Supporting charity projects is a great thing to do. Donors deserve to know for what their contributions were used. We are happy to announce the launch of a new, central feature, our SmartAid Token Management System (TMS). Projects on SmartAid can now use the dashboard of the TMS to allocate received donation tokens to their cost centres. These transactions are made visible to donors on their individual donation trackers, creating a transparent donation experience.
Recap: Traceable Donations with SmartAid
SmartAd’s mission is to make donating more transparent and engaging. As described in this previous blog posts, SmartAid uses a private permission Ethereum Blockchain to document each donation of its users. When you donate via the integrated PayPal API, we deploy a new ERC20 contract for you and send your donation tokens to the project’s address. The “Donation Code”, which is displayed on the top of your donation tracker, is the smart contract address of your donation token. With this address, you can identify and follow your donation within the SmartAid system. 
SmartAid Token Management System (TMS)
Now the journey of your donation tokens can continue. With the support of the EU-funded accelerator program, Blockpool, we developed our Token Management System, which allows projects to allocate the received tokens transparently to their various costs centres.
The budget allocation is enabled by our simplistic and user-friendly dashboard.
Project dashboard with dummy data
On the dashboard, project managers gets an overview on the most important stats of their SmartAid projects. In the “Budget” widget, the SmartAid project can create a new cost centre. After entering the budget name and amount, the budget is saved as open budget. In this state, project managers can still alter budgets. When the budget is finalized, the project manager closes the budget. At this point, the magic happens and transactions on the SmartAid Blockchain are triggered. The same percentage amount of each donation tokens in the “available budget” is transferred to a new address, representing the cost centre.
Let’s picture this:
Alice donated 200 EUR, Bob 500 EUR and Charles 300 EUR to the Water projects. A funding milestone is reached and the SmartAid project can start. The first money was spent (500€) on a report, evaluating the best place to build a water well. The project creates a 500 EUR budget on the SmartAid dashboard. Once the payment is conducted, the project manager closes the “Location Evaluation” budget. 50%(500EUR/1000EUR) of the available budget/donations tokens are spent. 100 EUR/ (200*50%) of Alice, 250 EUR of Bob and 150EUR of Charle’s donation tokens are distributed to the address representing the location assessment.
Benefits of the TMS
The TMS provides projects on SmartAid three main benefits, a clear overview on the current funding situation, a tool to dynamically plan budgets and for reporting to donors. All of them are important, however, we hope that reporting to donors can solve one of the mayor issues for charity organizations, which we identified during surveys. Currently, projects can only spend donors’ money on previously defined activities. However, not everything can be planned in advance and circumstances occur, in which the donors’ money can create more impact if spend on something else then specified before. The TMS can solve this issue by giving projects the freedom to spend donations on the most relevant causes, while keeping their donors happy by reporting closely.
The information on the fund usage is made available for donors on the SmartAid web app. The project page displays the overall allocation of project funds. Further, each donor can review the spending of her individual donation usage on her donation tracker page. Together with blog posts, this provides transparency for the donors, which are rarely by any other donation platform.
Conclusion
SmartAid’s new Token Management System provides projects with a tool for budget planning and reporting to donors. All transactions are documented tamper resistant on the SmartAid blockchain. By having donation trackers, reading from the blockchain, donors can follow their donation and answer the important question of “what happened with my donation?”. While this brings an advantage over most other online donation tools, we are still at the beginning. Users need to trust that projects honestly allocated the token representations of their donations the same way the allocated fiat funds. We are keen to migrate SmartAid to a public blockchain network to eliminate the required trust, when handling with legacy fiat systems.
Stay tuned!