givemeaning

Philanthropy Stock Markets

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Sean Stannard-Stockton has written a very interesting piece in the Financial Times about the emergence of stock markets for philanthropy:

Philanthropy is undergoing a transformational shift. While most donors continue to give in the same ways they have for 100 years, the vanguard of philanthropy is busily reforming the fabric of the charitable sector.

Often referred to as the "social capital markets" and characterised by a model of giving that mirrors the financial markets, this emerging model is still in its infancy. Since you can create only that which you imagine, I thought I would take a quick trip 25 years into the future to see what philanthropy might become.

For many donors, the year 2033 does not look a whole lot different from 2008. Many people simply write cheques to charities and devote the bulk of their giving to non-profit organisations in their community.

But for some donors, the landscape is radically different. The "social stock exchanges" that became popular between 2011 and 2019 now include all but a few large non-profits and many small but ambitious start-ups.

These exchanges compete for non-profit listings. Exchanges include big national networks with some international organisations, down to small local exchanges.

Continue reading "The donor landscape of 2033 is bright"

From the perspective of social actions platfoms, I'm sitting here wondering what role will Change.org, GiveMeaning, GlobalGiving, and others play in this brave new world of trading goodness.

Raising Money for an Organization You Meet While Traveling

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Last month, a friend from Montreal wrote to me for suggestions on how to raise money for an organization she had come across several years ago in Peru. She was about to return to the country and wanted to bring good news in the form of a micro-philanthropy campaign that would support the organization's community projects.

The only problem: she didn’t know anything about micro-philanthropy.

Below are my suggestions to her. I’m posting them here as a resources to anyone thinking of raising money and support for an inspiring organization they meet while traveling...

FIRST, you will need materials:

  • Digital pictures of the group at work, preferably from this trip
  • Video footage of your trip
  • An interview with the founder and a few interviews with the people involved. You can translate and put subtitles on these materials later in the campaign.
  • Footage of the group’s workspace and the community where they are based.
  • Ask the people you're visiting to state their needs in their own words. If you can get the group to write a “fundraising letter/solicitation” explaining their situation, then you’ll be in good shape. If you can get them to read it to you (and record it), then you're micro-philanthropy campaign will be smoking.
  • Facts and figures about the region/issue you’re focusing on

All of these materials will help give your micro-philanthropy campaign its proper voice -- in the end, the campaign will appear created by and for the organization in question. You will be the messenger and nothing more.

SECOND, you need to think about what the fundraiser will accomplish:

  • How much are you trying to raise?
  • Who are you trying to get involved?
  • How will you deliver the funds?
  • Where will the money go once it’s collected?
  • What will the donations make possible?

These are questions that potential donors will want answers to. If you can anticipate as many questions as possible, and provide comprehensive answers, then you're more likely to gain the trust needed to get more people to donate. Posting an FAQ will help in soliciting donations from the extended network of your friends and family, and from the people who come across your campaign by chance.

THIRD, you need to pick the right combination of social action platforms and tools.

For now, all you need to know is that you're going to use a combination of 'social action platforms and tools' to spread word about the fundraiser and receive donations. You can explain to the staff at the nonprofit that you're going to use new online tools to make the micro-philanthropy campaign spread to people who have never heard of the organization.

Also, you can assure them that you'll provide the exact names of the tools and platforms that you plan to use before the campaign is launched. Some of these platforms will be commercial. Some will be strictly nonprofit. It's important that the staff members at the organization know how their message is getting out. This will keep them in the loop and also give them the possibility of using these tools on their own to reach donors at some point in the future.

Raising money for an international organization is not easy. Most social action platforms are geared to U.S.-based nonprofits. As a result, you have two main options:

  1. GiveMeaning is a social action platform based in Canada that can help you find an official organization through which to pass the funds. This will help produce the tax-receipts for 'donors' who want them.
  2. ChipIn is a tool that will permit you to raise money with a specific fundraising goal in mind and receive donations through a PayPal account. In other words, you wouldn't have to worry about finding an organization to distribute the funds. If you use ChipIn, you can simply transfer the money from PayPal to a bank account or make periodic distributions from PayPal to the organization via PayPal. A third payment method would be to transfer the money from PayPal to yourself and then write a check and mail it.

GiveMeaning and ChipIn on their own won't produce the desired result. You'll want to enlist a range of social media tools and social networking sites to fully disseminate the message. Basically, there are a few things you'll want to do:

  • Create a Flickr account with photos of the group and your trip
  • Invite your friends to donate by email
  • Invite your friends to invite their friends
  • Thank people who contribute as soon as they donate
  • List the campaign on Change.org as a “change”
  • Perhaps start a blog for your fundraiser
  • Perhaps create a Facebook group for the organization.
  • Definitely compile the video footage into an actual online video that people can send around through YouTube
  • Update the website of the organization (if they have one).
  • And the list goes on.

CNN also has suggestions on launching a successful micro-philanthropy campaign.

I hope these suggestions provide you with enough information to get started.

All the best, Peter

Kings of Philanthropy and Princes of Micro-Philanthropy

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In July 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) posted two radio documentaries about the philanthropy of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jeff Skoll, and other billionaires. The recordings originally appeared on a radio program entitled Ideas. The two part series is called "The Kings of Philanthropy" (part i and part ii).

Here's a brief description:

Some have called it the natural fall-out of a hyper-capitalist society; billionaires who've made more money from media and technology enterprises than anyone in human history. There's Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft; Jeff Skoll, the founder of e-Bay; and, of course, Warren Buffet, who has been dubbed the "Oracle of Omaha." Now, they've reinvented themselves as philanthropists, giving away billions to help the poor. Freelance broadcaster Richard Phinney asks: can they re-make the world?

What's interesting about these podcasts is that they discuss the work of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Jeff Skoll in terms of a generational shift in attitudes toward philanthropy. These billionaires, according to the reporter, represent a new wave of philanthropists, wealthy grant-makers who emphasize transplanted business practices and social entrepreneurship over charitable giving for purely humanitarian relief.

"The Kings of Philanthropy" is an excellent documentary and casts new light on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in particular. But from my perspective, the philanthropists described in this program (perhaps Jeff Skoll aside) represent an 'older' generation of philanthropy, one in which great wealth is amassed first and distributed later.

"The Princes (and Princesses) of Micro-Philanthropy" are from generation Y. They are the founders of sites like GiveMeaning, DonorsChoose, Change.org, and Project Agape. They write blogs like Tactical Philanthropy. And create mash-ups like the Social Actions search engine. The young people behind these sites have committed themselves to changing the institutions of philanthropy, with or without huge amounts of money, and certainly before reaching middle-age.

Next time the CBC does an investigative report on new trends in philanthropy, I think they should look to the off-spring of Boomers. That's where they'll find the greatest generational shift in attitudes toward philanthropy.

Here are some leads:

As far as I know, everyone listed above is under 30, and often well-under 30.

A moment ago I referred to them as the The Princes (and Princesses) of Micro-Philanthropy. But come to think of it, since the aim is to democratize philanthropy, I should abandon feudal language altogether.

If you know of other young people using the web to democratize philanthropy, please post their names and projects below.

GiveMeaning Number Crunching

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Over the weekend, the Vancouver Sun published an unfavorable piece about GiveMeaning's finances (posted in full here). Below is an excerpt from the piece and a response from GiveMeaning's founder Tom Williams.

Giving Sounds Good - Let's Look at the Details

In the case of GiveMeaning, that overhead is disproportionately large. Of the $982,705 in total donations it received (and issued tax receipts for), GiveMeaning spent $666,070, or 68 per cent, on administrative expenses.

Those expenses included $199,043 for professional and consulting fees; $153,646 for salaries, wages and benefits; $28,433 for advertising and promotion; and $24,019 for travel.

I asked Williams whether he receives a salary. Well, yes, $90,000 per year. And his wife, country singer Jessie Farrell, who works part-time for the foundation "when she can," gets $30,000. So together they collect $120,000 per year, plus expenses.

After subtracting overhead costs, just over $300,000 was available for charitable purposes in 2006, but only $172,000 was actually given to charities (the remainder is still on the foundation's books). That $172,000 represents just 17.5 per cent of total donations.

But that's not the end of it. Many of the charities that receive money have their own overhead. So the net amount available for true charitable purposes is even less.

Williams insists that, whenever a person gives money for a particular charity, 100 per of that money gets to the named beneficiary. That may be true, but it does not mitigate the fact that the vast majority of the overall money collected during 2006 went to administration.

Here's Tom's response: (originally posted in this comment)

The writer of this piece blends together the money we raise online for projects posted at GiveMeaning.com and money we raise to pay our overheads which is absurd and irresponsible.

He called me on Friday telling me he was writing a piece for Saturday and seemed uninterested or incapable of understanding what is clearly said on our website in the About Us section. To quote directly from our About Page:

"We charge nothing for donations collected online and even cover the credit card costs associated with each donation. We rely on the support of generous donors and advertisers to provide this service." Can't get more clear than this.

But to reiterate, 100% of everything we collect through the GiveMeaning.com website for the projects listed on the site is forwarded to Implementing Organizations without charging their donors or the organizations a penny.

The donors who fund GiveMeaning Foundation's expenses do so specifically so that we don't have to charge any fees and do so with the knowledge of how their money is spent.

By lumping two totally separate activities together as one, the writer makes it appear as though we deduct money from projects, something that any of our project founders can tell you is clearly not the case.

We spend the money we do so that other charities don't have to invest in the infrastructure we provide for free. Infrastructure which dramatically lowers the cost of fundraising for charities of all sizes.

He also seems to think that a website runs itself and that more than 50,000 members and over 1500 fundraising pages happen without some serious investment required.

He also takes issue with the fact that many of the charitable foundations who have supported our work prefer to be anonymous. I offered him the opportunity to speak with some of our donors and he declined to do so.

Had he taken the time to understand the simple distinction between our operating costs and the funds we raise on behalf of our service, he wouldn't have had a story except that we have invested heavily to build a service for everyone to use free of charge.

Update: Tom Williams has posted an elaborated response on his blog.

Author:
Peter Deitz

How Social is the World According to Facebook?

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Facebook LogoA recent opinion piece from The Guardian casts new light on Facebook, and more importantly, on the investors who have helped turn the dorm-room project into one of the fastest growing multi-national companies.

For the last eight months, Facebook has had a strangle hold on the imagination of the nonprofit tech community. Technology consultants and bloggers have written endlessly about strengthening the relationships between a nonprofit and its supporters through Facebook, including myself.

But to what end? If Facebook is designed primarily to centralize resources in the hands of the few and advertise brand names that have nothing todo with the nonprofits we support, then what good could a one-off Facebook group or fundraising application do for philanthropy and the change sector?

As Facebook continues to flex its corporate identity, nonprofits and the people who support them may start looking elsewhere for social action platforms designed for social change. Purpose-driven communities like Change.org, ZaZengo, GiveMeaning and Razoo may prove safer and more credible places for organizations and independent projects to harness the power of networked individuals.

Here are a few excerpts from Tom Hodgkinson's With Friends Like These:

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

...

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."

...

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Continue reading With Friends Like These >>>

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