Raising funds for charities is an uphill battle.

Established charities even have well-paid staff dedicated exclusively to fundraising. Smaller charities cannot afford such a luxury, and really committed charities shrink at the idea of using the hard raised funds for their own benefit instead of the cause they are championing.

Those have hard-working staff, juggling between their day job, their duties for the charities and the always insufficient funds they somehow have to find.

Of course, tools such as Facebook Fundraiser are helpful, but they charge a 5% fee and do nothing to incentivize supporters to actively participate in spreading the message. As a result, charities ty[ically scramble at the end of the year to raise the money for the coming year budget and the rest of the year, they lose many opportunities to leverage their community to raise funds. Actually, more than one third of all donations happen in 4Q with over 10% of charitable giving happening in the last three days of the year alone.

So many charities, NGOs and non-profit are devoting boundless time and energy to make the world a better place and improve people's lives or the planet's health, but, far too often, they are under-staffed and their team is overworked.

There are ways to alleviate their burden.

Entrepreneurs Volunteer Dedicated to Improve Non-Profit Online Presence

One organization, Charity Makeover, gathers volunteer entrepreneurs who contribute their weekend to work together with local charities and revamp their online presence. These Charity Makeover events, high energy hackathon to improve or totally remake a handful of local charities digital presence are a testimony to the innate generosity of humans.

The latest Charity Makeover events, that took place in Lisbon (May’19) and Barcelona (Nov’19), each had over 20 volunteers, and awakened a lot of interest from numerous corporate sponsorships.

Do you know a deserving charity that would benefit from a make-over? Nominate them here for a chance to be a part of the next charity makeover event.

Accepting Cryptocurrencies Donations

After their controversial debuts, cryptocurrencies are now maturing and even their worst opponents are adopting them. In 2017, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon poetically dissed Bitcoin:

‍"It's worse than tulip bulbs. It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed," he then said. Now, JPM has its own cryptocurrency.

Regardless of people's skepticism about cryptocurrencies, they are steadily gaining relevancy.

‍Bitcoin was the best performing asset of 2019 (and the decade) and cryptocurrencies are starting to become an alternative asset that you can easily add to your traditional asset allocation.

Cryptocurrency owners, and its large group of crypto millionaires, are a potential rich new source of donations for charities.

Cryptocurrency wealth is already impressive and likely to grow. In fact, some large cryptocurrency market players are even setting up their own endowment funds to share some of the enormous wealth created from cryptocurrency.

A minute fraction of charities have caught on and started to accept cryptocurrencies, but not enough. That is less than 1% globally. In Canada, where Ethereum’s was developed and where the first Bitcoin ATM was made available to the public, the high awareness of Canadian means an estimated 4.3% of charities are accepting crypto-donations.

Yet, charities that do accept cryptocurrencies are doing well… In 2017, Fidelity Charity received US$69 million in donations of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, a nearly 10x increase from the previous year.

The nonprofits that have an active strategy to engage the cryptocurrency community can take advantage of this new opportunity.

There are already many well-known charity / non-profit organizations that are already accepting cryptocurrency donations, including the The Water Project, United Way, Charity Navigator, the Lupus Foundation of America, the Human Rights Foundation, Red Cross, UNICEF, and many others.

The number of charities accepting cryptocurrency will likely continue to increase quickly. Yes, there are difficulties in accepting cryptocurrency for those who are not familiar with it, but there are a number of companies that are working hard to make this transition as easy as possible - such as BitGive & The Giving Block in the USA and Sharehope in Germany, among others.

Unknown to many, donating cryptocurrency to a charity can actually be much more tax efficient than donating using traditional methods (e.g. USD). Cryptocurrency, is classified as “property” in the US and many other places and therefore the donor does not have to pay capital gains tax on these (hopefully) appreciated assets and is able to write this appreciated value off on their taxes. Great for donors.

This comes on top of all the other benefits of cryptocurrency and, by accepting cryptocurrency donations, these charities are able to receive donations that they may not otherwise have received. Why not offer this alternative?
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Enabling Charities to reach more potential donors online

By accepting Cryptocurrency donations, charities are able to tap into an entire new pool of donors. What else can they do to reach more potential donors?

Charities organic reach is typically limited to their network and expanding that network is difficult and labor intensive. Trusting Google Adwords or Facebook ads to get their message in front of the right eyes requires mastering the marketing tools they provide, or paying someone to do so. If only there was another option…

2Key is changing this model and empowering charities to motivate their network to work harder at sharing the message with like minded people.

By incentivizing seed supporters to share donation campaigns, you can multiply a campaign‘s reach by a factor of hundred or more, and reward all those who took part in bringing each specific donation.

This is how it works. When using 2key to run a donation campaign, the link to your campaign is turned into a SmartLink. The SmartLink contains a smart contract and leverages 2key’s proprietary protocol to track every referral downstream from the original link.

When a donation is made, the smart contract embedded in your campaign SmartLink will distribute the reward due for that donation to every referrer in the chain that led to the donation.

The rewards amount and how they are distributed amongst referrers are all defined to your specifications when you create the campaign. You can even opt to use participation tokens with no monetary value to be kept forever as virtual memorabilia.

This is an innovative way to integrate referral marketing in fundraising campaigns at a cost as low as zero, and with integrated comprehensive automated campaign management from the moment it is launched and shared with seed supporters.

A Free-to-use crowdfunding platform, 2key not only easily enables charities to accept cryptocurrencies, but also includes built-in incentives designed to ensure that the crowd helps share charity’s donation campaign. The end result is to reach more donors online.

2key recently partnered with many charities such as Code to Inspire in New York and 22Stars Foundation in Uganda who leveraged the 2key network to increase awareness about their cause and reach more potential donors online - all at no cost.

In short, it costs nothing and has the potential to expand your reach, find new donors and raise more funds.
2key is happy to answer your questions and help you or any charity you think would benefit from expanding their reach and raise more funds with minimal extra efforts.

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