Our Pitch:

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Charity Hub is an XLM-based donation ICO platform that focuses on visibility and verifiability, commonly believed to be the main inhibitors of making a donation. The platform helps good-minded individuals (advocates and mentors) and organizations (charities, NGOs, social enterprises) raise fund and, through smart contract, ensure transparency on the progress and result of their efforts. Donations will be held in an escrow pool and only released when proof of work has been submitted to and verified by a Validator. We believe this will eliminate the stigma that many donors traditionally have on actual impact of their contribution - resulting in a larger donation pool for charities.

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Currently, we have already secured a partnership with Teach For All subsidiary in Thailand. Through our platform http://charity-hub.org/ (website still in development), Teach For Thailand will accept XLM donations across the globe to empower Thai children and improve the quality of their lives. We hope to promote Stellar to be better known amongst the Thai community, especially as a good-willed and efficient blockchain network of choice.

Conceptual Flow:

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How It Works:

  1. Charity creates a Campaign (for example “Community Tourism with Local Youth Guide”). Campaign contains basic details (similar to kickstarter) with two deadlines: fundraising and fund utilization. If charity fails to raise 100% of fund required by the fundraising deadline, money are fully refunded to donors. If charity fails to complete all Sub-Campaigns attached to the Campaign by fund utilization deadline, donors have the option to receive refund on remaining unused money.

  2. Charity creates Sub-Campaigns (at least 2) under the Campaign above (for example “1.Local Food Trip” and “2.Ecosystem Educational Trip”). Sub-Campaign must be sequential and each must specify a Validator, a third-party that will validation the work done and can sign off each Sub-Campaign.

  3. Charity create Metrics (at least 1) for each Sub-Campaign. Metrics has 2 important fields:
    a) Target - Quantitative goal that the Sub-Campaign tries to achieve. For example, “Train 10 students to become youth guides emphasize on food in Bangkajao.”
    b) Reward - Donation amount that the Charity request for achieving the Target. For example, “215 XLM”

  4. Donor browse Campaigns on our platform and donate to a Campaign. Their money will be held in an escrow pool and only released when progress of the Campaign has been made and verified. (hence our tagline “Payment by Result”)

  5. Once Campaign successfully raised 100% of its funding, platform will release advance payment that only covers the first Sub-Campaign so Charity can start its work.

  6. Charity submits regular update on progress of current Sub-Campaign it is working on.

  7. Finally, when a Sub-Campaign’s Target is met, Charity send proof of work to Validator for validation (for example, certificate issued by Ministry of Education for every teacher trained). If Validator sign off the Sub-Campaign, Charity receives advance payment for the next Sub-Campaign.

  8. Repeat step 7 until all Sub-Campaigns are signed off within fund utilization deadline. Else, donor has option to receive refund on unused money left in escrow pool.

Our Stellar Technology:

We utilise many of the key stellar concepts such as multisignature accounts, batching operations, time bounds and token creation to facilitate the features described above.

Here are some of the highlights:
1. We create a multi-signature escrow account to store the donation fund. This account requires signatures from both the campaign owner and validator to perform any transaction.
2. We issue a campaign specific donation token and sell it to the donor in exchange for lumens; A time bounded transaction is created to buy these tokens back if the campaign fails to reach the funding goal within fundraising deadline.
3. A third party auditor is assigned to validate the completion of each sub-campaign. The validator needs to sign the transaction in order for the reward funds to be released to the campaign owner.
4. We create another time bounded transaction to buy the remaining donation tokens back if the campaign owner fails to complete all the sub- campaigns within the campaign execution deadline.

That’s it folks. If you made it this far in reading our post, we deeply thank you for your interest and greatly appreciate any feedback you may have as we are finalizing our MVP. Please stay tune for update.

John
Charity Hub Team

Interesting application of this technology being used in the donation space where donors want to know the transparency!

    Hi Cynthia - thanks for your interest! While I cannot speak for @bram , my guess is there’s definitely have some synergy/similarity between our projects - especially how we want to highlight on Stellar’s strength for charity application (multi-signature escrow, validator token, multi-operation transaction and capability of handling transactions). Thus, we welcome any collaboration possible!

    However, there may be some differences. For example, we may tend to focus more on “transparency” of the donation while Lumenaid focuses more on promoting visibility of the selected charity. We believe transparency is the real inhibitor of donation...and that if we could increases that, donation amount will increases and charity will reap the most benefit.

    Furthermore, we ran our idea through our pilot charity and went through some fine-tuning before finalizing this concept. Therefore, we really do hope this would be fruitful as we got firm commitment to make this project live and start accepting XLM donation soon.

    @Cynthia due to your background in nonprofit, we would love to hear more on what you like, dislike, or any general comment so we can improve Charity Hub to the next level.

    • bram replied to this.

        Great idea, and I think with the ability to simplify and explain this concept (which I am sure good clear messaging will achieve) this will open up many apprehensive donors to the idea of dramatically increasing not only the frequency but also width of initiatives they donate money to. Good luck!

        5 days later

        Charity-Hub
        Hi,

        You are correct. Lumenaid also wants to show how the Stellar network can be used for donations. The goal of Lumenaid is not to set up a crowdfunding but more to bring attention to an organization. It will also provide a few gimmicks on the website to keep people interested. Though there's also a lot of focus on transparency: all decisions made on the platform and prove of payments will be publicly visible to everyone.

        Lumenaid is still in an early stage but I will contact you once the platform is ready to use and we'll see if there could be some collaboration (for example: charities from Charity-Hub could be forwarded to Lumenaid and vice versa..).

        Bram

            savebattgo Yes, this is definitely in our roadmap. Our first attempt would be to convert XLM donated by donors into the charity’s preferred fiat currency (such as Thai Baht) and directly deposit the Baht to charity’s local book bank via banking app. However, we are still waiting for clear rules with regard to cryptocurrency and ICOs from Thai regulatory bodies (see https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/news/1424187/ico-and-token-rules-take-shape ).

            Anyway, savebattgo would you mind sharing with us how banking app integration works with cryptocurrencies in your country? Your guidance may help us foresee what’s to come for our country. Thank you very much in advance.

                  bram please do keep in touch as we love the idea of exchanging/referring charities between our platforms. Ultimately, through Lumenaid and Charity Hub we hope charities would reap the benefit from Stellar’s network.

                  By the way, I’m wondering how we could use stellar transaction memo text in different ways to enhance the donation process? Any suggestion on this would be appreciated.

                  • bram replied to this.

                      Charity-Hub I currently use the memo text to optionally attach extra data to your donation. First you go to the Lumenaid website and fill in some message and vote for the next round. You then receive a reference that you need to fill in as memo text with your donation. This way you can add way more data to your donation.

                      Stellar also supports a mechanism for adding attachments (https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/attachment.html) but here the sender is responsible for creating the attachment and it is also meant to be used with an authorization server which I have not yet configured.
                      I believe with my approach I have more control over the format of the attachment.

                          Charity-Hub We provide cryptofinance called UnbankedX in East Africa and a few other emerging markets by matching lenders to borrowers on a P2P basis. It is a fully automated system with multiple user interfaces. We do not involve banks. Your application needs to deposit XLM into our Stellar wallet and then post to our API and our system will reply with confirmation. This can be done in any country by any user who uses our application

                              I’m a project manager of community tourism with local youth guide. Thank you, charity-hub for the donation. I will maximize the value of this amount of money. I will try my best to improve my students’ communication and leadership skills.

                              bram Very interesting indeed especially with regards to attachments mechanism. Thanks for pointing it out – will look into it!

                                savebattgo Oh got it. Do you have any mechanism on conversion from fiat to crypto and vice versa? Ultimately, to reach a broader audience, Charity Hub hopes donor can convert fiat to crypto in our platform prior to donation. And when a campaign funding is met, we want to convert crypto to fiat to transfer to charity. Any suggestion?

                                  15 days later

                                  30/3/2018: Charity-Hub Platform Update: Since the launch of Charity Hub, we have received over 7 campaign inquiries, one of them with high potential from African region, and currently working hard to due diligence them before opening up for public donation. Much help is needed in the world and if everyone work together, we can make a difference.

                                  6 days later

                                  05/04/2018 Campaign Progress Update : For the campaign “Community Tourism with Local Youth Guide”, our teachers are busy training students (see image) to become youth guides to lead the food tour in Bangkajao - which is expected to happen during second week of April 2018! Please stay tune for update as we look to complete our first sub-campaign soon!
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