Trend Talks: Lessons in Transparency From Jolkona

Wednesday, September 17
12:00 - 12:30 PM

Jolkona means “drop of water” in Bengali and represents the idea that when it comes to charitable giving, “every drop counts.” For the last 6 years, that idea has been the basis for how Seattle-based nonprofit, Jolkona uses crowdfunding and donation level transparency to engage new donors and revitalize the way we think about giving. From educating girls in Afghanistan to providing farm training to women in Kenya, Jolkona has impacted thousands of lives in over 40 countries and inspired thousands of donors through impact reports.

In this Ted-style talk, Jolkona co-founder Adnan Mahmud will talk about the lessons learned from starting a crowdfunded-impact driven non-profit and where they are going next.

Audience Expertise Level: Suitable for all levels
Shop Size: Suitable for any size shop


Adnan Mahmud

Adnan Mahmud is the founder and CEO of LiveStories - a Seattle-based social enterprise building data tools for non-technical people, simplifying data analysis, visualization, and presentation for everyone. Prior to LiveStories, he founded and grew Jolkona.org a crowdsourcing platform that provide impact reports for every donation. He also worked 8 years in Microsoft where he managed the feedback data pipelines for Microsoft products, obtaining few patents around data analysis and visualization, and ran incubation projects in Microsoft Research, contributing technologies to major Microsoft products like Office, Windows, XBOX Kinect, and Bing. Adnan is an envoy for US State Department for social entrepreneurship and youth leadership, speaking at university campuses around the world. He has been featured on TED, CNN, NPR, and Seattle Times and he is a regular contributor to Huffington Post.