Being socially responsible is no longer an option for companies — it’s a must. In 2017, donations to charity reached an all time high in the US, with an estimated $410 billion USD donated to various causes by groups and individuals. Similar trends are evident all over the world, including Australia, where the 50-largest ASX-listed companies donated a total of $867 million to community causes during 2017. As we hand the baton to a new generation that will lead investor and consumer markets, the standards that companies must uphold have become markedly higher.

According to the Millennial Impact Report, 90% of millennials interviewed planned to give to 5 nonprofits or more. And this was in 2015! Millenials are also expecting much more when it comes to transparency and accountability. They grew up in the era of social media and messaging, where everything is shared and interconnected. They want to be engaged, and they want to see their actions influence change.

Millennials also take this mentality into the workplace as they become the decision makers that determine how their companies will spend funds on the right social impact projects. Making these decisions is a real challenge. According to Robby Greenfield, Co-founder at ConsenSys Social Impact, “this is a problem for both companies and individuals that want to fund social impact projects and nonprofits.”

These are just some of the reasons why ConsenSys, along with WWF, developed Impactio. It is a project curation and funding platform which utilizes Ethereum blockchain technology and tokenization to maximize collaboration between subject-matter experts and individuals or organizations to bring social impact projects to life.

“Just like most companies, projects within NGOs and standalone projects compete with one another for funding. And the result is that they will only have the resources to assess and focus on a few. This will lead to good projects falling through the cracks. This is even more apparent for projects that aren’t part of a funding network and these nonprofits spend a lot of time producing the same work to pitch their ideas to funders. The other problem is how these projects are assessed and greatly they vary. Many nonprofits struggle to show that they are using their funds effectively and how it aligns their funders’ goals,” Greenfield explains. In fact, law firm Nolo reported that, in a study of over 220,000 nonprofits, researchers concluded that 75% to 85% of these nonprofits were improperly allocating their expenses.

Here’s how Impactio works to fix that: Individuals or organizations submit their projects with clear objectives for issues ranging from sustainability and inequality to emerging communities and the environment. The process starts off with project leaders submitting their projects based on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).