Apps for Water

It’s important to me that Gaucho Software, as a company, gives back to society as a whole. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, from providing the app XRG for free (and open-sourcing the code), to donating money to different charitable organizations. With the holiday season upon us, I wanted to take this opportunity to give again, but in a bigger way than ever before. So today I’m announcing a new campaign called Apps for Water.

Apps for Water gives app developers a chance to donate one day of their sales to a very worthy cause: providing clean water for developing nations. It seems like a simple thing, turn on a faucet and clean water pours out. Unfortunately, there are almost 1 billion people in the world who don’t have a safe, clean water source. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience. It turns out, the lack of safe water is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Over 2,000,000 people die each year from diseases stemming from the lack of clean water.

This is where organizations like charity: water come in. The goal of these organizations is to provide safe water for communities in developing nations. Believe it or not, it only costs about $20 to give a new person access to clean water. And because of a collection of private donors that pay for the day-to-day operations of charity: water, every dime that is donated by 3rd parties to their organization goes directly toward water projects.

So here’s the deal. Gaucho Software will be donating 100% of the proceeds from app sales on December 20th, 2011 to charity: water. Help fund a water project, get an app for free. Furthermore, as an additional incentive to donate, Seasonality Core and Seasonality Go will be on sale that day for 20% off.

A call to app developers…

But the hope is that my offer will be just the tip of the iceberg. I would like to formally invite all other developers of Mac and iOS apps to participate in this campaign. We’re setting up a new website1 at AppsForWater.com to list all the apps that will be giving discounts and donating their proceeds that day to charity: water. Then we’ll get the word out, and tell everyone about how they can give clean water to communities in need.

If you are a developer who is interested in participating, please send me an email or ping me on Twitter. I will do my best to answer any questions and will let you know what materials I need to have your apps listed.

It’s been shown time and time again that the Mac and iOS community can make a big difference in the world. Please help us do it again.

1 I want to send a special thanks to François Joseph de Kermadec and the rest of the team at Trumper, Forsyth & Kline for so generously donating their time to develop the website for this project.