The Ukrainian government is marrying some digital marketing tools with crowdfunding and other incentives for giving to keep global attention trained on its war efforts against the Russian invasion. “There is a wave and there is this kind of euphoria, but then it abates,” Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister of Ukraine and minister of digital transformation, told The Associated Press. “We want to keep up this positive energy, the positive vibes.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tasked Fedorov, 31, the youngest member of the nation’s cabinet, with setting up a new fundraising campaign and website to encourage donations for the country’s defense, humanitarian aid and reconstruction. That resulted in the United24 website and campaign that lets donors send funds via PayPal, cryptocurrency, credit card or direct bank transfer to the state’s accounts. “It’s very important that people helping Ukraine are not paying money directly all the time, but that they have some fun,” said Yaroslava Gres, who runs a public relations company and is one of the coordinators of the project. In the future, people looking to help Ukraine might buy a T-shirt with an image of Zelenskyy printed on it or attend a soccer match played by the national team with ticket or merch sales benefiting the country, Gres suggested. “I cross my fingers,” she said of the Zelenskyy T-shirt. Gres has asked international companies and banks to invest in repairing Ukraine’s damaged infrastructure. She envisions a menu of projects that a donor can choose to support. They want, “to see these two pictures: as it was, as it is,” she said of the before and after comparison that shows precisely where funds were spent. Donations from individuals over a recent seven day period totaled around $27 million, a drop in the ocean compared to the support other governments have sent to Ukraine. The U.S. alone will send over $50 billion if the U.S. Senate approves a new aid package, which it is expected to do. On May 10, a single entity donated almost $22 million directly to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense through the United24 site, representing the bulk of the donations that came in between May 5-11. The National Bank of Ukraine does not share the name of donors, a spokesperson said. Ukraine pledges to release weekly reports detailing funds raised and dispersed. The project will be reviewed by the international accounting firm Deloitte pro bono, Sergey Kulyk, managing partner of Deloitte Ukraine, said. The company is still finalizing the scope of work with United24, he said. Most individual donations come from Ukraine’s political allies: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada and Germany, though Ukrainians have also been giving, Gres said. She considers their donations a mark of trust. In late February, Ukraine started soliciting donations in cryptocurrencies that raised some $67 million in about a month. Ukrainians have crowdsourced funds for national defense since at least 2014, when private campaigns raised money online for volunteers fighting Russian-allied forces in the country’s eastern region. The government also set up a way to collect donations through text messages to support the army, though that was less popular. Garrett Wood, an economics professor at Virginia Wesleyan University, studied what motivated Ukrainians to donate to their defense at that time and found donors could chose at a very granular level to […]

The post Ukraine’s Crowdfunding Aims to Keep Donors’ Interest in War appeared first on The Yeshiva World.