LearnAsOne

Well thanks to LearnAsOne you will soon be able to.

LearnAsOne is a new digital charity set up to fund schools and support their running cost throughout the developing world. Phase I of the website is already live: it’s based around this blog which lets you follow the fundraising progress towards the first school in Zambia, keep on top of all the latest news and interact with other members of the LearnAsOne community.

Phase II - MySchool

But the big idea behind LearnAsOne is to further develop the website to provide an extremely cost-effective way for you to give directly to an overseas community in need of a school. The way it works is very simple: every school will have its own webpage - or blog - that will look a bit like the line drawing below, right (click on the image to see it full size).

The page features the following:

• Two fundraising targets: One for the initial build costs and the other for ongoing support costs (such as books and teachers’ salaries). You will be able to donate to either of these or set up your own fundraising page for an event you are taking part in - more about that later.
• Regular feedback (including videos) direct from the school, so that you can see exactly what your money is helping to achieve.
• The opportunity to leave comments and questions for teachers and pupils to answer.

MyFundraising page

If you do decide to set up a fundraising page you will be able to link it directly to the school you are supporting. (Click on the image to see it full size)

Promote the school with a badge

You will also be able to add a badge or widget to your own website, blog or MySpace page to encourage others to give to your chosen school. (Again, click for the full image)

Facebook application

A Facebook application is also in development so that you can add your favourite school or fundraising event to your profile and promote it through your feed.

The beauty of this idea

Once phase II is developed, it will provide everyone with internet access a new, interactive and fun way to support education in the developing world. And what’s really great is that it will cost us virtually the same amount to fundraise for one school as it will for 100! So it will be a highly scalable and a very cost effective way to donate to education in the developing world.

How can I help?

As you can see from the drawings a lot of the thinking has been done. But these drawings still need turning into a web application. To minimise costs we are looking for graphic designers and web developers (xhtml, css, php, MySql) who are interested in volunteering their skills to help develop this functionality. It doesn’t matter if you want to help out for the whole project or just help for a few hours, if you are interested, please get in touch with Steve by emailing volunteer@learnasone.org.

Spread the word

If you like the idea of being able to partially fund your very own school then please, please let other people know about the idea too. Please take the time to digg this post, submit it to StumbleUpon, tag it on delicious, tell your friends, forward it to the press, email bloggers who you think may be interested or post this on Facebook.

And if you have any suggestions for improving the wireframes or turning them into reality, please add your ideas in the comments below. Thank you.

While this functionality is being built fundraising for the first school in Zambia will continue, and updates will be provided on this blog. You can subscribe to the rss feed if you want to stay up-to-date.

Thank you.