I'm a birder. I love birds. Anything with wings. And reading things from Cornell labs, the Lab of Ornithology, or the World Wildlife Fund, everything talked about declining populations. That's really scary because you hear about... You always hear people talk about how they want to go to Africa and see the lions and the zebras and the rhinos, how they want to go to Australia and see the kangaroos. And then there are these same reports saying that those animals are declining and then those same people don't care about it, even though they want to see those animals. And that's... And someone has to care. And there are people who do care, but wildlife populations are directly linked to the climate crisis that humans have caused. And I realized that if I loved animals as much as I thought I did, I would have to get involved.


What are you doing? So I want to start with a quick poll. How many people think, raise your hand if you think we do not have an impact measurement problem in impact investing? Anyone? OK. So everyone else who does think we have a problem? Anybody who doesn't like to vote? OK. So it's interesting because in reality, if you look at the data, what you hear is that 95% of impact investors say that they measure impact. This is data from the JIN. So on one hand, it's not a question of, are people measuring impact? They're measuring something, apparently. But what do we mean when we say we measure impact? So what I would say, an acumen has been an impact investor, has been doing impact investing for 14 years now. And we and our peers are pretty good at telling you one set of things. So we can tell you things like a number of farmers a company has reached, students attending school, maybe the number of solar lanterns sold. But by and large, I would say we can't answer questions like, are these farmers better off? Who are the children attending these schools? Or if you buy one of these kerosene lanterns, what actually happens? Does your life improve? I think basically what we have done is we have said we want to figure out if we are reaching a lot of people, we will share kind of fancy headline numbers that tell the world that we're having a lot of reach and that look good. But these numbers fundamentally are a start. But I don't think they're telling us enough about whether or not we're making a difference. And I do personally think that that is a big problem. Now, if someone gets on a stage and tells you we should really start measuring impact in your practitioner, you may be sitting there thinking, well, maybe I don't actually want to do that. I mean, it's probably going to be hard. It might be expensive, slow, intrusive. You name your list of words. And probably more importantly than all of those distractions, I think you might be worried that you won't really learn anything new anyway. I think also some of your skepticism may be fueled by this sort of kaleidoscope of standards and approaches that we've created, which I'm kind of torn about. Because on one level, we need this level of foundational work to really understand what it would mean to do this.  And I think if you're an entrepreneur living in the developing world who has so far said, it's too hard, it's too much trouble to measure impact, I have a business to build here, well, my answer to you is, yeah. My answer to you is that my clicker doesn't work. My answer to you is that you're right. But there's one thing that's changed, right? All of a sudden, every single one of the people in the world that you're trying to serve has a mobile phone in their hands. So 65% penetration of cell phones in sub-Saharan Africa. And the numbers are just moving up. So if you look across all of Africa, it's about 85%. You can see this number extending too pretty soon. We'll have ubiquitous coverage of cell phones in the developing world. And not just cell phones, but actually smartphones. So in the next five years alone, there are going to be two and a half billion new people in the developing world who have smartphones in their hands, most of them Asia Pacific, another almost half a billion people in sub-Saharan Africa. So what does this mean? Well, let me take a step back and say, what does the rest of the world realizing this might mean? So a week ago, a company called Premise raised $50 million with investors like Mark Andreessen and Google Ventures. And so what does Premise do? Premise actually has realized that this network of cell phones is actually a source of information. So they are paying 25,000 people in the developing world on the order of $100 to collect economic data and report it back up to them. So you've got the most progressive forward-looking investors in the world saying, wait a minute, if we could use this network as a way to gather data, maybe that will reposition the kind of information we have to know how to act in these marketplaces. And I think that that's instructive for us as impact investors who are living every day in these markets to say, wait a minute, what could we do with this network? So we've been asking this question at Acumen and for the last 18 months we've been building something that we call Lean Data. So what Lean Data is is the application of Lean experimentation principles to the collection of social impact metrics using, again, these low-cost technologies. And so what does this look like? Well, in the last 18 months, we've done 12 of these projects. We've surveyed 6,000 customers. An average project takes about four weeks and most importantly costs about $5,000. Not $50,000, not a half a million dollars, but $5,000 to really get meaningful social impact data. Our first of these projects was with a company called Zekitza. Zekitza runs a network of over 1,000 ambulances across India. Their motto is that we're gonna have an access for all service, service available to everyone. We did a Lean Data project using Grameen's Progress Out of Poverty Index. We trained their call center workers to ask just a series of 10 questions and over the course of about four weeks they actually got data back to say are our customers actually under the poverty line in both ERISA and Punjab? What they discovered, 75% of their customers actually were under the poverty line. They were serving the customers that they aimed to serve and talking to Shweta, the CEO. So this was the first time we actually had real data that said we are accomplishing our mission. It changed the orientation of the company, the morale. It gave them a sense that they were actually doing what they set out to do. This also gave us a lot of confidence that we could do this in a way that wasn't disruptive to companies' operations. And so we moved forward, not only using call centers, but again, taking advantage of cell phones. And so another project we did just this year was with a company called SolarNow in Uganda. Now SolarNow sells solar home systems, 50 watt systems across Uganda. Willem Nolan's a CEO of SolarNow and wanted to understand were these solar panels, 50 watt systems that cost about $340 affordable to the poorest customers. They were particularly concerned because the World Bank had had a subsidy of $250 per panel that had gone away. And so the way that Willem had responded was to introduce an 18 month financing program to make the panels be within reach of their end customers. So again, we did a series of SMS surveys to these end customers and the data came back was very confirmatory. In particular, we found that 49% of SolarNow's customers are living below $2.50 a day, a higher number than they had expected at the time. The customers were reporting nearly a complete stop using kerosene, 93% reduction of kerosene. And on average are using about two and a half hours of additional light per night, all very, very positive. Perhaps the most interesting part of this work though was we'd been experimenting with both closed-ended and open-ended questions. And so the very last question in our short survey was, is there anything else you'd like to tell us? And if you have a question of well, how good is the data you can get back from SMS, you can get really great data back. So 30% of the customers said, hey, I've got a problem. Maybe it's with the panel, maybe it's with the radio, maybe it's with the after-sales support. But all of a sudden, we weren't even looking for this and the company's getting this feedback in real time directly from their customers. So what did they do?  So they've directly addressed these problem performance issues, they've recruited a new customer service team. And again, most validating to us in terms of this being entrepreneur friendly is they have said, look, every quarter we're going to repeat this same set of questions because this gives us real-time data that we need to run our company better. And again, to see how well we're serving our customers and are we delivering the value we aim to deliver. We're getting other good data. We have a long list of examples, but this is with burn manufacturing, a cook stove manufacturer in Kenya. We surveyed their customers to see how much charcoal they were using and in fact, they are decreasing their charcoal expenditure by about 60%, which is in line with the company's expectations. And we're also using the PPI again across our entire portfolio to again see across different sectors, what is the different poverty profile of companies? The reason we think that's important is because ultimately a question we need to answer as a sector is, how far can the markets go to serve the poor? We know they can't go all the way there, but how are we going to answer this question while out data? And my call to action to the impact investing sector as a whole is, this is data that we can all collect today. And I would like to see a year from now or even two years from now at every impact investor who is again trying to serve poorer segments of the population, collect this data and start to share it because we're in a position to begin to compare who's doing a better job and who's doing a worse job in reaching the poorest segments of the population. I think this would start the conversation of not whether we should measure but what data we're getting back and how can we learn from it. Finally, although most of our work is going through SMS messaging and we're feeling it's very powerful, there are some limits, right? And so we're working with Guardian which is an investing of ours in India that is helping customers build sanitation and toilets. Asking in customers about the toilet usage over SMS it turns out is really a hard thing to do. And so we can't get that data back really reliably so we're working with some companies to help us develop a sensor that would end up trusively again see how the toilets are being used because if you don't use the toilet all the time obviously the health benefits aren't realized. We're also working with the company to sense us smoke in the cook stoves. So again the question is can we figure out a way to get the data to come back in a way that helps us learn and make sense for the customers. Finally I want to take again a little bit of a step back and say kind of what does this all mean and how can we as a whole pay attention to larger trends? And so a book came out this year called Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail and they tell a really powerful story to me. It starts with a company called NAVTEC. I had not heard of this company but NAVTEC was founded in the 1980s and by about 2007 they have developed the largest network of road sensors across Europe. So about a quarter million miles worth of these road sensors covering about 13 cities in Europe. So Nokia really saw value in traffic data management and really thought that this big infrastructure was going to be a valuable asset and so what did they do? They bought NAVTEC for $8.1 billion and thought that this would provide them a real competitive advantage but two other things happened in 2007. The first was we all remember Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone. The second which you probably don't remember was a small Israeli company was founded called Freemap. Now in two years Freemap was able to build a network of sensors that was as big as it had taken NAVTEC 25 years to develop. So how did they do that? Well they put it on the mobile phone. And by 2000 and by two years later than that they had actually 10 times as many of these sensors you probably recognize it more as the company called Waze. And so over the course of that time Waze becomes a $1 billion company. The value of NAVTEC goes from $8 billion down to $3 billion. So it's $5 billion of values is destroyed because the bet on big infrastructure is the wrong bet to make. We all know that we have these high powered computing devices in our pockets. And what they're doing is they're providing value to us and value to other members of the network through the information we're able to gather and share. We are experiencing that today every day in the developing world. But I think our opportunity really is that in the developed world can we use technology to amplify the voices of the two and a half billion people who are now coming online today? Our belief, our experience and our hope is that lean data helps accelerate that conversation to make these voices heard. And we hope that we can use this data so we can better serve them and move forward in accomplishing our collective mission. Thanks very much.


Welcome to TechSoup Talks. Today's webinar is Manager Data, Donations and More with CityCRM. My name is Kamie Griffiths and we'd like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series. And also thank presenters Dave Greenberg and Jeff Porter for taking time to put together such a great presentation. We'll be doing introductions in just a few minutes. To get us started I'd like to tell you a little bit about TechSoup for those of you who are new to what we do. We are working towards a time when every nonprofit and social benefit organization on the planet has the technology resources and knowledge they need to operate at their full potential. Here's a screen grab of our homepage. Again for those of you who are new to TechSoup there's quite a bit going on here. We've got our donation program where we take donations from companies like Microsoft Adobe Symantec and 36 other vendors and redistribute it to nonprofits and libraries for a low administrative cost. So you'll get Microsoft Office for $20 or $30 as opposed to $400. So if you want to check out more information about that you can go to Get Products. There's also articles and other learning programs on the Learning Center which is also where you can find the webinars. And there's more information on our community forums I had mentioned so if you have questions you post those community forums and we have a special project just for libraries as well. So there's a little bit about what we do. We've got some newsletters you can sign up for. So now I'd like to introduce our presenters and so happy to have their knowledge. This is the webinar I've been wanting to do for quite a while. City Theorem is really great yet complicated so I wanted for us to go through what City has to offer and then give you a case study about someone who is using it. So Dave let's get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure, Cammie. First of all, thanks Cammie for pulling this together. The folks on the City Theorem project and the community are really excited to have this opportunity to share this kind of outreach and bringing essentially more people into the community through the TechSoup channel. My name is Dave Greenberg and I've been working on the City Theorem project for five or six years pretty much since the beginning. Okay, I'm trying to speak up. I have a background in social work and community mental health and I have been working in IT for about 20-something years and very excited to partner with Donald Lobo and a great team of folks to put together the City Theorem project which we've been growing and working on for the last five, six years. And I'm excited to help present that to you in the coming hour. Great. Thanks Dave. So we're having quite a few comments about how it's hard to hear you. So I'll send you a chat message real quick while Jeff does his introduction. So Jeff, can you introduce yourself please? Sure. And hopefully people can hear me a little bit louder than Dave just in general but very, very excited to be here and talk about City Theorem. It's a platform we've been using in our organization for about four years now. And I got involved in the nonprofit space because my daughter was born with a genetic disorder and coming from a technology background, we got involved, my wife and I, in establishing a couple of different nonprofits as well as getting established with the Foundation for Broderly Research. And what we've done is focused a lot on how we can use technology to not just advance the organization from an operation standpoint but also help advance it from a fundraising and donor management standpoint. So when I'm not working in a nonprofit space, I spend quite a bit of time still in the technology sector but mostly focused on local search and discovery technology and mobile application development. Great. Welcome Jeff. And I'd also like to thank Elliot Harmon from TechSoup and Donald Bogle from City Theorem. They are answering chat questions so submit your questions. I won't answer it or it will be held to the very end. We have 15 minutes reserved for Q&A. Okay, so let's get started. First I'll go through the agenda. We're going to talk about what is City, the features that it has, and give you some examples of how it's being used. And we'll talk deeper about how the Foundation for Broderly Research is using City Theorem. We'll talk about how you can get started, we'll have some time for Q&A, and then just a quick wrap up. But before we get started, I want to do a quick poll to find out how you are currently tracking your information. So choose as many of these that apply to you.  So I'll give you a few seconds. And Dave, why don't we do a quick sound check? You said you're not using your headset? Yeah, I just took the headset off. Just using the handset. Is that better? It's a little bit better, but I think you're going to have to project a little bit more. Okay, I'll do my best. Hopefully you don't lose your voice over this. Okay, so we've got, I'll skip to results, and you should still be able to submit. So most everyone is using spreadsheets in some fashion. I imagine you're using multiple forms. A lot of quick book users out there. Oh, the paper users. We'll talk about that. And not tracking your data at all. Okay, so we're going to close this poll. There you go. You can see some of these answers bring back some familiar memories. Hopefully you've learned some lessons that you can share. Sure. Okay, so let's get started with, Sydney CRM offers many features. Dave, can you explain the different tools available and give some examples of how it's being used by nonprofits? Yeah, sure can, Cammy. Good question. So, Sydney CRM, the CRM part stands for constituent relationship management. And it's related to the idea of contact relationship management, which was started as Salesforce automation tools quite a while back. And at the beginning of the project, several of us realized that there was a need to come up with a solution for organizations in the civic sector. So, nonprofits, NGOs internationally, and subsequently other types of non-commercial organizations that would bring some of the benefits of CRM to that sector. And we had seen a lot of folks using spreadsheets and paper-based solutions for keeping track of constituents, and also saw that there was an increasing trend for organizations to be distributed, to have virtual staff, not necessarily to have everybody in one place where they could get to a file cabinet or a single desktop computer. And so, the idea of having a web-based solution seemed to make sense. We were also concerned that a lot of nonprofits were putting a lot of their precious revenue resources into really expensive proprietary licensing solutions. And it felt to us like there would be a place for an open-source tool. For those of you who are not familiar with open-source as a concept, we're not going to spend a lot of time on it. But basically, the idea is that anybody can have access to the source code. Anybody can take that source code and modify it and customize it to do things differently than what it does out of the box. And that people can share those distributions. And so, part of the concept in the nonprofit sector is that if organizations can collaborate around their requirements and share resources to help develop solutions that really meet their requirements, then that's great for the sector overall. We also felt like it was a good idea to see about combining the types of information sharing that could happen on a website with the actual information about constituents. And so, from the beginning was integrated into two different open-source content management systems. And you might see the acronym CMS up here, and that's what that stands for. Again, I think there was a webinar on CMS pretty recently, and hopefully people have an idea of what they are. But basically, it's kind of the modern way to have a website that's dynamic and can be interactive and where you don't need to go to a website developer and ask them every time you want to add content or change what's on your website. The CIBCROM team is located in three different countries, U.S., Poland, and India. And the platform is localized. It's been translated into more than 20 languages, and we have volunteer folks working on those translations all over the world, really, which is really exciting. And it means that if you have the need to maintain your constituent information in more than one language, that's definitely one benefit that CIBCROM has. I moved it forward for you. So one of the big benefits that CIBCROM brings to nonprofits is the idea that you can have all your data in one place. Before I was working on this project, I worked at another organization that was offering online fundraising solutions for folks, and it was a pretty cool tool, and a lot of people liked it and used it. But then when they wanted to do mailings, for instance, online mailings for any newsletter, they had another place where they had that data. And if they were running events, then maybe they had another place where they had information about people who had registered for events. And another spreadsheet where they might be keeping information about grants or cases working with clients. And one of the things that CIBCROM does that I think is really exciting for the sector and really a great benefit is that it keeps all that data in one place, knowing that whether somebody is a volunteer, a member, a client, a staff person, somebody who comes to an event, first of all, these people often wear lots of different hats. And donors go to events and sort of volunteers. And being able to see all that and understand when you're looking at a particular constituent, all the different ways that they've interacted with the organization is a really great benefit and something that CIBCROM offers. To illustrate that a little bit more clearly, this is from one of our training sites, an example of a home dashboard that you can have in CIBCROM. And if you kind of look at it a little bit more closely, you can see that you have the ability to have information about donations that have been happening on a month-to-month basis. If your organization does case management, you can have information about open cases for you as the person who's looking at this dashboard. And these are just two examples, but this dashboard can also include information about events that you're running, how your membership campaign is going, basically all the different ways that your constituents are interacting. And the dashboard is customizable so that the person who is the development director might want a dashboard that's really focused on donations while somebody who's working on running events might want to really be focused on house registration coming for our golf event, for instance. So you really have the opportunity to have the big picture at the organization level by bringing together all these different kinds of data. When you're beginning to look at a particular constituent, the model is very much constituent-centric or contract-centric. So when you're looking at a constituent, you can potentially have information about how they participated in events, when they've given contributions of whether they have, do they have outstanding pledges, have they received newsletters from you, e-newsletters, and what are the kinds of meetings, phone calls, and other interactions you might have had with them, volunteering episodes, et cetera. In order to see how that might look on a real civi screen, here's an example of a civi screen for a particular constituent of Ms. Jane Black. And we can see that we have her name up there. And this area, we have a whole bunch of different tabs with little numbers by them. And those numbers are basically indicating to us a level of engagement, different kinds of engagement that that constituent has had with my organization. You also get a nice snapshot from a summary point of view of information about them, who their employer is, conservation core, what their position is, the ability to store work address, home address, actually as many addresses as you want, privacy information, phone number, email, all that kind of information. All here has sort of been one nice snapshot for you to look at for the client. Another benefit that civi screen brings to the table as a solution that's integrated with your website, with your CMS is the ability to self-service collect information from your constituents. This is an example of a user registration page for the International Mountain Biking Association. And you can see that we're collecting account information here at the top, such as username and email address, but down below there is another part of the form that is completely configurable that civi surround provides that allows you to collect whatever other information you might need about this particular constituent who is becoming a user on your website who's getting ready to interact with your website, potentially blog post content, et cetera. So the fact that you can do this and that the constituent can come back at a later point and keep their information up to date, you can prompt them to stay up to date and they can take care of that information and make sure that the information that you have for them is accurate is another benefit that civi brings to you based on being web-based and integrated with your CMS. One of the nice things about a web-based tool is it allows us to integrate with other web services and a nice example of that is a map integration that civi surround comes with out of the box where you can basically sign up for a free Google or Yahoo map account and once you have that, any of the constituents that you have in the database are geocoded and can be displayed on a map. And this is an example where I've actually done a quick search for people who are on a particular committee and it's returned basically the physical locations of the three people that are in San Francisco on that committee and one of the things that allows me to do is figure out where we should have a committee meeting because I can see where each of them are and what location might be convenient for them. But there's a lot of other interesting things that you can do once you're able to show maps both for constituents as well as things like event locations. So now let's start looking at some of the, quickly at some of the components that are part of civi in a little bit more detail. We have a component called civi contribute which is focused around fundraising and provides support for recording online and offline donations. Includes a wide variety of built-in reports and a configurable dashboard. You can use what we call smart groups which is basically a safe search type function to be able to pull out lists of people based on giving criteria between giving ranges, giving dates, all kinds of different criteria, demographic criteria, et cetera. And then use those smart groups potentially to drive your communications whether email, mail, mail, et cetera. There's also a personal campaign page feature which basically allows your constituents to become fundraisers on your behalf and set up their own giving portals. And Jeff's actually gonna talk about that in quite a bit of detail because his group uses that feature a lot. One of the things that to the offers we mentioned is this online donation capability and this is an example of a site for a concern worldwide which is an organization based in Ireland but global which does fundraising for international crisis situations. They used Civi CRM last year to raise more than $2 million for the Haiti earthquake and continue to use Civi for a number of different appeals. You can see that on this page they basically have an invitation to donate or to drill down more deeply and learn about a particular appeal and donate at that level because Civi CRM allows you to offer as many different contribution pages as you want with a point and click interface to create them. You can have lots of different campaigns and separate contribution pages for them that really are focused on different tasks and different things that your organization is doing. Couple of other features in the online campaign, online contribution page functionality. This is a page from the Mozilla Foundation. They have a drumbeat campaign to raise money for the foundation and for Firefox development and you notice that one of the things that they're featuring up front is the ability to get a really cool t-shirt which is an example of a thank you gift and Civi CRM allows you to configure thank you gifts as part of your online contribution or offline contribution functionality and set things like contribution levels. See there's a question about recurring donations which I will speak to because you can actually see on this particular example that the contributors invited to either make a one-time or recurring contribution. That functionality is available a bit conditionally depending upon what payment processor you use and Civi CRM offers quite a few different plug-in payment processors depending upon what's going to make sense for your organization, your contribution volume, where you're located and quite a few other factors. I mentioned the idea of personal campaign pages and here's an example of one for Creative Commons which is another Civi CRM user organization and this is one of the board members and founders of Creative Commons, Laura Slesing who is prompting folks out in his community to help contribute and support the Creative Commons cause and as you can see these personal campaign pages are kind of cool because they allow each of your fundraising constituents to set a goal. There's not one in here but you can also have like an honor list that scrolls with the names of folks who have given and in the back office, people who give through a portal like this, the person who's portal it is, winds up getting what we call a soft credit which is a concept that should be familiar to those of you who are in the development side so that you can see who your really active and successful fundraisers are. Second key feature or set of functionality in Civi is the event functionality and you have the ability to create as many events as you want and have both the event listings, event information pages and online registration integrated with your Drupal or Juma website.  It's very easy to figure out either who's coming or who has come to a press event and communicate with them via email again or a snail mail or export that information to share with other applications or other people. You have the ability to set up a simple fee structure for events or a very complex sort of shopping cart like the structure where people can say, you know, I want to go to this session and not this session and I want to have lunch and I want to have the CD afterwards or whatever. So it's pretty robust set of event functionality. Here's a simple example of an event signup page from the Gay Straight Alliance Network which is another Civi CRM user and they are registering people for a leadership summit and very simple, this is a free event so there's no pricing involved. Basically we're collecting an email address and then some additional information all of which is configured in Civi CRM as you're creating the event and again allows you to collect a very rich amount of information from your event participants which becomes part of your database. Another type of functionality in Civi CRM is the ability to offer memberships that have a defined set of benefits and a duration. They may be free, they're generally paid. We can support online or offline signup and renewal of these memberships so again the self-service functionality is something that is really powerful and can help save staff time and resources. You can also use memberships to limit access to various pieces of content on your website so there may be special parts of your website that you only want members to see. Here's an example of a membership signup, self-service membership signup form for the Aviation Management Association. There are quite a few trade associations using Civi CRM because of this membership functionality. You see that you can offer lots of different membership levels that may have different pricing, different durations based on the type of personal organization that's joining. So again, a really cool feature. Members become part of your database just like event participants just like donors and of course somebody may be all of the above. Civi has a built-in broadcast email functionality called Civi Mail which allows you to do bulk mail and e-newsletter type communications directly from your CRM which of course means that you can use all the information that you've been collecting and that we've been talking about to filter and focus your communications on particular segments of your constituents based on people who've come to events, money that they've given, who's a member, etc. The email tool includes click-through tracking so you can see who's responding to various links and prompts that you have in your email campaigns as well as bounce handling. And there's again self-service via the website recipients can manage their own subscriptions to mailing lists. Of course opt out directly from the mailing if they don't want to receive it anymore. So one of the last things I want to mention in terms of functionality is the fact of the customizability. And so we have a really wide variety of folks using Civi CRM many of which use it pretty much as it is out of the box but sometimes there's a need to develop very custom workflows, custom aspects of a particular feature set and that's one of the cool things about being an open source project. The code is there and if you have in-house development resources or can engage them, there's a supportive developer community that can help them figure out the best ways to customize the application and to make it do special things that you need it to do. And this is an example of the Maryland Family Network had some very specific needs about setting up training requirements by staff physician and center and a very complex registration process for their family support centers and their consultant was able to use Civi and extend Civi very easily to make it support their needs. One of the features that they used which is a really powerful part of Civi CRM is the ability to create custom fields for pretty much all the kinds of records that you have in your database. So this is an example of some custom fields that were created for the Maryland Family Network to be able to control various aspects of their training registration flow and I just demonstrated here as an example of the kind of things that you can do in Civi CRM pretty much out of the box and setting up custom fields is not actually a developer task. It's a point and click administrative task so there's a lot that you can do without having an actual engineer involved. So that pretty much is that's kind of your 3,000 foot view of the top level features and functionality in the system. There's also a case management component which we can answer a few questions on later if that's important to folks here and a very simple grants management functionality as well but we've kind of covered the top level here. So before I wrap up this part I just wanted to mention a little bit about the community. So Civi has been designed from the beginning to try to meet the needs of a pretty wide variety of organizations in the nonprofit sector and you can see some examples here. And the sectors within nonprofits range from foundations like the Wikimedia Foundation to small community arts organizations like the Wellington Circus Trust, human rights organizations like Frontline Defenders, political parties, New Zealand and Australia and Canada Green Party are some examples of that. We've seen trade association examples and more recently government entities such as the New York Senate and the European Union have been using Civi CRM. The Senate is using it to keep track of interactions with their constituents. There's also a lot of schools and religious organizations, synagogues, churches, church-based organizations using Civi CRM so it's a really diverse community and the fact that within the Civi interface it's very easy to turn on and off various components. So I showed you a lot of stuff but you can decide that we don't use membership. So basically you click one particular checkbox and the membership stuff disappears. Civi also has been growing quite rapidly. We've got, as you can see, almost 400,000 downloads since 2006 and that number is probably already obsolete. We believe we've got more than 3,500 active installations again around the world and a really active forum which is a great place to interact with other people in the community, ask questions, answer questions and figure out whether, it's also a good place to come and figure out whether Civi CRM might be good for your organization by asking very specific questions. And we'll provide links to this and other resources at the end of the session. So with that I think I'm going to turn the mic back to Kami and we'll take on the next part of our agenda. Great. Thanks, Dave. So many great questions coming through the chat. Hopefully you are getting them answered by Donald but we're holding them for the Q&A. And perhaps Jeff will answer some questions during this portion. So Jeff, we're using your organization, the Foundation for Prada Willy Research as a case study to show folks how it's being used in the field. So can you tell us how you're using it, Civi CRM, and some of the benefits as well as some of the challenges? Yeah, absolutely. So we'll talk about, I'll give you a brief introduction to who we are and kind of how we raise money. And then we'll get into why we picked it and what we use it for, kind of what our fundraising philosophy is, how it's evolved, and then just some advice on how to make it work. So real briefly here, at PWR found in 2003, it's a rare genetic disorder. There's millions of them out there. This one happened to inflict my daughter. She's the one in the top there at the Blind Hair. And it's an organization where we're trying to help families and individuals impacted by the disorder. And the way we do that is we go out and we raise money and then we manage a research process where we give out grants to individual researchers who are doing medical research that can help find treatments and hopefully ultimately some sort of cure for it. So we funded over $1.3 million in projects since we were found in 2003. And here's kind of just a general history of the organization that I've mapped to some of the technology milestones that we've run into. I joined in late 2005 and starting in kind of 2006 timeframe, we started to really try to ramp up our fundraising efforts and use more technology. So before I joined, there was about 10 to 20 donors. These were folks that were large contributors. There was no real website there was a very basic brochureware type of website. There was no online marketing being done. There was no donor management system. It came in in late 2005. And at that point in time we were evaluating different types of web technologies trying to figure out what we were going to do. And we installed a very, very preliminary version of a package called CivicSpace which was a combination of a Drupal CMS system coupled with CVCRM. And we didn't really do much with it at the time. We kind of installed it and we were trying to figure out where we wanted to go with it. And we kept the old website up and decided though that we needed to really expand our fundraising effort beyond just a couple of large donors in one or two events that were happening within the U.S. So 2006 things kind of got kicked off. And there we implemented CVCRM 1.3. There was a module that came with it called Civi Contribute which was the online contribution module. And that's specifically what we needed when we started. That allowed us to, through PayPal website payments bro, take a payment and be able to go out there and have people come back to our website and make an online donation. So we kicked off some new fundraisers. We had some folks who were parents of Children with Prada Really Syndrome who decided that they wanted to fundraise for us. And so they ran some fundraisers and we drove those donations back to our website. And then we started to kind of think about the whole process of donor management and where we wanted to go with it. So from 2007 to 2010 things have kind of evolved a little bit. We've continued to implement new versions of CVCRM. New features have come out during that time frame, stuff like Civi Event which allowed us to do event registrations, the personal campaign page system. We were involved kind of early on in helping to try to figure out how that should work. We were also trying to also evolve our fundraising process. We're an organization that's very virtual. We have a very small office in Washington, DC, but beyond that most of our folks are kind of all over the country or board is all over the country. We've got now international affiliates in Canada and elsewhere. And so this is an organization that's doing most of its marketing and most of its fundraising online. So how can we leverage technology and how can we also leverage some of the new technological trends and online trends to kind of evolve our fundraising process? So that's what this next slide is showing you. So we started out with this whole idea of, and there's some things missing here, but catching the big fish, right? We're going to have one or two major events. We're going to focus on large contributions. We did some golf tournaments, some galas. We still do some of those, but they're very resource-intensive. They take a lot of time and effort to put on. Hey, they raise a decent amount of money, but how do we go beyond that? So we started kind of in the 2006-2007 timeframe expanding into what we would call more online events, hosting walks and smaller types of fundraisers across the country. And it's getting more of the families involved. Hey, we don't need you to host a golf tournament or run a gala, but can you have a small event in your neighborhood or whatnot? So we might have been raising something in the order of $100,000 to $200,000 in the first model. In the second model, we're talking more, maybe $30,000 or $40,000. But there was more of them. And now where we've evolved is we want to go mass market. So we want to build out these online fundraising pages. I want anybody to be able to log into our website using our software and be able to set up a fundraising page and go out there, share it with their friends across social networks, and try to raise money. And each fundraiser in this model might be only raising $1,000 or $2,000, but our goal is to get hundreds of these people onto our system. So when we started out, why did we pick CiviciRM? Well, in the beginning we were pretty small. We didn't have a gigantic budget, and we wanted to be able to have something that we felt could kind of adapt and grow with us. And when you talk about costs, it's interesting. We went out there and did a due diligence on a lot of the commercial applications out there. A lot of these folks wanted $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 set up these. A lot of these different systems were looking to take 4 or 5 or 6% of your gross income in terms of kind of an online or kind of an annual maintenance fee. And they were really looking for organizations that were raising at least $1 million a year. So you're not looking at it thinking, okay, if I'm raising $1 million a year, I don't really want to pay $30,000 or $40,000 a year to some sort of online system. I could probably pay a software developer way less than that to maintain what we have. So that's kind of where we started. The other reason we chose and have stuck with CiviciRM over the years is they continue to enhance the product. And the other thing is, is that I would say we've gotten better support out of this platform than we've gotten out of a number of other commercial software applications that we've used. And I've spent a lot of time in the tech industry, and I'll have to say even on the commercial side, in my non-non-profit experience, the support has just been spectacular. So I've had a very good experience with being able to go into the online forums, post a question, and within hours get a response. That's a very helpful response. And know that I can look at the roadmap, know what kind of features are coming out, that particular types of defects or things that are affecting us. We can either A, go and customize and fix right away, or we can wait for an upcoming release and know that they're going to get fixed. The other thing is, we are looking for something that does the job, but doesn't overwhelm us with features and functionality. So we're looking for something that we would say is meeting our basic needs and allowing us to kind of expand from there. Like I mentioned earlier, in terms of customizations and cost, I would rather spend money on customizing and adapting the software than I would on paying an annual licensee and hoping that the vendors roadmap and our roadmap align. So what do we use? We use a bunch of different stuff, but this is the stuff here that we've stuck with. We use Civic Contribute and then attached to that is something called a personal campaign page. So we're able to take a donation online. And then the beauty of the personal campaign pages is that we can have individual fundraisers have their own page out there and that kind of connects into our system. So we're collecting that money as well. We used to use a tool called CityMember to manage membership, but we've eliminated membership from our organization, so we don't charge membership fees anymore. But when we were using it, it was great. It would allow you to set up different types of membership. You can have lifetimes and annuals and whatnot. You can set dues. It will remind people that they need to renew. You can establish permissions and access to various parts of your site based on their membership status. So it's a useful module for those that process and manage membership. We do use Civic Event. We used to use it more before the personal campaign page system came out, but we still use it to register people for any sort of conference that we have or any other type of paid event that we're going to have. And then on the donor database side, I mean this is kind of the heart of why you use these tools is that you want to be able to track and record donations. We managed all of our contacts in here. We do not use our accounting system to manage donors. I know a lot of answers came out about using QuickBooks. I know a lot of nonprofits that do that. All of our information that comes out of Civic is summarized before it goes into QuickBooks. So we don't store individual contact records in our QuickBooks system for donation. We go in and we will say online donations total this amount, and that's the number that's recorded in our QuickBooks system. And then we handle all the individual contact records in our donor database instead. So Jeff, I'm going to interrupt because we're running short on time. So I wanted to jump ahead to talk about getting started using Civvie. Did you have any last points that you wanted to make before we jump to that? Yeah, I'll finish the slide. And then we use the Civvie Mail system to do mass mailings. And we've actually outsourced that to an external service which I recommend you guys take a look at called Civvie SMTP. Thank you so much. Sorry for interrupting. So we're going to jump to just one slide ahead and talk about because there's so many questions. How do I get started? What are the costs? So this is what people are asking about. So Dave, can you explain the process for getting started with Civvie CRM and what do you need to think about beforehand and who should you have involved? Sure. And I'm going to hook Jeff to jump in here a little bit as well since he's the one who's had the experiences of actually doing this as opposed to me on the platform side. But in terms of what you need physically, you need to have a web server or identify a web server that you can use with a hosting provider. You will need to have either Drupal or Joomla CMS running on that web server before you can install Civvie CRM. And then we've got this item here called Prepare Your Data, and that's probably the biggest. No matter what kind of database you're moving into, you need to think a lot about data migration and figure out what data you have, where is it, what parts of it do you need, and do data cleaning to hopefully get rid of a lot of garbage before you actually move it into a new system like Civvie CRM. You do need either a volunteer with technical skills, some of the in-house, an IT person, or hiring a consultant to do the installation. I wouldn't recommend somebody who is not technical at all to take that on. That said, we have a lot of small organizations where volunteers have done this for them. Obviously a consultant can do that for you as well. In terms of the team, you're going to want to be thinking about what you're going to use Civvie for, whether it's membership development events, case management, and make sure that there are folks on your team who have domain expertise in those areas. Somebody asked on the chat whether you can actually start with one piece of this functionality and then grow and extend it to be used for other parts of your organization. We actually really recommend that, figuring out maybe where the biggest need is and where you have folks who are really ready to work on some change management with you and bring them into the process and see about getting Civvie up and used for one particular area, maybe it's events, maybe it's the online fundraising piece, and then begin to explore how you can use it and expand it in the organization for other kinds of functionality. Jeff, do you want to add anything to that? No. I mean, there was a lot of questions floating around about what is the nature of this setup? This is a module or an extension to Drupal or Juma. Both CMSs call it something different, but you start by having that setup and host it somewhere and then you add this component to it. Are there folks that will do that for you? There are, right? And there's even hosting companies that will probably do the installation for you as well. And when I say installation, they'll likely set up Drupal for you and they'll likely install the Civvie CRM module, but in terms of configuring it to your needs and importing your data, that one I doubt they'll do. They might do that as some sort of custom work, but there are other consultants out there. If you don't have technical resources on staff who can help you with that as well. And a lot of that work is non-programming related. You don't need to have a programming background to import your data and be able to customize Civvie CRM from the admin GUI, but you have to be fairly technical in the sense that you need to be able to feel comfortable being able to manipulate a spreadsheet and then import that spreadsheet map data fields and whatnot. So the question comes up, what does Civvie CRM cost? And of course, the software is free. There's no licensing cost, so that's the beginning of it, but nothing is free in this world and certainly not in the software world. So the answer to that question is difficult. When we were discussing this earlier, Jeff compared it to asking what does a car cost, which I think is a good analog, because it really depends a lot on what you want to do with it, how much help you can get from in-house resources and volunteers versus paying a consultant, how much data you have, how complex is that data, how complex is your organization in terms of the various folks that are going to be using the CRM and what they need to be doing with it. So really that's a really tough question to ask, to answer. And what we'd say is that you definitely need administrative resources to maintain the data, and in some way you need some technical admin resources to manage things like deduplication, data import and export, and setting up custom data. Many of these are one-time tasks, however, and in terms of the people who use the system on a day-to-day basis, certainly a little bit of training. There is one really great book out there and another one coming soon for people who like to learn that way. We have various tutorials, online tutorials on civisrum.org that also can be used, as well as live training sessions for folks who learn best that way. But training is definitely an important part of this. If you don't have folks in-house with some technical abilities to help you think about the data structure, customizations that you might need, how to move your data, where to host, then that's where you're going to be looking for an IT partner. Civisrum.org has a really good list of professional service providers. We don't have any interest in any of them, but they're up there for you to look at and talk to and obviously get references from. But selecting a partner is important. And I guess the main thing I would advise people not to do is to assume that the person that built their website or designed their logo is the same person who would be good to help them installing a CRM and configuring a CRM because those are very different skill sets. Hopefully you can find somebody who has experience with open source and experience with Civisrum and they can show you and tell you about other organizations that they've helped. And hopefully those organizations that have some similar use cases and structure to yours. And you'll want to ask them, if you think that you might need some customization, you'll want to talk to them about how they go about customizing the platform. Because there are definitely best practices for doing that where you're not creating upgrade problems for you in the future. And that should be something that they have a very clear answer to if you ask them that question. Next steps for those of you who are just sort of getting engaged, there is a really awesome free book online called Understanding Civisrum that kind of takes you from the top level in terms of what the pieces are and what they do and who is using them down into a lot of details about configuration and everyday tasks. We have a public demo which you are free to play with and try stuff out and that's another good way to get your hands in. Talking to other people on the forums at local meetups, find out how they are using it, what's working for them, what's not, potentially a consultant, as well as installing a test system of your own and bringing in some of your data and seeing how that works for you. And with that, I'm going to turn it back to Kami for I think Q&A. Exactly. There's been a ton of questions and I'm so thankful to have Donald answering questions rapidly and Elliot for pulling them so I can sort through them. So you did a great job of giving us an overview of what you need to get it set up. So most likely people will need to have somebody set it up for them who has that expertise and that means hiring a consultant. What in general do they charge for the service? Can you give us a ballpark? Jeff, do you have a familiar experience with what you use? I set it up for my own organization. You know, I don't really know the answer to that. We moved one organization that we're affiliated with to a company called Springs Hosting in Colorado Springs and they set it up for us for free in exchange for a contract. So when I say set it up, I mean obviously it was a shared system so they had to install all the modules themselves and give everything kind of ready and configured for us to go in and customize it on the website. But I really don't have a number for you. I think some of these hosting companies have either automated it or would probably give you the ability to do it yourself or might even do it for you as long as it's straightforward enough. So it's good for people to make a couple phone calls and get some quotes? I would think so. The one thing that I have heard is I've heard quotes on the data migration piece ranging from 2000 and up depending upon the size and complexity of the data. And that's probably one of the biggest parts of the task is having someone look at the data that you have in one or many, many places figuring out what you need in terms of custom fields and then actually getting that data cleaned up and moved. And there are folks out there on our professional services list who actually specialize in that. And it can be definitely something in your budget. I would say if you don't have research to do that in-house I would be looking at at least $3,000 if not more for that. And it depends on the state of your data. I mean we skipped this slide in the presentation but getting your data in a very good and organized and accurate state before you dump it into CVCRM is a smart idea. It really doesn't matter what system you would use dumping inaccurate or disorganized data and theirs aren't going to help you. So number one, getting your information organized and set. I would do as much of that as you can yourself because that's just spreadsheet work before you hire a resource to import it. And I was trying to pull up that slide that you were referring to. Plus everyone you'll get this PowerPoint later today. So another question that came up about a dedicated employee and I know we skipped over the best practices for maintaining your data but this goes for any database. Do you need to have a dedicated employer? What would you recommend for keeping your data organized and current? I think you need an organized process and depending on how big and complicated your company is or how many donors or records you have in your database that might dictate whether it's a full-time job or not. Our problem was even when we had 50 people and I say 50, not 50 employees, 50 donors when I came around, the processes were bad enough where it wasn't working for us. So first and foremost whether it's a part-time job or not, you need to have a very organized process. What I mean by that is how do you maintain this information? Where does it source from? If somebody is going to fundraise from you and they're going to send you a bunch of checks in the mail, do you have the right information to be able to record that donor into your database? How often are you refreshing that information? You need to understand what CIVI does to your data. So when somebody logs in and creates another donation, how that record gets updated. You need to make sure you understand how that works. So it's just understanding all those pieces and making them work out. And then for our organization, Foundation for Proto-Really Research, we have 5,000 solid donor records. And we do not need a full-time staff person to maintain those. But every so often we will bring in additional resources and we will go through a process where we will have to contact and try to clean up and just update and refresh that data. So let's give to a question regarding security and a concern about hosting data online. So can you talk a little bit about the risks or if there are risks associated with hosting your data online? I would say that there are risks. There are risks, security risks for data no matter where you have it. Whether you have it on a single desktop, in a spreadsheet or an access database, or whether you have it online, again it's really a matter of processes. If you've got it on a desktop, you have the risk of the data not being backed up. You have the risk of somebody having access to that computer and exporting the data and doing things with it that you don't want them to do. You have the risk of a person whose computer it is getting hit by a bus and nobody knows how to log into the computer. So I think the risks that you have online and offline, they are somewhat different but it really has to do with making sure that you have processes in terms of either you or your hosting provider is doing the right kind of backups, is maintaining the latest versions of the operating system, the web server, the database manager, and both CIVISRM and your content manager. So those are best practices that help guarantee that you have a secure setup. And I do think that the risks are in some ways quite comparable but just a bit different and it's a matter of making sure that you follow good procedures. Dave, I think you're right because I think whether it's online or offline isn't really whether you're storing it in some sort of distributed fashion or you're storing it in some sort of file. We have one organization who had that concern. The moving data in CIVISRM which would be in a hosted database format was going to be less secure than keeping it in Microsoft Access but this is the same organization that stuck their Access database up in one location and then gave everybody file share access to it because they need the multiple users to access it. And to me that's less secure and a little bit more stressful than the other model. So it's important to know that regardless of how you're storing your information there's pros and cons of doing that. You just need to make sure that you're doing it the right way. Well, this has been a great presentation and obviously we could continue for another half hour at least an hour. But I've posted this resource slide for you guys to see that there's some links to explore once you get this presentation. The book that Dave had mentioned is right here. So also I want to let you know that next, let's see, your questions haven't been answered. Please post those to our community forums. I'm going to send out a link to everyone right now where you can post those questions. The next webinar we're offering is December 9th on winning grants. I'll be sending you a link to that as well in the post event message. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series. And for everyone thank you so much for attending today's webinar. It's been a ton of great information. I hope your questions were answered. Again, post additional questions to the forums if you didn't get them answered and watch for an email from me this afternoon with more information. So Dave and Jeff, thank you so much. This has been really helpful and really interesting. Obviously stimulated in a lot of questions. So thanks again. You're welcome. Great, thank you. And thanks everybody for your participation and all the great questions. Wonderful. So thanks all. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.


British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Tuesday that he was on Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Shyshe Nazkaya's side. He also hints that he supported democracy and civil society in the former Soviet Republic. One of the first governments to put sanctions on the government of President Lukashenko and we remain committed to supporting the Federation, civil society, democracy, human rights. BBC is out there, I hope. Thank you, you know, that's the United Kingdom since the very beginning supported us and for it. And maybe the United Kingdom is supporting Belarus many, many years already. And after the corruption, you know, your documents were first that had been sent out and it means that when the Russian closer was going on and, you know, regime felt that in your diplomats' festival and the diplomats' case, we used to make money. It was very important.


All hell's broke loose, I'm crying, my eyelash is wrecked. The tablet of terror goes off on the last day. That's all we need. Not today. He sent me, George and Kate to the beach. When Beth came out of the water, to be fair, I was a bit like, there's not long left, so I really weren't bothered. I got sent on a mate date with Beth just to like clear the air, have a little bonding time, because we are pals at the end of the day, we do get on. Come back into the villa, lay my cards on the table and just said to Nat, nothing happened on the date, we went birdwatching, you're the only bird for me. We've done a bit of birdwatching, but at the end of the day there's only one bird for me in it. A bit cheesy, but that's how it is at the end of the day. I've told the girl every day how I feel. As soon as I looked at her, she was pissed and I knew I was in trouble. Like whatever I said, I was going to be fucked. What's up? Is it the hat? In the next minute, she's throwing chairs and I'm thinking, do I really deserve all this?  I met her when I beefed her. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to hear it. I don't know you, but you banged right before.  It's happened before you even... It's happened before you met you. It's irrelevant. It is irrelevant. I banged the girl before I met you. Shit hits the fan because I've had a drink.  I kick off all house broke glues. I'm crying. My eyelashes are wrecked.   Oh my God, all right, I might do up. Oh my God, you've lost it, mate.  I had a monumental meltdown. What goes on in my head? Why have I got to be in that job? I'm just really disappointed about the whole situation. I've had such a good time in this villa with Nat. And on the last night, for something so little and bitter to kick off like that, I'm just... I don't know, I'm a bit taken back by it, if I'm honest. I honestly thought better of the girl. River thinks of the wall.  I didn't think Natley was that girl. I thought she was better than that. I do not want to speak to you. We've had a great day today.  I've not had a heavy object thrown at my head. I swear to God. Why are you getting involved? I'm not going to let you do that. Can we talk to the plant? I don't know what people were drinking last night, but everyone was just round with each other.  We were on a date when we get fucked. You didn't, you weren't even there. What are you starting? I swear to God. Because you're jealous, you're bitter. And to be fair, the only people that didn't actually argue last night was Aaron and Dominica. There's one little situation and everyone jumps on it and gets involved and it just blows up. There's just no need for it.  For a reason.   I think I have royally messed this up. Oops. I'm done with the whole ag. I'm glad it's over. I've had an absolute blinder. Well, this is a good glass night, ain't it? And hopefully I can sort things out in that. It's goodbye from me.


If you see also the volumes of tether compared to the rest of stablecoins, that they are insanely higher. They are even 10 times higher on a bad day. This is Paolo Ardoino, the CTO of tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer. Stablecoins, whose value is backed by real-world assets, are among the fastest growing cryptocurrencies. USDC, the second largest stablecoin, has been gaining market share and could threaten soon tether's dominance. USDC is not more regulated if an average TV is provided by the competition does not make it true. In this video, we talk about tether's key role in spreading crypto adoption. We also discuss how tether plans to keep its leading position in an increasingly competitive stablecoin market. I'm Giovanni, your host, and this is a Cointelegraph interview. So Paolo, let's talk about Plan B. Tether recently entered a partnership with the Swiss city of Lugano in order to make Bitcoin, tether and the local stablecoin Luga de facto legal tender in the city. So can you tell us a bit more about the project and what is the current status of it? So we are used to live in an industry that is the crypto industry that is really often abstract. We wanted, as tether and Bitfinex as a group of companies, we wanted to provide a first use case of a clear adoption of three of the, well, two of the most used cryptocurrencies in the world, Bitcoin and tether. And then, of course, the local stablecoin created by the city of Lugano. We wanted to show how using these three cryptos, the citizens could extremely benefit from, first of all, improvement in terms of accessibility to financial services and improvement in terms of reduction of transaction fees. We know that now the majority of payments are done through credit cards. And then these credit cards have a variable fee from 35% using stablecoins that fee could remain in the pockets of either the customer of the merchant or the merchant itself. So we wanted to actually build in an ecosystem in a contained environment because Lugano has 70,000 inhabitants. So it's a fairly contained environment. So we wanted to start from something we could, in a way, control that we could oversee to ensure that the adoption of these three cryptocurrencies would happen in the most organic way but with the highest quality. And so what can citizens of Lugano concretely do with cryptocurrency now? So the city is, so the administration of the city is working to allow the citizens to pay citizens and tourists. So the citizens to pay taxis and all the city services in the Luga, Tether, and Bitcoin. And of course, all the tourists that come and use the city services in stealing the three currencies. Of course, it will take a few weeks or a few months anyway in order to have all these new payment systems integrated into the city accounting. The second step is now nowadays there are already 200 merchants that are supporting Luga stablecoin and more than 100 that are also supporting Bitcoin payments already. So what will happen in the next months and we are already well had in working with different partners to provide, to create a simple offering for the merchants of the city to have a new point of sale system and that will accept both credit and debit cards but also crypto payments in the three currencies that we mentioned Bitcoin, Tether, and Luga stablecoin. This initiative reminds me of what happened in El Salvador last year where Bitcoin was accepted was adopted as legal tender by law. So that law was a bit controversial because essentially all merchants in the country were forced to accept Bitcoin if they were offered Bitcoin as a means of payment. As far as I understand in Lugano, it works differently. No, it is not. So as you said, there is a difference. This is in Lugano, there is a de facto legal tender in the sense that the city will support. So all the administration will support these three cryptocurrencies for all the city services and will help the education of the citizens and merchants to understand why is going to be extremely beneficial for them and in a way a no-brainer to adopt Bitcoin and Tether and Luga as payment systems. I believe that it's important to not force this thing through all the merchants. It's important that people have the choice and that they have the freedom of choice. The difference between Lugano and El Salvador is actually the population and the base wealth. Lugano is a rich city in Switzerland that is one of the richest countries, if not the richest country in the world. El Salvador is a country in Latin America that is not as rich and there is a percentage of unbanked that is extremely high. So Bitcoin for El Salvador is part of a primary infrastructure and financial infrastructure while Lugano is optional but is a benefit that could benefit for merchants that will potentially make more business. And that is completely fine, right? Different places, different use cases, Bitcoin is for everyone. So let's talk about Tether now, USDT is currently the world's largest stablecoin. However, USDC, Tether's main competitor, is quickly gaining market share. So the market cap of USDC stood at around $6 billion over a year ago while today it stands at around $51 billion. And according to arcane research, USDC would overtake Tether as the largest stablecoin in June if it continues growing at the same rate. So what do you think is the reason behind USDC's impressive growth and what is Tether's plan in order to maintain its dominance in the stablecoin market? So first of all, I have read the research but things change. Look at what happened the last 30 days. Tether grew almost 3.2 percent, USDC dropped 2.8 percent, something like that. So one month ago the discrepancy between Tether and USDC, your Tether USDT and USDC was $26 billion, nowadays is $31 billion. So actually in the last 30 days, Tether regained momentum. And you can see the reason I believe that Tether is growing so fast is that Tether is really perceived as an instrument of freedom, a solution, a tool that helps everyone. It's not a tool built for the banks. It's not a tool made for Wall Street. It's a tool that everyone, the last person can use, it's not made for the rich but it's made for young banks. It's made for people that have actual problems to access financial services. So again, as Tether we don't want to, we are not interested in going public. We are doing this because we believe that is going to be beneficial for billions of people. That is why if you see also the volumes of Tether compared to the rest of stable coins, that they are insanely higher. They are even 10 times higher on a bad day. So they are usually much higher than 10 times. So I personally don't care if we become the second biggest stable coins. I don't have that sense of pride in myself but I believe that Tether will continue to thrive over the next years just because it's useful, it's trusted and it's just proven by the use of people. So it must be said that USDC has built a reputation for being quite friendly with the US regulators while Tether has rather a patchy history when it comes to the transparency of its reserves. So do you think that might be the reason why people are increasingly turning to USDC because they feel more protected? No, I really don't say that so I'm sorry but on many fronts I believe that there is a big misconception here. First of all, USDC is not more regulated. We are regulated in the same way. We are both registered Vincent. We worked with law enforcement and I believe in the same way at least we know that the Tether is compliant and working really well with law enforcement and regulators across the world. We have been just named by Fitch that is a US company as the most transparent stable coin. So our reports are considered more transparent than the other competitors. And why is that is because starting from January 2021, we started providing the attestation, the quarterly attestations that also contain a breakdown reserves. We didn't have fear. We provided more information immediately to all our users. We provided that information that contained the breakdown reserves and also contained the famous commercial papers. And then people start asking about the commercial papers. And then we provided the breakdown of the ratings of the commercial paper. The ratings are provided by, so we take the lowest rating among Fitch, Moody's and the Southern Pours. And the vast majority of the commercial paper turned to be A2 or better. That is basically at the same level of the US Treasury. And then people still had questions. So we also decided to reduce the allocation of commercial papers to increase the Treasury allocation, all that said and demonstrated publicly. So I believe that, of course, there is an interest in our team from the competition. But that is that does not mean that if an average TV is provided by the competition does not make it true, I believe that we have demonstrated our transparency. It has been also suggested that our transparency was higher than the competition also by a big organization like Fitch. So I think that we as debtor in terms of transparency were in a really good shape. So now let's talk about CBDCs or central bank digital currencies. We are seeing that all over the world governments are developing this new technology that will allow basically national currencies to run on the blockchain and work in a similar way as stable coins do now. So when this new technology will be available to the masses, what will be the relevance for privately issued stable coins such as Tether? I believe that they will coexist with privately issued stable coins like Tether will coexist with CBDCs. The reason is that the standard of the traditional banking industry is relying on really outdated technology. So they are relying on technology that was built 30 years ago, even more is probably even older. They are still using like languages like COBOL and other stuff, right? The cost of maintaining that pooling infrastructure is enormous. So actually, imagine if you could use a blockchain to set to all the transactions across all the banks in a region. The cost of maintenance will go down by many orders of magnitude. The reason is because with blockchains, everyone is looking at the same number, at the same values, the same. So you can put all the transactions and all imagine if all the banks could run nodes, even on the private blockchain. The saving in terms of maintenance and the stability and security are scoring to be huge. So that's why I believe that CBDCs are interesting. I believe that although I believe that so CBDCs and the way they will work, I believe that will just replace the ACH or the SEPA or the SWIFT channels. So it's just another way to send wires with a different protocol. So when you are moving money from one bank to another, instead of using a SWIFT or a SEPA transfer, you will just use a blockchain transfer, a private blockchain transfer. And also, I believe that it's really hard to imagine a CBDC being issued on Ethereum, Solana, Tron, right? So that will be still the duty of privately issued stablecoins to bring the national currencies on public blockchains. Right, but why do you think that people would care about that? Why do you think people would care whether these digital currencies are running on Solana or on any other specific blockchain? I think that most people would just care about a system that works, that works well. Well, that's a fair point, but I still believe that having one of the things that excites people about the public blockchains is the programmability. So you can build more complex behaviors and games and even, you know, now that we are in a game fight, right? So there are games that could have a financial aspect that will not likely run on a privately managed blockchain from a government, but still they will run on a public blockchain that is auditable and by everyone and so on. And so I believe that there are still important aspects for public blockchains, that is, you know, all the possible experimentations that you can do and the absolute ability of making money programmable. I hardly think that a privately issued or privately maintained blockchain will be EBM compatible and will let you to create complex behaviors. OK, cool. Thanks a lot, Paolo, for jumping on our show. It was a pleasure to have you with us. Well, thank you very much for your time. It was a really pleasure to talk to you and meet you. That was Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex and Tether. I'm Giovanni, your host. See you next time.


Welcome to fill my room for the Ben Nevis Ultra. This is 52 kilometres, 4,000 metres of elevation. It's kind of the baby brother of the Glencoe Skyline. Not quite as high elevation.  There are a hundred people taking part today. We're going to have a great time. It's going to be really warm so these gloves are coming off very soon. Page one of the best female arts rumours in the country. Kilometres done. About 400 metres climbed so we've got to do that again nine more times. It's quite technical running but what do you expect in Scotland? We are 13 and a half kilometres in. There's our first proper view of Ben Nevis. The summit up there. Beautiful river. This is a very boggy bit of terrain we're running on now. Everyone's slipping and sliding. Even though it's a lovely summer's day, it's very very wet and messy on the foot here. It's kind of runnable but then you just get to a point like this here where you thought it just goes about three feet down into the ground. It may not be said that the Ben Nevis Ultra doesn't rival the London Marathon for support. So on we go up. This is the climb now up to the top of Ben Nevis. We're 18 and a half kilometres in in four hours and we're on a steep climb up now getting on towards the erect which we need to traverse to get to the top of Ben Nevis. Difficult scrambling down there. We've got to get some more like it. I've cut my leg. I don't think we're going to make it now are we? No. Oh really? Well apparently two and a half k to go but I don't we've only got 15 minutes to do that in so looks like this game over. There's at least two and a half k to go before the checkpoint the cutoff is in 15 minutes. I just don't think it's going to happen but we'll do our best still just under a kilometer to go to the checkpoint. I'm still running just in case they say cutoff is at quarter past or half past but I have a feeling in these events they're going to be quite strict and cutoff will be enforced. And I've not made it again fourth DNF this year. Didn't think I was going to DNF this one by any means. I thought I'd make it. I've never had to chase cutoffs before but last three races I've been chasing every single cutoff. I don't know why I'm just not fit really. But there we are. So that is it and there's quite a lot of people still on that hill coming down so there's a lot of us being timed out here at two o'clock after two o'clock. This is a shame but never mind. Only you know 22 k to go but maybe we wouldn't have made it by dark and did you miss it by 15 seconds? Mate I'm gutted and I've missed it by 20 minutes. Did you beg with them to let you go on? I didn't have the energy to speak to be honest. I sprinted from the bridge over there and like everyone all the way was telling me oh you can make it you can make it and then I've got to probably wear this. So good isn't it? I can't believe the guys asking people if they had a good run. I'm really down about this one. I didn't want to DNF and I didn't even think about it and maybe that's why I did because I didn't think hard enough about it because often where I needed to be at each time and I'm there. I'm a bit naffed off about it to be honest. Right that's it. That's it from Filmer Run. Fourth DNF of the year. Not happy but there we go. See you for another Filmer Run next time. Take care.


Hi my name is Brian Kim and thank you for having me and the opportunity to share some of the things that I know and some tricks and pearls to help you with your cataract surgery. So this is my FAKO technique on how I disassemble the lens. On the video it says double chop and cross chop and I'll explain what that means. No FAKO and no vacuum refer to during disassembly of the lens I don't use any ultrasound or vacuum. So right here when the video plays please pay attention to the FAKO dynamic overlay. Ultrasound, aspiration and vacuum are never used during lens defragmentation. You place the chopper out to the equator in typical horizontal chopping fashion. You place the FAKO tips of incisionally into the soft depi nucleus and you can see from the side angle that both instruments are placed at the depth of the equator then the instruments are brought centrally to fracture the lens and the fracturing is purely mechanical no ultrasound or vacuum are used and so you can see the forces are centripetally towards the center and then the lens is fractured. Again this is purely under mechanical forces there's no ultrasound and no vacuum and I think that's important because I think it couldn't be safer that way. The chopper is placed out to the contralateral equator and the FAKO tip holds counter force as the chopper is pulled centrally to fracture the right heminucleus and you see that there. The right upper quadrant can be emulsified very easily with FAKO and ultrasound. Remember all the defragmentation maneuvers are under irrigation only and no ultrasound or aspiration or vacuum are used and then I take the chopper out to the contralateral equator again and I prolapse that right lower quadrant centrally and it's easier to access the lens fragment with a chopper. The chopper is safer than a FAKO tip and you cannot inadvertently grab anything. With horizontal chop you want to place the chopper so if this is my finger you want to um pronate your your wrist so that the chopper tip is pointing outward towards the periphery you want to push down on the lens itself and then glide out towards the equator make sure you get under the anterior capsular opening and as you glide that way you'll be able to probe you'll be able to supernate your wrist so that the chopper is now in the proper position and you know that you're in the proper position because you can feel kind of a kind of coming off the cliff you kind of kind of get off the edge and it goes kind of into this little pocket if you don't feel that that means you're still on top of the lens and so um you won't be able to get an effective chop but when you get out to that position you can feel that kind of dropping off the edge and if you want you can actually kind of nudge the lens and you'll actually feel it move laterally and so when you see that you know you're in good position and then with the fecotip you want to make sure you go within the anterior capsular opening but you want to kind of go a little bit vertical and push that um fecotip deep into the epinuclein material and then you bring both instruments together if in the case of a dense lens or a white lens you you can put the fecotip on the surface of the lens but then you want to make sure that you kind of have your chopper rotate a little bit more supinated so it's kind of angled towards you and then you can kind of bring those instruments together and you can still get an effective chop so this is the soft lens example I placed the chopper out to the equator and then you see I put the fecotip deep into the subincisional epinucleus I bring the instruments together and I fracture the lens no ultrasound or vacuum are used I placed the chopper out to the contralateral equator and I pulled the the instrument centrally for the cross chop maneuver and here I'm feco emulsifying and using vacuum to remove that quadrant I use the chopper to then prolapse that quadrant in the right upper area to centrally and then I emulsify the lens and so this is really the basic technique on how I'm removing the lens same maneuver place the chopper out to the equator fecotip subincisionally bring those instruments together and then fracture the lens take the chopper out to the contralateral equator and then fracture the right upper the right haeminucleus you can see that the emulsification portion of it is fairly routine that the tricky part of doing cataract surgery is to make sure that the disassembly can be done fairly easily and safely this is a white cataract now with this technique you cannot put the fecotip into the subincisional epinuclear material because it's not there because it's firm so you can put the fecotip on the surface of the lens and then you can fracture the lens using diagonal forces as you can see here and when you do it this way it still works and so going back to the white cataract video I'm bringing the chopper centrally and the fecotip centrally and it fractures the lens and it works fairly easily you place the chopper out to the contralateral equator and you pull that lens the chopper centrally and it emuls it fractures the lens and then the rest of it is just emulsifying the lens remember with dividing conquer and other fecotechniques you have to use a lot of ultrasound and vacuum and with this technique you don't have to do that so again you place the chopper out to the equator the fecotip is subincisional you bring the instruments together and you're able to fracture the lens you place the chopper out to the contralateral equator pull the chopper centrally and then you're able to fracture that hemunucleus as well so this is a brunessant lens with a posterior plate same maneuver and you can see I'm fracturing the lens however because there's a posterior plate the the lens is almost being held together almost like a crab claw or a flower petal so to speak and so you want to continue to chop and place the fecotip fairly deeply as you do the chops and the reason why this works is because you're not using feco or vacuum for these maneuvers and so you're not at risk for accidentally grabbing the posterior capsule or the iris and so look you see that very deep position of the fecotip I'm able to fracture that lens and you can see that it's able to segment very easily same here I'm placing that fecotip very deep and I'm able to fracture that lens again and that's how you're able to attack that posterior plate by placing that fecotip fairly deeply now of course this comes with experience as to how deep that should be and so this is really kind of a technique that should be employed once you've learned how to do dividing conquer stop and chop and the traditional chop techniques and so once you start to break up the pieces as I'm showing here again a deep position of the fecotip you're able to get through that posterior plate without having to fight that plate so much and so the lens removal ends up becoming fairly easy after that and so this is a final example this is a small smaller pupil case I'm placing the chopper out to the equator the fecotip is subincisional I bring the instruments together to fracture the lens the cross chop maneuver fractures the right heminucleus because the iris is small you can actually use it the chopper to prolapse that lens fragment centrally and you see that again here after the chop is performed and so the key for a small pupil case is to use that chopper to pull the lens centrally so my best pearls for double chop and cross chop use that technique to disassemble the lens using only mechanical leverage this eliminates the need for ultrasound or vacuum during lens defragmentation use a chopper to pull the fragments centrally and then you want to activate ultrasound and vacuum only when you're in the central safe zone and only when you're ready to emulsify the lens none of the disassembly steps should require any ultrasound or vacuum and double chop and cross chop because of this technique can be used for a wide variety of lens densities and pupil sizes thank you once again for having me I hope this helps you and I wish you the best again my name is Brian Kim best of luck