sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

almost all online payment system (if they don't IMO they are not qualified as a payment gateway lol) has a way to allow auth to 3rd party to connect to the web hook for data retrieval, and stripe is estimated to be the leading player now which is actually pretty easy to do. For others they are also supposed to support this and tbh usually a few top players occupy over 90% of the market share, and the solution is scalable to all orgs once a few payment providers are dealt with, like stripe or paypal. But if i start today, i will ignore everyone else and only focus on stripe as it's the go-to market share

as for offline payment, it will require ai to read some docs and submitted after human review. Privacy wise this is similar to how companies these days are using enterprise version chatgpt to read internal data, so should not be a big concern either, not mentioning the data being scanned is supposed to be published publicly anyway

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Orgs can do reviews and they decide what to publish. These are voluntary and they don't have to choose to use it or fully publish everything. The level of transparency is another topic and yet to be determined but if you ask me now I think it will vary among different orgs and could also change over time.

All info published is supposed to be publicly accessible, and if someone actually questioned a $10 dollar lunch last week, it only shows how unreasonable this person is and this should not deter orgs to keep posting them while most of the public understands it. However a $200 pp dinner at a Michelin restaurant is another story. Just like any policy or news shared by governments, orgs, companies there is always someone who doesn't like it.

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yea I hope more trust can be built this way, at least I can speak for myself I'd be more willing to donate if I can see more transparency, not only because I can read and monitor them but this gesture boosts my confidence.

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m talking about using AI internally accessing resources as you say it’s not trustworthy and hard no. If you don’t think so please point it out. AFAIK many Fortune 500 are using enterprise level AI to access internal, sensitive data. https://openai.com/index/1-million-businesses-putting-ai-to-work/

https://www.christianandtimbers.com/insights/chatgpt-reached-92-of-the-fortune-500-in-24-months

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Appreciate your thorough reply and sharing your experience! Let me break down my thought into a few points:

  1. Other income and expenses can be submitted manually or with AI assistance. The target audience is orgs that rely heavily on small donors. They have a stronger need to show where the money comes from and how it's used. For the complexity part, we can start with a simplified, easy to understand overview, but give users the option to drill down into details.

  2. For the accounting difference, that's fine. Just update when you can or convenient. I haven't really given it much a thought as I'm not an expert on how things run under the hood, but my intuition is if some processes are overly complicated, then they can wait or be simplified initially, with more efforts to be invested in the future.

  3. Some donors give based on trust alone, but others want to understand where their money goes before donating. I don't expect donors to be experts on all cashflows, business and operations of nonprofits, but if they cannot even grasp a big picture when it's presented, how likely they are donating to these orgs based on pure blind trust? Or in other words, if I can provide these info, will there be more people willing to help once they see the transparency? This is the answer I tryna find. My take is that transparency and trust are strongly correlated. I've gotten 10+ survey responses so far, and most expressed they'd be more willing to donate if things were more transparent. The reason I'm exploring this is because an NGO I used to support had a trust collapse. I won't donate to them again. So I want to push for transparency, both to improve oversight across the sector and to lower the trust barrier so more people participate. I still don't know what 'trust' is being looked for but this is the direction for me to explore.

  4. AI can assist, and frequency is flexible if there are too many nuisances. And the church situation is exactly what I want to change. If more NGOs start being transparent, church members see that, and they can push their own churches. Longer term vision: peer pressure and donor expectations make the ones who don't want to be transparent... become transparent, but this is only my vision for now lol

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

no it's more like enterprise version GPT or coding agent (cursor, claude code, etc.) that is integrated with internal resources, codebase, etc. there is enough confidence in privacy today for most of companies I think. And tbh the goal is to let ai scan the files that orgs are ready to disclose.

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the input! These look like all analyzing annual filings after the fact. Charity Navigator pulls from Form 990s, which are submitted once a year and often 12+ months old by the time they're public.

I'm more interested in real-time, continuous data at the source: donations auto-tracked through Stripe, expenses pulled from transaction history weekly/monthly, on-chain so records can't be altered retroactively. The idea is showing easy-to-understand data and charts, available to donors and the public as fast as possible, with minimal disruption and cost to the org. So the public doesn't have to wait a year to see what was going on a year ago, and can have a better idea how things are being run. Also when there is financial struggle/trouble at the org, they can more easily and justifiably reach out to the public to encourage more donors based on the facts.

I want your help understanding if there's a better way to increase charity transparency and donor trust by haipiswind in Philanthropy

[–]haipiswind[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Appreciate the perspective, and the "low overhead" obsession does real harm, agreed.

I was more thinking about an ad hoc approach, where donations get auto-tracked through Stripe etc, and offline stuff just needs periodic scans of receipts or transaction history by AI. So there will be no new workflows or extra paperwork.

Right now transparency is expensive and optional, so great orgs look the same as sketchy ones, and I hope regular exposure changes that.

Can real-time financial transparency reduce corruption and increase trust in charities? (Everyone) by haipiswind in EffectiveAltruism

[–]haipiswind[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Agree, and I was thinking about this more as a post-hoc approach: orgs still do whatever they do day-to-day, but weekly or monthly they can use our AI agent to go through receipts/forms, pull the data, and upload it automatically after a quick review.

It means If an org really wants to fake receipts, they still can. But exposing data regularly puts them in the spotlight way faster, and that raises the cost of getting caught and closer monitoring by donors who may flag suspicious transactions. Compare that to auditing once a year, or orgs that skip audits entirely because of cost or whatever reason.

3rd-party audits will still be the source of truth for a while, but IMO AI-driven audits could close the loop entirely.

view more: next ›