RootProject Weekly Update

RootProject uses blockchain to bring the power of markets to nonprofit fundraising. Our crowdfunding platform facilitates a new form of campaign design that maximizes rewards to supporters and beneficiaries, creating replicable and recurrent paths to funding.

Many of you asked questions last week about our campaign partner structure so we thought it would be helpful to center this week’s update around that to give you a bit more context on what we are working toward week-to-week with our campaign partners.

A couple of notes:

• RootProject is changing impact financing by developing a new mode of capturing and allocating resources toward projects and activities for social benefit. During our ICO, we built a community of investors interested in supporting the application of emerging technology to develop a better way to crowdfund. Much of the pre-campaign launch work outlined below is done to identify and engage potential stakeholders. This has the added benefit of establishing the RootProject name and brand among new, relevant interest groups. By partnering to raise funds for such a diverse set of projects such as those represented by our upcoming campaigns, we are obtaining valuable third-party buy-in and validation while growing our community across a variety of industries and geographies.
• Our expectation is that in time that people everywhere will think of our platform when raising funds and awareness for the causes they care the most about. Whether an individual organizing a fundraiser for their favorite nonprofit, a nonprofit raising funds for expansion or core operating expenses, or our on-the-ground teams spearheading pilot cities — we believe there’s a use case for everyone.

With this in mind, we hope you’ll enjoy reading more about our campaign partner process along with an updates from Jared on his progress toward his campaign goals.

Necessary Conditions for Campaign Traction

Here are the individual items we see as necessary for us to say “go” on organizing the fundraising event that is the kick off to a 30–60 day crowdfunding campaign.

A1 Weekly calls

B1 Main campaign video complete

B2 Very high quality crowdfunding page fully set up

A. Workflow Well-Oiled Machine

A nearly non-broken pattern of:

1. Weekly calls
2. Per-person Weekly goals
3. Non-call substantive midweek Slack/Telegram update
4. Well organized, shared folder between RootProject & campaign partner

B. PR Resources & Strategy

1. Main campaign video complete
2. Very high quality crowdfunding page fully set up
3. Press releases: must be something a lazy reporter can copy and paste from & link to media to generate an article with next to no effort
4. Extra video footage
5. Successful trial run done on (1)
6. Journalist list
7. Some cultivated relationships from (4)
8. social media targets list
9. Op-eds, etc, ready to be published during campaign. (at least two from partner, one from RP)

C. Partnerships

1. Names/validators: 2 major validators signed MOUs
2. Operational help: 2 ‘boots on the ground,’ reliable commitments of resources & network (could be same as above but often will not be)
3. Ideally (2) includes a partnership for the event itself, but this does not seem necessary
4. Project-RootProject-Workflow for campaign fully settled
5. If needed, pass-through relationship set up.

And since we last updated you, Jared has accomplished the following:

Outreach efforts continue. He has scheduled conversations with two community foundations and completed an initial conversation with a community foundation regarding development of analytics around policing to support their work. Community foundations are an initial entry point for conversation because of their central role in bringing local stakeholders together around community issues. Hopefully these partnerships result in some conversations and further development of policing analytics soon.

Jared also reached out to a journalist in Wisconsin and a data activist in the Chicago area about organizing some community discussions using the information in the arrest prototype and city fact sheets. He’s also doing a lot of work right now to improve the similar cities comparison tool in the arrest prototype so that the user can control what attributes of cities they want to use for the similarity calculation. Hat tip to the Elements of Statistical Learning textbook and its great chapter on unsupervised learning models.

Be sure to check out Jared on Twitter for a steady stream of community specific insights drawn from the fact sheets. And if there’s anyone you think would benefit from a quick conversation with Jared about his work, let us know and we’ll make a connection .