Grace, a small startup organization, developed a blockchain-based platform where charities, donors and promoters can prosper.
Grace abandons the traditional method of fundraising where charities have to do all the marketing. The startup created a platform on the Ethereum blockchain. There are three types of participants: charities, in need to raise money for their cause, donors, the ones donating the funds, and the advocates who spread the news about the charities to attract donors to the cause.
The startup is aware of the problems surrounding the nonprofit sector. Contrary to for-profit companies, nonprofits do not have the chance to aggressively expand their market shares. These organizations are relying on a limited budget so they are not capable of launching huge marketing campaigns. Furthermore, donors generally do not like the idea of spending their money on advertisements. Talent recruitment is also an issue nonprofits are facing. According to Grace’s stats, only 25 percent of such organizations reported they had attracted talented staff between 2016 and 2017.
That’s the part where Grace comes in. The organization dedicates its efforts to empower and incentivize individuals on a global scale, and to pragmatically engage and break the existing social stigma. The Grace platform provides a decentralized solution for all the nonprofit sector’s problems. In addition to transparency and security, the platform puts charities in the spotlight, letting the community to contribute to their cause, exponentially improving the exposures of the organizations.
The organization introduced an innovative method called the Advocate Incentive Mechanism. The main concept is to incentivize advocates to attract donors to the charities. Advocates are getting a percentage (five percent) of the funds as a reward if they had successfully engaged donors. According to Grace, with the Advocate Incentive Mechanism, there is no need for charities on the organization’s platform to spend valuable funds on marketing. On the other hand, advocates, both amateurs and professionals (social influencers, marketers, etc.) can make money by promoting the charities. The advocates are paid in Grace tokens for their efforts.
Using the advantages of the Ethereum blockchain, everything goes through smart contracts. The donation of the donors, who are conducting their transactions on the Grace platform, are held in smart contracts until the release conditions are met. According to Grace, the release conditions are specified during the creation of the campaign. Once the campaign is live, the conditions can be reviewed by the donor before a donation is made. This way, the donors can be sure that their money is in the right place. Furthermore, as the traditional charity fundraising is encircled by numerous problems, including corruption and fraud, using the Grace platform will get rid of these issues.
“Transactions on the Grace platform are recorded on the blockchain thus are transparent and immutable. Not only can the Donor be rest assured that the donations get transferred securely to the Recipient, the donations directly contribute to a ripple effect of positive impacts that delivers much more value than traditional donation methods – a realization of our manifesto. As well, Donors may apply for tax deductions with their donations. Grace makes it easy to retrieve relevant donation records, which are persisted on the network indefinitely,” Grace writes in its whitepaper.
Grace’s token sale starts on November 1, in which the organization will offer 80 percent of the Grace tokens for sale. The startup published a well-written, transparent budget allocation. Grace is planning to spend 20 percent on operations, 15 percent on legal expenses, additional 15 percent on security, 10 percent on marketing, 10 percent on network expansion, and 30 percent on research and development. Grace also published a roadmap. By Q4 2017, the private Alpha of the Grace web client will be released while the public beta will be released in Q2 2018.