 Well, hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. So, my name is Yana Randa and I'm the President of Engineering for Change and I'll be your moderator today. Today, we're very pleased to bring you this month's installment of our 2018 webinar series on the topic of engineering a level playing field and getting humanitarian supplies to market. We're so excited to have this webinar today as it falls in conjunction with the United Nations Science, Technology and Innovation Forum and seems to us as a rather appropriate time. Now, the webinar you are participating in today will be archived on our webinars page and our YouTube channel. So, both of those URLs are listed on the slide that you see in front of you today. Information on upcoming webinars is also available on our webinar stage. E4C members will receive invitations to the upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar series team at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. And if you're following us on Twitter today, I'd like to invite you to join us in the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Now, before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization and global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide. Some of these challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to new thought leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. E4C members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we will be able to serve you resources online to your interests. For more information, please visit our website as you see on the side here and sign up. Now, today is a particularly exciting day because we have an announcement of our own. So, there's a real struggle when it comes to planning technical information about products developed for and used by those living under constraint. Data is often scarce, biased or inaccurate. These information gaps have had a number of consequences. For example, loss of lessons learned and reinvention of the wheel when it comes to technology based solutions, challenges in assessing performance and scalability, ineffective implementation of solutions and lack of transparency and accountability for poor quality or unsafe products entering the market. In 2011, E4C took on this challenge of co-designing by co-designing a resource with our community of development engineering experts. That resource is our solutions library. We took a phased approach and stress tested our framework for several iterations with a growing early adopter community. Today, we are very happy to announce that the solutions library is now launched as an E4C member benefit. What does this mean? Well, for those of you who are online right now and already familiar with the solutions library, this results in integration and improved user experience for you. We will transition the solutions library as a fully E4C member benefit. There is a new user experience design and related content tie-in so you'll be able to circulate news articles and webinars such as this one. There's also improved functionality in the form that both E4C experts and users are able to upload photos, user experience reports and case studies associated with the various products. For those of you who don't know, the solutions library is also supported by a diverse group of content partners and a multidisciplinary network of hundreds of expert advisors. We're very excited to share that we also work quite closely with our research fellows who are globally based and in 2018 include 16 incredible young people who will be working with us to source information for the solutions library. As I mentioned, we have fantastic partners, one of which is the Level Market. As you will hear, we have a shared commitment to transparency, informed decision making and better solutions out to get to and user needs. We are working actively together to further develop the framework around solutions information, evaluate success and evolve data tools to ensure these mutual goals. E4C will work with Level Market to serve as a diligence platform and distribution resource for solution seekers seeking volume orders and to get a quote directly via the Level Market. And what you will see in the next slide is an example of a product as you will see from the Level Market. This is the Life Shelter, an emergency shelter that is available today on the Level Market. And what you will see when you arrive at our platform is acknowledgement of the Level Market and a place where you can click directly to get that quote. So with that, I'd like to invite all of our participants to share with us. We're going to do a little bit of a few housekeeping items. Let's practice using the WebEx platform by letting us know where you are in the world. Now in the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type in your location. I will get us started and type in where I'm coming in from today. All right. If the chat window is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon in the top right corner. You can use this window to share remarks during the webinar. And if you have any technical questions, you can send a private chat to the Engineering for Change admin as well. So, and I see some folks also using the Q&A window, but I would like for you to use the chat, please. So we have folks here from Indiana, Minnesota, Chicago, Colorado, Venezuela, Alberta, Nepal, Tunisia, Peru, Rome, worldwide participation here, India, Oregon, Panama. So excited to see all of you here today and Oregon as well here, I see. We're so thrilled to have you join us today. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window exclusively for typing in your questions to the presenter and that is located directly below the chat. Again, if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and encounter any trouble, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. E4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please follow the instructions on the top of the E4C professional development page after the presentation. That also is available and link is also available in your member dashboard where you will actually be able to see what webinars you've already participated in. So you can just go to your member dashboard when you sign in and get that information as well. All right. Thank you again for everybody for entering your locations. I really appreciate that. Now, it's my pleasure to now tell you a little bit more about today's webinar and our presenter. As I noted earlier, there's a real struggle when it comes to funding the right products and deploying goods to those in need. In 2015, the level market began building an e-procurement marketplace for aid and development products to allow nonprofits to request the supplies they needed in the form of crowdfunding campaigns. Whether the supplies are for preparedness programs, a development initiative to help those in poverty, or for disaster response, crowdfunding can quickly get them in a transparent and cost-effective way. Today, we are joined by Stephanie Cox, founder and CEO of the level market to provide insight on how a global marketplace can speed delivery of humanitarian products. And just for a little bit of background, Stephanie has spent almost two decades leading technology and consumer goods companies in conflict zones and emerging markets, spending food security, water and sanitation, clean tech and microfinance sectors. With field work in more than 20 countries and as a survivor of a 2004 Asian tsunami, she's witnessed the plight of those living in poverty and suffering from disasters. Her extensive time in Asia and Africa has given her a deep understanding of those needs, aspirations and buying habits of aid organizations as well as consumers at the base of the pyramid. We are so honored to have Stephanie join us today and I'm going to turn it over to her to share with you some information about the level market. Wonderful. Wow. Thank you, Yana. That's fantastic. If everyone can see, can you see my screen? Yes, we can. Okay. Awesome. So thanks again, Yana, for that introduction. It's great to be here and be able to be part of this great community of like-minded individuals. And I just wanted to give you a good shout out and a congratulations about the Solutions Library. We're really excited to be partnering with you all and look forward to a really bright future and getting these aid solutions to market. Just today, I want to discuss two main ideas of everybody, how a global marketplace can help get humanitarian products to market and secondly, and most interestingly, how crowdfunding can be another sales channel. Now, Yana gave you a brief introduction about me, but I just wanted to give you a little bit more about who I am and why you may or may not want to be listening to me today. I am a social entrepreneur, a solar tech startup executive, an international aid expert and a tsunami survivor. I've grown social enterprises from about 200,000 in annual revenue to over 40 million. I was named an everyday tech hero by a UK charity, the Nominate Trust, in 2016. In 2018, became the entrepreneur of the year runner-up in Colorado Biz Magazine. And I also run my own podcast called 22 light bulbs, which features humanitarian entrepreneurs, so any of you out there who are manufacturers or suppliers of humanitarian aid products would love to talk to you on our podcast. But right now, I'm going to just take you back to 2004, about 14 years ago when I was on a small wooden boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean when the deadliest tsunami in history struck. I was there working in Nepal during the Civil War on an aid project and I went to Thailand for a much needed break. I was one of the lucky ones who made it out of the boat and up to the jungle, but more than 230,000 people died. Hundreds of thousands were left behind and they desperately needed life-saving products like lights and tents and blankets, and aid couldn't come soon enough. This experience shaped my life in many ways. And the 10 years since, I criss-crossed the globe, working for social enterprises, helping to create business solutions to poverty. The challenge was always taking a pretty awful situation and looking for ways to meet the needs of the people and enable the businesses to profit. We spent a lot of time, this meant introducing products often like water filters that could help people improve their quality of life. Often though, as some of you probably find in your fieldwork, it's quite hard to find these products locally or globally. We would spend hours and days, if not longer, hunting down these core innovations and coming up with very little. So I became pretty good at looking for opportunities in challenging environments and today we're facing pretty challenging environments. Today we're in the midst of the worst humanitarian crisis, and I used to say since World War II and we have now surpassed that, unfortunately. In the next 24 hours, over 28,000 people will become displaced in the need of humanitarian aid, much like this boy and his family. And in addition, more people will be affected by natural disasters per year than the entire population of the United States. And we know that climate change isn't helping. So as a result, requests for humanitarian aid are increasing by over 10 percent every year as hundreds of millions are being affected by these disasters. In 2014, I was talking with a colleague of mine in Sierra Leone who was working with the WHO and he was tired and he was hot and he was pretty distraught. And when I asked him how his aid efforts were going, he told me that they're pretty horrible. He told me they were out of clean drinking water, they were out of buckets and they were out of body bags. Now this proved to be the deadliest outbreak of Ebola to date. More than 11,000 people died, including 40 aid workers. Later in AP investigations cited shoddy supplies, red tape so thick and death by conference call as health officials argued about the proper color of body bags. Now the morning of this call, I had just ordered shoes off of Amazon for my child to be delivered to my house the very next day. So how many of you on this call buy books on Amazon currently? You purchase your airline tickets on Travelocity or review a restaurant on Yelp. So we live in an e-commerce world, don't we? And as humans, we're accustomed to using e-commerce and marketplaces for everything. But when it comes to aid, we step out of that world and we tend to resort to old behavior. In decades ago, Silicon Valley created a marketplace for just about everything we can imagine, except for the goods that meet the basic needs of humanity. Now here's just five things that my colleagues and I regularly encountered over my 18 years in the industry. Number one, there is no easy way for suppliers of humanitarian products and buyers to connect. As some of you probably know, we often have to travel long distances and show up at industry trade shows and that costs thousands of dollars. Number two, there's little competition. So poor products are being dumped on poor people. Three, paper catalogs gather dust while Google searches and Excel spreadsheets and faxes. Yeah, faxes still remain the norm. I just had somebody the other day ask me to fax them something. Four, prices aren't published. So there's absolutely no price transparency. I encountered this over and over in my career where we wanted baseline pricing for certain technologies and it was virtually impossible to find a pricing that was listed. Shipping is problematic at best. So we all know that international shipping and at least getting a lot of these products to where they need to go is incredibly expensive. There's very long supply chains and that's not even talking about the last mile distribution. There are very few warehouses and depots around the world that house these products. So the supply chains are incredibly long and expensive. So the result of all of this is that people fall further into suffering deeper into poverty and they die waiting for aid. Empires, oligarchs and malaise. It's not Russian history. It's actually the characterization of the humanitarian system by a London King's College report in 2016. The report called the system quote, illiquid to deal with emerging humanitarian events. And then Tufts University said that this enterprise, this humanitarian industry is the world's safety net and it provides essential services to the survivors of conflict and crisis but there are huge gaps and inefficiencies. So that day that I was on the phone with my colleague with the WHO, I had a bit of a revelation, the constellation of events in my life from working in Nepal during the Civil War to the tsunami to Ebola. All revealed to me that just as other industries have been transformed by the ease and speed of today's e-commerce processes, they have yet transformed the world's most critical industry, our industry. So why not take the best technology of Silicon Valley and apply it to humanitarian aid? So around 2006, a revolution began to design products for those challenging environments. Thousands of new technologies have been invented to help better access food, shelter, energy, water, and often they have higher efficiencies and better price points. So you can just take a look at Kickstarter and all of the products that get launched on Kickstarter or take a look at the 12 and growing humanitarian engineering departments at major universities around the world. However, few of those technologies actually find their way into the hands of those that need them the most. The humanitarian and development space has never been more relevant and yet there is a real struggle when it comes to finding the right products and deploying goods to those in need. Just as Amazon meets all of our wants and desires, I believe that the aid industry needs a marketplace for the basic goods that 90% of the world actually needs to thrive and survive. Now almost 10 years to the date after surviving the deadly tsunami, we began working on creating what we conceived as an Amazon for aid and we call it the level market. We aim to prove an open and transactional marketplace that can enable nonprofits and governments and yeah the private sector that is a major player in this space around the world to access life-changing essential and innovative supplies quickly and at a fair price. So in a day when I can order shoes from Amazon and a click of a button, I believe we should be able to provide shelter for children in Syria. I imagine a day where aid workers know where supplies are and how much they cost and can order them on their mobile phone in just a few clicks of a button. I imagine a day where warehouses around the world are stocked with mosquito nets and clean birth kits and cook stoves and yes buckets and body bags and I imagine a day when e-commerce will serve humanity. So about two years ago we began creating this marketplace for release supplies and innovation. We aim to make it as easy to buy water filters for children in Ethiopia as it is to buy books on Amazon. You see we fill a void that was missed by the tech world and the nonprofit world. We provide a marketing platform for global aid suppliers to connect to global aid buyers. We are a B2B e-commerce platform. We streamline financial transactions. We built a quote system for international and volume orders for a highly audit oriented industry. So we pulled tools and information forward to help buyers make a quick buying decision like pricing and specs and manufacturing locations, minimum order quantities, certifications, inventory levels. We have global supply companies eager to save the cost of sales by listing on one central platform. We currently have over 55 global suppliers and 270 products across eight categories and growing by the day. But the greatest thing is that this can be a way for local suppliers to list their products and this is a big topic in the aid industry is how are we going to engage local manufacturers and local suppliers and many of whom I have met in my travels and in my work around the world. They are eager and capable of selling and distributing their supplies that they have no platform in which to list what goods they have, how much they cost, where they're available, and how soon people could get them. So instead of scrambling to find out what's available locally, suppliers and manufacturers can actually list their products and inventory on our 24-7 marketplace. So a good example is during the Nepal earthquake when we weren't even in business yet, we were inundated by people sending us Excel spreadsheets trying to figure out what supplier had what locally and how close to Nepal supplies could get, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, however close they could get, but it was all spreadsheet-based and it was just in my mind such a waste of time when they could have simply uploaded what they had and where they were located. So there's a huge universe of potential buyers for these humanitarian goods. There's over 75,000 government entities that procure goods, there's over 10 million NGOs in the whole world, and at least 40,000 of them are focused exclusively on aid. And what's more, and it's a really hard number to calculate, we pulled together this because no one's attempted to do what we've done before, but this industry spends in procurement over $100 billion every year. And very few people think about that when an earthquake happens or a hurricane hits, how all these supplies get procured and how much is really happening on an annual basis, and that's how much is being procured and sent around the world. So the good news is that there are though two industries working to help people and solve some of these problems. And so one is this humanitarian industry of the procurement side, which is $100 billion. But the other one is also this charitable giving side, which is $390 billion. So what's still the problem? Well, something happened along the way while we were building our marketplace. Donors and nonprofits and investors were asking us that they could use our marketplace to procure supplies on behalf of the nonprofits working in the field. And then Hurricane Maria hit and devastated Puerto Rico. So we were outraged ourselves. We were infuriated. And even though we're running this global marketplace, we felt helpless until we had an aha moment. And that moment was when we realized that, yeah, we could use our marketplace to help get more supplies to market through crowdfunding. We can also create some transparency along the way and give crowdfunding a bit of a facelift. So just stay with me for a moment and imagine, have you ever written a check to a nonprofit and then wondered how your money was used? When was it used? Where did it really go? You see, the problem with crowdfunding and online giving is that donors actually don't know where their money is being spent nor the impact of their giving. So while people respond generously to crises and, GoFundMe raised $3.5 million from Hurricane Harvey alone, their current crowdfunding platforms are only cash-based and they don't have tracking once no donation is made. So money flows into general pot and donors don't know the true impact of their giving. So we built level giving into our existing global marketplace. So instead of cash, now, donors come to our marketplace and they buy physical relief products like mosquito nets, cook stoves, shelters, clean birth ships from pre-vetted suppliers. We nearly could use the basic principles of e-commerce such as customer support and shipment tracking so that donors could track their donations from the moment it's made until it's used by the nonprofit in the field. And so we feel that that would give confidence to the donors and how their money was actually being used. And this is all based on the need that the nonprofit has in the field. See, so with level giving, we aim to get more supplies to market by giving donors an opportunity to buy them on behalf of the nonprofit. And the nonprofit receives the goods and distributes them. So right now, we actually have just beta tested this and launched this. We have two live campaigns right now. We invite you to go to our website and you can also participate in them. Now online giving is a $31 billion market in the United States alone. And it is also growing over 7% every year. So this is a huge opportunity to excite people around humanitarian innovation. And as I mentioned before, we know that shipping is one of the biggest obstacles in international aid and you probably know that too. It is expensive and it takes a long time. So we secured major partnerships with logistics companies, including one called Flexport, California-based company that is worth over a billion dollars, and iContainers based out of Madrid. And they've already guaranteed that they will be shipping for the humanitarian industry the supplies at cost. And they'll be using speedier supply lines because these artificial intelligence and other technology to maximize supply routes. We also have over 50 top tier humanitarian suppliers of solar lights and shelters, clean water filters. You name it, load it up in our marketplace ready to serve the needs of the non-profits. So we invite you to join us. If you have a product or innovation you'd like to list on our marketplace. If you know a non-profit that wants to buy your supplies but is unable to do that, we can raise the money for them through level giving. If you know donors, you'd like to buy aid supplies instead of just giving cash, we can certainly help them do that too. And if you know of a manufacturer or supplier who would like to be featured on our podcast to tell their story to get the word out, please contact me. Here's the contact information and I want to thank you right now for your attention and excited to take questions. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie. This is really just fantastic and I invite our listeners now to include their questions in the Q&A window. This is so thrilling for us especially as there's a lot of overlap in terms of the products that you see in the level market with what we have in the Solutions Library and we feel quite strongly about the fact that it's really important that that's that informed decision-making. So one on that note of informed decision-making, one point that has come in in question is kind of sharing the pain of procurement. This listener notes that your point about unpublished prices is something that I've suffered with. Do you know why companies like Delagua etc. don't publish their prices? Yeah, so often you know the prices aren't published because we deal with volume orders and that's that that's legitimate right because you can publish right can you hear me? So you know you can publish an MRRP price or basic price but typically in international development and international aid you're not dealing with one Z2Z orders in other words you're not dealing with single unit orders you're dealing with volume orders and depending on the volume the pricing will go up or down and that's often why we don't get transparent pricing however we expected a lot of our suppliers to push back against having just one published you know a no published pricing. So in order to list on our marketplace they must publish baseline pricing that gives that gives the customer right a sense of is it ten dollars is it a hundred dollars like give me an idea of what this cost and of course if we order more we know that the pricing will most likely go down and so happily there's been no pushback on pricing transparently and so that's been a really happy revelation. Fantastic so another question here is level giving has an option to choose a specific location for the purchase good or is it oh sorry my question just moved as I of course naturally wanted to read it or is it dependent on the organization? So I think the question is can you choose a specific location for the supplies that you are contributing to or is it only constrained by the organization that is supplying that good okay well there's a few so on the marketplace there's a few ways to find the supplies that you need you can do it by where where the supplies are manufactured so if you for example take the Nepal example so if you are interested in getting goods into Nepal now you can search by you know where the manufacturing location for those supplies are or where they ship from which is which is sometimes it could be different locations also we we have the headquarters addresses of the manufacturers as well so so we have many many filters in the marketplace that allow users to sort and find and filter exactly what they're looking for and get as close to what they're looking for as possible. Fantastic and another question has come in relative to a regulation and this this person wants to know do you get pushback from governments within regions and if so how are you resolving those challenges? Yeah so you know and on you know we've been we've been live for about a year and a half we've had orders from over 38 countries we've had a few orders from government entities and so far it has not been an issue in fact one order just went through for female condoms going to someplace in Asia. It tends to be you know we don't participate in tenders so we do get inquiries about tenders but when governments purchase they're really purchasing directly through the suppliers so you can think of us as you know the marketing platform and the transactional platform and the lead generation platform for suppliers where all this information is housed but at the end of the day the negotiations really are between that customer the government entity and that supplier that's why we allow the certifications, the specs you know we work with World Bank Lighting Global, we work with Global Alliance for Clean Cook Stoves, work with industry bodies to also make sure that you know we're getting high quality supplies but thus far there's been no pushback yet from any government entity. Fantastic that's great news and another question is related to the procurement itself there is interest in understanding whether the level market is limited to humanitarian organizations or can for example the private sector procure purchase these products for themselves let's say the private sector within countries like Kenya or in Nepal themselves if they wanted to purchase directly from the level market would that be an option? Yeah absolutely you know this is something I'm pretty passionate about you know that the private sector actually has a huge role in humanitarian aid when I was working at the solar tech startup and there was a what was it a hurricane I think in the Philippines it was the private sector that was buying all the solar lights within their community so they were buying the solar lights from us shipping them and then distributing them and so the private sector is a big player particularly in international aid and relief because it's also their community it's also part of CSR of a lot of corporations and so we do not limit who can purchase we do ask questions of the customers you know our is for humanitarian purposes this is for distribution purposes or resell you know what you know we try to vet them but we're certainly you know this is part of us wanting to be an open and transparent marketplace but ultimately it's up to the suppliers to decide whether or not they're going to make the sale I've been surprised that there have been quite a few suppliers who have turned down sales because the customers don't meet their profile of a perfect customer that's their prerogative that's that's great as a business person I wouldn't necessarily turn down that's their prerogative and I think it's fantastic they know who they want to sell to and who they don't some will only exclusively sell to nonprofits some will sell to any of them that's why we've created an open marketplace and what that's fantastic there's that on the note of nonprofits another listener has noted that your presentation seems to talk mostly about suppliers and donors I work with a small local NGO and have some links with the local government who also have trouble sourcing supplies what would you say to people in my situation and mainly people looking to buy yeah that's what you know it's a great question um you know our our beta test of the marketplace was really interesting you know we thought that we would attract you know larger aid organizations in the government but you know they're pretty set in their ways and that's just because they've been doing stuff since 1919 in certain ways and so the people who actually opted in first were the small to medium nonprofits and so nonprofits in Venezuela and Guatemala and who had know what I call butts in seats they didn't have procurement officers and they didn't have a lot of red tape and they needed these supplies just as much as everybody else but they wanted good quality supplies right or your local civic organization like Rotary or Lions Club or whatever that is in in your state or country you know they often pack their suitcases with stuff and hop on a plane and go somewhere we want them to do quality stuff we want them to take the good stuff not just do a google search and not just buy what their neighbor had but but really think about what's needed and what's going to last long and what's not only based on price but also you know eventually based on reviews and everything else so for small nonprofits that are looking to buy the best thing that I can say is launch a campaign through level giving that's why we added this into our marketplace so in other words the marketplace is hey XYZ nonprofit come by the goods or or government or whomever the goods that you need right because they all have budget line items for goods that they regularly know that they need the level giving aspect of it is hey nonprofit we know that your budget is constrained why don't you have other donors now the consumer side come in and buy those goods on your behalf so for example we have these two live campaigns right now we're sending 250 clean birth kits to Malawi donors have come on and purchase those goods directly for Birthing Project USA which is going to be receiving those goods in Malawi so Birthing Project USA knew what they wanted they knew how many they wanted they knew where they wanted to go and donors have bought them on their behalf and that's that's about to wrap up as our first successful campaign and so you can see that people really want to do this they will the donors will be actually able to track that shipment of those birth kits all the way to Malawi and that excites them so I would say that is a great way for other small to medium nonprofits to get involved and get the goods that they need that's fantastic on the note there's a question here around actually delivering the supplies how is it ensured that the time that timely supplies of basic required goods is achieved for those who need them in disaster struck locations so maybe you can speak a little bit more about the logistics aspect of how do you track those shipments and how do you guarantee timely delivery to what extent yeah so this is I think this is the vein of everybody's existence and humanitarian aid is logistics and shipping and this is why it was really important for us to go out and invite the private sector in to also do business with us and participate in this market that's why we were able to secure significant partnerships with flex port and with i containers we wanted to do it differently these these these logistics partners have shortened supply chains by at least six days now you might not think that's much when you're just ordering you know a book on amazon or something but when you're dealing with saving lives and stemming suffering that's an a huge amount of time and that's a lot of lives saved they just haven't been able to break into the humanitarian market and so by aligning with us we certainly aim to bring the shipping times down now they use artificial intelligence they use technology for these supply chains so they will guarantee at least door-to-door shipping there has to be has to be you know a good quality non-profit there to receive the goods and distribute the goods right that's really important for the last mile distribution you really don't want somebody else to do it for you the way the model is now and it's always evolving is that the local non-profit so in this case Birthing Project USA or World Hope International who were also working with to get goods to Puerto Rico right now they are going to be the receiver they will clear customs and they will distribute to the end users so if customs needs to be cleared i are you know we can work with brokers who will do that there is a you know a cost to that but often the non-profits know how to negotiate that and work with local brokers to clear customs too you know it is very complex but i do think i believe in everything can be simple simplified and i think by bringing in multiple partners we're able to practice that and do it a little differently this time that's really great and actually dovetails really well into a follow-up question from our listener who's noted i've tried talking directly to suppliers about importing their products they prefer to prefer to go through an intermediary to help with import charges how do you manage this area of import taxes and procedures you kind of already touched on it maybe you can expand a little bit yeah so we don't you know we the level market and level giving are involved in that aspect of it however we have found that we've become a repository of advice on both sides of the marketplace we have an active blog too where we answer a lot of these questions and we take customer questions and turn those into q and a's so i do advise you all to also check out the blog for more information and and subscribe to it but like i said if you are the importer on record and suppliers will only get it to the let's say the port my recommendation and i is is to get a custom clearing agent that you like that's a local a local broker i think that that is the best way to secure that your your shipment is actually clear customs it's also clear customs in a timely way and that is only something that you can do locally is to know who is who is doing this and who's on the up and up and able to clear your clear your goods and get recommendations from people locally i would not leave it in the hands of an international shipping company frankly that's some sound advice and i have a really interesting comment here someone wants to confirm it i am i right to say that the level market is playing uh the the business model is like alibaba of emergency products yeah i'm laughing because um i guess about a year ago i met with um a founder of alibaba i think it was like you know employee number eight or something and he looked at me right and he said oh my gosh you're alibaba for humanity well that's a huge undertaking um but the answer is yes and also um i will answer the follow on question to that that that probably hasn't yet been asked but it begs this question so why isn't alibaba or amazon doing this right um you know i my goal is to start this conversation to bring transparency to the space and to say to people that there needs to be an amazon for aid there needs to be an alibaba for humanity it you know we have a humanitarian imperative right these products need to move around the world the way that stuff that nobody really needs moves around the world these things need to not just in un depots around the world but for all of us small the little people working in in in aid organizations and small nonprofits so that we can access them at a fair price and quickly um and so i look at i look at the level market as the catalyst as the conversation maker as as as the one that's going to push the edge and i will be happy i will be so happy if one day alibaba or amazon wakes up and says oh my gosh this is a market to take seriously this is a market um to use our supply chains our warehousing our knowledge our technology on for the better of humanity um and so i look at it that we are proving the market and if someone can come on and do it much better than us then i will welcome that that will be a happy day oh i'm i couldn't agree with you more stephanie and this is one of the reasons why we are working together uh is to really push that that needle forward because it's so essential and to democratize this process um so i'm a note of kind of the impact and you're speaking about you know the tremendous impact that is available uh there's a question here requesting more information on what an impact report includes this and that you spoke about in your presentation mm-hmm that's a great question because what what the initial impact on this is on a level giving and we've been beta testing these these two campaigns and we're going really well and we actually when we work with the nonprofit to set up their campaign we we tell them you must send an impact report within six weeks of the campaign closing because donors want to know how their money was used the first initial impact report is just what was shipped what was distributed how many lives were affected right just give us the numbers and give us that first thing um throughout though uh their their work on the ground using these supplies we want to work with them to keep communicating back to the donors about more things about the impact so we all know nonprofits do a lot of eminy and a lot of eia and a lot of impact reporting um they do it for a lot of their you know institutional donors and we're just saying hey share share that with these donors that bought you know a few kits or a few lights or a few water filters because their money counts too um and so the initial impact report is how many goods where did it go who did it help and then follow-on reports will be much more detailed um and that's what we're working on right now as we transition from the beta phase to the scaling up phase and level gaming fantastic thank you for sharing that insight uh so um one of our um participants uh sent that chat trying to help out another uh colleague who asked the question about customs but as she said sent it privately so I'm going to go ahead and read it really quickly as it seems like a good nugget um so for those of you uh that listener who was interested in learning a little bit of managing uh customs uh this um listener suggested that you should match your harmonized code hs code with the customs both your country issues for better knowing customs related uh issues uh these are all standardized around the world um so hopefully that helps yeah so um we I think we've uh hit all our questions that we received from our audience and I'm sure folks will be happy to get an extra 15 minutes back to go about their work days or perhaps uh author a nice email to Stephanie asking for further questions and and getting on the level market so with that I would like to thank you Stephanie for for your time for for your concise presentation and and your detailed answers to our listener questions and I would like to thank all of our listeners today for attending we really appreciate you joining us today for those of you who are interested in receiving your professional development hours the pdh code is listed on the slide and you can go to your member dashboard in order to get the link directly to apply for those pdhs if you have questions that we haven't addressed or that you haven't thought to ask until now please email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org we'd be happy to pass on the questions to Stephanie as a reminder the presentation is recorded and will be posted on our platform so you can come back and listen to it again and get inspired and we'd like to invite all of you to become e4c members to get information of upcoming webinars and to access our solutions library as well as products from the level market through the solutions library you'll get all the information you need to make good decisions and with that I wish you all a good afternoon good evening or good morning depending on where you are and I hope to see you on the next e4c webinar take care