Original language of the article: German

Mr. Aydin, why don't you tell us about your career and how you came to found AIDONIC AG?

Equipped with some pocket money, I decided to travel to the border with Syria in southeastern Turkey in January 2013. With the help of my uncle and the local church, I organized the first food distribution for needy families in Al-Qamishli, northern Syria. Upon my return, the Zug newspaper published an article about my relief work, which was immediately met with support and sympathy. This led to the next humanitarian missions in Lebanon and Jordan. In the same year (2013), at the age of 27, I founded the relief organization ARAMAIC RELIEF International with a focus on development and emergency aid for persecuted and displaced minorities and for war victims left behind, in the spirit of active charity. In 2014, I traveled for the first time to war-torn Syria to reach out to war victims who were left behind in their homeland and most in need. This attracted a great deal of media attention.

To date, ARAMAIC RELIEF International has been able to implement over 400 relief and development projects and reach over 380,000 war victims with humanitarian aid.

As a social entrepreneur, in 2017 I started exploring new ways to improve the efficiency and transparency of humanitarian aid distribution, especially in the last mile through digitalization and innovative technology. In 2018, I conceived a new idea using blockchain technology to tokenize donations to make distribution easier to manage and completely transparent. In October 2019, I founded the technology startup AIDONIC AG based in Zug, Switzerland. The vision of the startup is to support humanitarian organizations in the digitization process to provide faster as well as more cost-effective aid to more people in need worldwide, while reducing administrative efforts and creating full transparency.

AIDONIC offers a unique end-to-end payment infrastructure. How is this different from other solutions?

Other solutions usually only focus on fundraising for incoming donations using different payment providers. AIDONIC, on the other hand, has digitized the entire process from fundraising to last-mile donation distribution to beneficiaries, unifying all functions in a single payment infrastructure, automatically ensuring end-to-end transparency and traceability that is unique to date. In addition, a key difference is the integration of blockchain technology. All transactions are automatically stored in the blockchain, further strengthening transparency and creating permanent immutability of data and payments.

You use blockchain technology. Why is this technology so valuable in your application?

The blockchain provides a direct link between actors who do not know each other and enables an exchange of value without the need to share personal data. These transactions are stored in a decentralized and globally distributed database, making them permanently immutable and fully transparent to view. This ensures trust, improves accountability to donors, and provides a real-time record of a service delivery. It can also massively limit embezzlement, corruption and mismanagement.

Thanks to this technology, it is easy to track how each individual donation is used. Is this transparency expected by donors today?

Our transparency is not only about financial transparency of donations, but also transparency in impact measurement of social projects using reliable data sources and evidence from blockchain technology. There are numerous surveys and studies that show that more transparency is demanded by private donors but also by institutional donors and accordingly leads to more donation revenue. Such as the peer-reviewed study published in December by the Journal of Accounting, Auditing & Finance. According to that study, nonprofits that were more transparent and proactively shared information with the public received 53 percent more donations the following year than organizations that were less transparent.(Source) In addition, there is also increased regulatory and third-party pressure for greater transparency due to increased risks around terrorist financing, money laundering and sanctions evasion.

What are the costs of using the AIDONIC solution?

AIDONIC is a B2B cloud-based software solution. The annual license fee is calculated at 2 to 3.5% of the processed donation volume.

What fundraising benefits do you experience when you use AIDONIC?

Attracting young donors in particular is a major challenge today and more important than ever, because they should become the donors of tomorrow. With AIDONIC, aid organizations reach new donor target groups that they could not reach before. AIDONIC solves part of this problem by building trust, and the other part is that our platform is equipped with the most important social media tools. This allows us to bring donors close to the action, giving them the opportunity to connect with their favorite organizations and issues and interact with the content. They can actively participate and see the impact of their contribution live and share it with their friends. In doing so, they will not only be part of the solution, but also delighted and motivated to continue making good things happen.

Furthermore, aid organizations benefit from many other digital solutions of the AIDONIC platform:

1. Audience and program management: the platform enables multilingual customer onboarding, de-duplication, bulk SMS & email communication with recipients, automated project reporting, project data and demographic analysis in a secure and DSGVO compliant platform.
2. Digital tracking of relief goods in the last mile: Using blockchain technology, this solution enables remote monitoring and reporting of in-kind aid delivery using QR codes as digital vouchers, updated in real time on customizable indicators that can be managed in a dashboard.
3. Distribution of digital cash & electronic vouchers: This solution enables bulk payments in the form of digital cash or electronic vouchers (QR codes) via a menu of different modalities and global financial service providers.

We support aid organizations, foundations and social enterprises in the entire digitization process and offer tailored and customized digital solutions that are not yet available in our product range.

Finally - you have already won various innovation awards with AIDONIC. What are the next goals and projects?

We are working on more very exciting innovations and will debut our new NFT tracking solution on February 7 in Zurich. Everyone is cordially invited to our physical networking event.

Click here to register

In addition, we are particularly looking forward to the upcoming collaboration with PostFinance in the area of impact banking, in which we will pilot and test our transparent donation solution in the banking environment.

For questions, please contact:
Severiyos Aydin, Founder & CEO
[email protected]
Tel: +41765757773

Case study videos

AIDONIC Case Study, Tanzania.
Food Security Pilot Project in South Sudan.

Case Study: MEDAIR and Swiss Solidarity in Lebanon:
1) Healthcare
2) Cash and Voucher Assistance
3) Why blockchain applications?

Posted in Interview