The Evolution of Project Giving | #sndboxquest

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~ Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. ~
Michael Jordan

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Hi all you wonderful Steemians,

I hope this finds you enjoying or having enjoyed a peaceful weekend! By this stage, I really really hope that you had a chance to check out @projectgiving and the incredible introductory post our team made for it!

Read the official @ProjectGiving introduction post/whitepaper here.

The post linked above provides a full explanation of what Project Giving seeks to do, what it has achieved so far, and why we believe that our NGO has the capacity to be a movement for global development through the Steemit Platform. I really hope you all have a chance to check it out and please dont feel shy about leaving us a comment too :)

As I have said many times throughout this process, my team and I are extremely grateful to @SndBox, @anomadsoul, @guyfawkes4-20 for organizing the Summer Quest and bringing us all together. This post below details the evolution of the Project Giving during the final quest of the #SndBoxSummerCamp.

A little background

Project Giving began as an idea which came to me as I first began to get to grips with the Steemit Platform. As I developed this idea into a rough outline for a project, I realized that I would not be able to make this vision a reality by myself.

In a case of good fortune, this happened to be around the same time that I had involved myself in the @sndbox summer camp quest! After a couple of other tasks for this project, I was thrilled to hear that one of the quest would be to develop the idea for and present a basic outline of a Project built exclusively through the Steemit platform. It was for this quest that I first introduced Steemit to Project Giving, the Steem blockchain's first NGO.

Read my initial post detailing what I envisioned for Project Giving here.

To my surprise and with extreme gratitude, this initial project outline was chosen as one of 6 projects which @sndbox and other members of the Summer Camp would work together to operationalize. And just like that, 8 other wonderfully talented, innovative and creative Steemians joined onto Project Giving to help make the idea their own, and turning the initiative into a reality.

Introducing ourselves to one another

One of the most amazing aspects of this team being brought together was the fact that we all lived on different sides of the world. In fact, no two team members were even from the same country! This meant that most of our conversations, planning and project development would take place on Discord.

To bring some order to this process, the first task was creating a little "introduce yourself" exercise so that everyone could get to know each other, while also sharing skills which everyone could bring to the table.

Below are the details our international team and the project positions which we all took on.

Name	Username	Country	Role
Tristan	@tristanoliff	Canada/South Africa	Project Director & Founder
Gabriel	@dedicatedguy	Venezuela	Writer & Researcher
Becca & Sam	@travelling-two	Thailand	Writers & Marketing
Rowan	@raj808	United Kingdom	Marketing & Writer
Hakym	@kymio	Malaysia	Graphic & Visual design
Mustafa	@mnallica	Turkey	Graphic & Visual design
Anna	@anna-mi	Russia	Content Creator
Ayodeji	@golddeejay	Nigeria	Writer & Researcher
Sophia	@imaginedragon	USA	Writer & Marketing

Brainstorming phase

The first task on the agenda was to have a round table discussion on ideas of where all the members saw the project going throughout the duration of the final quest period. This included looking at ways to best advertise initiatives which we would sponsor in the future, thinking about what graphics we would have to create and how our project could appeal to the Steemian Community.

Here are some early conversations regarding the direction of the project:

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Some of these early ideas were kindly summarized into a preliminary "to-do" list by @travelling-two (above).

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All this early brainstorming was hugely influential in setting the agenda for how the Project would develop over the two weeks of teamwork. In order to have clear direction for the project, a Development Plan was created which attempted to summarize the project idea, integrate the ideas which were put forwards by the team, and finally, organize who would be completing all the relative tasks! These are some of the functions of the development plan:

• By outlining all the ideas of the project along with those brought forwards by the team, the development plan provided a point of reference to come back to if any of the team were stuck in their tasks.
• As some of the photos below show, the Development Plan laid out all the task for the team, while also grouping team members together to work on specific tasks.
• The development plan also outlined what our Project Giving team would seek to achieve in the 2 weeks we had together.

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Below are some screenshots from the development plan!

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You can read the Project Giving SndboxQuest development plan here:

Logo Design

One of the more important tasks which everyone on the team was excited to complete was the development of our Project Giving Logo. The logo of any project is it's mast head and often is what creates people's first impression. Here were our three steps to making a successful logo

Step 1: Inspiration (by @anna-mi)

Early on in the project and while we were looking for inspiration for our logo, @anna-mi told us of the Legend of Danko, a mythical tale of a man who ripped out his own heart and held it up in the sky to bring light to the world. Anna recommended that our logo should be a burning hand holding a heart. Just like that, the first inspiration from our logo was formed. Anna also provided this sketch (on the right) as an original stimulus for our logo design.

Step 2: Experimentation (by @mnallica)

The next step of the logo design was to get some concepts going from the initial experimentation. @Mnallica took the impetus on this and created a multitude of interesting logo designs for us to develop from. Below are some of these incredible concepts.

Step 3: Finalization (by @kymio)

Once the team had reviewed the logo concepts made during Step 2 and agreed on the designs we liked, @kymio took over the logo design to try and come up with a final product. You can see the finished product to the right..

Ultimately, the logo was one of the team's happiest achievements since we felt that it incorporated everything we Project Giving represented. Firstly, the pattern of dots around the hand and heart represented the fact that our initiative exists on the blockchain. Secondly, the hand showed that our project seeks to give to others. Finally, the heart represents that our project and the Steem blockchain has a big heart, and through Project Giving, we can make a difference.

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Below are some ways in which we thought our logo could be used. These were developed by @kymio who also came up with our motto: Big hearts on Blockchain)

Creating our initial proposal

Since Project Giving would rely heavily on finding initial funding and sponsors, we thought it was of upmost importance to create a full whitepaper/proposal which we could then distribute. This proposal would outline what the project was, what it sought to achieve, how the model worked and why it would bring value to the Steem Blockchain.

A lot of the project giving team members reached out to affluent Steemians and Discord Groups such as WhaleShares and @minnowsupportproject. We received a lot of positive feedback on our ideas, but they encouraged us to build a proposal, similar to a financial proposal one would have to create if applying for funding outside of Steemit.

Thus, the final project would be professional, to the point, easy to read and would effectively explain what Project Giving was and how it would be used.

The first piece of work done for the proposal was this beautiful graphic (to the right) which was made by @travelling-two and summarized the entire project. Using their graphic as a guideline, I then expanded on all of the sections of their graphic to make up the main body of our proposal.

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I highly encourage you to check out our official @projectgiving Whitepaper/Proposal here:

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Creating this proposal was one of the most time consuming parts of the project, however, as soon as it was done it provided great worth. Our marketing guru @raj808 used some of his contacts to mass distribute the whitepaper around Discord and sure enough, we received a lot of positive feedback with many people agreeing to support the project.

Above are two pages of our 8 page proposal

Accountability structure

One of our greatest challenges when we started the project was to develop our accountability structure. For Project Giving to work as we had planned, it would require people to be comfortable donating their steem delegations to us in order to use for donations.

However, as a group we saw an important need in being as transparent as possible with how we handled donations through the project so that Steemians would be encouraged to donate often. This would require the forming of a comprehensive accountability platform.

Thank goodness our team had @raj808, who almost single-handedly took responsibility for coming with our accountability structure. Over a multitude of drafts and refinement, he formed what we believe to be one of the most fool-proof systems of transparency on Steemit for projects such as ours.

Sharing our idea with the world

With the majority of the task which we had sought to achieve completed, we moved forwards with the creation of our #introduceyourself post on the official @projectgiving page.

This introductory post was a beautiful amalgamation of everything our team achieved over its two weeks together. This included what Project Giving was seeking to do, how it would do it, and how members of the Steemian Community can help. What was perhaps even more humbling was the amount of positive feedback which we received from other Steemians on the Project.

All in all we were extremely satisfied with how our introduction to the world went and our team is more motivated than ever to accomplish the tasks which we set ourselves. Below is a screenshot of our @projectgiving page along with our introduction post! We couldnt be more proud!

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Looking toward the Future

Amazingly enough, we managed to do all the work outlined in this post without using any of our allotted 100SBD budget. Since we are a charity, we felt it would be apt to instead ask @SndBox to instead donate this allowance to the first initiative which we hope to raise funds for.

While this post signifies the end of this SndBox quest, the Project Giving team believes that we have built a solid foundation from which to realize our project ambition of raising funds to donate to community initiatives around the world.

In proof of this, along with the first initiative that we are going to work with and highlighted in our introduction post, our team has already found other initiatives through Steemit which we are hoping to work with. Information on these will soon be organized and accessible on our Project Giving discord channel which will soon be open for other Steemians to join.

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In conclusion, we have to once more give a big thanks to @SndBox and the summer quest leaders, @anomadsoul & guyfawkes4-20 (along with SndBoxBros @voronoi & hansikhouse) for giving us the opportunity to create this wonderful team. We believe we have created something wonderful for this platform, and we cannot wait to see @projectgiving grow.

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