About 5-6 months ago, I wrote an script to synchronize the GivingBlocks Projects in our platform. At first they were about about 600 projects, however today there are over 1161 projects.
Back then, I did not see the magnitude of what this represented but as time went on and after talking to Lauren, Ashley and internalizing the idea of public goods. I think most of this projects do not fulfill this vision of public goods.
Giveth currently has 622 projects of it’s own, and I would not like that we become just a catalog for the GivingBlocks projects and shadow over our own platform projects and vision.
Currently the issues raised by this integration are:
Our projects list (including our admin) is filled with givingBlocks Projects and it’s harder to filter and maintain. This also complicates any manual work done by Ashley.
Most of the GivingBlocks projects are not standardized, are incomplete or have little to no information. They do not fulfill the idea of public goods and in my opinion are not adding value to our platform and just filling space.
GivingBlocks do not have a webhook system, we do not know if they deleted or cancelled a project on their side. As the list grows, attempting to do this manually is simply not scalable.
I took the liberty of stopping the cronjob synchronization, and would like to propose some ideas to alleviate these issues:
Delete projects that do not fulfill the idea of public goods, leaving only those that have donations or fulfill this purpose.
Make the integration like we did with the ChangeAPI, add an admin page for synchronizing manually those projects we want in our platform.
YES
NO
ABSTAIN
0voters
Let me know what you think, and any input is welcomed.
Edit:
GivingBlocks projects total donations is 27, across 22 projects of 1161. Added the list in the thread below.
I completely agree and I like the solutions you offer
But also I have a question, can we know how many donations have been made to GivingBlock projects so far? I believe that’s also a good measure of value added
And there are a lot of these sadly… but The Giving Block provides most of the verified projects we have, so we don’t want to over correct and then not have enough projects on the platform.
Long term, we want to bring nonprofits into the crypto space so that they can use and benefit from web3 tooling, becoming DAOs with microeconomies of their own… creating a new way to reward to production of value to meet our collective needs.
I love the work the Giving Block is doing to bring nonprofits into crypto, although there are limitations that I think are in favour of the idea to limit our integration:
project must be registered 501c3s in the United States (we want to be “borderless” “global”)
projects do not necessarily need to be providing “public good” - many projects from the giving block are religious-based
donations are offramped via Gemini into fiat (projects have limited crypto exposure)
projects only accept donations from a very limited token list on Mainnet (they don’t accept GIV… so majority of our “verified” projects don’t accept our own token)
WRT to our integration, imo key limitations include:
project owners do not have control over their Giveth project & very often don’t even know it exists! (unlikely to move forward to becoming a regen economy this way)
we have no idea if projects are cancelled or deleted on the giving block side… potentially leading to donations disappearing into some abyss.
I think removing some of the projects - particularly the ones that we otherwise would not verify (i.e. are not really providing “public good”) is a good start. I’m quite concerned about the fact that projects could be removed from Giving Block & still show up on our UI… so I think we should also do a push to increase our own verified project base (perhaps some nonprofit outreach w Connect WG) and then check in again on the numbers in a few months.
Perhaps we can look to create a different kind of partnership with the Giving Block in place of this.
Hey Carlos, thanks for making this post. I think this is very important.
I agree with the approach of starting by deleating the projects that wouldn’t fulfill our verification process.
I cosider, it would be good that those that are not deleated are reached out to make them aware they are on Giveth and hopefully they get more engaged with our platform.
Thanks for the post @cquinterom096. Really great to hear @karmaticacid 's perspective as well, based on the comments above I would be in favour of removing the Giving Block Integration. Some reasons stated above seem to hit home for me:
Many projects don’t meet our quality standards
We have to manually check things like the project quality and if it still exists ( doing things manually)
They don’t accept GIV and might have no idea that Giveth even exists
Generally don’t and probably won’t participate in the Giveth Community and roadmap vision
I think unless there’s some effort from giving block to make their projects more integrated into our platform I don’t see the value they provide to Giveth. Perhaps an upgraded API? Get them to accept GIV??
We should focus on quality over quantity - what’s the point of having a fat stack of verified projects if they don’t really integrate with what Giveth is trying to build, @karmaticacid has it when we should focus on home-grown projects rather than mass importation of projects that don’t really know what we’re about. I can see some technical issues creating major headaches for us down the road.
TL;DR unless there are some major improvements in the integration I don’t think it’s worth the headache to have Giving Block projects integrated.
Any project that has received a donation should stay IMO…
Even if we want to remove the integration completely… we should do it step by step, and prob tell The Giving Block that we are taking these actions, maybe they would be interested in responding to them.
I agree that we should remove most of them. I always filter them out when I donate! I think we should remove the integration and just keep the ones that already received a donation or ones we want to add manually.
Another thought @qqsong, maybe we can identify the high value Giving Block projects (that are good for attracting donors), and try to get them to manage their project directly on Giveth (instead of through the Giving Block), so we can build one-to-one partnerships with them
Good thoughts @aabugosh but as I learned from the Giving Block projects, they in fact don’t have control over their wallet (they don’t own it). Two of the projects are really interested to get to know us, they then have to set up their own wallet (not using the Giving Block’s). I am convinced that the these projects are not active because they don’t have direct channel to donors/don’t know they are also on Giveth. What they receive is FIAT cash from the other end. Hence the integration is really meaningless for Giveth.
Accidentally deleted my original comment as I wanted to edit
I agree with this but mainly because I don’t think integrating the Giving Block project will add value to the Giveth platform because the nonprofits on the Giving Block don’t know their wallet address and wouldn’t know they are also on Giveth thererfore won’t have any interaction and bring donors to the platform. Very little value at this point
I am not much in favour of the Giving Block integration as there seems little alignment with Giveth values. Here are some of my key reasons:
charities pay a significant fee to be listed on the Giving Block and significantly more for the ‘premium’ service. These fees would exclude a lot of grassroots projects.
in turn the listing on Giveth provides free advertising for the Giving Block (now owned by Shift4 Payments who bought Giving Block last month) and I’m not clear how the Giving Block partnership reciprocates. Giveth is not listed as a partner on their website (at least not anywhere I could find) and Giveth projects do not feature on the Giving Block.
during the initial consultation with the Giving Block, they offer cashing out of crypto (and not having to deal with crypto) as a selling point. It is not explained that you do not own your wallet. It is explained that you automatically receive your converted cash donations weekly. Strong focus on cash.
If projects are unaware of listing on Giveth, they are definitely not promoting Giveth when fundraising but can use a Giving Block widget for donations.
When so many of the Giving Block projects showing $0 in donations, this has a detrimental impact to Giveth as a successful fundraising platform.
I love the exposure to crypto fundraising that Giving Block is bringing to the world of non-profits but I totally agree with all of @karmaticacid’s points.
With the recent takeover by Shift4, perhaps this is a good opportunity to revisit the partnership agreement, as I currently do not see much alignment with what Giveth is working towards.
It’s another website that allows donations with crypto. We integrated them but only added in our AdminPage a searchbar where we put the ID of the project we want to import to Giveth, that way it’s more manageable.
They have over 200k+ nonprofits in the US, bringing all that would be too much for our app.
I think we should talk in a meeting this, as I see a lot more input, to really come to a decision.
They recently discovered that they had a project on Giveth and were interested in learning more as well as exploring a good path for them to have more ownership in their project. We discussed their needs as a charity and some of the barriers that they face as a traditional non-profit looking to incorporate innovative technology like blockchain and crypto.
We plan to have a more detailed conversation about the hurdles and in the mean time this is what we concluded would be the most beneficial for them right now.
they are hesitant to be in control of their own wallet, liable for reporting, responsible for doing their own due diligence as to where the funding is coming from, etc.
they would like to be able modify their project description, add details and media, provide updates etc.
they would like to keep the wallet set to the Gemini wallet and remain a ‘Giving Block project’ on Giveth.
they would like to explore more ways of how we can cross promote one another in a communications campaign or event participation like Meet the Makers.
they are very intrigued by the tokenomics and the GIVeconomy and are really interested in participating however they lack the confidence to take custody and responsibility for their funding transfers, conversions, off ramping etc.
I think this is a great use case to use to explore how we can bridge the gap with our Giving Block projects as well as learn best practices for assisting projects in becoming more blockchain savvy and confident in the web3 and crypto space. I plan to have another call with them soon and will continue to update here
Thanks for this post. This is where the Giving Block integration becomes interesting for me as the bridge between traditional non-profits and Web3. Could we do a workshop / AMA for Giving Block projects - maybe as one of our ‘spotlight’ community AMAs - could be great way to introduce Giveth, encourage cross-promotions, as well as gather some useful info and trends?
doing things manually)