Many privately-owned digital platforms, like Facebook and Airbnb, prioritise profit, inadvertently contributing to power imbalances. Brazil’s third sector faced similar challenges, with NGOs struggling for sustainable funding and effective digital tools. Cooperativa Digital stepped in, using a novel community-led design and governance framework to address this critical need.
Cooperativa Digital was a 10-month research partnership funded by the ESRC Digital Good Network. The project’s core was a series of co-design workshops focused on transferring ownership and control of a private fundraising mobile app called Reapp to a network of local NGO organisations in São Luís, Brazil. This wasn’t about imposing a solution; it was about working with the community to redesign Reapp, ensuring the app genuinely reflected their needs and experiences. This isn’t just academic research; it’s a story of real-world impact in Maranhão, Brazil’s poorest state, where co-design is empowering non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and fostering a more equitable digital society.
Co-designing a Digital Commons
Our research, led by Dr Rosendy Galabo, focused on the transformative potential of co-design and “commons” principles. This involved working directly with Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) organisations in São Luís, Brazil, through a series of intensive co-design workshops. To empower these organisations to take control of Reapp, a private mobile app designed for tax-receipt donations, and transform it into a community-governed “digital commons”. This approach ensures digital solutions are genuinely community-led, context-sensitive, and truly empowering.
Tangible Impacts: Real Change on the Ground
The empowering effects of these workshops have manifested in significant social and economic impacts:
– Enhancing Transparency and Donor Engagement: For Publicidade Jove, the project’s non-academic partner, the co-designed Reapp platform is a game-changer for donor relations. It now acts as a “social network” where NGOs can share transparent reports, detailing how funds are used, who benefits, and where their work is located. Crucially, the platform “translates” complex technical data into a donor-friendly language, overcoming previous communication barriers and fostering stronger trust.
– Boosting Collaboration and Income: Cooperativa Digital fostered unity amongst previously unacquainted organisations and individuals. This new collaborative spirit directly inspired participating NGOs to launch a new annual network event called “Jantar Solidário em Rede” (Solidarity Network Dinner). Held in November 2024, this inaugural event generated BRL 12,500 in income for Instituto Santa Luzia, the lead host, demonstrating a powerful new, self-organised fundraising mechanism.
“These workshops brought us the chance to create something that would be new for us, which would be a pilot project that, if it worked out, could be replicated by
other institutions. And we started with ourselves, right? So, I brought ten institutions into this dinner; they are partners of the solidarity dinner, and now it will be rotating. This year it will happen at another institution, and we will be there to help them. And that’s how I see that the union makes us stronger. (…)
“Through Reapp, we held the first solidarity dinner, because in those workshops we were participating in, an idea came up for us about sitting down together with our institutions staff and plan it […] Well, so we did it, right? It worked very well, we managed to have 175 attendees, right? The price of the dinner was 50 Brazilian reais. But there were 3 meal courses, there was dessert, there was juice, there was everything, right? So, it was something that worked out. I saw that it’s really like that, that you have to chase after your goals. […] I know that, I know that the dinner, it worked out. We raised 12,500 Brazilian reais at the dinner. Besides the dinner, we had an auction. In this auction, we put several pieces. The girls who work at the institution, who make crochet pieces. Then there was desserts, pies, right? There was what the auction was made of. We raised 880 Brazilian reais just with the auction . Just in the auction, just with the small things, right? But it’s a. It’s a way for us to raise funds too.”
Raimundinha, Director of Instituto Santa Clara NGO, Participant institution of Cooperativa Digital (Translated from Brazilian Portuguese)
– Creation of a New Social Enterprise and Employment: A significant economic outcome of the project is the establishment of Reapp Mobi (www.reappmobi.org), a new social enterprise founded in December 2024. Classified within Brazil’s “impact sector,” Reapp Mobi focuses on social projects, territorial development, and minority inclusion. This enterprise was specifically created to support the ongoing development and maintenance of the community-governed Reapp mobile app. This demonstrates tangible and enduring economic benefits and employment opportunities within the local community. Furthermore, Reapp Mobi is expanding its reach beyond São Luís, connecting with over 80 VCS institutions across Brazil through initiatives like the “Costurando Conversas” (Sewing Conversations) webinar series, with ambitions for international growth.
“(Reapp) is registered as a simple national tax and small-size enterprises within 2.5 sector in Brazil. This is a new sector catalogued by the Brazilian government as an Impact sector, which includes enterprises that do not solely aim profit, but also aim at reinvesting the profits into social projects and development of activities that include minorities, marginalised communities, and geographically Underserved Areas”
“Right after, when the project ended and we managed to do the work of finishing the application, the platform became ready and we modeled the business. So, when we developed the business model, we started to do job tasks, including hiring the team that developed it (Reapp) at the university, the undergraduate students who were developing the app at the university, they were hired through a vesting contract, because of believing in the project ideals, mainly for that. Today they are part of the team and, besides them, two more people also joined to work in the marketing and communication department together with us, so we organised two departments within the company with six people working directly in the development of REAPP, within these ecosystems and incomes from institutions. And a very cool thing is that we jumped from the place where all the research and study was done in a single city, which is São Luís do Maranhão, and we are expanding this to the entire national territory, including engaging with a community with more than 86 members, with 80 of them being institutions, and the other part the team.”
Jovemar Junior, Director of Reapp Mobi (Translated from Brazilian Portuguese)
Impact timeline
The Cooperativa Digital project stands as an example of how community-led design and governance can create lasting positive change, empowering organisations, fostering collaboration, and driving economic benefits in underserved communities.
Rosendy Galabo