SharedLink - Fundraising for NGOs

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We'll create the first portal for NGOs fundraising campaigns. Supporters can directly donate or access other fundraising tools. Funds will converge to a specific stake-pool dedicated to the NGO.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

As the ideator of this project, I'm a very experienced (25+ years) Systems Engineer and Developer.

I had the idea of leveraging micro-transaction for humanitarian purposes back in the day, during my 8 years of experience as a volunteer for https://en.emergency.it/

-- Davide

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

“Even a tiny contribution is enough to accomplish something outstanding when a good intention is shared with a proportional number of small benefactors”

SharedLink's primary focus is to provide economic and technological support to the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that play a fundamental and active role, on a daily basis, in the defense of human rights and in the protection of the world in which all of us are living.

This goal is achieved through an innovative system that allows anyone to support their favorite organizations using cryptocurrencies in the fastest, most secure, and easiest way possible, via several different fundraising methodologies and yield optimization strategies.

For the first time, NGOs have access to an additional tool to gain more funds for their humanitarian missions, getting exposure to a way broader audience. Also, supporters who can’t afford to send funds via a specific donation can still contribute to the organization while growing their capital: something that would never be possible using legacy systems and FIAT currency.

While the original idea behind SharedLink was to replicate the effectiveness of legacy models, like telephone fundraisers (better known as “Solidarity SMS”) to the cryptocurrency world, it has been developed to agglomerate several different tools in a single place and automatically extend efficiency for the benefit of the member NGOs.

Using their usual means of communication with the public, NGOs supported by SharedLink can simply advertise the web address of their specific landing page on sharedlink.org, for example, by providing a link on their website or publishing a QR code in other promotional material.

Meanwhile, leveraging the native features provided by the Cardano blockchain, the technology deployed by SharedLink will automatically grow the collected amount, to maximize the results.

How did it start?

"In March 2006, Emergency (an Italian NGO) launched a solidarity SMS campaign to build a cardiac surgery hospital in Sudan. The success of this campaign made it possible to start work on what, a year later, became a center of excellence to guarantee highly specialized and free care to the sick in Sudan and the nine neighboring countries.

As a volunteer for this NGO and a nerd, I had the dream to build an organization that, leveraging the power of micro-transactions, could benefit other NGOs for their humanitarian projects. Unfortunately, at the time, Cardano was not yet around, and that dream could not be realized.

Many years later, on August 13, 2021, Doctor Gino Strada, benefactor, and founder of Emergency died. I was very sad, but the very same day, Charles Hoskinson had one of his “Surprise AMA” on YouTube. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but something lit up that very old dream of mine.

A few weeks later I started putting ideas together to understand how it is possible to achieve that goal, greatly optimizing the results, thanks to the native features provided by the Cardano blockchain"

-- Davide

How does SharedLink work?

NGOs can apply to join SharedLink using the provided form on the sharedlink.org website and including any relevant information.

Once the request is received, the members of our community will vote in favor of the inclusion of the applicant NGO; the votes are weighted according to the amount of owned governance tokens ($SHLNK). Once the application is accepted, SharedLink will take care of deploying and managing the necessary infrastructure for having a specific landing page on the sharedlink.org website and a new, dedicated stake-pool on the Cardano blockchain for the applicant NGO.

All the donations collected with the above-mentioned fundraising tools will be received by a new wallet, that will be created by the NGO and configured to stake to this new pool, for the usual ~4.5% year-over-year compounded interest rate that is earned by staking on the Cardano blockchain: that’s why, for the first time, supporters will contribute to the NGO also by just staking to its stake pool, while the amount of ADA they own will automatically grow in their wallets.

While SharedLink will keep being the official operator for this new pool (taking care of all the necessary technical and management activities), all the collected rewards, minus a minimal fee for covering the required operational costs, will be transferred to the NGO’s wallet, drastically improving the compounded amount of collected funds available to the NGO.

The number of blocks produced by a stake pool is proportional to the amount of ADA staked with it: it is, therefore, necessary to advertise the existence of the new stake pool and try to get as many delegators as possible to optimize earnings, and the NGO should put some effort into it by reaching out to their supporters. SharedLink will help out with that by publishing the necessary information on the website, engaging with the community, and (most importantly) providing a certain amount of $SHLNK as an extra reward to the delegators, for the first weeks after the launch of the new stake pool. A proportional amount of extra $SHLNK will be provided to the NGO’s wallet, which can be used to participate in the SharedLink governance or sold for additional funds.

There are already quite a few existing Stake Pool Operators who decided to donate part of their rewards to specific NGOs or other causes, and we think that it is simply amazing.

SharedLink will offer a more structured service, that is 100% dedicated to the member NGOs, and basically "owned" by them, without the burden of its managing costs.

Together with the provided fundraising tools, it is, therefore, possible to maximize the compounded results.

Fundraising tools on sharedlink.org at launch

In our long-term vision, we want to deploy several different ways to collect donations and grow funds for the approved NGOs, but for this Catalyst round we prefer to avoid increasing too much the scope of the project, and we will focus only on direct (wallet-to-wallet) donations.

All the collected amounts will be transferred to the NGO’s wallet. Those funds will automatically grow, thanks to the above-mentioned staking rewards and the extra operator rewards that SharedLink will transfer regularly.

Those fundraising tools will be available using a specific landing page, with a URL dedicated to the NGO. The landing page will be configurable to enable the desired features and can be generic or customized to focus on specific campaigns.

No extra managing effort will be required by the NGO, which can instead focus on its main activities.

• Direct peer-to-peer (wallet-to-wallet) donations

Microtransactions are one of the most traditional yet effective ways to collect funds for humanitarian campaigns.

While with the old-school telephone fundraising people can just send an SMS to donate a small amount of money with their phone, they can now use the same device to also send some crypto.

In the future, donors may be incentivized by offering some kind of reward as a “thank you” message, like an NFT randomly chosen from a specific, pre-minted collection.

• On-click-staking

For the first time, supporters will contribute to the NGO also by just staking to its stake pool, while the amount of ADA they own will automatically grow in their wallets. Accessing the NGO portal on SharedLink, anybody can just press a button to stake their web wallet to the NGO's stake pool.

Other fundraising ideas for the future

As soon as SharedLink will be successful, we will implement other fundraising tools, to improve our service even more. To achieve this, we may access other Catalyst rounds.

Those are the first services that we plan to add:

• NFT marketplace

Famous artists actively support many NGOs. It is pretty common for them to donate some of their creations or belongings to NGOs, which can then be used for charity auctions and so on. We think that the same concept can be applied to digital art and NFTs.

Using SharedLink, digital assets can be minted as NFTs, and all the income generated by selling those NFTs can directly go to the NGO’s wallet, without any cut or excessive fee.

• Sale of lottery tickets

It is also possible to get more creative and, instead of selling a specific NFT, use it as the prize for a charity lottery.

Supporters can buy an NFT ticket. Winning NFT tickets can then be redeemed in exchange for the actual prize.

Considerations about Governance and Tokenomics for $SHLNK

We know that tokenomics is not something that can be underestimated. We prefer to conduct a serious study, even hiring external consultants if required, and we plan to have it done during the first months and release it at the launch.

This is even more important for our idea of governance in SharedLink: we want our organization to be "owned" as much as possible by the included NGOs, their supporters, and regular people who are taking into serious consideration the main problems that are affecting the world. This definition usually doesn't apply to common VCs.

The most important, and first to be implemented governance solution will be the tool that allows token holders to evaluate the credentials of another applicant NGO because we want to make sure that SharedLink's focus keeps being on non-business-centric activities.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

We think that one of the most important goals of this challenge is to make the Cardano ecosystem more connected to real-world activities. We believe in empowering the right organizations, which are focused on solving specific problems. This is probably the most effective way to use our first-class blockchain technology for improving the world.

With our proposal, we do not need to “reinvent the wheel”, but we simply need to show existing NGOs that we can implement a new way of leveraging micro-transactions to gain additional funds for their humanitarian campaigns.

This will directly benefit the Cardano ecosystem by attracting adoption from millions of small benefactors, who already support their favorite organizations using legacy solutions.

Also, by deploying (single) stake pools for the supported organizations, we directly improve the decentralization of our blockchain.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

As our focus is on both the people within Cardano and also outside the blockchain ecosystem, we see a few challenges to be addressed:

1. Some NGOs may be skeptical about cryptocurrencies because their daily focus is oriented to totally different activities, and they don't have enough knowledge about the technology.
2. In many different countries, there are fiscal benefits when donating to NGOs with legacy systems and FIAT currency. Due to the lack of regulation, we may not offer the same advantages.
3. If an onboarding campaign doesn't go very well and there are not enough ADA delegated to the new stake pool, we risk releasing too many governance tokens.

To mitigate the first issue, we need to approach new NGOs in a professional way, showing them how SharedLink can help and that we don't plan to replace their current fundraising systems, but instead, we'll be giving them also a new one, that can be extremely effective. For the same reason, we don't think that the second issue will be a game-breaker, and the situation can only get better in the future.

To mitigate the third issue, we really need to think carefully about our token distribution and onboarding strategy for new NGOs. One idea is to start a first fundraising campaign, before deploying the new stake pool, that lasts a few days or weeks.

During that time, SharedLink will announce the event and the NGO will reach out to their supporters.

The collected amount of ADA raised during this campaign will be used as a pledge for the new stake pool and will give us an indication of the effective amount of additional tokens that we should release. This way, NGOs that show the most effort, will benefit more from their presence on SharedLink and will have a more substantial weight in the governance process.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

We plan to carry out some of the following tasks in parallel, while for some of them there are dependencies that need to be deployed before being able to proceed further.

Month 1

• Deploy the main sharedlink.org website, replacing the current, temporary static pages.

The new website will contain all the necessary information about the project and an active roadmap for its development.

• Start the YouTube channel and social media presence.

Months 1 - 2

Deploy SharedLink's dedicated stake-pool.

This will be done by implementing IaC (Infrastructure as Code), and we will use the same concept to deploy the stake pools for our organizations.

We prefer to use decentralized cloud providers, and we hope that a similar solution can be deployed on Cardano, sooner or later. Meanwhile, we will start experimenting with services like ThreeFold or Akash, but in case things don't go as expected, we can fall back on traditional cloud providers until we are ready for a switch.

Months 2 - 4

Deploy the first prototype of the NGO portal accessed by the supporters/donors.

Any onboarded NGO will have its own presence under the sharedlink.org domain, like “sl.sharedlink.org”, that supporters can access to see the current campaigns, and stake their wallets to the NGO’s stake pool, or make a simple donation, unrelated to any campaign.

Months 3 - 4

• Deploy the “private” parts of the NGO’s portal (management page), where it is possible to create and manage campaigns, donations, appearance, settings, etc.
• Develop the “Access FT” minting procedures: those FT will allow anybody who owns them to access the management page.
• Tokenomics study.

Months 2 - 6

• Engaging with the first NGOs who show more interest.
• Marketing campaign.
• Social media engagement plan and monitoring.
• Create the necessary Youtube explainer videos dedicated to supporters, NGOs, and the community. Those will include practical “how-tos” for accessing all the website functions.

Month 4

Launch of the first POC, using SharedLink as the first “NGO” for testing and developing purposes.

Months 4 - 5

• Deploy application version 1.0, fix all the problems found in the POC, and implement the missing features.
• Tokenomic reveal.

(end of) Month 6

• Official release and onboarding of the first NGOs.
• ISPO launch (in case the Tokenomics study suggests so).

After the first year, we plan to release other and more advanced fundraising tools, and we will possibly access Catalyst again.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Based on the average rates we found in our countries, we can estimate the following costs:

Project Development (including management)

UX/UI Design and Branding, ~ $50/hour: 12,000$

Stake Pool deployment procedures and automation, ~ $75/hour: 18,000$

Front-End Development, ~ $50/hour: 20,000$

Back-End Development, ~ $50/hour: 15,000$

Other Expenses

Marketing budget: 15,000$

Travel expenses, engagement, and training for NGOs: 10,000$

Infrastructure costs: 3,000$

Other issues and contingent expenses: 5,000$

We plan to develop part of the required code and infrastructure internally, among the team members, but we'll also reach out to external consultants and developers for the remaining amount.

One of the team members, the founder, will work full-time for SharedLink, while the other ones are only part-time, and we plan to hire specialists for some specific tasks.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Davide Lucchesi - https://www.linkedin.com/in/odiobill/

As the ideator of this project, I'm a very experienced (25+ years) Systems Engineer and Developer.

I had the idea of leveraging micro-transactions for humanitarian purposes back in the day, during my 8 years of experience as a volunteer for https://en.emergency.it/

Marco Montabone - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-montabone-938b5bb1/

A relentless, versatile, and cross-platform System Engineer with a serious love for development and Cardano

Cesare Ghirelli - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cesare-ghirelli-35456b119/

I'm a senior full-stack developer & system administrator who strongly believes in Cardano's fundamentals and, most importantly, its future

Hara Iliopoulou - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hara-iliopoulou-7b938436/

I'm an expert multi-lingual communicator, and I can guarantee that the message of SharedLink will be clear, concise, and free of the usual bumpf

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

We will probably return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding when we are ready to add more fundraising tools, besides the simple wallet-to-wallet donations that will be available on launch: this will require the development of more advanced smart-contracts, NFT minting, etc.

The goal for SharedLink is to be self-sustainable. In fact, we plan to register as a not-for-profit organization, trying to automate as much as we can to reduce the costs. While we'll retain a part of the stake-operator rewards, our goal is to transfer as much as we can back to the NGO wallets.

We'll also have our dedicated stake pool and we'll be open for donations like any other organization that we'll support, using the exact same tools developed for them.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

This proposal is projected to be developed in six months' time: there is a huge amount of work to be completed, both from a technical and communication point of view, and we would like time to carry out tests to perfect the systems and assess results.

Project Catalyst does not give the funding of projects in one lump sum; funding is paid over the number of months projected to complete the project plus an initial and final payment on closing out. Therefore a six-month project would get 8 equal payments.

These payments are only paid if a monthly report is received by Project Catalyst/IOHK by the 24th day of each month. We will publish our monthly reports also on our website and social media channels for the community.

All the software developed will be available as open-source, therefore all progress can be monitored in real-time.

There are also a few metrics that we can use to track our progress in the long run, for example

• Number of NGOs interested in joining SharedLink
• Amount of donations collected
• Number of wallets connected to the platform
• Engagement with the community on social media

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

In the short term, the project will be successful if we manage to achieve the following:

• Smooth platform launch
• Good engagement with the community
• Interest in the project outside the Cardano community
• Onboarding of the first NGOs (we plan to establish the first contact with two of them in a very short time)

In the long term, we want to see SharedLink as self-sustainable, and with a growing number of supported NGOs and funded humanitarian projects.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is an entirely new proposal.