Watch — 41 seconds
The whole model in forty-one seconds: who funds it, what a visit does, and why it costs the business nothing. The full flow is written out below.
Fairhaven is an example community, not a customer. The causes shown are illustrative.
HOW GIVEPASS WORKS
A sponsor funds the campaign
A business or organization commits a capped charitable pool to support one community.
A local organization recruits the businesses
A chamber, Main Street organization, BID, or other local partner recruits participating businesses and selects local causes.
People visit and scan
Each business displays a GivePass sign. People scan it with their phone camera to record a verified GivePass visit. No app, password, purchase, or required signup.
Participants direct the impact
As visits accumulate, sponsor-funded contributions are unlocked. Participants choose a local cause, the sponsors pay the causes directly, and GivePass reports the campaign results.
In full: a sponsor — typically a bank, health system, university or large local employer — commits a pool of money and the campaign fee to a chamber of commerce, Main Street organization or similar community group, which operates the campaign under its own name. That organization recruits the participating local businesses and the local causes, then prints a GivePass sign carrying a unique code for each business location. A resident scans the sign with an ordinary phone camera, with no app to install, no account required and no purchase necessary, and the visit is recorded as verified. As verified visits accumulate, sponsor-funded contributions unlock, and each participant directs their share to whichever local cause they choose. Sponsors pay those causes directly at settlement. The participating businesses pay no fee, offer no discount, integrate no point-of-sale system and are asked for nothing but counter space.
WHAT NOBODY HAS TO DO
For participants: No app, password, purchase, or required signup.
For businesses: No participation fee, required discount, POS integration, or cashier action.
For sponsors: A capped commitment with direct payment to the selected causes.
For community organizations: One platform for signs, participation, campaign administration, and reporting.
What we do not claim
Someone can scan without buying, and buy without scanning. We never claim perfect attribution — a verified visit means someone stood in the shop and scanned the sign, and that is all it means.
A verified visit is a valid interaction with a participating location’s active in-store GivePass code that passed the platform’s integrity checks. Each location receives a unique, non-guessable code. GivePass uses cooldowns, duplicate prevention, and anomaly detection to protect campaign results without requesting a participant’s geolocation. Read the full measurement and privacy page.
A worked example
Milestone ladder at 3 / 6 / 10 visits, paying $25 / $50 / $100 cumulative. Per-visit matching set to zero for this example, so only milestones pay.
3 visits
$25
100 participants reached this
6 visits
$50
40 participants reached this
10 visits
$100
14 participants reached this
(100 × $25) + (40 × $50) + (14 × $100) = $2,500 + $2,000 + $1,400
$5,900
paid out, about 84% of the $7,000 pool
Illustrative example, not a customer result.
What the participant sees
No app to download and no account required. The phone camera opens the campaign, and the participant decides which local cause their visits support.
Every screen the participant app has. Fairhaven is an example community, not a customer, and the visit counts are seeded demonstration data.
We'll walk a running program on a phone so you see exactly what your businesses and participants would see. Campaigns start at $10,500 in total sponsor commitment, of which at least two thirds goes to local causes.
The pool is a cap, not a bill. Anything participants do not unlock is not owed, and GivePass never holds the money.