Our Responsibilities

There is a regular theme that is at the heart of what we do at SOS Bend and that is community trust. As a team we recognize that there is a wide-spread lack of trust in our institutions, our systems and our leaders that has affected us all. Most importantly, however, we recognize that our current times serve as a reminder as to how vital it is for all of our communities to come together and demonstrate what community trust means and that we each share in the responsibility to ensure we do things right. For the SOS Bend platform that means ensuring we do our best to provide a trusted experience for our customers and that we are transparent with what this means.

Our primary goal has been to get $$ into the hands of our local small businesses and merchants as quickly as possible. On the surface this is simple, but there are a tremendous number of nuances that go along with this, all of which impact trust in one fashion or another. We’ve done our best to articulate some of our thinking around this through the following in an effort to provide a perspective on our responsibilities:

• Experience: Businesses that have already had difficult experiences must be provided with a frictionless experience in using SOS Bend. We have heard time and again from business owners who are already burdened with navigating not simply their cash-flow situations, but platforms that are being provided to help them that aren’t working. It is our responsibility to make the SOS Bend experience as frictionless as possible.
• Fraud: We must do our best to eliminate merchant fraud. In other words, businesses that register on SOS Bend should be confirmed they are who they say they are. We have put in place automated technical methods along with manual procedures to do the very best we can to ensure this is the case, but we also recognize that if someone wants to commit fraud they will find a way. Our job is to do our best to eliminate and limit bad actors ability to do so.
• Opt-in: Some businesses do not want to be registered and we need to ensure we honor that. That is why we established the platform as an opt-in platform. We’ve heard from some businesses in the community that they do not want to register themselves on SOS Bend because they do not want to take $$ from their fellow small business owners who may have a greater need.
• Financial Transactions: We are dealing with financial transactions and we have to get these things right. This has changed from when we first started as we envisioned we would directly process credit card payments, however, due to risk & financial liability restrictions on SOS Bend, we no longer will be doing $$ transactions directly. That said, we’re still tracking the financial commitments being made by consumers for merchants. As such, it is important we provide the tools necessary to the merchants to help track and manage financial commitments.
• Customers: SOS Bend is set up to be a platform that allows consumers to support businesses they love now in exchange for credits they receive to be used later. It is important to ensure that those credits are available for the consumer from the merchants they choose to support. That said, in some cases consumers may never redeem these credits; in some cases the small business merchant — particularly in these unprecedented times — may not be in business to redeem any credits. Our thought process around this has come back to community trust in that we are a small enough community where we are neighbors; we run into each other on the trails; at the grocery store, etc. This means the relationship between the merchants and their customers is largely based upon doing business right and ethically and honoring commitments. If we all do that, we’ll be a lot better off overall.
• Community & Civic Organizations: a key aspect that has been critical from the very beginning is to partner with and engage with local community & civic organizations and their leaders. We, as a community, are in this together and we not only feel it is vital, but mandatory that for communities to be made stronger and for solutions like this to work, it requires deep public, private, and service engagement with an agreed upon mission and focus. SOS Bend has provided a small, but important mission to allow so many organizations to contribute in ways many will never see. That said, this instills further community trust that is at the heart of what we hope will help others.
• Technology: as technologists you might think this would have been first on the list, however, technology is just an enabler. That said, we have built out a platform that supports our local community and should be thought of, in many aspects, as what we call an MVP or Minimum Viable Product as a solution that can potentially be scaled to much wider audiences (i.e. across cities, states, etc).

All of this centers around a core code of ethics that is central to what we are doing:

• Serve from a community first perspective in all that we do
• Put our small businesses first as the primary customer & constituency
• Act with integrity, humility and respect and in an ethical manner with the public, businesses, consumers, colleagues and and other participants in the community capital market
• Solve for the good actors and do our best to limit bad actors
• Partner with civic & community organizations to raise the awareness of and impact to help our community organizations
• Recognize that we are all volunteers and communicate transparently the limits to what we can do for this current evolution

Originally published at https://medium.com on May 2, 2020.