Frank — NGO donation-proofing using notarising ledger via blockchain
Aeons ago, the author of this blog made a promise to himself of not caving to the malfeasance through procrastination and rather focus on voicing beautiful concepts and new beginnings, solving meaningful problems of the world of today.
Here is a belated entree that sat on my checklist for a while now: spiced up by the vicissitudes of politicking last year in the US and the amount of fake news often sponsored by corporate vested interests — the surge in millenial political activity is inspiring — but deafened it is by the amount of capital from the big guns.
Well covered by the New Yorker and other liberal establishements, the students went in droves to vote for the socialism peppered agenda of Bernie Sanders — but his grassroots campaign, despite the records set in terms of volume of small-value donations coming his way, it was not enough to surmount the volumes coming from social welfare organisations:
According to Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money”, an account of how dark vehicles dominate the mindset of those willing to contribute to a political campaign anonimously, as well as it motivates those elected to relentlessly campaign for the money and choose big money over small amount, “in 2006 only 2 per cent of outside political spending came from social welfare groups that hid their donors. In 2010, this numberrose to 40 per cent”.
“The 100 biggest known donors in 2014 spent nearly as much money (USD 323 million )on behalf of their candidates as the 4.75 million people, who contributed 200 USD or less”.
The sheer power of hidden donations made certain tech-minded geeks to try to provide a counter measure to raise awareness against “dark money”, but to motivate the mass — an accountability platform has to be available — to notarise:
> the inflow of money and connect the inflow with the one donating them for a social or political cause;
> the ledger colour coding the inflows and tracking the expenses with the categorisation beeing out of bounds for those using the software, the story being stored in the distributed ledger;
> proof of money being spent as they are accounted for by the ledger — promoting transparency in one of the most opaque and often inefficient lines of work
Enters Frank, a US-based platform, offering an accounting / proofing platform to NGOs, willing to colour code money for maximum transparency to the donors. The team behind is a seasoned family of entrepreneurs — and also a true blood entreprenurial family of brothers and sisters, now building this in their free time form working at Snap.inc.
The platform allows NGOs to have a cloud based accounting with a public facing rich-reporting mechanism, creating a virtuous circle for donors to see (through a mobile app) where their particular funds are going to, with the platform proofing and stamping the quality of those willing to process their flows with Frank.
