Philanthropism+

Fast popularization of such P2P platforms as Uber and Airbnb shows us that it is time for the world to have a technological evolution in charity practices, which have for a long time been dominated by organizations and foundations that often incur substantial administrative cost. 

We see that the world needs a new charity model - the one that would provide an online P2P platform, where philanthropists would be able to give charity directly to people in need of help.

This model would change the lives of dozens of millions of people when scaled globally - popularizing the philanthropy of workers in developed countries such as USA to send direct monetary donations to poor people in developing countries such as Uganda would open a new type of transfer of wealth, drastically improving the lives of poor people in developing world due to purchasing power disparity between these two worlds.

Most of the charitable donations in the world pass through large NGOs, which, due to their size, are not very transparent and contain a large administrative apparatus. As a result, the people who donate don’t see how and to whom they are helping, since these decisions remain with the charitable organization.

For example, only 77.2% of each donation given to Oxfam America goes to program expenses (according to Charity Navigator), while Alzheimer's Association and American Cancer Society commit (Forbes) only 77% and 79% of donations to charity respectively. New York state Attorney General’s “Pennies for Charities” report released in 2017 stated that about 33% of charitable donations made in New York end up going to professional fundraisers instead of the intended charity.

However, there is another type of very old charity aid - direct assistance to neighbors and people in need in the immediate environment. It is this kind of help that our platform will expand through peer-to-peer.

The introduction of our new charity model based on the online P2P platform that connects philanthropists with people in poverty would greatly benefit people who came to be in a difficult financial situation in their life that may put them on the brink of homelessness or lead to a sad any other sad end.

The solution would firstly - give every person/family in poverty an equal chance to present their situation before the philanthropists on the planned online platform. Secondly - almost all (approx 99.95%) of the donation given to them would get directly to their account, without any middlemen organizations. Thirdly - philanthropists would be able to feel their direct connection to improvement of a well-being of a person/family in poverty or need since the latter would need to set up and update weekly their page on the online platform.

Our solution is the online P2P blog/social network platform for philanthropists and people in poverty, where the latter set up their web pages explaining their need in charity and update it weekly, while the former can browse these pages and donate money to the person with the problems they feel the most sympathy/connection.

The required platform creation approaches and technologies are quite standard, but their use to create a new model of charity for philanthropists is where novelty lies.

After examining the current market for microfunding platforms, we saw that there are no platforms in the world that allow philanthropists an access to a platform with web-pages for people in poverty who they can transfer donations directly to. Even platforms that implement P2P - Save the Children, Qgiv, Fundly, CharityWeb, GlobalGiving, all contain elements of a charitable organization - for example, in Save the Children, a charitable organization collects money and decides how to organize assistance in the village of needy children, and the remaining charitable P2P platforms connect only people with the charitable organizations themselves, being thus only a platform for choosing a charitable organization.

e see that the world needs a new charity model - the one that would provide an online P2P platform, where philanthropists would be able to give charity directly to people in need of help.

This model would change the lives of dozens of millions of people when scaled globally - popularizing the philanthropy of workers in developed countries such as USA to send direct monetary donations to poor people in developing countries such as Uganda would open a new type of transfer of wealth, drastically improving the lives of poor people in developing world due to purchasing power disparity between these two worlds.

The core technology or novelty that is being used in our solution is the application of P2P platform concept into a basic philnatropistic action - giving money directly to a poor person. This combination creates a new and unique platform (marketplace) - which would allow people interested in direct charitable action to engage in philantropy at the scale that has not been accessible to them before. A place that would revolutionize the available approaches to charity as we see it through the scaling of simple actions that is a common effect of P2P economy.

We expect that introduction of digital P2P platforms could change charity forever, creating a direct link between poor people and philantropists in the form of our platform (marketplace). This would not only greatly scale simple acts of direct charity to poor individuals, but also give an alternative to working with often untrasparent and giant charity organization for people who are interested more in personal and live approach to charity.

The solution is only in its demo version and we are not launching it to avoid bad first user experience. Also, we have found out that without proper funds for marketing and servers it would difficult for the project to have a good start, since it heavily depends on having a good first user-base.

We expect that the good scalability of P2P technologies would allow our platform rech the international status in the next three years. The platofrm itself would provide the best utility when the philantropists from the developed countries would start donating money to individual families in developing countries. If you visualise how much more wealth would really be transferred thanks to the purchasing power parity when a poor family from Uganda would be able to receive an equivalent of small donation from a philantropists in London.

Thanks to the rapid development of internet coverage around the world and fast spread of relatively cheap smartphones in poor countries, we beleive that the only real barriers are financial - need for international marketing and outreach to involve international organizations and non-profits throughout the world.

We plan to overcome above-mentioned financial barriers through participation in the Solve challenge, by winning and getting as much publicity as possible.

We are a team of four individuals working part-time on our project:

- Junior Software Engineer (C++ and Agile experience)

- Marketing specialist with extensive experience

- Data analyst

- Lawyer

The team members have a various experience in public administration, large holding companies and financial organizations. They have experience in solving important public issues in social and financial areas. Team members have higher education diplomas in Computer Science, Law, Marketing.

Team-member Dastan Tuyakbayev has an experiences in financial services, risk-management and regulatory authorities. He was responsible for protection consumers right in financial services. Work-experience with different social groups helps to understand social behavior and priorities.  

The business model of our platform is a combination of P2P marketplace and non-profit organizations. The registration and use of the platform is totally free, except for a non-substantial fee that would be levied upon each donation to keep the servers up. However, we would try to amass sufficient starting funding that would allow us to run the platform for the first year without any fees as a social project.

One of potential source of financial sustainability is - advertising. After seeing their potential auditory in our platform,  commercial organizations will be interested to place their advertisements and information in our applications. Also there will be social repute that 5%-20% of advertisement payments are going to charity.

We believe that our path to sustainability is a balance between public donation to the social project and having to levy a very small fee to provide for the functioning of the platform. This balance is likely to shift from one side to other depending on the number of donations we receive.

As we have mentioned in a previous section, the participation in the Solve challenge would be of great benefit to our project and the team itself. $10,000 would greatly contribute to jump-starting our platform locally. Moreover, the financial barriers (need for marketing funding and international outreach) would be nearly eliminated thanks to the visibility we would get as a winners of such a competition.

We would be glad to achieve partnership with any reputable non-profits and international organizations, since the social and non-profit nature of our project does present a perfect opportunity for achievement of common goals. We have a basis to beleive that UNDP and other UN System organizations would be attracted to partnership with us in regards of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially after our project would reach the first stage of local success.

We would like to apply for the Morgridge Family Foundation Community-Driven Innovation Prize and if we win plat to utilize the prize to go over our initial barriers: need for international marketing and outreach to build an initial base of users. These barriers would be overcome thanks to the prize, if we win it.

Moreover, the Prize funds would not just give us a small success, the international scaling of our platform would allow us to transform the current practices of philantropy by introducing a way to introduce disruptive P2P technologies into the process of giving money to the poor. Instead of traditional collection of donations by charity foundations, our platform's novelty - the ability to donate directly to a poor person or families - would change how people approach charity the same way as Uber has changed our approach to cab hailing or how Airbnb has change the traditional renting industry.
With P2P technologies at the core the platform has a great potential to scale worldwide and transform the world of philanthropy as we know it.