Giving is changing. Gone are the days when you have to write a check and cross your fingers. Technology is enabling a new breed of nonprofits to make giving more transparent, efficient, and delightful.

Segment is excited to partner with Watsi, a nonprofit leading the charge in using tech principles to drive transparent impact. Watsi helps fund patients in need of care with direct donations to medical expenses.

Available today, our integration with Watsi makes it easy for companies to give back automatically when a customer takes a specific action in their app. For example, during our beta of this integration Segment issued $10 Watsi gift cards every time someone took the NPS survey inside our web app.

analytics.track('Completed Survey', {
 type: 'NPS',
 score: 9,  
 name: 'Bill',
 email: 'Bill@acme.com'
});

See the API documentation for more details.

This is the first integration of its kind on Segment, and we think it’s an inspiring way for businesses to encourage people to signup, thank someone for referring a friend, or delight customers when they reach a successful state!

Using Technology for Good

If you’re not familiar with Watsi, it’s a nonprofit that enables anyone to donate as little as $5 to directly fund life-changing health care for people around the world. Their founder was inspired to start the crowdfunding platform while serving in the Peace Corps in Central America. Since 2012, more than $6.5M has been donated to fund healthcare for 8,220 patients in 23 countries. And, 100% of the donations go directly to patient care. The organization’s costs are covered separately.

Watsi is headquartered in San Francisco and runs a bit like a tech startup, using data and analytics to understand and improve the user experience. At our event last year, Analytics for Good, Watsi opened up their data to the analytics community and found that increasing corporate sponsorships presented a huge opportunity for them to advance their mission.

Since then, Watsi has collaborated with companies like Segment (hello!), LinkedIn, Mode Analytics, Amplitude, and New Relic to offer different types of gift card promotions. Together, Watsi has raised $2M in donations from corporate sponsors.

Taking cues from their tech counterparts, Watsi decided to build an API to make it easier for others to donate money to Watsi patients. The Watsi Segment integration, built on the Watsi API, enables companies to make their charitable giving as simple as sending a welcome email.

New Relic, Zenefits, and Creative Market Automating Delight

Segment customers New Relic, Creative Market, and Zenefits have already cooked up a few ideas for how they are going to use the Segment Watsi integration!

New Relic has used Watsi gift cards to say “thank you” to its partners and customers in the past with great results, said Tommy Lloyd-Davies, senior segment marketing strategy manager at New Relic. “Sending Watsi gift cards has been a really successful way for us to live out our values and delight our customers at the same time. The response has been incredible, and we’re excited to automate it with the Segment integration.”

As a human resources and insurance company for small businesses, Zenefitswants to humanize their sales process. This new integration makes it easy for Zenefits to bring the Watsi mission to customers who refer new potential customers by thanking them with a Watsi gift card. “We’re excited about the opportunity to create meaningful touch points with our users,” Cristina Salhuana, Zenefits’ Director of Growth, said, “and this integration will make it simple to scale.”

Creative Market, an online marketplace for digital goods used by web creatives, donated the proceeds of its holiday-themed Pay it Forward bundle to Watsi and supported 261 patients in December 2014. With this integration, Creative Market plans to spread out their giving across the year by systematically sending Watsi gift cards to users who purchase bundles of goods or buy credits in bulk. “Creative Market’s always been passionate about paying it forward to do good for others. With the new Segment Watsi integration, it’s really easy for us to get our customers and community involved in giving back too,” said Creative Market co-founder Aaron Epstein.

On Karma

Watsi holds a special place in our hearts at Segment because they are our partner in Karma—one of our company values. Before opening up gift cards to customers and customers of our customers, we started by offering them to every new Segment employee.

Segment Values: Karma, Tribe, Drive, Focus

On my first day, I got a $300 gift card and used it to fund a C-Section for a young woman named Elinah in Uganda and help a little boy in Guatemala get treatment for acute malnutrition. When the treatments were over, Watsi sent me a note to tell me how they went. I’ve never seen my (or Segment’s) dollars have a more direct impact.

To date, Segment has donated over $50,000 to more than 353 Watsi patients. We’re excited to scale and automate our giving program. The Watsi integrationempowers other companies to do the same.

Start Giving Today

Getting started with the Watsi integration is really easy. It took me about 5 minutes to set up our own program!

You’ll just have to create a Watsi account, enter your Watsi credentials in Segment, and choose which event you’d like to trigger gift cards. You can also set custom donation amounts and write a special message for your customers. Here are the Watsi and Segment docs that explain the process in more detail.

Ready to get started? Create your company’s Watsi account, and email connect@watsi.org for your API credentials.

Tweet at @Watsi and @Segment once you have your gift cards streaming, so we can help spread the word!