Collective financial decision making is often both emotionally challenging and extremely lengthy. Our experience is that these discussions can become intractable and frustrating for the participants (decision makers).
Some of the factors that make this situation challenging:
- Multiple decision makers, with different points of views.
- Multiple recipients (can be people or projects), with different purpose and level of needs to be supported. More often than not, not all the recipients can be supported to the full extent of their needs which will require the decision makers to choose to prioritize the needs of some recipient.
The goal of this tool is to help orient the discussion to where there is strongest disagreement amongs the participants so has to promote alignment or at least address points of disagreements prior to finalizing the allocation decision.
- Open the GiftHub distributor app
- Create a room and specify amount to be distributed
Room creation
Room "observer" view, currently without recipient
Note that the generated room code in this case is "AHFT". It can be used by the participants to join the room.
You can also toggle the Observer view mode and start adding recipients:
- Add recipients
Recipient specifies their name, a discription of their needs as well as their "survive" and their "thrive" levels.
About "thrive" and "survive" levels:
- If the survive level of the recipient is not met, participating in this group is no longer viable for them.
- The thrive level is an indication of the upper limit they are comfortable receiving.
Recipients gets added to the live view
Live "Observer" view (just use the toggle)
The red bar indicates the recipient "Survive" level and the green bar indicates the recipient "Thrive" level.
What it looks like after adding more recipients:
Start at the app home page and click "Join Room"
Enter the room code and click "Submit"
Click on "Join as Distributor" and enter your name
Note that distributor (decision makers) and recipients can but do not need to be the same people as the decision makers. In fact, recipients can be anything, like a project or an organization.
Decision maker view:
From there, decision maker can start making allocation decisions which will be reflected in the observer view. The ":)" reflects the "survive" threshold of the recipients The ":D" reflects the "survive" threshold of the recipients
In the current allocation, we can see that:
- 21$ are left to be allocated.
- The survive needs of Green beard are not met (and meeting them would require allocating the entire pot to green beard)
- The survive needs of Red Beard and of Yellow Beard are met
Here is what that looks like from the "Observer view"
Note that there is only one decision maker so the distribution plots are not very informative yet. Lets add more decision makers and assume they all make allocation decisions.
Here we have 3 decision makers which allocations are reflected in the Observer view
A few discussion points emerge:
- Some decision maker allocated in such a way that the survive needs of Red Beard are not met while most others allocated in such a way that they can be met.
- All agree that the survive needs of Green Beard cannot be met, however there is a disagremeent (wide spread) on the amount Green Beard would be receiving.
- All agree that the survive needs of Yellow beard can be met, however there is a disagremeent (wide spread) on the amount Yellow Beard would be receiving.