What Is the GiveCrypto Ambassador Program & How Does It Work?
By: Joe Waltman
Tags: Venezuela, Blockchain, Charity, Cryptocurrency, Startup

The GiveCrypto ambassador program aims to give cryptocurrency to people in need in Venezuela — and eventually other areas — through the local knowledge of compassionate, enthusiastic ambassadors. Some charity models rely on outsiders to import expertise and experience. But we recognize that in the communities where we work, with complex economic issues, the best way to reach people is through community members who understand their day-to-day lives.

Ambassadors identify which recipients are most in need of help and teach them how to use cryptocurrencies. By empowering communities from the bottom up, we hope to provide people with the tools they need to make the most impact.

They also work to establish a network of local vendors — such as pharmacies and grocery stores — to accept payments in cryptocurrencies. This allows our recipients to purchase essential goods and services directly from other members of their community.

We’re currently working with 24 ambassadors in Venezuela and more than 50 have participated across all projects to date. Without this local knowledge, we wouldn’t be able to effectively distribute crypto in these communities nor help recipients and vendors understand its applications.

As we continue to grow and move into phase two of our pilot program, we’ll explore new ways for ambassadors to help their local communities.

What is the Ambassador Program & Where Did it Come From?

At GiveCrypto, we believe that people inherently want to do good.

This isn’t just restricted to a belief that our donors want to make the world a better place through crypto philanthropy, but that caring community members exist everywhere, fueled by the desire to help eachother.

It’s this belief that drives us to connect with people on the ground to promote better overall engagement in the communities. By empowering one group of people to help their neighbors, friends, and peers, we believe that we create lasting change beyond the relatively short term crypto transfers made.

But the idea of using ambassadors for charitable outreach has met mixed success in recent years. For instance, charities may want to bring in technical expertise for assembling, installing, or using new technology like solar panels or water filtration systems in areas where this knowledge isn’t already present. These outside experts teach locals the ins and outs of the new tools and then return home hoping that the knowledge will be spread.

Out of the gate, we wanted to make a difference by adopting a bottoms-up charity model that empowers the community to help itself with the backing of our organization and donors, instead of pretending to understand their challenges better than they do themselves.

We saw it as an opportunity to grow a network of support around GiveCrypto and our mission. When we rolled out our experimental programs last year, we began finding people on the ground who believed in our values and wanted to help their peers.

Currently, these ambassadors are selected on a case-by-case basis through referrals and our own interviewing process. Once selected, each ambassador works with 10–20 recipients to set them up to use crypto by teaching them how to receive, hold and spend cryptocurrency. Recipients are given $10 a week for a set amount of time. At the end of the first phase, our 24 ambassadors had facilitated this knowledge exchange with more than 330 Venezuelans across four communities.

This is a departure from paternalistic models, which presume to know what people need better than they do by giving them pre-purchased objects such as goats or school supplies, and gives the recipients the agency to fulfill their own day-to-day needs.

Of course, there’s been a learning curve to empowering citizens to act and educate on behalf of GiveCrypto. But, our startup roots mean that we’re better positioned to take on novel approaches — like empowering ambassadors to take an active role in growing outreach on the ground and encouraging them to find vendors to grow crypto-economies.

Without this expertise, we would never be able to effectively scale our charitable efforts and would likely end up wasting our donor’s time and funds.

How Has the Ambassador Program Been Working?

As with everything over the last year, the ambassador program has been a learning experience for our team. By connecting with people who live in the communities, we’ve had the chance to tap into their localized knowledge, especially in Venezuela where the day-to-day situation for recipients changes rapidly.

This has allowed us to learn as we go to find the best way to run our charitable efforts and reach the most people without placing an excessive burden on our existing ambassadors. In the future, we plan to adjust the workflow to empower them to take on more outreach and coordination work related to vendors and fraud prevention.

So far, these ambassadors have helped us give approximately $17k to more than 330 Venezuelans. This money has been used to buy food and household goods, as well as bolstered an encouraging number of peer-to-peer transactions between recipients. The local expertise of our ambassadors has helped send these funds not only to where they’re needed most, but created new and innovative opportunities for crypto use.

Though we’ve seen the beginnings of success in terms of crypto adoption and education, we’ve also identified a number of learning opportunities from the first phase of our pilot program in Venezuela:

The program as is relies on trusted relationships with local field operations contractors and isn’t scalable

Willingness to participate is a hurdle to finding ambassadors

Ambassadors are sometimes flooded with requests for money once neighbors learn of their role in the program

Currently, we’re using our existing connections to recruit ambassadors. While this helps us find people who are trustworthy, it’s a slow-going process that takes a good amount of legwork. Over time, we’ll need to find a way to discover and qualify ambassadors in places where we have no local contacts.

This brings us to our second challenge: finding ambassadors who are willing to participate out of altruism. When recruiting new ambassadors, some candidates ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Even though the ambassadors are compensated, this attitude suggests that the candidate won’t be a good match with our program. Finding people who are willing to work for the sake of it can be difficult in communities where people are struggling to make ends meet.

As we move forward, we’ll need to invest in an upfront process that better communicates the benefits of the ambassador program and why people should be willing to help their community.

Finally, some of our ambassadors have reported being approached by people after a rumor circulated that they were giving away free money. While we want to promote community members’ interest in crypto, at this point, we don’t have the resources to give crypto to every person looking for help and want to avoid becoming a temporary handout source instead of a model for longer-lasting financial change.

How Will We Improve Our Ambassador Program?

As we move into phase two of the program, we’re focusing heavily on how to scale our operations beyond a handful of ambassadors and recipients. A large part of this will lie in our ability to delegate work to our ambassadors, such as:

Recruiting more vendors to accept crypto

Recruiting cash-in and cash-out partners

Leveraging spot checks on their peers and recipients to identify fraud

We’ve already developing software and processes that will help us successfully scale our network of ambassadors. Additionally, these efforts will allow the ambassadors to take on more responsibilities, such as recruiting vendors.

Our improvements will also provide better reporting on impact, usage, participant activity as well as identification and prevention of fraud.

Stay Updated with GiveCrypto as We Evolve

GiveCrypto is always working to improve and learn from our on-the-ground successes and hangups. As we close phase one of our Venezuelan Pilot Program and begin phase two, we hope you’ll follow us on Twitter to hear more about the amazing work our ambassadors do every day and how we’re developing software to support them and our recipients.