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Guru appoints GoFundMe co-founder Andy Ballester to Board of Directors

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Guru appoints GoFundMe co-founder Andy Ballester to Board of Directors

Guru, the fast-growing museum app development start-up, has announced the appointment of Andy Ballester to its Board of Directors.

Ballester is the co-founder of GoFundMe, the world’s largest online fundraising platform that helps people raise money for their own nominated causes.

So far, campaign organisers on the site have raised over $3 billion for causes such as medical expenses, education, community projects and sports.

In his new role, Ballester intends to apply his years of streamlining and enhancing user experiences to the Guru product.

‘I hope to provide support in scaling the product massively,’ he says. ‘On GoFundMe, some people are going through horrible things and others are raising money for positive things. You have to think: any changes we make to the product, how does that affect the users?

‘We had an around-the-clock customer service centre where users only had to wait 5 minutes to get feedback. This wasn’t an autoresponder. This was an actual person answering messages.

‘If users are having a bad time on your site, take it personally.’

Guru creates applications to enhance visitor engagement at museums, aquariums and zoos. Clients include the San Diego Museum of Art and Battleship Iowa. The company recently secured $100,000 from Qualcomm Ventures alongside $100,000 in cloud services/support credits from Amazon Web Services and $25,000 in legal services from DLA Piper.

‘Guru has a product that takes educational offline experiences and makes them fun and more enriching,’ explains Ballester.

‘I believe Guru will help millions of people find joy in educational experiences.’

Ballester is clear about where he sees Guru in the future:

“I would like to walk into almost any museum and have the ticket counter tell me that I should download a Guru app,” he says.

‘I want my Instagram and FB feeds to have posts from friends who enjoyed the Guru app.’

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Charles Read

Charles is managing director at blooloop. He attends numerous trade shows around the world and frequently speaks about trends and social media for the attractions industry at conferences. Outside of blooloop, his passions are diving, trees and cricket.

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