Either share the Good Use App with them directly, or send us a message at info@goodu.se and let us know about the organization. We’ll reach out to them and see if they’d like to be a part of the community.
Good Use only shows you results from people and organizations who live near you. If your search returned no results, it is probably because no one near you has posted a listing. Get things started by posting one of your own!
Good Use is a new community, so you might be one of the first users in your area. Help Good Use grow by letting other people and organizations (non-profits, schools, and other causes) in your community know about it. We’d love to have them be a part of Good Use. We know there are many great causes in every community that many people aren’t aware of. Tell us about them so we can help others in your community discover them.
We want Good Use to be a community made up of real people and real organizations, so we make an effort to verify every account in the community is real. Personal accounts are verified using Cognito HQ, a third-party verification service. When creating your account, you’ll be asked for several pieces of information that let us verify that you are a real person. (Organizations are verified using a separate but similar process.)
We're working on an Android app. Join the Android Waitlist. Whether or not we create a web version depends on what we learn is most important to the members of the Good Use community.
Yes! Good Use is free. We think requiring a fee to give and receive takes away from the true spirit of giving.
With that said, we intend to explore ways to generate revenue that add value and align with the values behind giving and happiness. We don’t yet know exactly what those will be, but we’ll update this answer here when we do.
Ultimately, no one can force anyone to respond to messages. So if the person or organization you wrote to doesn’t respond, you should probably move on to another opportunity to give or receive. If you think a person or organization is using Good Use in bad faith, please email us at info@goodu.se to let us know.
Good Use is all about giving and receiving freely, and we don’t allow directly selling in our community. We hope that everything that is given is accepted in that spirit and put to good use. Someone who accepts something from you in bad faith only to turn around and sell it is not living up to our community values. Let us know about that by sending us a message at info@goodu.se.
With that said, not all selling falls into this category. For example, someone might accept a gift from you only to repair and refurbish the item and then sell it. That would definitely count as being “put to good use”! Likewise, some non-profits are up front that they sell goods that are given to them in order to raise money to pursue their charitable mission. If an organization selling your gift would upset you, please ask them first before giving. Ultimately, whom you give to is up to you to decide.
A full explanation of how Good Use handles user information is provided in our privacy policy.
We temporarily collect some information from you as part of our account verification process. (See also the FAQ about account verification.) But once that process is complete we discard all information except for your name, email address, and mailing address, which are stored in an encrypted format in our database. (Your mailing address is used so we can sort search results and show you the ones closest to you first.)
Your name and the general area where you live will be shown to verified user accounts if you create a listing (give or wish) on Good Use and another verified user in your area searches for it and contacts you about it. Non-verified user accounts will never be shown your name or the general area where you live.
We won’t ever use your personal information for marketing purposes unless you give us explicit permission to do so when you create your account.
Users who are near you will be able to search for and find the listings (gives or wishes) that you create in Good Use. If a user is verified, they will then have the option to send you a message about that listing. Each listing has its own messaging thread. Inappropriate messages or behavior from other users can be reported through the app.
Good Use is a community of giving, but it’s made up of local communities of giving. Our hope is that by giving and receiving with others in your area, you can build tangible relationships with others in your area and help spread the act of giving.
For this reason, we limit you to seeing only those listings posted by other users in your area. By default, you’ll see listings within 50 miles of your address, although when a listing is created, the user who creates it can limit its visibility to people who are even closer (down to a minimum of 5 miles away). If someone has done that, you won’t see that listing in your search results if you live farther away.
Good Use is new to the scene, and all of these distances are our best first guesses about what will work for the community. But we’ll very likely change things over time as we learn what works best.
And if you really want to show your listing to someone outside of your area, there is a way to share it via text, email, or Twitter.
Not right now. Good Use is focused on the giving of things, skills, and time for now. There are great resources out there for facilitating cash donations. Cash gifts are something we may explore adding to Good Use in the future.
Yes, as long as you do so with your own account and don’t claim that it is the official wishlist of that person or organization unless you have their permission to do so.
Give until it feels great.™
