betterplace – new partners, more power, new perspectives

It took place at noon on Thursday, 2nd of July 2009 in the former “Milchstraßen” publishing house in Hamburg. Seven representatives of the national media gathered in our Hamburg office. Everyone was greatly excited because our new partners were to be announced: Bernd Kundrun, Arno Mahlert and Oliver Grün are three new partners of betterplace. At the turn of the year betterplace will be transformed into a non-profit stock corporation (“gemeinnützige Aktiengesellschaft = gAG”).
Now everyone is probably wondering – why? The opportunity to take a stake offers these partners the chance to share the success of betterplace and even to multiply it in future by combining forces. Personalities from the economy, media and society are expressively invited to actively shape the future of social commitment – a call that Mr. Mahlert, Mr. Kundrun and Mr. Grün have followed. We are delighted to WELCOME them! Arno provides us with his experience from his time as entrepreneur at Tchibo and Beiersdorf and makes his network available. Bernd supports betterplace by actively collaborating, by his contacts in the media sector as well as with a huge contribution from his private assets. As a specialist for fundraising of aid organisations, Oliver will bring the Internet domain “spenden.de” along with software capacities into the gAG.

Needless to say that the betterplace gAG will not pursue any profit maximisation but will remain a charitable (!) “company to improve the world”, meaning that the only return of all parties concerned is a better world – and no money.

With young bloods, the additional know how, lots of teamspirit, and the new effective synergies, we will have the chance to expand our field of activites. This will happen in form of the new „betterplace Lab“. The aim of the lab is to constantly improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the donation process. Furthermore, because of the integration of “spenden.de”, for the first time it is possible to donate directly for global budgets of organisations, and not only for charity projects. “spenden.de” will be a second platform, ran by a separate team, but we can benefit from synergies in the common admin-interface.

By the way, in the course of the restructuring there will not be any changes for the betterplace.org-Users. The donations will be forwarded as it was in the past – 100% are forwarded to the projects. More details about the “Lab”, about “spenden.de” und about the gAG will be published and discussed here in our teamblog in the forthcoming weeks and you all are invited to take part in the discussion.

Thanks to our new partners we can achieve much more now. But to be well prepared for all these new challenges we were in the need of more energy – so we all met at a huge grill filled up with good vibrations to use the momentum of doing good. We had tons of great salads, we had very delicious beef and sausages, and of course we had a few bottles of beer. Cheers to this eventful day and cheers to all you guys who took part. We say thank you to all who supported us and helped out to make this day so successful.