Volunteers have developed a smartphone alarm clock application to help raise more money for the Ukrainian army.
Called Wake App, the app works like a simple alarm clock, but sends money from the user’s bank account each time they hit the “snooze” button to the nonprofit Return Alive. The NGO in turn buys equipment for Ukrainian soldiers.
The sum of money and currency are set before the alarm is used. The payment system Fondy allows users to donate from any spot in the world in euros, dollars or hryvnias.
There are various wake-up melodies, including one written specifically for the app by Ukrainian poet and novelist Serhiy Zhadan and performed by rock band Krykhitka Tsakhes.
The song, called “Kolyskova” (Lullaby), is designed to make people want to sleep more, so that people snooze and donate.
“The idea was to create an anti-wake-up song,” said the song’s author Zhadan during a press conference at Ukraine Crisis Media Center on May 22. The song can be heard here.
An advertising specialist, Artem Karelin, who came up with the idea of Wake App, told the Kyiv Post that all work was done voluntarily, including the app’s development.
“All of us help others using the skills we have,” Karelin said, adding that his background in advertising helped make the app what it is.
The app was designed in cooperation with advertising and PR firms AGAMA сommunications and Talan Communications. It’s available for Android and iOS devices.
IT specialist Vitaliy Deynega, who is also the founder of Return Alive, told the Kyiv Post his nonprofit today collects and directs to the army the same amount of money it did in 2015 and 2016 — around Hr 500,000 per week. “It’s stable,” but the app may enlarge these numbers, he says.
Deynega thinks the volunteer movement in Ukraine shows the integrity of people.
“Look at me,” he says. “I am afraid to go fighting at the front, but at the same time, I found a way I can take part in the war. And there are many people like me — they can’t fight, but they can donate money.”
During 2016 and the first quarter in 2017, Return Alive collected Hr 36 million.
“So our army drove in volunteer cars, aimed with volunteer sights, and measured ranges with the help of volunteer rangefinders,” Deynega says. “Only the guns are their own.”
“I think the Russians were quite bewildered,” he added.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denys Krasnikov can be reached at [email protected].
