By Joel Markoff, General Manager, Nexus Notes
Founded in 2011 in Adelaide Australia, Nexus Notes is a peer to peer marketplace that allows high performing university and professional students to monetise their course summary notes by selling them to students across the globe. Buyers get the benefit of seeing how the top students prepare for exams, and sellers make a passive income from selling their notes and helping other students learn.
We started Nexus Notes because when we were at university – we found it much easier to learn from other students, as opposed to university lecturers and tutors. We believed (and still do) that students are often the best teachers, yet there was no collaborative platform that enabled students to learn from each other.
And so from humble beginnings the company grew and yet in early 2014, we recognised that a lot of our high performing students were less interested in monetising their services and more interested in helping other students learn. We went back to our founding vision and looked to determine the best way to help our top students to give back to the student community through our platform.
After many late nights brainstorming how we could give back to the student community, we decided to partner with a charity organisation and allow students to donate their sales commissions directly to that organisation. After doing significant due diligence we eventually settled on partnering with AIME, Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience. AIME is a not-for-profit with a simple mission: to get Indigenous students finishing high school and going on to university, further study or employment at the same rate as all Australians. Like Nexus Notes, AIME puts facilitates anyone to learn from top performing students and mentors.
Since introducing the option to donate commissions to AIME, 11% of our note sellers have opted to donate part or all of their commission to ch. Our generous sellers have been amongst our top performing students, resulting in a massive 16% of total commissions occurring through our site being donated to AIME.
The model of donating commissions in a marketplace is something rarely seen across the world and we are proud of have come up with such an innovative way to give back to the student community.
