Dono.eu

Dono: bringing donors and non-profits together

Check out our website: dono.eu

The problem

Non-profit charity organizations are very important in today's society. They fulfill many needs that otherwise would be left unattended. They fight for people's rights, help the environment and provide for people in need.

However, due to the COVID-19, the vast majority of non-profits are facing difficulties in fundraising and donor engagement.

We are developing a project that will help non-profit charity organizations to maintain their income stream in this new normality, and that will be useful for organizations of all sizes in the future.

We consider that there is a lack for a good internet platform that provides useful information for regional and international non-profit charity organizations, aside from regular directories or newspaper articles.

Dono wants to make donations a regular and shareable activity. You can find our website here: dono.eu

Our solution

We are developing two products that are have a symbiotic relationship to each other:

Dono's charity gift card. we intend to produce gift cards that will be obtainable in retail stores, next to the existing gift cards from lots of other companies. Also, we will offer the gift card online as well.
Our website platform. This is the place where the user will be able to redeem and use the card in the organizations of their choice. Here all non-profit charity organizations will have access to a dedicated page they can fill with useful information, and will have access to the visibility the website will offer. The platform also hosts information and statistics about the impact of non-profits among society, which will also serve as a visibilization tool. Donations made through the platform are highly secure thanks to the use of blockchain technology.

We believe that sharing is important. When sales of the gift card increase, more people will find it a meaningful present to make to your loved ones, proving the gift card to be a great alternative to regular presents.

We would like to let people know that there is a way in which you can show your support to someone you care, by allowing them to help the non-profit charity organizations of their choice and leaving a positive footprint on society.

What have we done?

Although this project has been under development for several months, This event has been a great opportunity to develop the blockchain aspect of the project, implementing the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) as a core asset.

The first step was the idea development. In order to do so, we spent several months building different business plans that ensure the feasibility of the project. We found several ways for the company to function. Currently, the platform will operate free of charge for non-profits and donations have a 3% commission in case of online gift cards and 5% commission in case of physical gift cards.

We also built a website thinking ahead, making all the necessary structure for a highly scalable project for user and non-profit charity organizations management and a system to organize all data.

The website dono.eu is developed using VUEJS, Laravel and QLDB.

Challenges we ran into

There are three main issues we had to face during the development of the project:

The first challenge we faced is the development of a solid business plan. Having studied chemical engineering, we had to learn this part of business development mainly on our own, by the development of other projects. Despite that fact, we have managed to build a business plan that holds several feasible ways to develop the project.
There is a lot of content to manage, a lot of data analysis to do and a tag system optimized to show non-profit charity organizations the best possible way. We intend to make the information clear to the donors to make the donation user-friendly, and provide a way to easily learn what these organizations do in an easy but complete way. The structure of the website needed to fulfill all mentioned requirements.
We intend to offer these services free of charge for non-profits, as we wouldn't find ethic to profit from them. The second challenge we need to face is make third parties understand that this project is not only commercially viable, but a necessity for society, thus reducing commission costs and fees for retail stores

We have been able to build a website structure with almost all the functionalities we need to provide in the finished product.

We have developed a business plan that will ensure feasibility of the project with different functioning options.

Impact to the crisis

Here we list the added values to our project regarding the COVID-19 crisis. However, most of these values will always be present in our project.

The user can help fund non-profit organizations affected by the COVID-19 emergency while maintaining social distancing, trough the use of digital gift cards.
The good structure of the website will make users more eager an motivated to donate
Increase on donation amounts while reducing fundraising cost.
The product offers the donor the possibility to split the amount the user will donate among several organizations
Dono will offer the only way to donate in cash thanks to the physical gift card in a lot of European countries.
Dono will make sure that all transactions and donation logs will be accessible to the customer thanks to a fully transparent and traceable blockchain system.
The website will gather key information and statistics of hundreds of organizations, providing visibility to non-profits and raising awareness among society
Availability of the product among all Europe.
The gift cards are a low cost and low maintenance product
They are also a great product to give as a present.
All present and future products will take environmental issues into account.

Necessities in order to continue the project

Negotiations with retailers and supply chain companies have been hard, as we are a very small company. We believe that with external support from an organization as the European Innovation Council would give us the strength we need to achieve our objectives.
We will continue working on the website and design, to finish all the mentioned functionalities. In order to accelerate the start of our activity, we would need support from other tech experts
We are in need of funding to start the manufacturing and distribution of the physical gift card

Social impact after the crisis

There are also some other problems that non-profit charity organizations face even with no epidemic:

Overall, these organizations spend 10 % of their budget in fundraising.
One of the main reasons people don’t donate is the mistrust in traditional donation methods, for example face to face fundraising.
Many small organizations don't have the resources to spend thousands of euros in marketing campaigns to gain visibility.
Information from non-profit charity organizations is scattered all around the internet. There is not an European platform that unites all organizations in a structured way.

The social impact generated by Dono after the COVID-19 crisis will remain or even grow, as we intend to make Dono one of the main fundraising options to donate to non-profit charity organizations.

We have created a great platform that has the potential to become a very big helper in society in the future, by popularizing and making the act of donation a common and more shareable activity.

Thank you very much for reading. If you would like to get in touch with us, you can do so through our website.