Donation box
Free Software, Open Hardware , Open Design Project for physical crowdfunding.
Idea
Problem
During the last few years, especially in Greece, many communities and initiatives have tried to do things in many different fields of interest. Often times, these teams will sooner or later need some funding in order to fulfill their goals. Some of them organize events, some run online crowdfunding campains and some also find several new ways to cover their needs. From our experience, online crowdfunding does not work as expected, most of the time. People are hesitating to put all their details online, especially if they choose to donate a small amount, or some may not have a debit or credit card to do that. Eventually, most of these people prefer to give their donations in cash, in person or into a physical box somewhere. Of course, many donation boxes, usually managed by NGOs, already exist in public places, shops and such places. The problem with these boxes is that they do not offer much information about the organization that asks for money, nor do they offer transparency about what happens to the donations, who are the organization, or how much money they need. Due to the lack of possible ways to convey sufficient information, traditional donation boxes are not being used by teams that focus on a specific project, because people can not understand what the project exactly is.
Solution
In order to solve the above problems, we came up with the idea of a screen-enabled interactive donation box. The box can run several projects or causes that are asking for donations. It provides information (text, images, video) for each project. It provides real-time information about the progress (donations accepted, donations needed, finishing date). Donations are recorded and if users choose so, they can be registered to keep in touch with the project for which they donated. The box also can issue receipts for each donation. Connecting several donation boxes to an online service can add more value to each box and all the projects that are running, as a project can be created online and activated in several boxes in several locations simultaneously. This way, we hope to help NGOs, social initiatives and others, to achieve their goals and their fulfil their ideas. By offering a platform for crowdfunding that exists in physical, public spaces, we are offering a different and more direct connection between projects asking for help and people willing to help.