A Win-Win-Win Scenario for Philanthropy

In this article, we will explore how every party on Grace can benefit from the network.

When designing a network of users, we cannot naively expect participants to behave nicely and always act with the greater good in mind. We can, however, build a robust system that aligns the interests of all involved parties.

Grace users can be categorized into three types: Charities, Advocates, and Donors. Grace is designed such that all participants playing the different roles are incentivized to maximize the outcome of the fundraising campaigns they support.

Grace for Charities

At first glance it may seem straightforward how nonprofits can directly benefit from Grace: they get much more contributions, as a result of delegating their campaign’s promotional work to the Advocates.

Truth is, there are several other crucial benefits that go beyond, that are worth discussing.

A closer examination of the current state of charity fundraising will help us appreciate the enormous potential of Grace.

Grace circumvents the entire issue of overhead costs with the Advocate Incentive Mechanism (AIM), which allows nonprofits to incurs zero upfront costs and risks, while saving precious resources to be used in other important areas. This is a remarkable yet simple solution that solves many of the pressing problems for nonprofits all at once.

Grace for Advocates

Advocates on Grace are individual users who help spread the word for a fundraising campaign, and they in turn receive a percentage of the additional donations generated as a reward for their promotional work.

Non-Monetary Contributions

In many cases, people want to contribute to a cause, but cannot commit to a consistent stream of donations due to financial concerns. By becoming Advocates on Grace, they now have a way to contribute equally importantly as Donors.

In fact, it is also possible to turn these efforts into a viable and stable source of income — effectively adding an additional layer of benefits to doing good.

Even For The Busy Folks

Most people like to support a worthy cause, but not many actually commit to volunteering. This is mostly due to time constraints and opportunity costs. For a busy individual, passion for a cause alone usually isn’t sufficient to have them devote their limited time to volunteering in a sustained or recurrent way.

In a world where numerous commitments constantly compete for one’s time and attention, Grace provides competitive rewards to attract talents for social good such that their efforts are justified.

While we expect many Advocates on Grace to be motivated by altruistic reasons, the system functions equally effectively even if Advocates contribute purely for self-benefiting reasons such as financial gains.

By providing incentives for actions that contribute to social good, Advocates and other participants in the network benefit regardless of their underlying motives. Maximizing self-interest means maximizing social interest.

Grace for Donors

To Donors, nothing matters more than having their hard-earned cash transferred directly to the right hands, and no one else. Grace smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain ensure just that.

Greater Control of Money Flow

In addition to the extra security, transparency, and immutability, recording donations using smart contracts allows for greater control — not just when, but how the money flows from the donor to the charity.

This is enabled by the fund-release conditions on Grace, where donations are withheld until the conditions specified by the Donor are met.

Utilization of smart contracts further reduces the likelihood of fraud and corruptions, and provides Donors with a peace of mind that their money is being put to good use.

Most importantly, it enables a long overdue feature in charity donations — Donors can get the money back if the charity misuses the contributed funds.

Every Dollar Donated Through Grace is Much More Than a Dollar

If you are a Donor making contributions to a charity, chances are, you want as much good to come from your donations as possible. With the Advocate Incentive Mechanism, every dollar of contribution is leveraged and goes into a value-generation cycle, effectively yielding a much higher value output.

The comfort in knowing that each dollar donated through Grace can create many times the value than conventional donations otherwise would, is a tremendous sense of accomplishment. It further encourages Donors to opt for Grace as the medium of choice for making contributions.

Record Keeping and Tax Deductions Made Easy

As you make charitable contributions throughout the year, there are several benefits to having an organized record of transactions: keeping track of your expenses for future planning, using the donation receipts for tax deductions, just to name a few.

Reality is, we are generally much less organized than we would like to think. With so much going on in life, it is not an easy task to keep perfect track of smaller charitable contributions.

With Grace, every donation is recorded as a transaction on the blockchain, which means it is stored securely, permanently, in a decentralized manner that is easy to retrieve and query.

When it comes time to file taxes, Donors can access all of their historical donations with ease, through a clean and intuitive user interface on Grace.

Win-Win-Win for All

Every participant on Grace benefits from using the platform, even if we make the most conservative and pessimistic assumption that everyone else acts purely out of self-interest.

Now imagine a more realistic scenario where the majority of people involved act more selflessly such that their efforts encompass the welfare of others. The possibilities are limitless.

The operation of the Grace platform and Grace network are designed to be largely community governed — a conscious effort to ensure the power stays in the people’s hands.

This is a win-win-win scenario where we can collectively build a better way for charity fundraising, and ultimately a better world.

Learn more about how Grace works at https://gracetoken.org and take a look at our whitepaper.

Join the Movement

Join us on Slack and follow us on Twitter @Grace_Token, we would love to hear from you and are happy to answer any questions you may have.

Our team is super excited to take part in bringing you the future of nonprofits fundraising. Stay tuned for updates and leave a comment below to let us know what you think!