Social Action Platforms

PincGiving enables you to donate to the charity of your choice right now. Choose the charity or organization you want to support and list the monetary amount you want to give. We have charities in Canada, United States, UK and Australia that accept donations in 14 currencies.

Fundraising Pledge Pages - PincGiving gives you the tools and resources to create a successful fundraising campaign online. Donors can create customized online fundraising pledge pages to collect funds with peer-to-peer fundraising for their cause or charity.

Giving Gateway - Charities can place a 'Donate Now' Button for online payment processing on their website and collect donations online. We offer preferable rates with top payment processors, secure transactions and charity tax receipting.

Gift Card - Pay-It-Forward Gift Card - The Pay-It-Forward Gift Card program enables companies to further their reach with charitable match giving programs. Let the recipient decide which charity to support with the dollars you give. The charity gift cards allow the individuals to make a donation to the causes that are important to them and their friends.

Grant Services - PincGiving researches, assesses and then writes winning grant proposals to secure funding for your cause. We know what is required and have access to thousands of potential funding sources and will find the ones that meet your objectives.

MDTN seems to have learned from the proven best practices of sites like KIVA and Donors Choose.

• As with Donors Choose, the giver can fund a specific project, called in this case a "Wish" by the nonprofit.
• As with KIVA, the giver gets feedback and a felt bond with particular recipient or group. The donor might purchase five soccer balls and get not only a thank you, but a video uploaded showing the balls being kicked about on a dusty field in Africa.
• The site also has a social networking platform for donors to have profiles, blog about their interests, and "befriend" other donors.
• The site is set up to touch the heart as well as the mind.

The business structure is that of a closely held forprofit. The business model, to be announced officially in 4-6 weeks, is as follows:

• Nonprofits can have 5 wishes posted for free
• Beyond that they have to pay for an upgraded membership.
• Businesses are encouraged to purchase an upgrade for a charity. Included in that package is something like 50 wishes, plus training on social network marketing via the site, and additional bandwith to upload videos and pictures.
• Business thereby get the chance to sponsor local grassroots organizations in the communities in which they do business. A sponsorship costing, say. $1,200 a year might enable the nonprofit to raise ten times that.

I asked about competition and critical mass.

• The site is unique given its celebrity overlay. Jessica Biel and her celebrity friends will attract some visitors and makes for a nice story.
• The emphasis, though, is on execution of proven best practices, rather than doing something totally new.
• The hope is to achieve critical mass through network marketing. Each donor and charity has its own network. The charities may upload videos that go viral. Participants can invite friends. Businesses that participate may also tout their participation to employees and customers.

Continue reading Phil Cubeta's review of MTDN >>

* Overview and introductory remarks [00:22]

* Demos of website functionality [04:55]
- making a donation
- zooming in on classroom project details
- choosing a project
- impact statistics [11:25]
- thank-you packet

* How it works behind-the-scenes [15:25]

* “Business model” and marketing programs [21:00]
- Blogger Challenge and other Challenge applications
- gift certificates [31:55]
- project notification and syndication feeds

* Technology topics [37:05]
- handling big spikes in traffic
- support received from the tech community

* Closing remarks [41:50]

* Q&A [43:45]

MicroGiving is a true charitable website dedicated to direct online person-to-person giving from the heart to those in need. In essence, it’s a philanthropic marketplace similar to Ebay but instead of buyers and sellers, there are donors and recipients.

MicroGiving is a new and unique way of giving to the heart of the cause, where it’s needed most! By using the internet as means of global communication and the foundation for an online community dedicated to helping those in need, MicroGiving provides all donors of every means the same control over their gifts as the wealthiest philanthropists have enjoyed in the past. No longer are small “micro gifts” lumped into larger institutional accounts and divided out as other see fit. Now for the first time, you as the donor have a direct and controlling voice in where your funds are distributed.

Zopa is a global social finance company. We are a community of members who help each other financially using the tools of finance and social networking. We operate in several countries including the U.S., and in each country our approach is a bit different.

In the U.S., members who invest in a Zopa CD get a guaranteed, federally-insured investment. At the same time, they help members who've borrowed a Zopa Loan by reducing their monthly loan payments by the amount of the help given.

We're coining a term to describe what we do. It's called social finance. It means we want to improve the tools of financial services--investments, and loans, and so forth--by allowing people to use them to help themselves, and other people, at the same time.

There are lots of variations inside the world of social finance, like online person-to-person ("P2P") lending, which we pioneered in 2005, and the world of international microfinance, which we admire.

Firstgiving, a leader in providing Web-based fundraising services for individuals and charities, today announced the ability for its users to add YouTube™ video and Flickr photos to their personal Web pages. Mark Sutton, Chief Executive Officer of Firstgiving stated, “Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.” The end result he says is more people raising more money for their favorite charitable causes.

Firstgiving fundraisers can choose from among hundreds of thousands of U.S. certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations for which to raise money. Many individuals use the pages for event-based fundraising such as marathons or polar plunges. Others set up pages to raise money in lieu of birthday or wedding gifts or in memory of a loved one. Charities themselves can also use Firstgiving’s fundraising pages for events, special appeals or general donations. At any given point, there are 15,000 – 18,000 active pages on the Firstgiving Web site. Since 2003, they have helped over 100,000 people raise more than $50 million for more than 12,000 charities.

Sutton noted that there is no “right” tone for the videos or photos that people post, but rather that it’s more important that they reflect the personality of the individual making the appeal. “Some are funny, others are serious and then there are those that are so inspiring they knock your socks off,” he said.

Ultimatums is a product of The Point, which puts a unique spin on online petitions by creating a call to action that signers pledge to follow through on if the campaign hits a predetermined tipping point. I.e., We all pledge to do X if Y number of people pledge to do so too. The Ultimatums application is more or less an extension of that function on Facebook.

Like any web site that launches a version of itself on the Facebook platform, the one major advantage that the Facebook version has over the web site is the pre-installed user base. We have anecdotal evidence that campaigns on Facebook, from the serious to the moronic, can gather support on the network very fast. What the Ultimatums app does is simplify and clarify the call to action and encourage people to pledge to a specific goal, rather than just lend their name to directionless support of an issue.

Continue reading "Ultimatums: Using Facebook to Organize Social Action"

Weʼve seen the power of crowdsourcing through sites like Wikipedia. Now, The Point brings the wisdom of crowds to philanthropy. Through this new program, The Point helps philanthropists make an impact by using The Pointʼs member base to “outsource” the time-intensive process of distributing funds.

Limitations of time and resources usually prevent one person from determining the most effective way to distribute their donation. Organizations have arisen to help manage that process, serving as middlemen between philanthropists and those in need. But such organizations have their own costs, and by the time the money reaches its destination, thereʼs often far less of it than there was in the beginning.

But phenomena like predictive markets have shown that groups are far more adept than experts at making certain kinds of decisions, decisions like, “how can my money get the most bang per buck?”

Instead of an individual donor giving a large sum of money to an organization, The Point puts thousands of individuals in control of small increments of your donation, who will distribute it to the causes that matter, filling the cracks of our national prosperity. By enlisting thousands of individuals in the micro-distribution of funds, The Point brings an unprecedented precision to charitable giving.

...

We view the present initiative as an experiment in crowdsourced philanthropy. The amount of the contribution is flexible and input into the shape and details of the program is welcome..

How it works:

For more information:

Andrew Mason
Founder / CEO, The Point, Inc.
andrew@thepoint.com

So why Causes?
SEAN: I think it’s a pretty natural evolution.The perception that social networking has been frivolous, I think, has existed amongst non-core Facebook users for awhile, and certainly most of the applications up until now have been pretty frivolous. They’ve been about socializing, not socializing for a cause.

JOE: When you look at Facebook and social networking in general, it sort of heralds a fundamental change in how community works online. Before social networking, before Friendster, community online was very niche and very disconnected. You had StarWars fans, and they got online and found other Star Wars fans, and their identity was sort of a handle. They were Hans Solo, or whomever. But it wasn’t them and there was no real connection to their real life. Then Facebook came along, and it’s about real people and real lives. A person’s profile contains his or her real photo and a real name. To convince your friends that I’m you would be pretty much impossible.Facebook creates this very trusted identity. And so what you’ve got now with Facebook is what (cofounder) Mark Zuckerberg likes to call the social graph — people connectedto other people’s friends. It’s a map of social connections. What that allows you to do is to take things that are real-world and put them on this space and have them work far, far more efficiently.

...

This is a for-profit business, right?
JOE: Both of us have come to this primarily for social reasons. We did consider being a nonprofit but to do this at the scale we wanted to do it, it had to be for-profit. But our primary motive is to empower individuals and to make the nonprofit process a lot more efficient. So our business model right now is that we can raise money very cheaply. Nonprofits are spending a lot of money hiring firms to do direct mail and phone. It’s costing them 30 to 40 percent of what they take in — and it’s locking out smaller nonprofits who don’t have the institutional machinery to raise money in that way — and then it also locks out smaller donors, especially young people who can afford to write a $50 check once a year, but nobody ever asks. We, though, take a very small percentage of the transaction. The entire transaction cost on Facebook Causes is 4 percent, which, compared to what nonprofits pay now, is a pretty good bargain.

...

So where do you both see this going?

JOE: We’ve been very focused on growth right now — just getting the application used by as many people as possible. We’re also going to be working on building out a lot more types of actions people can take and various ways to raise money around a cause. One of the real powers of the Internet, though, is rich media. You have the power to make a cause real for someone. Instead of saying, ‘end malaria,” you can show someone what it means to give a bed net to a child. You can say, after watching a video, ‘Give us ten bucks, and you’ll save the life of one child by buying one bed net.’ You’re much more likely to get someone to give that way.

SEAN: What’s interesting about Facebook, and distinguishes it even from My-Space is that it’s so incredibly real. Causes is all about sort of broadening that concept of identity to include one’s higher calling, if you will — what you think about, your values, your beliefs, your sense of social purpose and mission. Second Life is about virtual identities. Facebook is about real identity, real relationships. There’s a much deeper social capital on Facebook than, say, something like Second Life.

JOE: When I was a student at Harvard, we did a study twice a year about college student civic involvement and what we consistently found was that this generation of college students cares incredibly deeply about changing the world, and probably has expressed more interest, infact, in that of any generation since the 60s but doesn’t understand how to do it and feels that the existing institutions really are not responding to them.

We think we can show people that young people can make a difference. I mean you look at this one breast cancer cause now on Facebook. It has amassed more than a million members in seven or eight weeks. I mean, it’s pretty hard to argue that this young guy who started it hasn’t made some kind of impact. He’s not the Susan G. Komen foundation. He’s one guy trying to get a breast cancer study funded at Brigham and Women’s Hospital up in Boston. He’s already raised something like $40,000 so far for that cause. It’s not big money — yet. But by exposing people to the power of their social networks, it can be.

Anybody can create what we call a cause; a cause can be about anything —Save The Whales, Pave My Street, Elect John Edwards, whatever. People are donating $10, $20, and there are some who have given thousands of dollars so far.

Continue reading the interview with Facebook Causes co-founders Sean Parker & Joe Green >>

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.

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.

At 12 years old, Mr. Williams started his first computer-gaming company. By 15, he'd left Victoria for Silicon Valley, working for Apple and helping pioneer the Internet music industry.

He went on to provide corporate and online strategy advice to Intel, Hilton Hotels and other Fortune 500 companies. He even worked for junk-bond king Michael Milken.

"It was frustrating," Mr. Williams said. "I was pulling my hair out. Now, I can say my measurement of my success is around how much meaning I've made.

"If somebody is making more meaning than me, all can say is, 'Man, I admire you.' As opposed to 'I envy you.' "

The GiveMeaning website gets about one million hits a month and includes about 1,500 projects.

"What we're doing is we're saying it's not about one donor giving a big amount," he said. "It's about every one of us giving what we can and when those donations are pooled together they become meaningful amounts of money."

I remember seeing the report on tv when he first got his job offer from Apple (age 15) and was headed down to California. At the time, I wondered what his future might hold. It's good to read today that success did not spoil Tom Williams.