 A disaster can seriously impact your organization's operations, whether it's an earthquake, wildfire, hurricane, or human-caused calamity. Prepare for the worst and plan for the best with innovative disaster recovery apps. Ben Smilowitz is an executive director of SmartResponse.org, a program of disaster accountability project. Ben launched disaster accountability project, an independent watchdog to confront root causes of the failed Katrina response and improve disaster relief and humanitarian aid. Ben is a member of the Maryland Bar and an Echoing Green fellow. He'll show us today SmartResponse.org, which maximizes the impact of disaster relief donations, advances localization, and incentivizes transparency, benefiting millions of disaster survivors around the world. Fully independent of disaster relief and humanitarian organizations, SmartResponse curates data driven localized how to help lists so donors can make more informed decisions about how and where to donate and directly support organizations responding locally without unnecessary intermediaries. So my name is Ben Smilowitz. I started disaster accountability project after Katrina as an advocacy organization to improve disaster relief and humanitarian aid. The need for independent oversight was essential to make sure lessons learned are not only learned but implemented, and changes are made to avoid repeating the same problems that result in preventable loss of life suffering after disasters. We've achieved quite a lot. We've worked on issues at all levels, local, state, national, also global, and our investigations and reports after the Haiti earthquakes and the Paul earthquakes illustrated the problem that we're addressing with our SmartResponse platform. While the reports are good for raising awareness, and they did, we wanted to change the way funds move on a global scale. And frankly, we just don't expect localization of humanitarian funds to happen on its own, or by the efforts of the UN or international NGOs, the international community keeps missing deadlines for goals that sets for itself. The World Humanitarian Summit aim to localize 25% of humanitarian funds by 2020 and the numbers barely moved. So this is our solution. We curate localized how to help lists of donors and other stakeholders can more easily identify and directly support NGOs on the ground. Some call it democratizing disaster relief data and how to help lists that follow disasters in the US and globally are often junk. They include organizations listening donations with often no basis for whether those organizations are often are on the ground. So this is what it looks like. This is our platform. This is a map of where we have organizations on the platform. And this is the reach in the first four years of existence over 600 organizations from over 62 countries and 25 US states and territories have self registered and most are sharing information. This is an example of just three countries and distribution that we have in those Bangladesh, Nepal and India. And those red dots are where groups identify as operating and that information helps us curate localized lists. So for example, for the southern Nigeria floods that happened towards the end of last year, we identified the areas impacted by those floods. And we use that map to curate a list of organizations operating in those specific locations. And we're not a part of the transaction process. So when you click donate on those links, you're going to those organizations directly. And so we don't take a cut. And we do this because we're trying to minimize the intermediaries in the process. We want all the funds to go to them directly. The Pakistan floods that we saw also last year, we identified where those floods impacted the country. There'll be two pages next of organizations that people can engage with directly in those profiles carry often similar to what a common grant application would include of data. So this information is not just useful to donors, it can be used by survivors with internet access to identify organizations responding locally, just a few weeks ago and an organization that operates in northwest Nepal, responding to a December bus for help connecting with other local NGOs in Nepal and we were able to connect them just with the information publicly available on the site now. So the site was built by hundreds of volunteer developers, and many thanks to them. I think one of them, at least one of them is here listening to the webinar. We've used a lot of latest technologies. Many thanks to TechSoup for all their support, and all the offerings made available through them. But really this is thanks to hundreds of volunteers in over 20 countries that help build the platform, help recruit organizations, helped organizations complete their data. And there are many ways to become involved. So we're looking for volunteers. And, you know, because we're a nonprofit, and we don't take percentage or fee and organizations don't pay. For their involvement in the platform, we're looking for additional capacity support to scale so that we can go from where we are at 640 groups to over 2000 and implement a self-sustaining revenue model. So if anyone wants to chat, please get in touch with my email or people can nominate organizations or organizations can just basically register on the platform and just like needs less to go through a basic vetting process and happy to take questions. Thank you.