Donio is five years old. When you think back to how you started, was it your plan to get to the point where you are now?

I'd be lying if I said I thought we'd be collecting 600 million a year in five years. But from early on our ambitions were big. Four months after we started, investors from Miton joined us and they taught me a global perspective. They don't just look at how to be the best in the Czech Republic, but they see the Czech Republic as a starting point and want to go further. Which helped me a lot personally. It seems to me that when some projects are launched in the Czech Republic and they don't have that kind of ambition, they get a bit stunted. We became the market leader very quickly, we are still holding on to it and we want to go to Europe at the very least.

What was your initial vision?

For me, the most interesting connection was that technology helps people. I already had a small history in charity work before I started Donio, and I had an e-shop for flower delivery, for fun sort of. This was at a time when on Facebook a person could reach half a million people for 200 crowns. I gained experience of how online works through that, and it made tremendous sense to me to bring charity and the online world together. I liked the idea of connecting people who need help with those who are willing to offer it from the comfort of their home. Because I had already discovered that there are quite a few people like that, but it shouldn't take them too far out of their comfort zone. They don't want to go to the orphanage, but they're happy to give someone two hundred to buy something for the kids. If it's simple, a few clicks away, it has the potential to appeal to the masses. At the same time, it's a chance for those who need help but just can't ask for it themselves or find it difficult. Typically, when an urgent problem arises, you write to the foundation, but the approval process takes up to maybe a month and a half and it may not work. Donio allows you to set up a fundraiser within 24 hours. Direct quick help was not possible in the Czech Republic until then.

What kind of message do you think this sends about the society?

Great in the sense that so many people are willing to help, that they care about other people's story and are willing to step in. Worse in the fact that they don't want to have that much to do with it. We may be a bit of a lazy nation. If someone doesn't reach out to us, we don't go for it. Which manifests itself elsewhere, take how many people have a business idea and never see it through. But if it's simple and quick, it takes a few minutes, people will do it. A good way to see this is when we compare conversion rates with other organisations, we are far more successful in raising money - Donio's conversion rate averages around 5 per cent, but it varies according to different types of fundraising.

You talk about e-commerce, conversion rate. Do these words fit the charity?

I don't see Donio as a charity. We are a technology platform that tries to help people. I didn't want us to have the mindset of traditional non-profits, we do a different type of help. We help you organize a fundraiser, we make it easy to send money, we help you with accounting, legislation, the whole administration of finances. To this day, for me, Donio is more of a startup that simply meets the definition of a nonprofit.

What does all this mean technologically. Is Donio more of an Alza or just a small e-shop?

Donio is a marketplace, typologically Alza. We have upwards of hundreds of "products", which are individual collections, and we're making sure that the whole user experience is good enough to have the appropriate "conversions". Especially since our donors are not as capable as typical e-commerce users. It must be that much easier for an elderly lady from a small village whose neighbor's house burned down to be able to contribute. We know that, for example, donor text messages would be easier for this group, but we think they are obsolete. That's why our interface is also extremely simple for fundraisers. These are people in a difficult life situation that affects them in some way, so the setup has to be very intuitive.

You've gone through a lot of technological improvements in the last five years. You yourself spoke about this, for example, in connection with the collection for little Martínek, which raised over CZK 100 million. What did those changes mean and bring?

Primarily we tackled scaling, server capacity and database load as such. The problem with the little Martínek fundraiser was that too many people came in at once, the servers couldn't keep up, and unfortunately the database got overwhelmed. For example, we have the functionality to recalculate the average amount from the number of donors and the value of donations, but it was only set for ten thousand donations at most, not when there were 200 thousand. This then overwhelmed the functionality and the database could not keep up at all. It took us an hour to figure out what was going on. We got to try a lot of new things with this fundraiser. It's difficult to predict the load on the server in advance, because it only takes one Instagram post by Nikol Štíbrová or one report on TV Nova, which you don't even know when it's going to happen. Thanks to this, we have more flexible servers today.

What were the other milestones?

Actually, all the big collections were. The first leap came in covid. In February 2020 we raised 450 thousand and in March we raised 27 million, which was a huge increase. We had to completely change our mindset, step on the foundation process and automate as much as possible, because a few dozen fundraising requests suddenly became hundreds. The next big break was the tornado in South Moravia, where we found that we needed to disburse aid faster. We had seven days as standard, but suddenly the affected families had nowhere to live, they had lost everything, and we were their only hope of getting them into a hotel for a week while they figured out what to do next. So we modified the process of finalizing the collection. The next turning point was Ukraine, where we branched out offline. As the masses of people came to us, we rented several apartments and housed mothers with children on behalf of Donio. It's not the direction we want to go in, but it was good to find that we are flexible enough to do this as well. On top of that, we raised 200 thousand for aid to Ukraine, and we also found out how administratively difficult it is to send money and aid there at all. In total, we have already recorded 2.2 million donations in five years of operation, which is an admirable figure.

Legislation is a particular issue for you, isn't it?

Yes. The collection of money for charitable purposes in the Czech Republic is governed by the law on public collections, which had its last amendment sometime in 2001, and it doesn't take into account the fact that money is collected in this way in an online environment at all. Fortunately, there will now be an amendment and changes from January, but up to now we have been struggling terribly because the old regulation puts unreasonable demands on the administration. We organise 2 500 collections a year and we have to account for each one separately. The law simply provided for one body to do one collection, not what we do. It's a "nice" example of legislation limping behind technological advances.

Yet you want to grapple with it in other countries too, because you want to expand. What's the plan?

We did an analysis of the European market at the beginning of last year and came up with a shortlist of six countries, which we then specifically rated based on the state of development of donations, the penetration of online users and potential competition. From this we picked out two countries where it would make sense for us to expand. However, any such expansion means we need to build a strong local team. We have already learned in Slovakia that we need local trustworthy people because we realize that people's trust is not boundless and we need to nurture it. If we were just a technology tool, we would do a language mutation into, say, Spanish, buy a domain and get started. But for us, the local team is important, which increases costs by leaps and bounds, so we're going slow and gradually.