This Analytics Company Wants To Help Put An End To Human Trafficking

http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/10/the-weekly-good-this-analytics-company-wants-to-help-put-an-end-to-human-trafficking/


he Weekly Good: This Analytics Company Wants To Help Put An End To Human Trafficking
DREW OLANOFFposted yesterday0 Comments
Editor’s Note: This is a weekly series. If your company is doing something amazing to help a charitable cause or doing some good in your community, please reach out.

Random acts of kindness and good come from many different sources, some of them being from the last place you thought you’d find it. One such source is a New York City based analytics company called SumAll. What business have trying to put an end to human trafficking? I wasn’t sure, but it’s quite clear that the team has decided to make it its business. That’s exactly how good things get done though, when good people decide to make it so.

Their product brings all of your data together to figure out how much you’re spending and making through services like AWS, PayPal and eBay. It then mashes up your costs and sales with social data from services like Twitter and Instagram to bust down silo walls so you can see everything in one place. That approach and passion easily translates into the non-profit venture SumAll.org.

I”ve witnessed companies attempt to take some parts of their technology or product and make it available to other non-profits, but it seemed force. That is not the case with SumAll. Here’s their approach:

SumAll.org is a non-profit organization dedicated to doing social good by analyzing data. One of the biggest challenges facing charities and non-profits is the lack of resources and data analytics at their disposal. By providing better analytics, we can gauge the success and impact of a social effort and how to improve. Our goal is for charitable organizations to reach more people and to be more effective in the way they do it.

If non-profits knew how successful their fundraising campaigns were, or not, they could use their resources in a better way the next time. There’s nothing worse than watching a charity churn and burn, only to fall flat on its face without ever realizing their original core mission. That’s where SumAll steps in.

Next week, SumAll will be releasing some analytics that focus on different types of current slave labor: a comparison of 1860s slavery vs. 2012 slavery; a comparison of slavery in different countries; and other human trafficking topics. The information will fittingly become available on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th. Even though the 13th Amendment abolished human trafficking and slavery, it is still very much an issue all over the world. It’s a dark underbelly of society that nobody wants to talk about, and so it’s difficult to make inroads on eradicating it once and for all.

SumAll raised its Series A funding last November and grabbed $500,000 in extra funding for its non-profit arm, which is a really great approach for any company that is passionate about helping the people around them. When you have core values built into your company culture, you have more in common with your colleagues than just putting in long hours and nightly visits to the local bar to unwind.

This is the type of company that investors get excited about and want to fund.

The company believes that it can crunch all of the information that is out there, be it numbers or social discussions, and put it into formats that can help society understand the issues at hand a bit better, as well as push non-profits to be more efficient in how it handles its time and funds.

Raising money is wonderful, and potentially selling to a larger company could be a huge dream for the whole team, but when you can make a real impact in society by educating people and changing minds of non-believers who are sticking their heads in the sand on a topic, you’ve just effectively changed the world for the better.

Can data make the difference? The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

For more information about what you can do to help put an end to human trafficking, visit HumanTrafficking.org and educate yourself and others.