Hisani

A social media and crowd-funding platform dedicated to meeting the financial needs of community-based organisations and building trust-based grant giving in the social impact sector.

Hisani will be a solution to 4 problems:

1. The heavy financial burden borne by community based charities and social enterprises. Studies that have shown that more than 70% of community based organisations struggle to find adequate capital and make sufficient revenue to keep their operations running. Two of the main factors responsible for this are the high setup costs associated with building a venture and limited market access, which our platform will provide assistance with. The consequences of this are having marginalized groups and communities especially in the Global South eventually being underserved at not receiving the support that they need in order to

2. The low rate of partnerships and information sharing amongst community based organisations. In Kenya there are over 1,000 organisations that work in menstrual health, however less than 100 of them have partnered or tide out a project together. The absence of partnerships in the social impact sector is especially damaging to marginalized and underserved communities. This is because of the intersectional nature of social impact work. To illustrate, if I was to donate reusable pads to a community in Kenya but do nothing to solve their challenges in accessing clean water and sanitation, then I wouldn't have solved the problem. All I would have done is created a relationship of dependency, which is counterproductive to development.

3. The low levels of trust in grant making and charity funding processes. From my experiences as a founder of a community based charity, I have come to learn that a very small fraction of community based organisations trust large donor institutions such as USAID the UN. At the end of the day the community-based organisations that do the charity work rarely come into direct contact with the large donor institutions in a way that is trust-based. Instead the interaction will be facilitated by a larger international NGO such as Oxfam. This  multilevel system of grant-giving introduces a lot of distrust and inefficiencies in the grant-making process. In the long run, the people who are hurt the most are the communities and the individuals who should be the direct beneficiaries of this funding.

4. The dwindling levels of hope for meaningful social impact for future generations. A famous lecturer once said, "before my job used to be to teach my students how to contextualize and focus on solving one problem at a time because they all wanted to change the world. Now the first thing that I have to do is to convince my students that's trying to change the world is not a lost cause." With the rise of social media and the propagation of negativity for commercial gain, many individuals are losing hope for a better future and falling into despair. This kind of pessimism has significant long-term effects on the future of society.  More specifically, it reduces the probability of individuals activities such as carrying out charity work, holding our leaders accountable and engaging in responsible consumption, which only hurts all of us.

Hisani will start out as a crowdfunding platform that will enable individuals and grant-giving institutions to donate money to community-based charities and social enterprises.  

The platform will use big data analysis tools, artificial intelligence and social networking technology to facilitate faster More trustworthy and more easily monitored and Grant donation processes. 

Hisani will also enable community-based organisations and social enterprises to partner with each other on joint Projects so as to have maximum impact in the charity work. Additionally the platform will facilitate service for service transactions between social impact organisations so as to reduce the financial burden that they will incur in starting and running their operations.  Finally as an added incentive for community-based organisations to join the platform, we will provide simple financial management and project management tools that will make it easier for these organisations to carry out their administrative operations

Moving forward we shall start to incorporate social media functionalities into the platform that will enable individual users to interact in real-time with causes and organisations that they identify with.  Additionally the social media element will enable individuals to find out where the services, goods or funds would be best suited as a donation.

Lastly, through the data that we will collect and analyse in the long-term, we will be able to provide information concerning the trends in the social impact industry, the type of work that people are currently doing in various fields and where the current gaps are in terms of the work that needs to be done and what type of projects or organisations need to be funded for the purposes of development. This will enable the larger social impact industry to plan more strategically for the future.

The main beneficiaries of the platform will be community based charity organisations and social enterprises.

Currently, these organisations are underserved in the following ways

1. Most individuals who want to carry out social impact projects or start charity based organisations do not have the necessary funding to carry out their plans. Hisani will not only allow them to access a large pool of individuals and donor institutions from whom they can crowdfund, but also facilitate  service for service transactions between his organisations. This will ensure that their initial capital requirements and operational budgets are lower than they currently are.

2. Community-based charities and social enterprises do not have sufficient platforms and fora in which that they can use to form partnerships. Currently social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are tpp general in nature for small organisations to use them for the purposes of partnerships in a way that is efficient and successful. Furthermore, official associations and bodies are prohibitive to smaller organisations that may not be officially registered or have enough of a brand to gain enough from such events. Through Hisani, we will use an algorithm and the data collected from these community based organisations to make suggestions on potential avenues of partnership that multiple organisations could embark on. In the long run this will positively contribute to the sustainability of these organisations and enable them to better serve the communities in which they work.

3. Small community based organisations do not receive enough contextualised information that is relevant for them. Majority of the reports and research studies that are done in the social impact sector are funded by the international NGO space. This means that many of these reports lack local contextualisation and therefore hold minimal value to the organisations working directly with the communities of need. Such information could include sustainable business practices, information on how to become funder-ready, how to register as a charity or an NGO within specific jurisdiction, how to carry out stakeholder engagement and more. Through this platform, we will provide information that will be locally contextualised for a large number of small community based organisations that will enable them to better formulate their Strategic plans and have greater impact

The secondary beneficiaries will be:

1. Individual users interested in social impact - Once we begin incorporating the social media functionalities, the platform will enable people to engage actively and in real-time on causes that they identify with. This will, in the long run, lead to more people being more optimistic about the future of the world and more willing to engage in social impact or for good projects.

2. Grant giving institutions - Through the Grant atomisation features that the platform will have, grant-giving institutions will be able to significantly cut down on the amount of time spent reviewing Grant applications, carrying out their due diligence on community-based organisations that they will fund and implement more transparent grant-giving systems. This will cultivate more trust between grant giving institutions and community-based organisations. It will also enable grant giving institutions to better plan on how to disburse their grants according to the needs of the communities that they want to empower

My team is composed of a diverse group of individuals who are committed to making change through volunteerism and entrepreneurship. We have all been actively involved in various youth programs and volunteer associations over the past few years and have founded our own community based charities so as to positively impact the communities in which we grew up in.

We have also worked in the corporate sector and with large grant-giving institutions, which has given us a good understanding of the commercial system behind the social impact industry. We believe that these experiences, coupled with our passion and drive, for social impact make us a suitable team to carry out this project. We posses the technical knowledge of the financial systems around crowdfunding the policy and the legal regulations  behind starting and running organisations and most importantly be challenges that founders of small community based organisations face especially with regards to funding. These skills, contextualised understanding of the industry and our openness to learn and to challenge the status quo are what I believe will make this project a success.

We also have a large network of youth-led community organisations around the globe and it is our hope that through our interactions in the various youth programs and volunteer projects that we have had, we will be able to directly find the user and the biggest beneficiaries of our platform fairly quickly.  Additionally, the access to these networks will give us a room to test out our product and to make sure that what we are providing fits the market need and provides maximum utility to our end customers. 

This is also a project that is  integral to what we want to achieve in life over the next few decades and we trust that our commitment to the cause will be one of the major driving factors of the success of this project in the long run.

We have undertaken the following steps:

1. Research with potential users - For the past two years we have consistently done both formal and informal research with community-based organisations to understand where their pain points are with regards to donor funding. We have also done research with regards to this matter from the perspective of the grant giving institutions and we have also attended multiple events, conferences and workshops in which matters such as social media, digital regulation, trust based philanthropy and social impact have been discussed. This has given us access to a pool of over 500 people, who we have asked varying questions about the product that we want to launch and received criticisms that have helped us develop the idea and plug potential gaps and risks that we may meet as we implement the project.

2. Work experience -  Cumulatively we have over 12 years of experience in the social impact sector and this has been spread across research, grant-giving and management, digital policy, financial technology, financial inclusion and youth empowerment. Seeing as these are the crucial elements of the project that we intend to undertake, we believe that we have been exposed to the experiences, networks and information that will be crucial to the successful implementation of this project.

There are two things that make or solution innovative

1. The first is that we will endeavour to develop a social Media algorithm that will promote engagement with positive, as opposed to negative content. The current trend with social media is to promote engagement with the most popular form or content, and very often that tends to be negative content. We intend to go in the opposite direction and cultivate a social media culture that is less destructive and pessimistic, so as to not only promote engagement on matters that concerned social good but to positively impact the mental health of many individuals around the world.

2. The second is that we shall rely upon principles of data ownership as opposed to data privacy.  Currently, companies such as Facebook and TikTok are consistently appearing in the news for their data privacy violations and being sanctioned for the same. However, this does not seem to have altered the way in which they intend to operate. In order to cultivate trust and transparency in the social media industry, we will develop a system that notifies individual users of the type of data that is being collected on regular intervals. We will also provide individuals with information concerning how much their data is worth. Thereafter, we will  develop a revenue-sharing model that will see Hisani receive a certain percentage of the profit from that data and the remaining percentage be  repatriated back to the individual user in the form of data tokens. The individual will then be able to use these data tokens to either purchase goods from local Social Enterprises or donate them to a community-based charity of their choosing on the platform. It is our hope that the implementation of these data ownership principles will create a self-sustaining ecosystem based on social impact and community organisation.

Our impact goals for the next year are: 

1. Launch our platform by the 4th quarter of the year and on board 10 to 15 community-based organisations from sub-saharan Africa Asia and Latin America so as to begin testing out the crowdfunding functions of the platform. 

We will consider this a success if the community based organisations we work with register at the very least an increase of 10% in the fundraising activities because of the use of the platform.

2. We also intend to work with two grant-giving organisations per region.  

We will consider the grant-giving automation test a success if each of these organisations successfully distributes up to 5 grants of not more than $500 each and are able to use our system to successfully and efficiently carry out their monitoring & evaluation processes following the award of the grants and the completion of the respective projects by the community-based organisations.

The core technologies that will be used in our platform will include artificial intelligence, blochchain, big data analysis and crowdsourced social networks.

We will use existing algorithmic formulas for social media applications but we intend to apply them in a new way. That is one that is focused on promoting engagement on positive sets of information and posts.  

We also intend to use big data analysis tools in a way that gives power back to the individual user as opposed to exploiting them through the implementation of data ownership principles. 

We will also merge the big data analysis and the blockchain functionalities of the platform so as to provide all individual users with a way to access and use their data tokens in a way in that respects their privacy and ensures transparency in the transactions that they undertake on the platform.

We do not serve anyone as of yet. 

We intend to serve a community of 50 community based organisations, 200 individual change-makers and 10 grant giving institutions.

Financial - We are yet to raise any capital and due to the nature of the project we will need a large amount of money to launch and test our prototype.

Technical - We will need access to a community of tech experts in blockchain, fintech, cybersecurity, data protection and app development so as to launch Hisani.

Legal - The fintech sector remains highly unregulated in Kenya and Africa as a whole (which is where we will be launching first). This will represent some long term challenges when we begin to scale to other regions.

Cultural - In the long-term, we intend to be a global platform. However, we do realise that charity work is not something that is culturally promoted or practiced everywhere, but this is one challenge that we intend to change ourselves.

Seeing as we do not have an MVP/prototype, we do not have any partners.

However, we have received pledges of support from USAID, ITU, The Little Big Fund, The Commonwealth Trust and CIVICUS.

Our key beneficiaries will be individual change makers, community based charities and social enterprises. However, we will not charge these groups of individuals anything to be on our platform, neither will they have to pay anything to access any additional features.

The benefits that we will provide to individual change-makers will be:

1. The ability to engage in real-time with organisations and causes that they care about in their communities;

2. The ability to track and participate in projects, fundraising activities and find ways to donate various goods and products to organisations that align with causes they identify with; and

3. The ability to find and match with potential co-founders or implementers of projects that they may want to carry out themselves.

The benefits that we will provide to community-based organisations include: 

1. The facilitation of service for service transactions on our platform;

2. The provision of simple financial and project management tools that will lighten their administrative work-load; and

3. Contextualised advice and information based on the data analysis that will carry out on the social impacts trends in the areas that they work in.

We plan to generate Revenue through

1. Charging for premium services that will be available to grant-giving institutions and corporate entities for the Grant automation and M&E tools that we will provide;

2. Through the collection, analysis and selling of data regarding social impact and charity trends; and

3. Through advertisement revenue from social enterprises. We will offer these enterprises advertisement services at a lower rate than they would have to pay if they were to advertise on the existing social media platforms. We believe that they will get added value in that they will be able to reach a market that is more saturated with people that will be interested in their products to begin with.

The long-term profitability of our venture is based on its potential to create a self-sustaining and self-supporting internal ecosystem through the data tokenization that we would like to carry out. Allowing individuals to benefit directly or indirectly through their own data will present a level of value that no other social media company is currently providing and this will act as a large incentive for anyone to join the platform.  

We do not intend to repatriate any money to an individual user due to the financial regulations and the difficulties in ascertaining their legitimacy of the identity of the specific user that a specific account may be associated with. However allowing individual users to purchase goods from social Enterprises using the data tokens or to donate them back into social impact Ventures will give individual uses the incentive to join the platform and give community-based organisations and social enterprises access to a pool of capital that previously was not available for them.

We intend to use a mixed revenue model that will incorporate elements of Free-for-service Market intermediary and Entrepreneur support models.

The primary source of funding that we will seek, to begin with, is investor funding and venture capital. As our platform continues to grow and we onboard more users we will start incorporating revenue-generating schemes such as premium packages and paid advertisements onto the platform (for selected groups of users) that will contribute to gaining revenue.

The main way in which we plan to acquire users is to leverage the various youth and volunteer groups said the team has been a part of the past few years which will give us access to over 30,000 community based organisations around the world. We intend to on board 10% of the community based organisations within our network within our first three years of operation.  We also intend to onboard, on average, 10 individual users for each community based organisation that we will onboard onto the platform. These users will be reached either through referrals from our partners, engaging with social impact accelerators or through the community based organisations themselves directing people to their pages on our platform.

In total we expect to have over 30,000 users active on our platform within 3 years and to then use this pool of uses to attract more grant-giving institutions and corporate institutions onto the platform.

Due to the overarching nature of our venture we will then seek capital to acquire similar organisations that will be operating at smaller scale to grow our network and user base, with the aim of becoming an entity that can collect process, analyse and sell data at profit. 

Once we get to a point where we are turning a profit we will begin to reinvest the profit into social enterprises through our own accelerator program and grant giving activities for social impact companies.  

We project that our program will produce high-value social impact companies as a result of the access to a ready market through our platform and this will contribute to our long-term sustainability as a company.