The Future of Fundraising

An introduction to Dignity Platform.

Dignity Platform is a digital fundraising innovation, that will sustainably fund societies most essential solutions, through enabling social interactions, within local communities.

It is an online marketplace, where you can give your skills to neighbours, in exchange for a considerable monetary donation, to causes both parties choose.

Communities have never had such potential to connect online, yet the distance in person has seldom been so great. Social isolation and poor mental health are emerging patterns in urban environments, and our aging population is increasing the number of senior citizens left alone. Let me paint a picture of change:

“Trevor, age 68, visits Dignity platform on his tablet, advised by his daughter. He creates an Offer; ‘Accounting consultancy’, and is satisfied he can give his expertise once again. Trevor is hired by a local mother of two; Habiba, to help with her new business’ bookkeeping. Through the gig he makes a new close friend of Habiba and finally feels useful once again. He is also delighted to fundraise a significant amount for the hospice his late wife was supported by. Meanwhile Habiba is able to get her accounts in order and fundraise for the disabled park her son benefits from. Win win win!

Dignity is a community catalyst and enabler of social capacity and funding ability. Think of it as the digital-fundraising gig-based sharing-economy. It empowers and inspires communities to meet each other, help one another and fund the organisations that solve all of the most pressing issues. It enables people to find meaningful interactions and connections, leveraging idling social capacity, in a seemingly segregated World.

Creating and sustaining solutions needs to be easier and more fun. People are disenchanted with a lot of the current methods of fundraising. Sometimes when we talk about Dignity, people say: “But I don’t have anything to give.” We want to challenge this limiting self belief. Finding meaningful contribution to society is sought after, and so the platform is an open door in enabling anyone’s skills or time to translate for the greater good.This of course includes people in our communities that may have been given labels and boundaries of ability from a young age. We intend to challenge this stigma and give more opportunity for participation from the entire spectrum of diversity and ability. We intend to empower communities to improve their own neighbourhoods and support one another. To create belonging once again.

This isn’t just an evolution to fundraising. This is a revolution to our society. This is a funding model for social change that no longer relies on handouts. It just counts on human’s specialised division of labor & driven by people’s altruistic instinct to give; to be valuable and feel valued. No one knows how to do everything, therefore everyone needs someone’s help for something. Dignity platform effortlessly facilitates these exchanges. We are building a new economic pathway for giving. An altruistic economy that is self supportive, resilient and sustainable. Personal and hyperlocal, yet incredibly scalable; a powerful combination.

Values of a Gift Economy

Dignity began its journey in Brighton, knowing the community here is close, caring and active. There’s a huge freelancer and creative community here as well as one of the UK’s highest densities of 3rd sector organisations, per capita (according to Community Works). We have launched the Brighton marketplace and intend to find deep rooted success locally, before scaling nationally and eventually globally.

When we hosted our launch event, we invited the Brighton community, charity leaders, council members, local celebrities and business owners to be part of our first steps. We introduced the concept and opened the floor for a Q&A, where free discussion began around how Dignity could best give value to the community. We want to radically include Brighton in our journey, to elevate the city to be a shining example of the way to come. Charities and community projects will become social investments and tackling societal challenges a joy.

We have run local offline match-making events, where we get to hear first hand people’s feedback and advice. These are a great chance to interact with Brightonians and feel their shared passion for this unique idea while inspiring us with encouragement. We are also working intimately with our ‘Early Adopter Causes’; local charities and nonprofits that have shown early interest in joining this social funding transformation. We run our own joining session at their events, as well as harnessing their supporters opinions on the platform. This is vital for our growth, as one of our core values is to build with, not for. We understand that the solution we have created might not fit our assumptions. We are therefore humble in listening carefully to Brighton’s community needs.

Dignity is a self managed (Teal) organisation.Meaning we bring our full, unmasked selves into collaboration toward meaningful purpose in flat hierarchy. Part of our growth in Brighton has been inviting other community members to be involved in our team. We work radically open and transparent, meaning you can view almost all of our resources, files, meetings and movements online. This is an important part of how we interact with our community, and people within the digital tech for good sphere. We share all that we can, so that everyone can learn from the challenges & growth.

We have also run our own collaboration and co-working retreats at the ASHA peace and environmental centre. These have been opportunities to bring other social entrepreneurs together around the same intention to improve the World. Through these we have connected with new team members, healed relationships, learnt new collaboration techniques and built a network of changemakers, as well as dear friends. We always have open positions for anyone to dive deeper into our self managed organisation to discover more about how we self organize. The retreats have been an enlightening opportunity to grow our deep connection with other collaborators. Here is an interview we did for Teal For Start-Ups:

Dignity Platform needs grant funding to fully take off. We are applying but would appreciate good recommendations or links. It will allow significant growth in the areas we are limited by money. We are here to leverage and expand social capacity.

Gaining a large grant will move us to financial sustainability. We have estimated we need around £300K before being fully self sustaining; through our daring but integral revenue model; the ultimate pay-what-you-feel structure. This is where we ‘eat our own dog food’; being a non-profit, we are a cause on the platform ourselves. If we are to prove this to be the evolution of funding societal solutions, then what better way, than for us to also be a cause, relying on our own methodology to thrive. Dignity has to be inspiring enough to be worthy of funding. We use some human psychology and some tech magic to make one of the chosen cause defaults as 10% to Dignity. (But of course people can remove, reduce or enlarge this) This, provided with ample transparent data on how much we need, how much the average donation is, how we use it etc; gives us a strong footing to have a reliable stream of funding. This counts on having a steady flow of around 8000 active users, donating a mean average of 5% to Dignity Platform per gig, at a rate of 0.2 gigs a week, per user.

We will primarily invest the money in automating the marketplace. Believe it or not, our current version 1 platform runs on very basic tech; so you can only imagine what the backend must look like. Let me briefly lift the bonnet; 20+ minute manual profile entry, manual peer to peer messaging forwarded through emails. Manual email responses, from a host of copy and pasted templates, and pitiful PayPal payments; manually split by one of the team to each cause chosen, one at a time, while paypal painfully pockets 3% each transaction.

Now this sounds bleak, but it’s worth pointing out we are already exploring a version 2 marketplace, based on the generous open source Sharetribe code. This is a marketplace we can adapt ourselves, to finally build our own native website. Free to create our dream user experience. Our in house technical team are currently running on a part time, hourly salary, which won’t last long, and surprisingly they can’t live on pizza and beer alone. Since the idea birth, in January 2016, we have only had £15K of funding to get us this far, so imagine what we could do more!

It’s felt particularly hard to translate the value of automation. We’re looking for a truly visionary funder who believes in big picture system change as much as we do. We’re aware our vision is too ambitious or unusual for some funders. We are driven to redefine what’s achievable with impact. For us this means the beginnings of a new system in which society can support itself through meaningful community exchanges. Our users have told us that trading skills and gifting to inspiring causes makes meeting neighbours less intimidating. Something we believe has never been so needed in our divided communities.

With a grant we would also have the chance to deeply explore the niche of Dignity in Brighton, through comprehensive community interviews and platform testing. This means giving lots of time to finding out where our solution sits within society; what people need, how to best include everyone, and how people will use it in ways we don’t expect. This is a vital part of the research and shaping process; allowing the tech to be moulded by the people who will use it; enabling us to keep the tech adaptable according to feedback. Community tests are the foundations of confidently scaling the platform.

A large financial injection would also allow us to implement the other key feature of Dignity Platform; Supporter Voice. We are teaming up with Vocaleyes, to bring online discussions and democracy to the funding World. We want to facilitate generative dialogue between supporters and causes, meaning people are participating in the solutions with their ideas and well as their wallets. This will be embedded on the platform, on each causes’ profile, giving one central place for supporters to give suggestions, ask questions and write ideas in aid of the cause. These will then be open for online voting, meaning the most popular answers can be elevated. We never charge causes for using the site; all we ask for in return, is that they listen and respond to their own supporters, through Supporter Voice. The reason we are introducing this later, is to keep the concept simplified first to find success with the basics initially.

Some key performance indicators we can reach with a 250K award (by late 2019) are;

• Close integration with a carefully chosen payment processor platform (www.wonderful.org or www.chairitycheckout.co.uk )
• Close Partnership with homeless crowdfunder (www.streetchange.org) to enable homeless people fundraise themselves meals, beds and opportunities.
• Close relationship with www.vocaleyes.org to begin testing and implementing the Supporter Voice feature.
• Building our official native website, with integrated messaging, profiling, payment processing, cause profiles and community reviews.
• Expansion to Bristol, Edinburgh and London.
• 5000+ active users in Brighton, Bristol and London.
• £60,000+ fundraised for charities, community projects and other people & planet before profit causes.
• 10,000+ new social interactions made in UK cities.
• 200+ new long lasting friendships.
• 50+ supporters’ suggestions implemented by causes on Supporter Voice.
• 1500+ people feeling more valued and purposeful
• 100+ people stating Dignity has helped them feel less lonely.
• 50+ Dignity ambassadors volunteering to help shepherd users online
• 50+ people working for the first time ever.
• 10+ people fundraising their way out of homelessness.
• 100+ charities spending less time & money on fundraising.
• 1 hour of our team’s time saved each gig on facilitating the giving.

To find out more about joining this momentum, to scale this epic journey into the giving economy, contact the family here or come meet us at our Brighton launch!

We’d love to listen, learn and collaborate with you.