Your Thoughts Requested: How Would an Organization Use steemit for Fundraising?
When reading Steemit's First 'Fest' Reveals the Power of Blockchain Community by @wmougayar today, don't ask me why, but I was reminded of this excerpt from the Steem Whitepaper (page 5):
And item 2 on that list reminded me of the book, "Mindsharing: The Art of Crowdsourcing Everything," by Lior Zoref. Here's a video of Zoref speaking about the book at Google.
So I'm going to take a stab at number 2 and crowdsource a concept that I've been thinking about. @cmp2020 started to explore this concept with Is it Possible to Use Steemit to Help Fundraise for a Charity?, but I'm going to go into a little more detail. What would it look like for a charitable organization to use steemit for fund-raising? I'm thinking specifically of an organization like boosters for a high school marching band or a football team.
One advantage that these groups have is that they're constantly asking parents for money (trust me on this...; -). It would be far easier to convince the parents to buy steempower and hold it while their kids are in school and sell it (or not!) after graduation. Then, after powering up, parents could vote for blog posts by the organization. They already have a motivated audience ready and waiting for them! Another advantage that these organizations have is that when some students graduate and others join, their steemit audience would grow organically year after year after year.... Finally, parents could painlessly donate to the organization year round by mining with their idle computers.
So what would a fundraising template look like for one of these organizations?
I. Set up trustees and protocols for managing keys and passwords.
As students enter and leave the high school, the account credentials would need to be transferrable, so procedures would need to be enacted to deal with that.
II. Get a steemit account.
A service like steemverify.com should be used to ensure that the account is actually tied to the organization it claims to represent. The account is tied to a cell phone, facebook, or reddit account, how does that effect the ability to transfer the account?
III. Select authorized bloggers, train them on using steemit, and give them posting keys (can this be done through the web site without giving out the active/owner key?)
In the case of a football or band booster organization, this would likely be students and parents.
IV. Instruct parents and other stakeholders on signing up and purchasing steempower.
Minimum amounts of steempower could be suggested.
V. Instruct parents and other stakeholders on setting up their computers to donate by mining and give out unique addresses so donors could be credited.
This would be a painless way of getting a small amount of money from parents and reducing the part that has to come out of pocket during the active time of the year.
VI. Bloggers start blogging, organization stakeholders start up-voting and mining.
Blog posts could be about things of interest to the organization's members.
Revenue might be light during the first few years, but as the audience grows and gains steem power, fund-raising should be very successful in later years. It is probably safe to assume that some parents and students would keep voting for the organization's posts after graduation. The nice thing about this is that due to curation benefits, contributing to the booster organizations could also become fun and profitable for stakeholders who choose to spend more time on steemit.
Because the parents and other stakeholders alone probably wouldn't contribute enough voting power for significant payouts, the blog posts would still have to be high enough quality to earn votes from the general steemit community.
VII. Develop and implement a procedure to convert steem, SBD, and steem power to cash when needed and deal with tax and accounting.
Additionally, we can bring item #4 from the list in here: "Free payments." That really is an underappreciated aspect of steem. Free payments really is a big big deal... or at least, should be. Maybe vendors that the booster organizations deal with could be persuaded to start accepting steem dollars.
So there's a rough sketch of my thoughts so far. What am I missing?
Update 1: Thanks to @stephen-somers, updated this post to add a need to use a service like @steemverify to verify that the steemit account actually represents the organization that it claims to represent. (Nov 24, 2016 @ 1510 UTC)
@remlaps is an Information Technology professional with three decades of business experience working with telecommunications and computing technologies. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and is currently completing a doctoral degree in information technology.
OK, this is something I hadn't thought about. I serve on the board of a small charitable organisation, and it would be terrific if we could raise funds - at however long range - through content creation and upvoting here. So if we posted about events, and attendees posted reviews, say, could we 'harvest' that Steem and convert it it to real £s to pay staff?
For a small organization, I think the trick is that posts would have to be relevant and engaging enough to get upvotes from other people on steemit, but yes, anything you get could certainly be converted to dollars or pounds or any other currencies.
I have done several post with the goal of fundraising. Some with variying levels of success. I have been able to donate over $60 to wildlife charities and am now trying to raise money for KIVA loans. With my last post being https://steemit.com/life/@stephen-somers/my-kiva-stories-part-1-not-quite-the-hells-angels-but-angels-none-the-less
Thanks. I've seen a number of fundraising posts where a person says, "I'm raising funds for cause X, and the steem/SBD portion of this post will go to them." That's a great start, but it still has two problems: i. steemit has to trust the person to actually make the donation; and ii. The authors typically keep the steem power for themselves because of the time involved in liquidation.
I'm thinking about the next step. If the organization raises funds for itself, then steem power value growth has the potential to be yet another source of raising funds.
BTW, I'm a big fan of kiva. I saw and upvoted your post yesterday. It's a great model.
Update: And that brings up something I've been missing. Verification. Some service like steemverify.com would need to be used to ensure that the account really represents the organization.
Some good points there. Yes the STEEM power is retained by the poster although this could be looked at as helping the next post gain more traction. Verification is also important and I guess account reputation is one part of that. I'd be reluctant to support someone with a rep of 25 doing a charity post.
This is definetly an interesting idea and I think that in some way it could work. However for me personally I tend to only ever support local charitable orgs and generally only ever through time never through money. Mostly because it seems to me that ALL orgs operate like black boxs where the money goes in from all kinds of sources and then does a bunch of stuff some of it good and then is gone. This process to me is not equitable or safe. However I believe it would be possible to create and administer a not for profit entirely on a blockchain which would result in it inherently being transparent about its operations this would suite very well for fund raising on steem. I could also be wrong about this but I think Ned has spoken about steemit.com eventually becoming a not for profit org that simply provision the maintenance of this website as a portal to the steem chain.
Yeah, my thinking is that the organization's stakeholders would be up-voting to support the organization, but the posts would have to be relevant and engaging enough to get up-votes on their own merit from the rest of steemit.
Well optimally lets take for example if steemit.com was an org that shepperds steemit.com then when the @steemitblog (lets say) posts an update about maintenance or changes that have been done to the site people would upvote naturally because it benefits the community and then in that case we would all be stakeholders of a sort.
Yep. And large charitable organizations could use the same strategy, if they get enough of their stakeholders to buy enough steem power. Small organizations would need to post things of interest outside their stakeholders, though. I don't see that as a huge obstacle, though. From my examples, football boosters could post articles about football training and coaching and weight training that might interest larger audiences. Band boosters could post about things like music or leadership.
Exactly.