Charity Fundraising in 2020 and Beyond

It’s that time of year again. The time of charitable giving.

I always tend to wait until the last minute. However, there is data to backup that I’m not alone, apparently more than one-third of all donations happen in 4Q with over 10% of charitable giving happening in the last three days of the year alone.

This year, #GivingTuesday actually occurs on 3-December, which is my birthday — so an extra special time of giving for 2019.

Yes, there are many scandals associated with charities. Essentially, the term “charity” has been used and abused, and much of the public is no longer willing to take charities’ word as bond.

Despite increasing skepticism with some charities’ high CEO salaries and concerns on where the donated funds are spent — Overall I still believe in many Charities, and believe that there are many that are different.

There are SO MANY charities out there that are REALLY working to make the world a better place and improve the lives of many people worldwide.

This year, I’ve gotten to meet many of these hard workers first hand.

This year, I’ve been fortunate to have started working with two organizations working to improve the charities themselves.

Charity Makeover, which conducts weekend hackathons to improve the digital presence of charities, and 2Key Network, which provides a referral marketing solution to enable charities to more easily reach more donors online. I’ve also been following very closely the work of The Giving Block as they work on facilitating accepting cryptocurrency for many non-profits.

Enabling Charities to reach more potential donors online

For charities, like all of us, our organic reach is limited to that of our network… and to expand out of this is difficult. Often we attempt to accomplish this by paying google or facebook to try and help put your message in front of the right people.

Google and Facebook do their best to figure out who “the right people” are for your message, and for the most part it works ok. But what if we had another option?

At 2Key, we’re looking to change this model.

We believe that by aligning the right incentives, there’s another way to 100x your marketing efforts and really increase the virality of your message online by incentivizing people to share links.

At 2key, our mission is to fairly compensate the people who create the value of the internet.

What if, instead of paying for exposure via these large platforms such as Google and Facebook you could pay this to ‘the crowd’ to ensure your message is delivered to its intended location.

At 2key, we’re “re-inventing the link.” The HTTP links that you’re oh so familiar with.

The 2Key protocol, which has been in development for more than 2 years, enabled us to create the 2key network, an innovative multi-step referral platform that is based on smart contracts on Ethereum.

At 2Key, my role is to help onboard a few more select charities to help them add some virality to their donation campaigns via the 2key network.

We’ve recently partnered with charities such as Code to Inspire in New York and Share Hope in Germany to leverage the 2key network to increase awareness about their cause & reach more potential donors online — all at no cost to the charity.

I’m specifically looking for select “Launch Partners” for when our product goes live from our testnet. The goal with these launch partners is to help them supercharge their donations via our free referral marketing software. What this means is you get the full support of the 2Key team to design, support and promote your donation campaign.

These charities use our platform for free, and the campaign can be done in parallel to any sort of fundraising effort that you are currently doing — so it’s virtually risk-free.

Best case is that many more people hear about your cause and make a donation — worst case is that you get access to the world’s most effective tracking tool, for free, and it doesn’t make any difference in your donations.

Happy to have a conversation if this is something that makes sense to onboard a Charity you’re passionate about.

Otherwise, you can join the conversation with 2key and join our growing network.

Accepting Cryptocurrencies for Charities

Despite the way you feel about Cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin, it’s here and becoming more relevant.

Cryptocurrency owners, with many of their new-found wealth, are a potential source of new donations for charities.

Yes, crypto is down lately, but it’s not dead. And I don’t think it ever really will be.

There’s a lot of wealth there. Some large cryptocurrency market players are even setting up their own endowment funds to share some of this enormous wealth created from cryptocurrency.

Some charities have caught on and started to accept cryptocurrencies, but not very many — perhaps something along the lines of 1%.

In 2017, Fidelity Charity received US$69 million in donations of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, a nearly 10x increase from the previous year.

The nonprofits that have an active strategy to engage the cryptocurrency community can take advantage of this new opportunity.

There are already many well-known charity / non-profit organizations that are already accepting cryptocurrency donations include the The Water Project, United Way, Charity Navigator, the Lupus Foundation of America, the Human Rights Foundation, Red Cross, UNICEF, and many others.

My guess is that the number of charities accepting cryptocurrency will continue to increase quickly. Yes, there are difficulties in accepting cryptocurrency for those that are not familiar with it, but there are a number of companies that are working hard to make this transition as easy as possible — such as BitGive & The Giving Block in the USA and Sharehope in Germany, among others.

Unknown to many, donating cryptocurrency to a charity can actually much more tax efficient than donating using traditional methods (e.g. USD). Cryptocurrency, is classified as “property” in the US and many other places and therefore the donor does not have to pay capital gains tax on these (hopefully) appreciated assets and is able to write this appreciated value off on their taxes. Great for donors.

In addition to all the other benefits of cryptocurrency — in a way, by accepting cryptocurrency donations, these charities are able to receive donations that they may not otherwise have been received.

Why not offer this other alternative?
With 2key, you can do it today, within a few minutes — start here.