Project steps

• Information gathering
• Concept
• Project Specification
• Sprints

Project description

The first step is akin to information gathering, marketing study. During the brainstorming we came across the following ideas:

• Marketing focus group
• Internet research, summarising
• National / international workshop: the title would be "NGO transparency in the digital age".

It would have been really fitting to organise it as part of the re-publica.de conference. It's too late for this year. I think we should definitely register for 2017: one year goes very quickly and even if the project has already moved on it will be very useful to get some feedback. That doesn't stop us from organising something in the immediate future.

• Interviews with NGO finance officers / managers / communication officers. The idea is to understand their needs and NOT impose anything on them. This has to be a partnership. Or else the project will fail.
• Questionnaire Like in marketing, as soon as we have a broad idea, the second step is to narrow down the ideas and send a questionnaire out to help us build the project requirements.

For me the crux of the problem lies in what Ashraf says, via @ninabreznik:

The backend solution should be nimble enough to communicate with any existing system used by the charity

It's hard to achieve integration with existing (€ based) book-keeping services because there are so many of them (mental note: we should find out what charities actually use for their book-keeping & finances). But going this way would not disrupt their habits. The other way is to use Bitcoins. Is that the original intention? Sorry I maybe that was obvious from the start but I missed the beginning.

Project steps

• Information gathering
• Concept
• Project Specification
• Sprints

Transparency in charity organisations

• user can track her/his donation (like you can track your DHL package shipping)
• it would provide real time feedback to donors
• it would be the tool charities can implement easily into their existing systems (widget) or a platform where charities "apply" for the tracking service
• it doesn't need to be public (it's enough if donor can just track her/his own donation)
• charity gets a certificate/badge that they are "transparent & socially responsible" (aka reputation)