GiveCrypto Monthly Update — June 2019: How What We’ve Learned from Phase One of Our Pilot Program Affects Our Plan to Help Venezuelans

With phase one of our Venezuelan ambassador pilot finished, we’ve started reviewing what worked and what didn’t.

The goal of the first phase was to find an ideal location for ambassador-driven crypto distributions. Phase one involved giving cryptocurrency to nearly 400 people across four different cities. Each city had different characteristics and was managed by a local field-operations contractor. As expected, each location performed differently:

A quick scan of the table shows that two locations got traction and two didn’t. While there were many factors that contributed to a location’s success, I believe that the tenacity of the field operations contractor was the most important. Working in a place like Venezuela is challenging. Successful field-ops contractors found ways to overcome the inevitable logistical challenges, such as vendors falling through and technical difficulty getting recipients up to speed.

We learned a number of lessons from phase one that will inform future work. The top four takeaways were:

1. We need to scale the field-ops contractors
2. Willingness to participate continues to be a hurdle in finding ambassadors
3. Our ambassadors are sometimes flooded with requests for funds
4. Tech issues continue to hold up crypto adoption

1. We need to scale the field ops contractors

For phase one, we leveraged personal relationships with people in Venezuela to find our field-operations contractors. While this helped us to quickly find trustworthy people who could help us recruit ambassadors, it isn’t scalable for a larger implementation of the ambassador model. In the future, we’ll need to find a way to discover and qualify ambassadors in places where we have no local contacts.

2. Willingness to participate is a hurdle for ambassadors

When recruiting new ambassadors, some candidates would ask, “What’s in it for me?” Even though the ambassadors were compensated, this attitude suggested that the candidate wouldn’t be a good match with our program values.

Finding people who were willing to work for the sake of it can be difficult in communities where people are struggling to make ends meet. As we move forward, we’ll need to invest in an up-front process that better communicates the benefits of the ambassador program and why people should be willing to help their community.

3. Ambassadors are sometimes flooded with requests for money

Some of our ambassadors were approached by people after a rumor circulated that the ambassadors were giving away money. While we want to promote community members’ interest in crypto, we don’t have the resources to give crypto to every person looking for help. We want to be a model for longer-lasting financial change, not a temporary handout source.

4. Tech issues are a challenge in Venezuela

The user-facing components of the platform primarily consist of a wallet app, a mobile website and SMS notifications. As we’re focusing on needy people in Venezuela, it isn’t surprising that many of them are using older devices. This has presented some unexpected technical challenges, like strange browser behavior, broken text messages, and network connectivity issues. We have already made a number of improvements to mitigate these challenges and have instrumented the platform to better identify user-facing technical issues.

Determining the Best Way to Measure Our Impact on the Ground

A critical part of our work is the ability to measure impact and see if the crypto is actually improving the lives of the participants. We decided to focus our impact measurement on three areas:

1. Income
2. Food security
3. Psychological well-being

To measure progress made in these categories, participants were asked the following questions before and after receiving the weekly payments:

Impact questions that participants were asked

While we are still collecting responses from phase one users, preliminary data suggests that we may have had an impact in the area of food security.

Below is one of the more encouraging charts, which shows the percentage of participants who had a household member go a whole day without food in the previous 30 days. The number decreased by almost 24% after they received 6 weekly payments of $10. It is important to note that this is preliminary data, and we will be publishing a full phase one impact report in the next few weeks.

Phase Two: What Comes Next

As mentioned above, our initial plan was to choose one location from the cities in the first phase. However, two of the phase one locations performed so well (and for very different reasons) that we decided to include both of them in phase two. We also decided to structure each location a bit differently so that we could test different variables.

Location one: promoting local entrepreneurship

The field-ops contractor in location one was presented with a major challenge at the beginning of phase one: The recruited vendor dropped out at the last minute. Impressively, the field-ops contractor was able to quickly set up his own store selling food and staples to the participants. For this location, we have decided to continue this model and are encouraging phase one participants to set up their own stores, rather than recruit traditional retailers.

Location two: Testing payment duration

The field-ops contractor in location two executed our plan very efficiently by recruiting ambassadors, convincing a store to accept crypto and ramping up a recipient base. We decided to let him build upon his great work in phase two. One element that we are adding in this location is that phase one participants will continue receiving payments during phase two. This means that some of the participants will get 12 weeks of payments. It will be interesting to see how they differ compared with those that receive only six weeks of payments.

We launched phase two on June 17 and have already on-boarded 383 recipients, thanks to the help of 22 ambassadors. It is important to note that 13 of the ambassadors were recipients in phase one. We think the process of promoting recipients to ambassadors is an elegant way to scale our program and is a big part of the reason we were able to get phase two ramped up so quickly.

Learning from Additional Experiments

The ambassador pilot is at an interesting stage. Although it is showing promise and could be an impactful way to distribute cryptocurrency to people in need, a lot of work remains to be done before we can definitively prove impact or scale the model. Additionally, I am encouraged by the fact that the ambassador model provides us with a vehicle to test a number of variables:

• Size, duration, and frequency of payment
• Type of vendor
• Participant promotion
• Recipient density
• Crypto asset utilization rates

However, there are a number of other, potentially very impactful, concepts that are difficult to test with the ambassador model. Two examples:

• Can an essentially valueless currency (i.e., community or complementary) encourage economic activity?
• Will people convert their hard-earned fiat into a (stable) cryptocurrency?

Success in either of these areas could provide a more sustainable way to use crypto to help people in need. Additionally, these approaches would allow us to have an outsized impact because the number of people we could assist wouldn’t be as constrained by our fundraising. Said another way, these approaches could give our limited funds more leverage.

We are currently running small-scale experiments with both of these approaches, and I look forward to sharing what we learn in future updates.