Donation Transparency and New Technology

America SCORES Bay Area is investing in a long-term project to use cutting-edge technology to increase transparency for our donors and implement a comprehensive plan for data governance. The very first step of these initiatives is our #GivingTuesday campaign, where we will be accepting many forms of digital currency like Bitcoin and Ethereum through partnering with BitPay. 

These donations and this technology will set us on course to move ahead in both data privacy for our students and impact-transparency for our donors.   

Donor Transparency

The donations we receive from our community not only help deliver the SCORES program to our students,  it’s these donations that enable us to innovate. We want to show that same respect and trust back to you in this project using decentralized technology to create a solution that tracks exactly where your donation is going, using results-based accountability. 

The first step is being able to accept cryptocurrency donations. Starting with #GivingTuesday, any digital asset donation to America SCORES will be recorded as a donation made to us. 

When you donate with Bitcoin and Ethereum, Each transaction has a “digital fingerprint,” which can’t be changed or tampered with. With this technology, you could know exactly where your donation is going, because you can see the digital fingerprint attached to a transaction marked where we spend it. 

Data Governance

You’re probably aware of the work we do with our students, the future leaders of our community. Our work requires that we collect data about students, so we can record and track their progress and also know where help is needed. We take the privacy and security of the personal information we collect, such as data about our students, very seriously. We are constantly improving the privacy and security controls we apply to that information and how we communicate our uses of that information to parents, guardians, and students. 

In the future, decentralized technology may be a good tool use, and we are keeping an eye on how decentralized technology can be used in our daily processes. 

Why America SCORES?

Since we’re right near Silicon Valley, America SCORES Bay Area is neighbors with some of the top technology companies in the world. 

With this proximity, we’ve seen how as data becomes more and more valuable, it also can become more exploited. We believe in the right to privacy and also the open-source movement, and that those two can exist simultaneously. You should be able to see what the software you’re using does, and be able to control where and how your data is being used by any website, especially if the website is profiting from it. 

As a nonprofit, we don’t have a profit motive. But we do want to assist our industry as much as we can, taking the lessons we’ve learned in the private sector and applying them here. 

We’re partnering with a company that specializes in blockchain and cutting-edge tech to expand the ways that people are able to donate, and find new ways to innovate in our organization.