It’s always great to be involved in a project with a charitable element that makes a real impact.
A while ago, Jericho Coffee Traders, a Blue Snapper client, started making charitable donations of 10% on online sales of a selection of its speciality coffees.
First was its Slava Ukraini coffee (Glory to Ukraine), supporting British Ukrainian Aid. They then added a Self Care blend supporting Restore, an Oxfordshire mental health charity. More recently, they added their ever-popular Coffee Advent Calendar with donations to CRISIS, a UK charity helping the homeless.
The Challenge
Jericho Coffee Traders’ challenge was to track and make its charitable payments efficiently. Manually managing these donations had become too much of an overhead (a measure of their success!).
In addition, it was evident that contributions would increase if customers could add their own financial gifts during checkout as an option.
The Solution
The solution was to add a Shopify donation app to Jericho Coffee Traders’ eCommerce store. The one chosen was by Virtue, formerly known as Pledger.
Implementing the Virtue app was a breeze. Virtue’s team was very helpful during the set-up and quickly tweaked the app to suit Jericho Coffee Traders’ needs.
Now, with the Virtue Shopify donation app in place, store donations from Jericho Coffee Traders are handled automatically, including payments to the various charities. So too are the customers’ donations captured during checkout. In addition, all the donation and payment information is presented clearly in Virtue’s reports.
For now, Virtue is only available for Shopify; however, support for Woocommerce is in their plans, though a date still needs to be confirmed.
It’s been an enjoyable, rewarding and successful project. Logging into the Virtue dashboard daily to see donations rising is certainly a highlight of mine. And it’s uplifting to know those contributions are making a difference. Well done Jericho Coffee Traders!
About Jericho Coffee Traders
Kiwi James and his wife Lizzie had always been in love with the idea of having their own coffee business, often scheming about how they would go about starting it up.
The opportunity came in 2009 when they found a beautiful Vespa trike for sale on the side of the road, and both thought: “that needs a coffee machine on the back of it”! And so, Jericho Coffee Traders was born!
Now they have a thriving online coffee subscription business and three locations in Oxford, UK including one housing their Roastery – all serving delicious espresso and filter coffees accompanied by locally made pastries and cakes.
About Virtue
Virtue was created by Mariya Kupriyenko, Liam Houlahan and Westen MacIntosh.
Mariya has been helping enterprise eCommerce brands scale with digital products for almost a decade. In addition, she has co-founded two social enterprises focused on food redistribution and supporting kids in poverty. Liam is a technology entrepreneur and the CTO at Virtue. Westen has worked in ESG for 7 years, joining Virtue after completing his MBA.
Working throughout the UK and New Zealand, our team is passionate about simplifying the process of charitable donations by businesses and their customers. Virtue, a Techstars alumnus, has already enabled 40,000+ orders with charitable contributions across 100’s of UK Merchants.
Virtue enables merchants and customers to make a meaningful impact from their product sales. With Virtue, merchants can:
- Choose up to three causes to support from an ecosystem of 20,000+ UK charities and non-profit organisations.
- Donate directly from their product sales.
- Empower their customers to contribute by adding a personal donation to any of the store’s causes.
- Incentivise sales with impact through Upsell with Impact features
- Track and share the difference they make from charity donations from their sales.
The Virtue app for Shopify can be found on Shopify’s app store.
