Purposity and Electo: Two Socially Impactful Businesses

Business and social impact are two fields that have not traditionally crossed paths, but as time goes on, this is changing with the field of social entrepreneurship. We will look at two great businesses, Purposity and Electo, that use their platform and business to achieve good in society.

Purposity

MISSION

Purposity is a mobile application that seeks to match people that can give to people that need. It brands itself as "generosity for our generation." Even though people are able to access doctor's appointments through their phone, the nature of giving and generosity has not been updated to match these technological innovations. Purposity seeks to use the power of today's technology to fulfill the needs of everyday people living in our communities.

For example, if there is a family that recently lost their house in a fire, they can post some urgent needs on the Purposity app and these needs will all be sent out to people in their community who have the app. From there, people from across the community can help out one of their own through a quick online payment, ensuring that the family can get their needs taken care of as soon as possible.

Also, Purposity partners with school districts to make sure that students in schools have everything that they need to succeed. The school district can sponsor a listing on Purposity asking for a pair of shoes for a student who may need them. As a result, the student can get new shoes in a convenient manner.

Purposity centers itself around the belief that people are generous and want to give, but that they may not always know how to do it effectively. With this app, people can impact their communities positively and help others get the assistance that they need.

ORIGINS

Purposity was founded by Blake Canterbury in 2016, after he was approached by a person who wanted to find a way to help schools receive supplies. Leveraging his previous experience in the social entrepreneurship field with the company Beremedy, in which he helped survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, among other things, he launched Purposity.

He chose the name as a combination of the words purpose and generosity. Blake has always found it important to carry purpose with everything that he does, and that this application also helps other people fulfill their purpose. He says that no matter how self-centered one's purpose may be, any purpose or goal will always involve other people, and that same mindset is how he founded Purposity, with its generous mission.

Electo

MISSION

Electo is a mobile application that seeks to create a population of better-informed voters that can make conscious decisions at the voting booth that lines up with their best interests. The way that Electo does this is by presenting information straight from the source, preventing bias and spin as much as possible. Electo believes that voters should be presented with good information in order to become an active member of democracy, and that this information should be unbiased and easy to swallow.

At times, people have to scroll through their phones for hours, trying to find news that is relevant for them. However, so many working people simply do not have the time to parse through news sources to get the right news. Electo seeks to fix this.

One unique thing that Electo does is collect a lot of information through a variety of sources and make it concise for the average viewer. By using these sources that are all directly indicative of what an elected official has to say about any topic, Electo informs its users. Electo also seeks to keep its information as non-partisan as possible, in tho hopes that readers can draw their own conclusions based on what they read from Electo. In fact, Electo has largely rejected the use of algorithms in order to prevent any sort of bias from seeping into users' feeds.

ORIGINS

Electo is the brainchild of Naeim Khanjani and Soraya Bagheri, who founded Electo in 2019 after thinking critically about how they consume their information online and how they can keep themselves informed without being influenced by biases in media. They knew that many people did not want to deal with biased news sources all the time, so they sought to put the facts out, which is a principle that they follow to this day. They hope that Electo can cause people to become more informed, and as a result, create a better democracy.