Internet Activism's 'Ukraine Takes Shelter' site, an Airbnb-style matcher launched March 2022, connected hosts with refugees and housed over 100,000 people on just $10,000 of spend.
“We connected refugees with potential hosts and Over the last year, we've been able to house over 100,000 refugees with just $10,000 in spend.”
Internet Activism pitches itself as the first nonprofit solely dedicated to building humanitarian software fast and cheap, with a suite of tools (a refugee Airbnb, a COVID tracker, a Bluetooth mesh messenger) that small teams can tweak and deploy in hours when a crisis hits.
“So the central thesis for our organization is being low-cost, having a quick response time, and having building with small teams. We're going to build out an entire suite of products that we can tweak in a matter of days or hours to respond to crises around the world. And our main goal is to bridge the gap between the tech sector and humanitarian organizations.”
Steal thisRun a nonprofit like a fast-shipping startup: a hacker team that builds and redeploys humanitarian software in hours, not years.
Internet Activism's coronavirus dashboard, launched January 2020 before the pandemic was official, reached over 600 million users with a peak of 34 million daily active users by being one of the first to aggregate the data.
“It had over 600 million users and a peak daily active 36 million— 34 million daily active users.”