Lumenaid - Stellar Donation Platform

bram

Lumenaid is a Stellar Donation Platform where you can send lumens to (charity) organizations that deserve to be in the spotlight. For every received donation a star pops up on the web site.

Once every week a new organization is chosen in a new 'round'. People can send lumens directly to the donation address or fill in a form on the web site where they can supply a message and add an optional vote for the next organization. The user then receives a memo reference that should be attached to the transaction.
Voting is limited to 1 per account per round.

Lumenaid's donation address could also be used as inflation destination where the payout of the inflation process would go to the currently active organization.

Organizations would need to submit themselves if they want to participate in this platform and thus if they want to accept lumen donations. Of course this could become more attractive for organizations when there are enough XLM > fiat conversions available on the network.
For better security the donation payouts could make use of Stellar's multi signatures.

The goal of Lumenaid is not only to promote these organizations but also to promote the Stellar network since it could show the network's capability of handling many micro transactions.

Additionally, another way to make this platform more interesting is if the stars are created in such a way that they reveal the organization's logo or some secret message or image.

link: https://www.lumenaid.org/ (running on test network)
source: https://github.com/bradiex/Lumenaid

Version 0.1.0 alpha:
First proof of concept
- Set up of initial test web interface
- Sending donations on test network
- Attaching messages + vote to a donation
- Each donation is represented by a star, the more lumens, the brighter the star

Version 0.1.1 alpha:
- Implemented logic for starting and stopping rounds
- Whenever an action is required by an organization or by a Lumenaid admin (e.g. validating new organizations) a link is sent via email with a secret action link to perform such action. For transparency the outcome of these actions are publicly visible.
- Added Logo

Planned features/todo's for beta version:
- Improve security of the application
- Make the stars reveal some secret message
- Layout improvements

Other planned features:
- Support multiple payment methods
- Integrate multi signatures for sending donations
- Work on different gimmicks to keep people interested

As you can see this project is in a very early stage so I gladly hear your opinions.

sheba

i luve the name but i'd like to donate to lots of organizations at the same time. that would be really neat!

bram

sheba The purpose of the platform is to bring attention to 1 charity organization every week. Where all the work done by these organizations will be highlighted and explained. It's not necessarily meant to raise as much money as possible, but rather to show these organizations that many people care (with small donations). One feature / gimmick is that the stars will reveal some secret message / image from the organization the more donations that are done.

cha5m

I was working on something very similar (called LumenadeStand)! Mine was going to be centered around a charity-driven inflations pool and offer GoFundMe style fundraising without the fees & and also advocate for charities to join the Stellar network by offering free XLM, consultations, etc. Cool to see someone else bring it to light though!

A little feedback on the general design. It feels a little "busy" to me and my eyes get a little distracted. Maybe having a call-to-action that stands out a little more would increase engagement! Otherwise, great job!

bram

cha5m Got to love these word plays on 'Lemonade'..
I see, Lumenaid is not really meant for fundraising, more to bring attention to organizations that need it / deserve it. I'm also planning to run validators to 'aide' the Stellar network.

Thanks for your feedback. The current design however is part of my proof-of-concept. There is a logo being made currently and I'm restyling the layout to be as minimalistic as possible.

Cynthia

I love this idea!! There are so many fantastic nonprofits/charities out there really trying to make a difference in the world and these organizations, as you already prob know, have to spend too much energy/resources into securing funding to survive. Creating an opp for the Stellar community to support these charities and thereby empower them to focus on what they have to do and deliver their vision of positive impact - seems to align well with Stellar's mission as well!

Just a few questions - 1. how are you vetting the charities? 2. is there min/max donation per round or is it uncapped? 3. how about building in some sort of incentive structure to make the donors keep donating? 4. what's your plan for onboarding charities? are you building an interface for them as well?

exciting! am looking forward to keeping up to date with Lumenaid's progress!

bram

Cynthia
Hi,
Thank you for your enthousiasm! First of all I wanted to start a new hobby project and I found it interesting to try to make something on the stellar network.. I saw there were not so much donation platforms existing while it seems to fit well with stellars view..
To answer your questions:

I'm still figuring that out.. What's the point to collect lumens when the selected charity doesn't want to participate in the stellar network? There's a good reason they don't trust the netwotk. However, I believe that in the near future stellar would become more accessible for more people. I guess in the meantime I need to spread out the message more and hopefully Lumenaid will get notified by enough charity organizations that want to participate. Participation would be done by simple registration where they acknowledge to receive lumens. These registrations are then evaluated by some moderator.
I don't foresee any min/max donation amount. People can decide for themselves. The main goal is also not to do fundraising but more to bring attention. But of course it's great if people want to donate larger amounts as well.
To make donating more rewarding my first idea was to let the stars reveal some secret message from the organization which will only be visible when there are enough donations. It could be maybe a fun thing to guess the 'secret of the week'..

Other than that I've had some other ideas:
Option to attach a question to your donation which the organization can answer (sort of like a reddit AMA)

The donaters could win Lumenaid merchandise, coupons for some webstores, or maybe some Lumenaid tokens that they could trade for access to special (yet to be defined) features on the Lumenaid platform. Though I would want to avoid it becoming some kind of lottery.. Anyhow I'm just brainstorming..

However, I don't want to overcomplicate the platform too much so I would only add them if the majority of the community would like it..

Part of question 4 is answered in answer 1. I'm not planning to make a separate interface for organizations. I want to make Lumenaid as transparent as possible so everyone has access to the same information. The communication and management on Lumenaid will be done via secret action links that will be sent to the organizations.
For example: An organization is chosen for the next round because it got the most votes. It will receive an email with a secret link on which they can change their description, logo image, stellar account and so on. Once they confirm a moderator will on his turn receive a secret link to either accept or reject these changes. All these decisions will be logged and publically viewable (with private or delicate information such as email addresses filtered out).
The reason why I take this approach is because I feel it's the smoothest and most straightforward one where new users don't have to learn about all the features in an interface. They will only need to take action when they are asked for it..
There's also maybe a possibility to run these actions partly on the stellar network instead of sending links via mail, but I have yet to figure out what are the best practices there.

Cynthia

bram That's great you are doing this as a new hobby project - what a good hobby to have ? And thanks for taking the time to answer my questions!

I guess I was asking more about how you would make sure that the charity is a "good" charity - what are the requirements/qualifications to apply as a charity? I was making the assumption that your target would be charities that normally do not get the spotlight but deserve the spotlight. But then because these charities are not well known, vetting them and assessing their impact/effectiveness could be quite challenging! Perhaps partnerships with orgs that are already in the impact measure business could be good! That can prob also help with trust building/act as an onboarding strategy.
Gotcha. It's to bring attention to the cause and the org rather than the fundraising as the main goal. Thanks for the clarification. I'm only speaking from my own experiences of working in the nonprofit sector but I think my incentive to participate would go down if I can't expect to receive a significant amt of funding. And if I'm using this platform primarily for raising awareness, then I think I want to be provided with some info about ppl in the Lumenaid community - e.g. demographics info to make sure that I'm targeting my focus pop for raising awareness.
Cute! Looking forward to seeing fun devs in this aspect!
Cool. I was thinking perhaps you would create a separate UI for charities where they can apply/check their app status/see donation history/etc. Some sort of automated vetting process can perhaps be built in? Just brainstorming haha.. yeah, agree - important to figure out the smoothest process for the users!

bram

Cynthia

Aha sorry. You have a good point. I thought that charity organizations could register themselves providing a website + email on the same domain name. Then some moderator on Lumenaid can check if it is indeed a "good" legit charity. We could also require the organization to provide some articles as a proof of their impact and there could also be volunteers who want to scout for new charities (assuming you can trust random volunteers..).
The donators can also vote to filter out scam organizations, but this may also result in small but legit organizations getting fewer votes/attention. Donators probably won't do much research either so I'm not feeling so sure about the voting system anymore. So yeah, partnering which an organization with actual experience in this business could indeed be a huge help..
Well, unless Lumenaid becomes really popular it would be hard to have a lot donators wanting to give much lumens (since probably most holders would want to keep their lumens..). So that's one of the reasons I don't except large amounts. (This will be hopefully less of an issue when adoption of the stellar network increases). But I understand that setting a goal amount would attract more organizations.. Gaining awareness is also good to find new donators that might be willing to donate to the organization directly even after the donation round on Lumenaid is finished.
Regarding gaining information about the donators:
Since donators are anonymous and the stellar network is global I would prefer at first to choose organizations that also have a global impact. One rather extreme example here might be the organization that wants to protect the earth from asteroid impacts (b612foundation).
Though I understand that we'll miss out a lot organizations that are targeting specific groups. One way to overcome this is to have a 'global' and a 'local' Lumenaid where the local one checks the ip address of the user who is browsing to the website and then redirects to a charity organization that has impact near the user's location. Organizations can then also choose in which regions they want to participate.
However, targeting very specific groups will be rather impossible with anonymous donators.. I believe the first step is to focus on global organizations and see how things go..
Since all history and actions would be made public there would be no real need for that. Unless of course charity organizations don't want that kind of transparency which is something I would doubt.. Automated vetting process? Well, I can only think about some things to make this process a bit easier for Lumenaid like requiring the organization to provide some proof while registering (see answer 1).