Chari makes donation matching campaigns easy and secure with cryptocurrencies.

What is donation matching?

Matching grants are a great way to raise funds for a charitable cause. A sponsor deposits a budget to match donations 1:1. Thus donors double the impact of their contributions. When the fundraiser ends, the charity gets twice the donations and any remaining budget is returned to the sponsor.

What is Chari?

A smart contract.
The Chari smart contract manages the sponsor grant and donations on the Ethereum blockchain. This means there is no need for a trusted third party to coordinate the fundraising and each participant can be certain their funds are managed safely.

A donation widget.
Easily embed a Chari donation component into the landing page of your fundraiser campaign.

The story so far...

The concept, the name, the design and all code for Chari was born during the Beyond Blockchain hackathon. With a multi-disciplinary team, we were able to go from just an idea to a production-ready implementation on mainnet.

GiveDirectly

We have a real live fundraiser ongoing to help people in extreme poverty via GiveDirectly with 1.25 ETH of matching funds from a sponsor. We have reached out to a few local charities and seen a strong interest in trying Chari in a campaign.

User experience

Making the user experience seamless was a critical consideration.

• contributions can be made with plain transfers (no dApp browser required)
• we support both ETH and ERC20 funding
• we have integrated the Portis wallet
• MetaMask and other dApp browsers are also supported

Some highlights:

Benefits of Chari

• charities can reach a new class of sponsors and donors
• no trusted 3rd party needed
• dramatically lower fundraising costs
• sponsor funds are fully commited, up-front

Fundraising costs

With Chari, there’s just a minimal gas cost of transfers.

• administration fee (3.5–5%)
• payment fees (0.5–3%)

Typical overhead of charity fundraising is 4-8%:

• https://www.gofundme.com/pricing#AT
• https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/family/charity-fundraising-sites/

Sources:

Subject Matter Expert testimonial

"Crypto fundraising opens access to a new world of potential sponsors and donors. Chari provides a safe platform for donations: no 3rd party to manage funds, no chance of corruption. I like how simple it is and the fact there’s no overhead on funding.''

- Reka Berczeledi, HospiSchool

HospiSchool supports long-term hospitalized children continue education with the help of student volunteers.

Next steps

There’s only so much we could do in two weeks :)

• Launch a full-blown campaign page on the permaweb.
• Tools for campaign discovery.
• Support matching ratios other than 1:1.
• Support multiple sponsors contributing to the budget (increasing the matching ratio).
• Track referrals, so sponsors and donors can see the impact of their shares / promotional campaigns.
• Issue unique NFT rewards for donors.
• Social media sharing features.

Some feature ideas for the future:

Thank you!