Washington, D.C. is becoming a hotbed for collaboration among government agencies, non-profit ventures, charitable foundations and private investors, all looking to drive social change through technology. The third cohort of the PeaceTech Accelerator, an accelerator dedicated to reducing violence and scaling peacebuilding efforts through technology, includes OneRelief, a non-profit charitable donation platform that is taking an innovative approach to micro-donations.

“When you make a donation through the platform, you actually get an update; you get a status notification; help has been embarked; help has arrived in a community. You get visuals; you get video of what’s happening on the ground, and you get feedback at the end of the disaster of what has actually been achieved with the money,” said Peter Prix (pictured), OneRelief founder and chief executive officer.

Prix spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at The PeaceTech Lab at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., as part of theCUBE’s special AWS Public Sector CUBE Conversation series. They discussed OneRelief’s innovative approach to crowdsourcing micro-donations for charitable causes.

Transparency builds trust

The primary challenge to growth for OneRelief is delivering a concise marketing message that conveys its differentiation and motivates donations via their service, according to Prix. The company’s differentiation is centered around increasing accountability and trust with donors.

“On the one hand there is the big players, the big charities that we don’t trust … there’s peer-to-peer fundraising that we don’t trust either, because they’re tiny and we don’t know who is setting up those fundraisers. We’re right in between,” Prix explained.

OneRelief is also looking at the innovative technologies to further differentiate from companies providing similar services. The latest wave of blockchain-powered products is helping OneRelief accept a wider range of donations in a shorter amount of time than traditional fundraising methods.

“We actually have an innovation and lab that is only purely looking at blockchain from different angles. One of them is for us to accept crypto donations. Secondly, we’re looking at blockchain technology and running a hyperledger project at the moment to see how we can accelerate the speed at how long it takes to get the donation from when a person makes it on into the receiving bank account,” Prix concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations at the AWS public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Photo: SiliconANGLE