While college students might want to give to charity, most don’t have money to just give away. With the new Stand 4 app, students can donate money by completing challenges in this social media style app.
Andrew Hill and Ian Sauer created Stand 4 to redefine charity. Aiming the app toward millennials, they wanted to create a way for students to give to charity without having to donate money themselves. Considering how many college students own a smartphone, the two decided that an app would be the most accessible.
“Because of this app, you can be involved in little ways. Even if it isn’t as much as you’d like, it’s still something, and something is better than nothing at all,” said freshman creative writing major Natali Cavanagh.
Cavanagh typically uses Stand 4 between classes. She says the app is an easy way to be involved without having to invest a lot of time. Instead of playing a game on her phone, she now completes stands on the app.
Stand 4 offers weekly challenges for users to complete. Each challenge, or “stand,” is the equivalent of a certain amount to charity. For example, answering a ‘Would You Rather’ question gives one meal. Other donations include: a gallon of water, an hour of animal care and school supplies. Once users complete a challenge, they are told how much charity they’ve given. The best part about these challenges is that they are easy and quick. Tasks range from taking a photo to typing in your favorite TV show. With Stand 4, donating to charity can take seconds.
The app contains tabs, similar to Instagram and Twitter. The home tab allows you to see the stands that you and your friends have completed. The discovery tab shows you what stands other people are taking. The impact tab shows how many total stands have been taken and how much charity has been given. There are tabs within the impact section, which will show the progress of each form of charity individually. Like any good social media app, there is also a profile tab. Users can upload a profile photo, friend other users and view the stands they’ve taken.
The stand tab lists the stands you can take for the week and what kind of charity will be given once the user completes the challenge.
Each stand also has a bar showing how many people have completed it. Users click on whichever stand they choose, then complete the challenge. That could mean taking a photo of a sunset or drawing their friend as a ghost.
Stand 4 is simple and easy to use. The app is currently in beta testing and the company is working on improving the kinks. According to Jeff Hill, a marketing intern for Stand 4 and a freshman entrepreneurship major at Ball State, the company is looking to allow for repeated stands in order to give users the opportunity to continue to donate even when the weekly challenges have not been updated. He also plans to add a search function, which doesn’t currently existent. The hope is to have the app ready for its official release on May 1.
“Everyone has an Instagram account, everyone takes selfies, so why not post it to another social media application?” Hill said.
