One of the great tragedies of contemporary American society is our increasing disconnectedness. Where I grew up in Texas, the economy was booming, but as the houses got bigger and the yards got wider, it became more and more rare for people to know their neighbors. And we wondered why we were unhappy.
Technology and particularly social media have a great deal of promise when it comes to reconnecting us in ways that weren’t possible 15 years ago—but they arguably do their best work when they understand themselves as existing to support face-to-face human interactivity in the real world. Totem is a company that understands this, reintegrating Charlottesville as it seeks to create a local culture in which philanthropy (that’s just Greek for humankind loving humankind) is made simple, visible and ultimately doable.
This week, I got to hear from the four visionaries behind Totem—PJ Harris, Alan Wei, Kyle Matthews and Danny O’Donnell—as they caught me up on the story of Totem and where they hope to see it go.
The idea came about in 2014, during the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge that took Facebook by storm. PJ, Totem’s CEO and original founder, noted the tremendous power of social media to inspire philanthropic action as people started giving back en masse to this cause they had never been invested in prior to the challenge. But he also recognized that Facebook and Twitter, powerful as they are, could be spaces for negativity and harm just as often as they were forces for good. So he began to ask, “How can we create a social hub for good things?”
After PJ brought on Danny, an old roommate with a mind for non-profits, the vision grew as it took on the secondary question of, “How can we get people to develop altruistic habits?” Their first answer, which became their business model, was corporate sponsorship.
With the addition of Kyle and Alan to the team in 2015, they realized businesses had a vested interest in getting their social responsibility out to customers—especially to millennials, who are driven by desire for meaning—and started to imagine how they could use this fact to fuel their mission to create a virtual hub for doing good. Alan built the first version of the app, and in 2016 they started using it to pair local businesses with causes, rewarding users for supporting the causes with prizes (such as gift certificates) from the businesses.
Currently in the works is a version 2.0, to be released in late August, which will expand the ways users can engage from simply donating to volunteering, attending, posting and/or advocating (by helping raise funds, themselves). A community side of the app will also feature content that Totem didn’t create, such as general philanthropic happenings in the area.
It became clear in our (very lively) conversation that Totem is about community—and in particular, strengthening community by giving people the sense they’re not alone in wanting to do right by each other.
“We know people want to do good, and we know people perceive that charity is a hassle,” Kyle explained. “We want to show people the barriers [to doing good] are not that high … it just takes a little.”
The hope is that making “philanthropy” a part of people’s everyday lives will help create a culture in which giving back and taking care of each other is normal, not something you reserve for a few days a year; part of the problem, though, is that much of our language for this has become opaque, trite and colored with overtones of heroism that actually make it harder to act. Alan had some great observations about this.
“‘Charity,’ ‘donation,’ ‘philanthropy’ … These aren’t sexy words. These are guilty words. We’re trying to shift away from that. … It’s not about charity—it’s about community. You’re doing yourself well,” he said.
While Totem has fantastic potential for impact on the individual level, it also hopes to increase the impact of businesses on the community and help them get their messages out. As Danny explained, it’s often the case that businesses’ action to help the world—what’s been called “checkbook philanthropy”—goes unnoticed and is therefore not as impactful as it could be.
Spotlighting businesses’ contributions to the community is one way Totem imagines it could help increase the impact of these deeds, as well as bring businesses and young people together in an age of institutional distrust. It’s been said that “philanthropy is the future of marketing,” and if this is the case, then Totem will have found a powerful way for local businesses to reach the public—healing not only rifts in communities, but rifts between the personal and corporate sectors as well.
In the mean time, we’ll eagerly await version 2.0 of the app, which is intended to be released in Charlottesville in late August. When asked about hopes for the second version, Alan (who built it) said, “We just want people to use it.”
