Social Mission:
1) Every charity faces its own challenges and pursues its own opportunities, while we would say the biggest, most consistent challenge for the majority of charities is fundraising.
In Hong Kong, we have 400 new charities set up every year. More and more social problems are being taken care of. However, the total amount of donations does not increase as rapidly as the number of charities. With so many groups seeking funds, raising funds and growing income has become one of the biggest challenges for the sector as a whole. There is hardly an organization that does not want to grow its income, or could not do more if it had more money. Established charities strive to grow income for further development or start a new project while small ones struggle to keep up their services. Are there any ways we can help the charities with good causes to reach more donors or even generate a new income stream for them?
AdCare aims to serve this cause with an innovative business model. We help charities and projects to focus on their good cause instead of constantly worrying about money issues.
2) AdCare values people’s attention. Every one of us is exposed to advertisements that do not have our permission to view them. AdCare serves to filter out what people are not willing to watch, and provide monetary benefits to viewers and their chosen charity for every single advertisement watched. Viewers are encouraged to donate their spare time to watch ads and give help to charities with limited resources, in turn helping those who suffer in poverty.
Business Model:
AdCare is an advertising platform that gathers viewers by social causes. Advertisers or brands place their advertisements on the AdCare platform to their targeting consumers. AdCare aims to reach an agreement with viewers based on the 4-3-3 mechanism: 40% of advertising revenue will automatically be donated to the charities specified by the viewers, 30% is given back to the viewers as reward and 30% represents AdCare’s operating income.
We envision AdCare becoming an advertising platform compatible with any smart device, taking care of all the day-to-day advertising information being delivered to its users, filtering out ads that they don’t want to be exposed to, and filtering in ads and special offers that they do prefer. By obtaining users’ consent to play advertising information, users are more willing to accept advertisements, and advertisers can target customers more easily.
Founding Team:
Rick Tsing, Co-founder & CEO
Rick has been a serial entrepreneur since 1992. He worked in TVB as media sales after graduating from university and founded his first company, Lunch Republic, which invented and adopted multiple supplier platforms to provide student lunchbox to schools.
Rick continued his entrepreneurship and teamed up with Andrew Law in 2014 to start AbundantWhale, a project starting with an idea of “Suspended Healthcare”, in the hope of helping people who cannot afford medical treatments.
In the midst of executing his crazy ideas, Rick came up with the magic number 4-3-3 and started the project AdCare.
Andrew Law, Co-founder
Andrew has been a successful businessman running Salotto Ltd. since 1973. This company is a major player in the commercial contract furniture supplies industry. Apart from representing many world renowned brands like Wilkhahn, Walter Knoll and Unifor from Europe, Salotto also has a factory in Dongguan producing furniture to the specifications of their customers. In 2013, Salotto was acquired by Okamura, the biggest furniture company in Japan, and Mr. Law retired from the company in 2014. Since then he teamed up with Rick Tsing to form the AbundantWhale Group of companies, in the hopes of combining business and charity into unity.
Andrew is one of the major shareholders and principal investors of AdCare.
Impact:
1) New stream of money for good causes
AdCare is going to extract the resources from the advertising market to fund charitable projects that do social good. 40% of AdCare’s total revenue goes to charitable projects selected by the viewers directly, while no one is actually donating a dollar in the process.
AdCare serves as a crowdfunding platform for charities to promote their good causes and contributions, at the same time viewers donate time and generate real money for the development of meaningful projects.
2) Normalization of giving
We help users to turn their attention to real social contribution. By adopting this model of double-layer revenue sharing, we aim to create dual motivation to attract the most viewers to watch ads on AdCare, in a way that some might be motivated by the charitable factor, some by the earning of ad fees, and some by both. AdCare will be able to gather a highly socially-conscious community, which is a good channel for small charities to reach the public.
On the other hand, those who come to AdCare because of extra pocket money will also be exposed to the good causes and impact evaluation provided on AdCare platform. We believe that people will definitely be moved by their own positive impact on the city, whether small or large, and carry it forward in their daily life.