"“Giving a little, but more often”: a donation of a few cents, like those involved in rounding up our groceries' bill up to the nearest euro or dollar, can appear very small. However, when this action is repeated thousands or millions of times, it becomes a considerable sum.
It is out of this principle that in 2009, Pierre-Emmanuel Grange left his job at General Electric in France, where he was in charge of the IT network of their Financial Services unit, to become founder of MicroDON, a small but very dynamic organisation based in France which develops tools to make it easy for the large public to make small donations to social causes and organisations. In fact, this principle can be applied to any field where a financial transaction is involved: online shopping, at the supermarket, on a pay slip, or when receiving a bank statement. In each of these cases, one can decide to donate a few cents to “round it up”. A small drop in the ocean for the donor, but a flow of essential funding for the receiving organisation.
For this to have a large-scale impact, Grange directly addressed those who handle these transactions to integrate this possibility in their financial systems. By convincing ADP, the Financial Services provider managing 10% of all salary payments in France, Grange has succeeded engaging several large companies in France (among which Accenture and Nyse Euronext) which now offer their employees the possibility to choose between different projects to donate directly through their pay slip. It is a kind of “alternative” crowdfunding where the donation may be smaller, but on a regular basis, and thus more effective long-term.
However, it is through the rounding up in supermarkets and other virtual shopping spaces that a large, undifferentiated public can be touched and motivated, and this is where Grange is investing most of his time. The possibility to donate the rounding up to the nearest euro is already active in some 300 outlets in the Paris area, with some 30 more in Lyon, but the objective is to expand this nationwide in the coming months. Each shop or outlet wishing to join let their visitors know through leaflets and other communication material. An additional service consists of specific campaign where “donation cards” for different face value (from 1 to 20 euros) are distributed to the public, which can be scanned at the counter and the amount is credited to the nominated beneficiary.
A few years ago Grange travelled to Mexico for a trip that was to have a direct impact on his current activity: in a small local shop he was asked whether he wanted to leave the change of his purchases to a local social program. That is how the MicroDON concept came to his mind. On that occasion he replied “yes” in his basic Spanish, just like many others do in the outlets partner of his program now. The final evidence that travelling is the basis of progress."
