Donating Better with Cardano

Twitter-friendly 'elevator pitch'

We aim to restore trust in charities and bring philanthropy to the 21st century by building a decentralised app allowing donors to follow how their money is spent and charities to manage their campaign with more transparency and accountability.

Overview

Imagine if you could be shown, with supporting evidence, that 90% of the money you donate to a charity actually goes to those in need? Imagine if it could be done in a few minutes instead of a few days? Imagine if the funds could cross international borders without a hitch - and at no cost? Imagine if the operations were completely decentralized, leaving governments and large companies completely out of the loop? And imagine if all of this could be secured by the most powerful encryption method in the world?
All of this can be achieved using blockchain's Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) on the Cardano ecosystem.
Thanks to it, charities can:

• Monitor every cent of a donation until it reaches the intended end user; all on a verifiable and immutable ledger because globally distributed;
• Increase the sense of trust projected to the customer by being completely transparent, thereby improving their reputation for integrity;
• Considerably reduce management and financing costs by automating a large number of processes directly on the programmable Blockchain;
• Attract an influx of new money from a younger generation of donors that are in it because they trust the technology as well as bringing distrustful philanthropists that are being cynical of traditional organizations, generally perceived to be greedy and opaque, thanks to the foundational transparency of the giving tool.

Our solution

By leveraging two key features of the blockchain, namely auditability and traceability, our initiative aims to improve the lives of those in need by restoring the public's trust in charities and other organisations that rely on donations.
Getting people to donate is already in itself quite a challenge, but when coupled with scandals and stories of embezzlement, it erodes the public's trust even further (see annex) and makes the whole endeavour near impossible.
Our solution aims to solve this problem by transforming a currently opaque donation process to a more transparent one, where donors have a front-row seat at how their contributions have a positive and significant impact on someone else's life.
This has the potential to bring philanthropy into the 21st century once and for all. It is time to start developing this platform and becoming the leaders of this revolution.

Goals

Add transparency and accountability

• The main goal of this project is to allow donors to see exactly where their money is going and how it is being spent.
• Each stage of the donation process can be monitored from donor to recipient with verifiable evidence, including all administrative, marketing and transportation costs, among others. This makes the entire operation completely transparent, verifiable and therefore accountable.
  Reduce costs and expenses
• This technology can simplify the management of charities by automating many management processes and, by doing so, rendering certain intermediaries obsolete therefore allowing more of the donor's money to reach the recipients.
• Blockchain transactions are extremely inexpensive, regardless of the size of the amount transferred. This alone can reduce the cost of transferring money close to zero, allowing almost-free value transfer to any country.
• As an added benefit, no ill-intentioned foreign officials of the recipient country will ever be able to say anything about how the money is spent, and likewise, no money will be wasted in bribery.
  Enhance security
• Thanks to cryptography and the fundamental nature of Blockchain, no money can be lost or stolen by hackers.
• It is also possible to secure documents or physical key contracts on the Blockchain, which cannot therefore be modified without the consent of all the parties.
• That said, certain precautions must still be taken at every level in order to secure the cryptographic keys.
• Improve confidence and perceived integrity
• The process being completely decentralized, it therefore improves the conditions for trust in the whole system. This means that no centralized entity, no corporation or government is managing the operations; making them free from undesirable or dominant control outside the donor-recipient conversation. This therefore naturally strengthens the charity's reputation for integrity.

Scope

Rather than delivering a finalized platform with all the features, we aim to deliver a Minimum Viable Product or MVP to validate our ideas while still having a usable product that can be put into the hands of donors. It will allow a donor to (1) fund a digital wallet (with ADA to begin with), (2) donate to a charity campaign; and (3) enable a charity to manage their campaign in a transparent way.
If we get funded, we expect to deliver the following:

• Code a web-based application that allows:
• Donors to fund their account (in ADA)
• Donors to choose and contribute to a charity campaign and visualise how their money was spent
• Code the charity-side application - along with its employee application - for managing the transparent use of funds
• Outreach & onboarding of charities and other organisations

Costs

• Web design & development - $34,000 USD
• General - $9,200 USD
• User-side features - $11,200 USD
• Charity-side features - $5,600 USD
• Charity employee-side features - $8,000 USD
• Project management - $6,000 USD
• Contingency (buffer) - $2,000 USD
• Total: $42,000 USD

Timeline

We aim to complete our MVP within 4 months from the start of development:

• In the first month, we will create and refine all the required project artifacts (solution architecture, business and technical requirements, user stories, wireframes).
• In the second and third months, functionalities related to the Donor, Charity and Employee will be developed and core features will be implemented.
• In the final month time will be spent thoroughly testing the MVP.
• Then, if time allows, enhancement will be added.

Why is this beneficial for the Cardano ecosystem and its users?

When implemented, this donation solution will embark a lot of new users that know nothing or very little about crypto and blockchain thus generating a brand new wave of future users.
It will show the world of crypto that Cardano is the ecosystem that is best-suited for tackling such tasks because of its solid, academically peer-reviewed and open-source foundations.
It will show the vast spectrum of tasks and functions it can undertake. Show the true potential of blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

Conclusion

We believe our initiative fits nicely into Cardano's mission statement to provide sustainability to decentralized applications and systems that will benefit society and the Greater Good.
It is worth mentioning that we are currently in discussion with the Canadian Red Cross about this initiative for them to implement the solution within their organization.
**PS: We are still looking for full-stack web developers and blockchain devs. Leave us a comment or PM us!**

Feedback

As this is our first proposal, any feedback is most welcome. Please do not hesitate to give us a shout!

Annex

https://blog.causeview.com/blog/fundraising/falling-donor-trust-is-a-major-problem-for-nonprofits
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/07/fewer-britons-donate-charities-after-scandals-erode-trust
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/make-iowa-ceo-arrested-theft-charges-75425426

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