Whoa. A surreal moment. Never thought I’d stumble onto a GlobalGiving project and see Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson among the top donors. I guess it deconstructs the algorithm here – largest donors appear at the front.

This project is:

1000 Voices for Hope – Building Mahiga Hope High

posted by Turk Pipkin, who I think was an actor on the Sopranos. He also visited the Africa Conservation Trust in Kenya in 2009 and did a documentary about the wonderful reforestation / reef preservation work they are doing.

But the biggest news of the day is that I won my NaNoWriMo for 2009!

Blogher.com is an online community dedicated to women who Blog. Sounds like so many of us out there, huh? While researching for this blog, I came across this network and it is a wonderful resource that shows just how many women there are out there in cyberspace with something to say, ability to motivate and yearning to make a difference locally and around the globe.

I found BlogHers Act with the tag line “ We’ve given you the facts, now it’s time to do something.”  BlogHers Act is doing what most bloggers out there, including me are doing by trying to do-get the information out there! They have partnered with Online Donation Site(GlobalGiving Web) to raise money for five global maternal health projects. It can be no body else’s responsibility but your own to take action but it has certainly become much easier and convenient to get information and in return give a little of yourself (whatever that means to you). In the press release for BlogHers Act the co-Founder and CEO of BlogHer, Lisa Stone states, “”Our partnership with GlobalGiving is an example of how social media is driving a radical shift in the way people think, act and associate with one another,” The BlogHer community has become a powerful forum for raising awareness and effecting positive change. We are pleased to work with such an amazing non-profit network to extend our ability to make an impact globally and continue our efforts to save women’s lives.” Read more of the press release here.

BlogHers Act ran this campaign back in 2008 and they decided to look at five Maternal Health Projects which included: helping: Mother and Child Clinic and Nepal, Afghan Women Deliver Healthy Babies Safeyt, Ensure Healthcare for 40,000+ Displace Darfurians, Empower Women to End HIV/ADS Stigma in South Africa, and Noon Meal Improves Girls’ Learning in Burkina Faso.

South Africa has the highest number of women infected with HIV/AIDS in the world. Years of stigma and discrimination lack of education and knowledge, access to treatment, and extreme poverty has all contributed to this statistic. This can change and it takes women like us and women of South Africa to get and give help. With support groups that empower and educate women, they are able to take action themselves to receive treatment, live a safer lifestyle and provide for their children. These women are given the tools to become healthy again, gain mental stability and ultimately use the trades they already know to bring in an income.

In Kenya in 2009 the health ministry launched a 3- week campaign to encourage one million people to get tested for AIDS.  The statistics show that between &-8.5 % of the adult population suffers from HIV/AIDS and the reason the figure is so vast is because most people have never been tested because in their mind it is a sign of promiscuity. The government launched Jitambue Leo- “ know yourself”.  They will go from door-to-door  trying to reach one million people a staggering jump from the only 700,000 people that have voluntarily been tested.

This is a huge feat in African culture to take a stand and help where help is really needed.  It is our voices and support that can allow the internal officials to do something about this problem. This is all just a start but we certainly are taking a big leap in the world of social media with 24-7 accessibility and access to knowledge.

We have been talking about reducing our carbon footprint as a company. GlobalGiving is a “small business” sized nonprofit (less than 50 employees). Still, we examined every facet of the office for places where we could achieve dramatic improvements on our carbon footprint.

Goal: catalytic improvement

What if some little thing we did went viral as an idea and many others did likewise?

Travel (40 tons of CO2e):

We work in 130 countries. We fly more than we should. That’s about 10 trips in a year. Instead of flying less, we decided to focus on including more training that would help eco-charities raise more money on GlobalGiving to plant more trees. A basic carbon calculator estimates that planting 200 trees would offset this flying.

Since we already did a “click to plant a tree” email promotion earlier this year, we planted 30,000 trees, got 30,000 new people on a green email list, and generated a carbon credit of 6,200 tons of CO2e.

Eating Meat at Work (9 tons of CO2e per year):

This came up as one of those “radical ideas” that might make a bigger difference than reducing paper use. Actually it DOES matter, but not the way you think.

Beef: 1 kilogram eaten consumes 36 kg of CO2e

Chicken: 1 kg eaten consumes 4 kg of CO2e

Based on 260 meals a year and an average of 20 daily meat eaters in our office, a 150g portion size, and the various costs of types of meat to produce, we get a baseline estimate of 9 tons CO2e for the whole office during lunch.

If people ate one more vegetarian lunch each week, we could shave 2.5 tons of CO2e off this total. That is equivalent to one aborigine, or double our current paper usage (about 1 ton of CO2e).

But if we instead cut out beef at lunch and replaced it with chicken, we shaved 5 tons of CO2e off. That’s five times the CO2e impact of all our paper usage!

5 tons of CO2e for a whole office isn’t a huge impact, but it is equivalent to planting 25 more trees (than the 30,000 we planted already), and a hell of a lot easier than cutting down our paper by 500%!

Computers and Energy (about 90 tons of CO2e):

This one was really hard to estimate, and I’m just guessing here. But I do know that we swapped out 20 of our 30 desktops for laptops. A desktop will consume 300 watts, whereas a flat screen and laptop will consume 100 watts. The savings are probably around 60 tons of CO2e per year, equivalent to 280 trees we don’t have to plant.

My message is that cutting our carbon footprint can be fun, straightforward, and free.

This is the best source for meat-related carbon calulating:

http://www.dothegreenthing.com/wiki/display/WIKI/Eat+less+meat+and+poultry

There has been a growing level of discussion here in the UK fundraising sector over the last couple of months about the much awaited launch of video-based charity project crowdfunding site See the Difference – added to just this week by a resounding endorsement in an open letter from UK Institute of Fundraising CEO Lindsay Boswell, which you can read on the Institute website.

As I outlined in my post about this exciting initiative back in May, the See the Difference team includes an impressive line-up of corporate backers contributing time and resources to launch a site that will offer videos of funding opportunities from a wide range of different charities, supported by social media sharing technology and the promise of specific video updates when projects are completed.

At first sight, this might just look like a video-based version of any number of existing fundraising websites already available – like GlobalGiving and PifWorld. However, what I find particularly interesting about See the Difference is just how they describe their vision for the site.

On their introductory video, Stuart Hamilton, one of the founding team, shares the vision for See the Difference by explaining “We might start seeing the See the Difference logo in all sorts of unexpected places, the logo appearing in all of the different places around the world where projects are going on. So See the Difference could ultimately become the standard way in which people choose and express the things they care about and the differences that they want to make to the world”.

This is a very exciting ambition for the See the Difference brand – and also very interesting from the point of view of charity fundraisers.

Put simply, if See the Difference grows the way that it hopes to then it could ultimately replace individual charity brands as the owners of relationships with online donors who fund their projects. Why give a regular donation to an established charity for them to use however they see fit, when you can instead choose specific projects that interest you from a wide range of different charities through See the Difference – and receive your updates and future giving opportunities through them too? In effect, See the Difference becomes my ‘Charity Choice Consolidator’ – and, thanks to them, I am free to switch my giving whenever I feel like it to any other organisation represented on their site.

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing – as this type of model fits very much with the way I believe fundraising needs to evolve if we are to capitalise on the opportunities Web 2.0 offers us to provide the choice and engagement that younger online-savvy potential donors are demanding. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that if we don’t evolve to offer such choice and engagement then we are in real danger of losing-touch not only with young donors but increasingly with those currently at the peak of their earning capability, who are typically less than enamoured with the traditional fundraising approaches used by most charities.

But what fundraisers – and the charities they work for – need to get to grips with is that the idea of charities no longer owning the long-term relationship with those people who fund their work is a real game changer. At the ultimate extreme, if donor relationships become the responsibility of a third party then there is no longer a need for the supporter database and direct marketing teams in every charity across the land to continue to be employed. In this new fundraising future, the key in-house fundraisers skill will be in packaging the work of their charity such that it will sell well on a Charity Choice Consolidator site.

There are, of course, alternatives to a single brand Consolidator-driven fundraising future. For example, SocialActions has taken a different route to providing online supporters with a means of choosing financial and non-financial support opportunities from a wide range of different organisations. They maintain an ever growing open source database of what are termed ‘micro-philanthropic opportunities’ – which can either be directly searched at SocialActions.com or used to ‘push’ opportunities specific to a particular cause or area out to any other website which wishes to publicise them. And, of course, there is still ample opportunity for charities themselves to engage directly with supporters online.

The truth is that for the foreseeable future I expect to see online fundraising evolve to embrace a mix of charity-specific approaches, open source aggregation, and big brand charity choice consolidators – with supporters choosing how to engage based on whether they have a specific link with an existing charity brand or are more interested in a variety of support opportunities.

What is for sure is that fundraisers need to be preparing right now for this evolution – understanding the new opportunities on offer and what implications each of these might have on the way they work, and developing strategies and staff training programmes that will equip them to maximise their online fundraising income in future.

In the wake of the Honduran military coup in June, several radio stations and other media outlets have come under attack, which has resulted in the cancellation of many broadcasts, including Media Impact’s radio soap opera about healthy environmental practices.

Now, the show is off the air and PCI-Media Impact is determined to bring it back using GlobalGiving’s Global Open Challenge, an online fundraising platform where individuals and organizations can make contributions to help innovative development projects of their choice.  Media Impact has until Friday, September 18 to raise $4,000 from at least 50 donors to ensure a spot on the GlobalGiving site and support the commercial rebroadcast of Agua de Ángel.

Time is running out; There are 9 days left in the Global Open Challenge and Media Impact only needs $931 from at least 10 donors.

Please help us reach this goal by making a $10 donation today. Support rural Hondurans’ right to clean, safe drinking water!   www.globalgiving.com/3732

I’m a neuroscientist. I work at GlobalGiving. Neither makes me an expert in psychology, but this past week at work has given me a much clearer idea about the psychology of anonymous feedback – or whistleblowing.

Tori Hogan quoted me recently in social edge as saying, “most volunteers try to self-filter and only say good things publicly [about a project after they visit], but privately send in negative comments.” Tori then followed up by saying, “Well, it’s not perfect, but at least it’s a start!”

Days later, I found myself witnessing this once again. I was buried in comments from a dozen people, each of whom had personal knowledge about what one organization on GlobalGiving has been doing in Cambodia. Everyone was desperate to opine and to feel they were heard by donors, yet I was amazed that none of them were willing to go “on the record” – AKA attach their name to the claim.

Since my only interest was providing all sides with a forum for fair feedback, I found myself doing something that benefits everyone. After years of fighting between the current staff and a group of former volunteers at this organization, everyone finally had a chance to air-out all the complaints in one place, in a way that protects each person’s identity.

My insights:

• Most people would rather do nothing than publicly stand behind their allegations (even when they have solid documentary proof!).
• Useful filtering: When you spread the word through a social network that it is “go time” on submitting an endorsement or raising allegations about an organization (meaning there is a deadline for comments), the most confident people will speak up first. Those who have mixed feelings are the last to speak up.
• Many of these commenters feared retribution. Are these fears founded? I myself can’t imagine what power each side has over the other. We’re talking about a small organization with no money or power, not the mob!

Maybe you can read through the debate and tell me:

The controversial project in question: http://www.globalgiving.com/projects/thecambodiaproject/

I recently completed my summer internship at Portland Public Schools with the communications department. It was a great experience and made my summer very busy, to say the least.

I kept my part-time job as assistant manager at maurices in Roseburg and commuted Portland. I stayed with family in Beaverton for two to three nights each week while I worked at PPS. Let’s just say I-5 and I got to know each other very well over the summer (however, I still managed to get lost several times while navigating Portland). However, all of the driving was well worth the experience PPS gave me.

Some things I learned:

• That writing features can take a very long time, especially when you have ten people to contact and five of them are on vacation – or they just never call you back.
• The names and demographic information of each 80-plus PPS school. I acquired this knowledge by making each school its own charitable giving Web site (hosted by Nike and GlobalGiving).
• Kids say the darndest things. Example: I walk into fifth-grade classroom. Boy: “You’re hot.” OK….errr…thanks?
• Calling strangers eventually gets easier and less awkward.

Worst part about commuting: traffic (I'm a small-town girl).

I had never worked in an office setting before this internship, so I was worried about boredness and back pain. Although my back needed to get used to all the sitting, I was never bored at PPS. I really enjoyed the office atmosphere and everybody was so much fun to work with. Moreover, there were baked goods on an almost daily basis!

I was confident in my time-management skills before I began my internship; however, I’ve realized now that time can get even more difficult to manage when you have two jobs and make a three-hour commute twice a week. At PPS, I would have both large projects, as well as small projects assigned to me each day. It takes time-management and patience to juggle everything and still produce the best work. I feel that my experience at PPS gave me a great perspective on what is realistic to accomplish in day’s and week’s worth of work.

Public relations is not the sort of career that you can always leave at the office; in fact, for the most part, it follows you around like a puppy– a cute puppy, though.

PCI-Media Impact is participating in GlobalGiving’s Open Challenge, an online fundraising drive, to save one of their most successful social change communications campaigns, which was recently cancelled as a result of the June 28 military coup in Honduras.

Agua de Ángel is a multi-faceted communications campaign developed by PCI-Media Impact and their Honduran partner, Red de Desarrollo Sostenible (Sustainable Development Network, in English), to encourage rural communities to protect and conserve local water supplies, which are increasingly threatened by deforestation, pesticide use, and mismanagement of solid waste.

The focal point of the campaign is an educational radio soap opera by the same name, Agua de Ángel, which broadcast its first five episodes in May and June on a government radio station.  As a result of the military coup, the program has been taken off the air, and the Sustainable Development Network needs additional funding to broadcast on commercial radio.

To learn more about this fundraising effort or how you can contribute please visit the GlobalGiving Open Challenge page.

We have been talking for some time now about integrating virtual gifting into our ecard sites. There seems to be a natural synergy between giving a virtual card — and a virtual gift to go along with it. That said, we feel like doing something more for social good than just giving people the opportunity to send a clip art rose or heart to their recipient. We’re very interested in the possibility of working with an organization like GlobalGiving, and leveraging their API on our site, allowing people to give charitable donations to organizations that fight AIDS, hunger, animal cruelty, etc. Another is Mokugift, where people can plant a tree for $1 in various regions of the world, to help fight climate change.

A recent article from The Business Insider entitled Facebook’s PayPal-Killer Will Be Bigger Than Facebook Ads, Some Execs Believe, talks about how Facebook users will be able to buy and pay for virtual and physical gifts from third-party vendors using “Pay With Facebook”.

What is interesting to us is that two of the four app developers helping Facebook to execute on this new feature are ecard providers: American Greetings Interactive and someecards.

It feels like the time is ripe to get serious about charitable gifting on our video ecard sites. Not sure yet if there is a tie in to Facebook for us, but certainly it’s validation that we have a good idea.

Learn more about GlobalGiving – connects donors with community-based projects that need support.

Learn more about Mokugift – plant a tree somewhere in the world for $1 and help fight climate change.

Ayer en la Universidad Iberoamericana nos reunimos de nuevo en sesión el Social Media Club México para seguir compartiendo, educando y transmitiendo conocimiento respecto a Social Media, Web 2.0, Marketing, Comunicación, etc. El tema principal fue el Sector Non-Profit (Sin fines de lucro, Caridad, Fundaciones, Etc.) y tuve la responsabilidad y honor de dar la plática.

Social Media Club Mexico

Image via CrunchBase

La idea de esta plática era inicialmente platicar de esfuerzos como SocialVibe que permiten ayudar y dar donaciones con poco gasto de tiempo y 0 gasto de dinero utilizando el poder de las redes sociales y de convocar a tus amigos a ayudar para que sean empresas las que realicen las donaciones.

Esto me llevo a investigar mucho más del tema. y a encontrar cosas muy interesantes al respecto, motores, canales, apoyos de muchas formas que aprovechan Social Media y las redes sociales, blogs, videos, multimedia etc para atraer donadores, voluntarios y comunicar mensaje, causar impacto y crear consciencia en las personas desde la causa más local hasta la global.

Estos esfuerzos son dignos de darse a conocer y sobre todo de seguirse y abrirse más allá de ciertas fronteras.

La reunión fue un éxito de nuevo, con gran asistencia, gran lugar para reunirnos y sobre todo conversación, debate e ideas por todos lados. Les invito a unirse en estas ligas:

Red Social Empresarial 2.0

Wiki Social Media Club

Grupo de Facebook

Les dejo la liga a la presentación:

Social Media Sin Fines de Lucro

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Power of Influence – Social Media Club (notes) (jurecuhalev.com)
• Social Media Conversation series (Talk with Anna Farmery) (themarketingblog.wordpress.com)

Street Gang is partly a story of new technology and new teaching methods (Sesame Street) used to reach a new audience.

I’ve been reading a new book Street Gang about the history of Sesame Street. Looking at it today as the most effective form of education in the history of mankind, you would never know that this program almost never got off the ground. Jim Henson was one of the last pieces in the Children’s Television Workshop puzzle of moving parts. And would Sesame Street have been a success without puppets? Unlikely

The most important part so far was reading how Sesame Street got moms in the inner city to turn on the TV and sit their kids in front of it for the show – a new phenomenon in 1968. Sesame Street hired community organizers to get the word out, driving cars with signs, blaring messages through the streets of Harlem, anything – to tell adults to turn it on.

Another technology note:

Most people didn’t know how to dial in a UHF station, like many PBS stations airing Sesame Street. You needed a larger antenna. Some TV sets required a screw driver or special knob to adjust the station above 13 in 1968. Hence the importance of old-style door-to-door advertising and practical advice on how to see PBS.

They held community events one night after another, to educate adults about being the first teachers for their kids. This was media on a grand scale.

Why care?

I think it is very appropriate to understand Sesame Street in 1968 if you want to know what is needed to make SMS work for feedback in development in Kenya, 2009. The lesson: We need to focus on raising awareness among Kenyans about phoning in what they think about GlobalGiving projects. The technology exists, but no one will use it if we don’t get the word out.

Stacy Harris works with the Africa Conseration Trust. Turk Pipkin was one of the actors on the Sopranos (HBO) and is shooting a documentary of their project. Here is his latest letter:

Dear Marc:

We had a great two days with Turk Pipkin and his staff. They visited Magadi for 2 days and had a blast. Hi coworkers daugher visited and stated, “This is the greatest day of my life” They were very impressed and are commited to helping us in anyway possible. It was truely a fantastic visit for our organization.

Turk says he will put together a 4 minute film on our project. He got tremendous video, including interviews with 3 of our Masai women workers. This in unheard of as Masai women firstly, do not work, and secondly, it is extremely difficult to get them to talk. He got great wildlife and tree footage so I am confident he will give you an awesome product. He wants you to get in touch with him to confirm all the details. He will be back in the USA of Thursday. We are attending the premiere of his film here in Nairobi on Tuesday, then he flies home the next day.

Turk is also interested in participating in the event. This is a possible marketing opportunity for GlobalGiving as his name carries weight in the environment world. Also, he is willing to do a film premier in DC. He will have premiers in NY and LA in September. If we can coordinate for his premier to occur after the LA and NY premier we will have built in publicity.

He was so impressed he is going to do a half hour documentary on our project for the Discovery Channel. He is doing a project for Discovery at the moment and will come back to visit our project in November to do a full documentary on our Masai program. So we have to thank Global Giving because without you, we would have never met Turk.

Thanks for everything.

Stacy

Stay tuned for more on our Washington eco-summit, where environmental leaders in grassroots organizations from around the world will get to speak.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rdubois/3568330105/

Listen to a short conversation with Kristen VanZantz of Pueblo a Pueblo.

The village was buried by a mudslide in Guatemala a few years ago. She is helping to rebuild the community now that the emergency relief money is gone.

Pueblo a Pueblo works with the local school to provide kids with lunch and wants to expand this into an organic gardening program for the school.

Podcast with Kristen

My friend Stacy (via twitpic) visiting with beneficiaries of www.globalgiving.org/1179

Marc Maxson – Saturday, May 23, 2009 – From Guatemala

Had a long day even through both flights were short by International standards. By 2pm Robert and I were in Antigua, Guatemala, a colorful town at the base of a volcano. We walked around for a while while we got acquainted with this new place. Our plan is to spend the week visiting GlobalGiving projects and facilitate two workshops at the end of the week about generating good media for the site. The people were quite friendly and the food great. You get the feeling that we’re not so far from home when every shop in town takes VISA and the ATM gives you the option of getting cash out in US dollars or Guatemalan Quetzals.

For my first item of business, I swapped out my SafariCom SIM card for a Claro one. Part of staff visits is testing out the pratical nuts and bolts of what makes GlobalGiving operate in over a hundred countries. We’d like to know what SMS tools work where so we can promote the cheap and easy-to-use ones for getting more “in the field” updates from travelers and organization staff. Ultimately, we like to hear from the people in the grass of every grassroots project that know best what they need and who is serving them. If you’re traveling, drop us a line and we’ll hook you up with a project to visit and the tools to help you share your story.

Robert and I found a corner telephone shop. I plopped down my African Nokia and asked for a SIM. The fella tried out various SIM cards until he found one that worked. Different networks use different frequencies, and apparently only one in Guatemala shares a bit of bandwidth with the one I used in Kenya back in March of 2009. $20 bucks later, I’m in business. Setting up twitter is taking a bit longer, partially because I needed to call someone to find out what my phone number was.

We wandered over to the park in the center of Antigua. I dropped into an ATM and withdrew $120 with a standard debit card from a small credit union based in Central Pennsylvania. The global financial network is amazing, and yet puzzling. It is great that a foreigner can use an ATM to suck $120 out of his US bank account for a $5 fee, but why does it cost our local NGOs between $20 and $50 to get money via a bank-to-bank transfers? Getting money to where it is needed most remains a huge challenge, but I that’s why I go into the field – to explore new technologies to drive costs down.

Why not just give our project leaders prepaid VISA cards, so they can pull the money out like I just did? (We’ve talked about it. The providers like iKobo are still too shaky in places like Sierra Leone and Somalia – where we need them most).

Another option is doing it over mobile phones. M-PESA, for example, allows Kenyans to transfer money directly from one phone to another. Last year some 15 to 18 million people transferred over a billion dollars within Kenya alone. The average transfer was $40 and it only cost them about 50 cents per transfer, according to a UNDP expert to spoke at a recent conference (Metrics from the Ground Up). Unfortunately there’s no bridge between M-PESA and US banks yet. But the potential for cheaper money transfers to make a material difference in the lives of three billion people that live on under $2.50 a day is obvious (http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats).

Here is a good blog post about the global remittance economy:

http://whiteafrican.com/2008/02/08/the-20-billion-african-remittance-market/

In celebration of Earth Day, April 22^nd, GlobalGiving is offering a way you can help fight poverty and climate change at the same time.  This month, PlayPumps International is featured in GlobalGiving’s Green Campaign among other special “green leaf” projects.   Give to a green-designated project like our program in Mozambique and your donation will be matched 50%. 

This means that through April 28, $10 becomes $15 / $50 becomes $75 / $100 becomes $150.  And, they are rewarding the projects that generate the most donations by putting up bounties for $5,000, $2,500, and $1,000.  Give today and tell your friends to give too! 

Learn more about the GlobalGiving Campaign here.  Visit the PlayPumps International Project in Mozambique here.

So this week our four graduate students in International development from George Washington University returned from their two-week trek across Kenya. Their goal was to visit 20 GlobalGiving projects and ask them all a set of survey questions they had designed. I hoped they would have 15 questions. They left with over 50. The week before they left, Dennis Whittle, our GlobalGiving co-founder suggested they add one question to the list.

“Get them to ask organization staff, ‘how do you know that you are serving your beneficiaries?’” he said.

When they returned, Shiela, one of our interns asked them, “So what question was the most useful in picking out good orgs from bad ones?”

“That question about ‘how do you know you are serving the people,’” Kara said.
“Any others?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Michael added. “Asking non-founders of organizations, why did you choose to come work here?”

Last week I also heard something profound in its simplicity to the credibility problem the world has. If you haven’t heard, there are many organizations worldwide taking money to do the peoples’ work and delivering very little. Some of outright crooks and some are incompetent. Many are good. But a few crooks can get away with a lot of money and poison the public’s appetite to help strangers. Deborah Winston works with indigineous peoples to give them the tools to help themselves. She said, “When you want to know if a person is bad or good, you ask a child. They will give it to you straight.”
“Wow!” Makes sense to me.

Finally, on the question of which organization left these guys with a strong impression, they immediately mentioned the Brothers Self Help Group. The founder, Vincent Atitwa came to my workshop and from the site description of the work, you can see he needs a lot of help in the description of his activities, but these four folks insist the community is totally raving about this guy’s organization. He works in the REALLY poor areas of Western Kenya. I thought he was kookie when he begged for bus fare to get home after my workshop, but according to them the area is dirt poor. These are $1 a day folks.

Based on the strength of reccommendation of Kara, Michael, Gerald, and Ryann, I gave $25 to this project. In March, 2009 Science Magazine has an article on the “Surprising power of neighborly advice.” Basically, asking your neighbor for his or her impression is often more reliable than being given the facts without any first hand impressions. This project description versus the impressions of friends is a case in point. And to prove this point, I gave some money. The way GlobalGiving works, this organization cannot remain on the site unless they raise 50 donations in the first month. That is a proxy for having the base to use the platform effectively. I did my part. Now it is time you did yours. Or is it too late?

Hi, would you like a little world-changing idea this morning?

How about a little idea with your coffee today?

Hi there, would you like to change the world?

These are the phrases that GlobalGiving is using to sell itself to passer-bys on the street walking to work in the morning.

http://www.globalgiving.com/

GlobalGiving is an online marketplace that hosts pre-screened charitable causes who are in need of some funding and need a way to connect with donors that won’t add to their operating costs. GlobalGiving categorizes the projects by region and by topic – e.g. women, environment, health, human rights, etc. to allow you to find a cause you believe in more quickly. Even a quick browse through the site will have you emptying your online pockets of spare change (metaphorically speaking) because each cause just seems so worthwhile and they ask for donations ranging from the tens of thousands to mere pennies. So if you feel like you’ve got a few spare pennies, and even if you want to just check it out… watch this promotional video explaining how GlobalGiving works:

- Sarah Topps

Next week, I’ll be hosting a panel discussion at the Skoll World Forum at Oxford University that takes its title from one of my favorite John Lennon songs: Power to the People. The discussion will center around online social activism and peer-to-peer philanthropy via networks, and it features a great line-up of social entrepreneurs who aim to change (and hopefully expand) both charitable and for-profit social ventures. If you’re going to Skoll, I really hope you’ll join us.

But if you’re not, the discussion has already started – and your ideas are most welcome.

Thanks to Social Edge, the Skoll Foundation’s online community for social entrepreneurs, we’ve been busily talking about “open source giving” over the past two weeks. I set up the discussion to focus on this question: “So how does this movement, this explosion in wired social ventures, change the web?”

I asked that question specifically because of a contest organized by Social Actions, itself a social venture/startup and the clearinghouse for tens of thousands of opportunities to give, organize, volunteer and get involved in wired causes. Social Actions’s Change the Web contest challenges developers and entrepreneurs to use its database of more than 70,000 actions across more than 40 ‘CauseWired’ platforms in interesting and innovative ways – to build widgets, to distribute the data to key audiences, to parse searches in ways that encourage open source giving.

But an important part of the Change the Web effort is the dialogue around just how the web is changing, and how socially-wired it will be in the future. So this conversation aims to advance that conversation.

Next week’s panel should be great: Premal Shah of Kiva, Mari Kuraishi of GlobalGiving, and Mads Kjaer of MyC4. And we’ve done much our panel planning in public – on the Social Edge forum, and centered around the theme of changing the web. Meantime, a few quotes from the forum (but head over and put up your own thoughts):

Peter Deitz: “Let’s take this opportunity to pose the tough questions to Kiva, Global Giving, and MYC4. Are they collaborating with other platforms, and could the be collaborating more? Are they sharing as much donor / project / web analytics data as possible with an eye toward accountability and helping the Movement grow? What is their strategy when it comes to open APIs, and permitting transactions to happen anywhere and everywhere?”

Tori Tuncan: “What I have noticed is that the community is key. It is not enough to have a unique way for people to give and help others online. These donors (lenders) want to connect….It appears, then, that even though the internet gives us the ability to contribute collectively to causes with people we would have never known otherwise, human nature still dictates a certain need to connect on a deeper level than just clicking the same “donate” (or “lend”) button.”

Daniel Bassill: “I think that we’re on the verge of making huge shifts in how social benefit organizations are funded, thus, how well they do their work. So far what I’ve seen is a variety of hubs that list lots of causes and try to draw traffic through those portals to those causes. www.networkforgood.org was one of the first, and is one of the biggest, to my knowledge. I’m one of more than 700,000 non profits listed, and the number of people who have found me and donated because I’m on this site is probably less than a dozen, if that many. Thus, the first question is “how do these portals draw meaningful dollars and volunteers or other needed resources to a larger number of their members, or to all of them?” So far, it seems that the rich, brand name, or high profile, orgs just get richer because of how these portals draw more attention to them.”

Jo Davidson: “I see the golden age as a broad term for changes taking place in humanity, brought on by the information age. Just like the software developed necessary to collaboratively link social media, mobile technology, and peer-to peer networks, the golden age is a transformative shift in access to information….To the question, how can the web transformation (socially wired for the future) advance social entrepreneurship – the answer no doubt lies with connecting communities. And since people love to watch their digital footprint and be part of networks that connect them, a golden age for causes is only a matter of time.”

Joe Solomon: “What do web portals look like that let anyone fund and support social entrepeneurs in our own backyard. For example, What if, for $25, you could help fund the next electric car? ( http://tinyurl.com/greenloans ) How will Kiva.org and MyC4 contribute and collaborate in this conversation rather than compete. Is there a place to bridge online collabortion sites like Amazee?”

Mari Kuraishi: “[The] question “how does it feel and what are the opportunities associated with being part of a movement that’s rewiring the web for social change, and how can that transformation advance social entrepreneurship in general?” I’m not sure I have a ready answer for, but maybe it’s a great question to ask during the panel at the Forum. On the one hand there are days when my nose is so flat up against the grindstone my response would be, “what movement?” and other days I can actually feel the ground shifting. But I guess that’s part of the bipolarity of being an entrepreneur …”

Jeff Mowatt: “While we’ve been hung up on widgets we’re just beginning to realise that getting information technology to those who can’t afford it is the enabler. To the extent that Obama includes rural broadband deployment in the stimulus plan and Bill Gates awakens to the fact the poor people DO need computers.”

Just a few weeks behind the originally planned launch date (which is pretty impressive for a development of this complexity) the online fundraising site formerly known as Play it Forward and now renamed Pifworld went live over the weekend.

I’ve been watching the development of Pifworld with interest over the last few months, for a couple of reasons. Partly because it is the latest of a number of innovative online community fundraising developments to recently come from the Netherlands, where the whole concept of online community fundraising has really taken off over the last 18 months or so. But also because pre-launch announcements suggested that Pifworld would offer a very different online user experience to that of established charity project crowdfunding sites like Kiva and Globalgiving – and indeed it does.

At the outset, in addition to the usual project search functionality we’re used to seeing, Pifworld’s project inventory is displayed on an interactive globe (shown above) that you can spin and zoom to see what they have available in any particular area of the world you might be interested in. All within a main screen that also displays latest funding and supporter data. This might sound like an unnecessary novelty, but actually works really well and is a fun and engaging way to see what’s going-on.

Then, when you find a project that looks like it might be of interest, in place of the traditional text and photo-based project funding request, Pifworld projects are promoted through neat little video interviews with key project staff who explain the project aims, activities, and needs – like the woman below explaining her project in India.

Now, other fundraising sites have certainly used video in places to help illustrate project activities. But I’m not aware of any which have taken the next natural step of replacing text and photo project reviews (which are often little more than on-screen versions of good old direct mail leaflets) with a far more authentic and engaging video presentation. Pifworld project updates are also video-based, so you can really see (and hear) what the team have been doing with your donation.

Unfortunately at this stage, once you’ve found the project you’re interested in, the user experience slips a bit – as the online donation process seems a bit more complex than usual. Donations are made from a Pifworld ‘wallet’ which you first have to upload 5 Euro ‘credits’ to. This can be done from vouchers or using most major credit cards (at an added transaction cost of around 1 Euro) but the overall process feels a lot less streamlined than I’ve experienced on other sites. Also the confirmation email doesn’t arrive immediately (I’m still waiting for mine). For all that I love other aspects of the site, I think this payment process could do with another look – given that it’s fundamentally what the whole site is about. It wouldn’t be the first time that an apparently very engaging online fundraising site failed to maximise income simply because insufficient thought had been given to the back-office functionality. Hopefully the Pifworld team will be watching their site analytics to ensure that people are completing their transactions and will fix this if not.

Beyond this, another very nice feature is the way that project advocacy has been built into Pifworld, with people encouraged not only to become Supporters but also Ambassadors for their chosen projects – with blogging facilities provided to help Ambassadors mobilise their personal online networks. There is also email promotional functionality and project details can be shared as an Open Social widget (although only by copying the widget URL and not through a simple pushbutton which is becoming the norm elsewhere).

So all-in-all, a fun and engaging site that will hopefully prove attractive to potential online donors of all ages – with a few wrinkles to iron-out over the coming months. Definitely a site to keep an eye-on.

Meantime, if you’re interested in what else is happening in online community fundraising in the Netherlands, then it’s worth taking a look at 1procentclub.nl and geefsamen.nl (thanks to Victor for those). As well as the latest implementation of the YoCo fundraising platform from my old colleagues at WWAV Holland, which has raised almost 1 million Euros in sponsorship donations for cancer charity KWF Kankerbestrijding’s Alpe d’HuZes cycling challenge just a couple of months after going live.

I first heard about the Donation Dashboard, created as part of a research project by the Berkeley Centre for New Media, through my US-based former colleague Jeff Brookes’ Donor Power blog, and I’ve been meaning to mention it for a while. Then it struck me that it could be of particular interest to any American donors (or donors anywhere I guess, but the organisations included are all US non-profits) wanting to get the new year off to a good start by refreshing the portfolio of charities they support.

Donation Dashboard uses a ‘collaborative filtering algorithm’ to recommend a portfolio of non-profits to support, including what percentage of the amount you wish to donate should go to each, based on an analysis of your stated interests combined with those of everyone else who has taken part in the research project (not dissimilar to Amazon’s ‘people who bought that also bought this’ recommendation approach).

To generate a personal giving portfolio, you’re presented with an initial set of 15 non-profits, with summary information for each, which you rate on a sliding scale from ‘Not Interested’ to ‘Very Interested’. The site then generates a statistical model of your giving preferences and a recommended portfolio based on this, which you can then refine through the rating of more non-profits.

My portfolio is shown above. No surprise that it includes Kiva, which I’m a big fan of, and NPR/PBS which I used a lot when living in the States. But One Laptop Per Child was an unexpected yet interesting, and personally relevant, recommendation.

It’s a fun tool to play with and if you’re the type of person who plans their charitable giving in terms of a balanced portfolio then it may well introduce you to some new organisations doing work that’s of real interest to you. However, I’m not sure how many donors actually approach donation decisions quite as rationally as that?

Where I could see this type of collaborative  recommendation approach being more effectively used is perhaps in online ‘charity supermarket’ sites like GlobalGiving and Play it Forward, where potential donors are offered the opportunity to choose projects to support from a wide range of different organisations. There the diverse range of choices might be more easily, and interestingly, navigated through some form of collaborative recommendation approach – rather than just via the usual drop down menu choices.

Then

Following the great success of the original US GlobalGiving site, which has raised over $12 million since launch in 2001 by offering individual donors the opportunity to support specific grassroots development projects run by a range of specialist organisations, a UK version of the site has now launched.

GlobalGiving.co.uk has partnered with an interesting mix of charities to offer UK donors a choice from over 500 projects in 70 countries. There are a few large brands like Help The Aged and VSO, but the majority are fascinating small specialist organisations like The Freeplay Foundation, PhotoVoice, and Riders for Health.

This mix creates a very distinctive feel to the project-specific content on the site – which forms the heart of the whole donor experience. When you read through the detailed project proposals from these organisations you feel not only that you know how your donation is going to be used, but that it will really make an important difference to the work of specialists doing great things out there in the field. Which, of course, is exactly what donors want to feel these days before parting with their cash.

For example there’s Satellife, who need £17,741 to ship 700 donated PDAs loaded with medical software to medical students graduating from Makerere University in Uganda so they can have access to the latest medical information without having to leave their patients and travel back to the city. As I type the project has received £539 from 10 donors – and the site is encouraging me to become number 11. It’s a highly engaging experience that feels somehow different from that achieved by the equivalent project content on the sites of large development charities.

Add to this an attractive and easy to navigate website, automated Gift Aid reclaim, a gift certificate service, and widget-based integration with a host of social media sites to help donors publicise their chosen project and GlobalGiving.co.uk adds-up to a great online supporter environment – and one which bigger charities with the resources to develop their own branded project fundraising portals could learn a lot from.

Thinking ahead, the GlobalGiving.co.uk launch raises a range of strategic questions relating to the impact such fundraising marketplaces might have on the future of online giving. Are they a significant threat to the large charities who used to have the upper-hand in online giving because only they had the resources to provide sophisticated fundraising websites? If so, how will the big brand charities respond – by offering competing sites which aim to provide a better supporter experience or promoting their projects through multi-brand marketplaces? Will they grow the donor market or cannibalise?

Then there is also the question of whether the impact of such sites will be felt by organisations across all causes, or if such marketplaces will only really be effective where the work is easily packaged into smaller projects. So, great for Community Development, but not for causes dependent on large-scale projects like Disaster Relief or Medical Research?

One thing’s for sure. Online and offline, today’s donors are demanding more control over how their donation is used, more evidence of the impact their support achieves, and a more personal supporter experience overall. As a sector we’ve known this for many years now and the opportunities to address these demands online have been discussed in great detail – but perhaps it will take a new element of competition from brands like GlobalGiving to really get things moving on turning the opportunities into significant new income.

Ok, the following post looks a little wacky.  I’ll admit it.  But you can get the gist.  And it’s worthwhile.  So there.

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