Frequently Asked Questions

Jolkona Foundation allows you to provide low cost gifts to various projects around the world. For each gift our partners are committed to providing you a proof of impact for your gift. You can get started by picking from any of our partner projects. Once you have found a project you like, select a donation option and the quantity of that option and add it to your gift basket. You can pick multiple projects to give to. Once your Gift Basket is finalized, you can go to the Gift Basket page to checkout using Google Checkout.

You can also help Jolkona Foundation with its operation costs by giving directly to our Kona Fund.

We have 3 gift statuses:

1. Pledged – this status signifies that the gift has been paid for by our user. However, the project has not yet utilized the gift.
2. Active – this indicates that the project has started to utilize the gift.
3. Completed – this status indicates that the gift has been fully realized.

You will receive notification emails as your gift goes through each of the following stages:

• Our member pledges a gift to a project.
• Project starts utilizing the gift.
• Proofs of impacts are uploaded at various stages of the project. Each time a proof is uploaded, the member is notified through email.
• Once the gift is fully utilized, a gift completion notification email is sent to our member.

You can also log into your account anytime to see the latest status of your gifts.

This varies from gift to gift. In the project's listing page, the estimated duration is shown for each option.

Our partners work very hard to get all the gifts implemented in the expected time frame. However, sometimes, due to unforeseen circumstances, small delays can happen. We hope you will be understanding of their situation. However, we are still interested in knowing when such situations arise. Please use our Contact Us page to let us know when such situations arise.

Kona Fund is a fund independent of our projects. We use the money in Kona Fund to pay for the various costs associated with keeping Jolkona Foundation running. You can find more information on Kona Fund here.

Jolkona Foundeation and our partners are committed to showing impact of our work. Our supporters demand that we are good stewards of their donations and Jolkona Foundation takes this responsibility very seriously. In the Impact section, we use various visualizations to show the overall difference the Jolkona Community is having. We aggregate all the donations we receive through our website to come up with these visualizations.

With the exception of Tangible Impact, all the other data is dynamic. Tangible Impact shows some of the difference the Jolkona Community is having as of the date mentioned in that page.

We only include the donations received through our website. Unfortunately, at this point we can not include the donations we receive through mail or matching gifts.

You can see your impact in My Jolkona section. You will need to give to projects before you can see your impact.

You can control your Jolkona activities through My Jolkona area. You can create a new Jolkona account or you sign-in using your existing Facebook account. Once you have created an account, you are free to browse projects and give to the ones that appeal to you. You can also invite your friends to join the Jolkona Community using the "Invite friends" feature in My Jolkona.

In our member profile, we store information about the gifts that a member has pledged. We keep this history because our goal is to show to our members the big impacts they are having with their small gifts. We take your privacy very seriously and as such, we allow you to decide who gets to see your profile information. We encourage you to review our privacy policy to understand how we handle your data.

At this time, your profile can only be viewed by yourself.

When a proof of impact has been uploaded to the website, we will send a notification email to you. You can login to the Jolkona website to see these proofs or proofs from any of your other gifts.

Jolkona Dedication allows you to donate to a Jolkona partner project and dedicate that donation to another person. If the dedication recipient is an existing member of the Jolkona Community, he/she can log into My Jolkona to see the proof of impact for that donation. If the recipient is a new user, he/she will need to create a Jolkona account (takes less than a minute) before seeing the proof of impact.

Once you have added your donations to the gift basket you can add a Jolkona Dedication to each donation. To create a dedication all you need to provide is your friend’s name, email address, and a short message. The following diagram shows the simple steps to add a dedication in the gift basket:

Your dedications show up in My Jolkona under My Dedications. Once you checkout, we send a notification to you and the recipient. For each dedication, you can see the status. If your friend has received the dedication, the status will show "Claimed", otherwise it will show "Unclaimed". If your dedication is unclaimed, you can resend the dedication message to the recipient. If the recipient is a new user, the status will show "Unclaimed" until the recipient has created an account. If the recipient is an existing user, the status will automatically show "Claimed." You will continue to see the proofs until the recipient has claimed the dedication.

Dedications that you receive show up in My Gifts page in My Jolkona section and are indicated by a gift box icon in the left column.

There is no limit to how many dedications you make. We encourage you to use Jolkona Dedication for birthdays, moral events, employee recognition, special occasions, etc.

At this time, we do not allow user to break up multiple quantities into individual dedications. However, you can create a separate order for each quantity and dedicate each order to a different person.

Our website makes use of FB Connect. You can log into My Jolkona using your Facebook username/password.

You can log into your Jolkona account and then connect your Facebook account from your profile.

We use your profile information to improve the services we and our partners provide. Facebook does not allow us to persist your information in our database. Therefore, we request you take few seconds to give us some information about yourself. We treat your privacy very seriously and give you complete control over what information to share with our partners. You can find our privacy policy here.

Jolkona Foundation's goal is to provide our users with low-cost-but-high-impact philanthropic options where you can see a tangible proof of impact for your every donation. We partner with existing projects around the world to create the affordable donation options. As a member of the Jolkona Community, you can pick from our portfolio of projects, give to those project, and then have the project report back your impact. You can find more details about our mission here.

Jolkona Foundation is possible because of the passion of many individuals who volunteer countless hours to make sure that every dollar of your gift is spent judiciously. We lucky to have an experienced, passionate Board and Advisory Council.

Believe it or not, most of our time is spent picking out partners and figuring out the partnership logistics. We believe that our members demand the maximum impact from their gifts. We also believe that there are projects around the world that challenge the status quo and constantly strive to find low-cost, creative solutions to problems. Our goal is to connect our members to these amazing projects. In order to make sure that this connection is beneficial to everyone, we work very hard to pick the right partners and create the right gift options. Our partners are dedicated to keeping the cost low, committed to showing impact for every gift they receive through us, and keen on enabling our members to make a difference. Read more about how we select our partners here.

Jolkona Foundation is committed to bringing a no-nonsense approach to problem solving. We partner with existing projects and use technology to keep our costs low so that our small organization can focus on connecting people to effective projects. As much as we would like to keep our cost to $0, that is impossible for any organization. As a start-up non-profit, we do have a small budget that pays for items like website hosting/development, marketing, fundraising, etc which is funded through a separate operations account call the Kona Fund. We do not nickel-and-dime our members to cover our operation costs or transaction fees. When a member pledges a gift to the library project in Tibet for example, every penny of that gift goes to that library. Kona Fund, which is supported by private and corporate donations, allows us to send 100% of the project donations to our partners. Additional info on Kona Fund is available here.

We try our best to make sure that our website provides a good experience for our members and our partners. However, we know that it is impossible to have a perfect website. We would love to hear from you about any issues you might encounter, so that we can fix them. Please report a website issue or send us any other feedback through our Contact Us form.

Yes! Yes! Yes! We always look forward to hearing about new ideas from anyone who is passionate about making a difference. Please send us your ideas or any other comments/suggestions through the Contact Us page.

We recommend that you use the Contact Us page for the quickest way to get in touch with us. We take great pleasure in reading every piece of feedback/comment/suggestion that we get. If you prefer postal mail our mailing address is:

Jolkona Foundation
PO Box 2153
Kirkland, WA 98083
USA

We look forward to hearing from you soon.