Donations to the Armed Forces of Ukraine: win-win initiatives for Ukrainian entrepreneurs
Despite the full-scale war, the Ukrainian IT industry in the first nine months of 2022 showed an increase of 13%, the market volume amounted to almost $ 5.5 billion.
The industry has not only become an economic pillar for the state and the future recovery of the national economy, but also a driver of donations. In particular, the B2B services industry.
Leaders of consulting companies and digital agencies use various tools both to help the army and to hold the economic front. Consultations for donations to the Armed Forces of Ukraine and related funds became a win-win initiative, which was one of the first implemented by influential Ukrainian entrepreneur Artem Borodatiuk from Odesa.
The algorithm is simple: experts provide their services to entrepreneurs free of charge, but the entrepreneurs should donate to charitable foundations and send experts their questions and screenshots of payment confirmations.
In conclusion, we have a win-win: Ukrainian business receives expertise, the experts get feedback and reputation, and the Armed Forces raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.
Artem Borodatiuk and his digital child Netpeak Group
At the beginning of his business journey, Artem Borodatiuk decided that it was not interesting to just develop business and earn money, so he chose to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) develop in his native country as his mission.
In 2015, the entrepreneur founded the My City project (Moye Misto NGO) — a crowdfunding platform for the implementation of initiatives of public organizations, charitable foundations and simply indifferent city residents who want to make life around them better.
For 7 years of the project’s existence, which is actually Artem’s favorite one, the benefactors of the platform have raised UAH 10.2 million. Artem Borodatiuk has successfully developed businesses that export services abroad, such as Netpeak and Inweb agencies, as well as one of the most popular search engine optimization services globally, Serpstat.
The entrepreneur met 2022 with the inspiration to help as much as possible both the Armed Forces and the economy of Ukraine. Therefore, in June 2022, looking at the ruined cities and businesses in Ukraine, Artem launched a social initiative: any Ukrainian business could receive professional advice from Netpeak specialists as a gift for a donation to the Armed Forces.
The amount of such donations started from $100, although such audits prices usually start at $800. The topics of consultations ranged from setting up contextual advertising to auditing analytics systems or consulting on B2B sales where Netpeak Group specialists are among the best in the region of East and Central Europe.
In total, Borodatiuk’s business consists of 14 companies working within the digital sector. This allows them to scale in times of war and keep donating to the military. Thus, the Odesa-born entrepreneur’s businesses have already spent more than $2 million on the fight against Russia.
That is why, in order to simultaneously support the Armed Forces and small businesses in Ukraine, Borodatiuk was one of the first to implement the idea of consultations for donations, which was picked up later.
Mentors in the home front and Artur Fedorenko
The second win-win concept of consulting business for donations was the initiative Mentors in the rear. The platform was launched in the summer of 2022. The mechanics of the initiative are simple: a person buys the consultation of the right specialist, and the latter transfers part or all of the fee to the charitable foundation chosen by the customer.
The founder of the project was Artur Fedorenko, who worked as a recruiter in IT companies for 9 years before the large-scale invasion. When the war broke out, Artur realized that it was necessary to create a centralized place for people that would connect those who need help and those who can provide it.
Mentors in the home front is a platform for sharing experience and knowledge, where everyone can get mentoring support from experienced IT professionals, founders and managers of well-known companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Vimeo, Snapchat, Grammarly, MacPaw and others. More than 100 people as mentors provide professional advice in various fields.
Projector Mentorship Platform and Oleksandr Tregub
Picking up the trend launched by Netpeak’s founder, Projector decided to give those who want to grow and develop professionally the opportunity to get motivation or impetus for career changes. Therefore, with the support of the Ministry of Digital Transformation and Diia.Biznes, the Projector Mentorship Platform was created.
This is a platform for mentoring sessions with experts from the creative and technology industries. The platform operates on a charitable basis: a mentoring session can be purchased for a donation (voluntary contribution of any size) to support Ukraine by transferring funds to one of the funds: Come Back Alive, Projector Creative & Tech Foundation, Kolo, Hospitallers or to the special account of the NBU.
Mentoring sessions are focused on the professional development of representatives of the creative and technical industries, as well as small and medium-sized business owners.
Such win-win initiatives continue to support the Ukrainian economy and implement the common mission: to keep as much money as possible in the country. It is very important that the majority of entrepreneurs who have benefited from the donation to the Armed Forces are small, but profitable and promising teams of entrepreneurs. And this fact is really exciting: Ukrainians are actively developing during the war, helping each other and diversifying the economy, bringing victory closer.