Out&About: Daniel Flynn

While some of us have been enjoying well-earned time off this year, some of our fantastic speakers have well and truly hit the ground running in 2021.

One such speaker is Daniel Flynn, the co-founder and MD of thankyou.co. Undoubtedly you would’ve come across Thankyou’s products on your weekly shop, but you may not know that Thankyou’s products exist all-for the end of extreme poverty.

Thankyou’s unorthodox business approach has well and truly “flipped the game on its head”. Their everyday products work to “right a wrong: an inequality gap so big it shouldn’t exist” Daniel explains. Thankyou has lofty hopes for 2021 and hopes to leverage the more than $63 trillion (yes, trillion) spent on consumer products each year for good.

Coming off the back of a year when the world’s richest got richer and the gap between those living in and out of poverty grew exponentially, Thankyou was able to give $10m to their impact partners who are serving the world’s poor, because of the imaginable uplift in hand sanitiser and soap sales in Australia and New Zealand. While other organisations have compromised and set smaller goals during this global crisis, Thankyou is determined for the world to emerge from the pandemic without poverty.

The best way to do that? Flip business as usual. Thankyou has urged their community to “imagine if Thankyou existed in every other country in the world- that the $10m given to impact, could have been hundreds of millions of dollars”. In September 2020, Thankyou launched their ‘No Small Plan’ campaign, inviting the world’s biggest product companies to partner with them to take #thankyoutotheworld. The campaign encouraged consumers to help them get the attention of the big product companies by tagging the companies and posting ‘I’m in, are you?”. The campaign kicked off with a video that now has almost 2 million views and inspired a movement of people from over 35 countries. Consumers shared the video, posted creative content, and after just two weeks of campaigning, they had 740 media features across the world, reached people in over 80 countries, and hit a crazy total of 2.6 billion campaign impressions.

Daniel hopes that by gaining the attention and action of the biggest power players in the industry, that big corporations who signal purpose and have the reach and scale, could partner with Thankyou’s unique business model, and go on to fight extreme poverty together.

“If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that business as usual is out the window,” says Daniel. Here’s hoping we can leave extreme poverty in the past!

Find out more about Daniel here