ImpactWayv™ Featured by PRWeek
Social Platform ImpactWayv launches with focus on social good
THE APP CONNECTS INDIVIDUALS, BUSINESSES AND NONPROFITS WHO ARE INTERESTED IN MAKING A DIFFERENCE.
NEW YORK: With heightened interest in pursuing meaningful careers, and nonprofits and companies investing in purposeful marketing, ImpactWayv, a social media platform for social good, launched on Tuesday.
It shares some similarities with LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. However, the platform focuses on creating a community of individuals and organizations that want to have a positive impact.
Users can download the app, set up a profile and create public or private networks. ImpactWayv has profiles of thousands of businesses and nonprofits.
Members can follow companies and nonprofits, and in turn be followed. Similar to other social networks, they can post text, photos, video and audio and engage with others in the community. They can link to external social media and from those platforms link back to ImpactWayv.
The company’s name sums up its goals.
“People want to join the wave of having an impact in the world. Everyone wants to do good. They’re trying to find a way to take action. And where there’s a will, there’s a way,” said ImpactWayv’s cofounder, chairman and CEO Dan Rubino. “We mashed those two concepts to come up with the overall concept, as well as the Wayv categories.”
ImpactWayv’s “wayvs” are their branded categories of social impact causes and topics, which users can follow. Similar to hashtags, they bring together people and content from across the platform.
Wayvs include categories such as food insecurity, gender inequality, climate action, diversity, equity and inclusion, corporate social responsibility, public health, environmental, social and governance, voter registration and renewable energy. The categories will also be dynamic, responding to users’ interests.
There’s an impact metric tool that provides analytics of users’ interactions and the responses across the platform.
Aiming to become the go-to platform for social good, the company built a new platform instead of forming, for example, a Facebook interest group, to add special features and to strip away clutter of other content.
Benji Bernstein, the company’s cofounder and CTO, explained that a company can end up competing with itself, using current social media options.
“A brand’s social responsibility folks want to use LinkedIn to talk about their initiatives. But the products people want to use LinkedIn to advertise products,” he said. “There’s an increasing need for a venue to demonstrate social responsibility and ESG initiatives, but there’s a limited ability in existing channels. By creating a social good focused platform, that solves that problem for brands.”
The social media company has partnered with Candid, a company resulting from the merger of the Foundation Center and GuideStar. It has one of the world’s largest databases of American nonprofits and provides ImpactWayv with organizations' profile information.
ImpactWayv also teamed up with CSRHub. This organization computes social corporate responsibility ratings for thousands of companies, including many global, publicly traded corporations. They’ll provide social responsibility scores for the businesses on the new platform.
The businesses will also serve as aggregators drawing employees, consumers, suppliers and others into the community.
“It gives them the opportunity to demonstrate who they are, and the meaning of their brand, beyond the sale of products and services,” Rubino stated. “It’s indirect marketing.”
ImpactWayv can be downloaded for free from the Apple App Store and will be available on Google Play for non-iOS devices later this year.