inefficiency and
corruption. This is in part due to the fact that it was historically
challenging to get money to healthcare providers in low income countries and
even harder to collect data about how the money was used. Long term, we plan
for our technology to enable not only individual donors, but foundations and
governments to fund healthcare more efficiently. We're trying to bring
healthcare funding online. And if we succeed, it could impact patients
everywhere regardless of their condition or the type of care they need.

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toomuchtodo
Thanks for posting here Chase!

What do you see as the biggest challenges Watsi faces?

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chaseadam17
Distribution. We're building a good organization, but not enough people know
about it.

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nooron
I finally signed up. I really like the Universal Fund option – I found the
prospect of choosing between many deserving people very daunting. Thanks for
building Watsi!

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jenius
So just a question and this probably is stupid. But what to investors expect
to gain from an investment into a nonprofit? Are the expecting to get their
money back somehow? Are they expecting to get more than the money they
invested back, and if so where would that come from? Or is it basically
equivalent to a large charitable donation they are making, where none of their
investments will ever come back to them in monetary form?

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chaseadam17
They're donations.

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mustpax
Out of curiosity, do these major donors receive partial control over Watsi in
return? If so, what's the mechanism for that? Board seats?

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gracegarey
Most of our funders don't receive anything in return. They just want to help
Watsi scale. That said, many of them serve as informal advisors to us.

So far, we've asked two of our funders to sit on our board (alongside Premal
Shah of Kiva): Paul Graham, and Christy Chin of Draper Richards Kaplan
Foundation.

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mustpax
Thanks for the explanation. Congrats on the fundraise!

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narendran1890
Happy to see crowdfunding being used for great causes. Brilliant stuff!

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utnick
congrats ya'll, what happened in the past couple months to spike the number of
patients funded? Would love to hear more about 'growth hacking' a charity like
this.

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gracegarey
Thank you! It's been a combination of 2 things: 1) building tools that make it
easier for our hospital partners to scale with us more efficiently, thereby
increasing their capacity to send us more patients, and 2) product/marketing.

If you're interested in the growth side of Watsi, we opened up a bunch of our
data to Segment earlier this year, and they put out this post about the growth
learnings they gathered: [https://segment.com/blog/what-we-learned-from-
watsis-data/](https://segment.com/blog/what-we-learned-from-watsis-data/)

We also talked with First Round a few months ago about how we use email
marketing to grow donations: [http://firstround.com/review/what-startups-can-
learn-from-wa...](http://firstround.com/review/what-startups-can-learn-from-
watsis-wildly-successful-email-campaign/)

Hopefully we'll be able to share more learnings in the next couple of months!

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dmix
Awesome, have you guys considered open sourcing your software? Maybe you could
get donations in terms of OSS contributions to help build your technical
infrastructure.

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gracegarey
Yes, we have plans to open source our software in the future. Stay tuned!

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ztratar
Watsi rules!

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jmscz
_applause_

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spike021
Very exciting.

