How my design background helped me to raise 25K euro in 2 weeks for Covid-19
By: Alberto Andreetto
Tags: Helping Others, Volunteering, Coronavirus

I’m a designer, I’ve nothing to do with charity and NGO but somehow by mistake in 2 weeks I raised 25k euro and I helped out few hundreds families, here I’ll explain how I managed this.

Before getting into details I just wanna give a brief overview of how’s going on in Italy (great website about Covid numbers in Italy coded by my colleague Enrico). I live in Milan, my region is Lombardy, we’re in complete lock down since beginning of March, everything is closed, we can go outside only for grocery shopping or emergency. We cannot go out for a walk, for meeting friends or anything else. Bars and restaurants are closed, shops too. Today is my 42nd day of quarantine. I work remotely so I’m a lucky one but a lot of friends lost their jobs and many people gets trapped in a city they don’t know without a job.

Many people gets trapped in a city they don’t know without a job.

My first post, then updated with the google form

I live in an area of Milan called NOLO (North of Loreto) and few weeks ago I wrote a post on the Nolo Facebook page (10k members) “Hey I’m lucky, I still have a job and if you cannot afford a grocery shopping just text me and I’ll do it for you”. The idea was simple, I just wanted to give a grocery shopping to a family that lost everything with this quarantine.

Unfortunately nobody answered my post, I guess the public shaming is too much, expose yourself asking for help to a stranger is not easy. Actually I got the opposite, around 15 people wrote me to give me some money. They wanted to help me out with the shopping bill. Late that evening I edited the post stating that I was not looking for money but I was looking to someone to give my money.

Solidarity is not giving what u have leftover but giving what u lack of.

It was a Saturday evening and I went to bed thinking about this. Why so many people wrote me to contribute on my shopping? Why they don’t just donate something to one of the many organisation that operate in the area? The day after I realised something, I used my post as a kickstarter campaign, I posted an idea and I saw that many people were interested in the same, I validated it. Unfortunately the public shaming of asking a stranger direct help was too much and nobody answered my post asking for a grocery shopping.

I did what I ask the client I work for to do, I escalated in a lean way. I created a simple google form with 3 options:

I need food

I want to bring a grocery shopping to someone

I just want to contribute to a grocery shopping

The google form

I contacted the administrator of the Facebook page, Daniele. I never met him but I saw him managing the page, approving post, kicking out assholes and I thought would have been a good idea to have someone trusted by the community involved in this thing. He agreed to help me out and he posted the form in the page on a Tuesday morning. By the end of the day we had 100 people filling the form, some asking for help and the rest split by carriers and donors.

Basically we started matching the people based on location, I was sending the contacts of someone in need of help to someone willing to bring them a grocery, I let them contact the family in need of help, my goal was only to put those 2 in contact, nothing more.