Meet Andy Savage—a pragmatist with a rebel’s heart. When he discovered that a few dollars could build a school for pennies on the aid-agency dollar, he didn’t just ask questions. He built answers.
In a world where charity often drowns in bureaucracy and bloated budgets, one man’s journey sparked a radical idea: What if giving wasn’t about guilt, gatekeepers, or glossy brochures—but genuine, grassroots humanity?
Enter ClickForCharity: a bitcoin-powered rebellion against the status quo, where every click, every satoshi, and every connection flows directly from donor to dreamer—no middlemen, no markup, no mercy for wasted funds. 
First Steps
- Hey, how are you doing? Kindly introduce yourself
My name’s Andy Savage, and I am responsible for putting together the existing Clicks for Charity system.
- What personal experience or belief drove you to create ClickForCharity?
I was sending money to a friend in the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and was amazed when I found out that the amounts I was sending him were more than the average unskilled agricultural worker’s monthly salary. I started to understand the differences between incomes in the West and elsewhere.
In Morocco, I was working with local people on a school project and found I could build a two-classrom school up in the mountains from local stone for about 30,000 dollars, a project that would cost hundreds of thousands if done by an aid agency.
Building on Bitcoin
- How would you describe ClickForCharity’s core purpose in one sentence?
To put humanity back into charity by cutting out all corporate involvement and making it direct again.
- How do users earn sats through clicks or tasks, and what makes this engaging?
The site earns income for each visit through ads, like the faucet and other free bitcoin sites do. This income will go to our recipients. Once we get enough traffic, we will be able to add more ad networks and other things like paid-to-click systems, games, surveys, and so on, just like the faucet sites have.
Advertisers will be able to choose their recipients just like members can too. Eventually it will be entirely our own ad system, and all revenue will go directly to recipients.
- Why is cutting out middlemen and marketing costs revolutionary for charity?
A revolution is a circular motion. Friends used to help each other out, and this was named charity. Then the world got bigger (or smaller), and funding of non-local projects needed a middleman to make it possible.
That started with churches, and the huge corporations handling millions followed. Then the internet happened and made them unnecessary, as we can interact with each other directly now.
- How do you ensure every cent from ads/tasks reaches recipients without deductions?
Initially we will use ad networks, and the money will need to go through the site, so this will be listed in a Stats page publicly. We are building an accounts system to report all transactions publicly too, with privacy protection for the users (their identity will not be available, but all users have numbers known only to them, so they can see that the accounts are legit).
- How are recipients encouraged to share progress (e.g., forum updates)?
They have their own blog and can post regular video updates. There’s also forums as well as public and private messages. But Nostr and other innovations are coming up that will likely make a better solution in time.
- Share an early example of a recipient project boosted by the platform.
On Rusinga Island (Lake Victoria), we have provided a water tower and pumping system for the tree nursery (via lightning network), as well as a laptop, a decent camera, and an antenna and mast to provide a better internet connection.
Through our sister Direct Sponsor project, one office staff is already being employed, paid directly by a sponsor, not by an organisation. This again uses the lightning network.
- How will the platform fund its own operations long-term while giving 100% to recipients?
I’ve been careful to learn how to get all the needed resources extremely cheaply, so that we can open source the whole thing and people anywhere can set themselves up with a really cheap system, less than 5 dollars a month, easily.
Tech support will come from volunteer developers and the network itself. As one project learns, it will help others.
- Can the system handle a surge in users or large recipient projects?
The system is built to be distributed. There won’t be a surge in users, because once a project is fully supported with enough users, it will not take on new ones; instead, we will have a system to send users where they are most needed.
Large projects can be combinations of small projects; there’s no need to have a megaproject.
- Can multiple recipients “pitch” for support, or is the system purely donor-directed?
The open source system will be competitive out of necessity. The only people making decisions about where the money goes will be those who are sending it or doing the clicking to get it.
Senders and recipients are all there is; click for charity and direct sponsor are just systems for people to use. People are what matters.
- Can users see which advertisers funded their chosen recipient’s projects?
If the advertiser is ok with that. I imagine they will be, but it’s up to them. Users will be able to see all income, just not necessarily who is sending it.
- Are there any specific goals the platform must achieve to graduate from beta to full launch? If any, what are they?
Developers. We need developers. The site that’s there is really just a sketch: an outline of what can be. It’s a chicken and egg situation. We’ll attract developers when the site gets busy and the successes start to rack up.
This is why every visitor is crucial at this stage. Don’t be put off by the site; help us to make it worth a developer’s while to make a better one!
What the Future Holds for Andy
- What feedback from early adopters has already shaped the platform?
A lot of the system was designed through extensive collaboration with recipients, who are the most important aspect of this. People don’t usually need outside advice for local things that they themselves experience every day, and for times when they do need it, they should be able to employ the advisers themselves, so that it’s clear who is working for whom.
In this way, we can let them design their own individual projects and simply be there to help them achieve their own goals.
- Could ClickForCharity pivot to support emergency relief efforts, or is it strictly for long-term projects?
It’s possible, but there are already good systems for that, such as Kuno (Monero) and geyser.fund, as well as the BTCPay server Donate plugin. Both those can take lightning payments.
- How can the global bitcoin community contribute to ClickforCharity?
Just visit every day, if possible. Sign up, get the weekly reminders, click on the tasks (only a couple so far), and help to promote the site on social media. We have a presence on most, including nostr, but we could use some help to get noticed better.
We need a social media team to compete with the bots that the big players use. We can’t pay for a corporate marketing team, so we just do it ourselves. If anyone is up for doing that, please let us know.
We had trouble with our lightning node, which has the ability to set up pages like GoFundMe, etc. using lightning. That is for one-off expenses, like the water tower and irrigation system mentioned above.
That’s another way to help; you don’t have to click things; you can contribute Sats directly too. This is another thing we need a good developer for. I can keep a lightning node running just fine for fun, but when other people’s sats are involved, we need some expert help.
There’s a contact form on the site; people can ask anything there.
