microphilanthropy

Raising Money for an Organization You Meet While Traveling

in

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

Barack Obama and Micro-Philanthropy

in

Can nonprofits learn something from Barack Obama’s online fundraising success? This is the subject of a recent discussion over at NTEN.

For me, the short answer is, “Yes, they can.”

For the long answer, I’d recommend the final section of Anthony Barnnett’s Taking Obama Seriously. Barnnett argues that the digital natives running Obama’s campaign have achieved online successes unlike any other candidate because their message, style, and form have matched the new medium.

What does this mean for nonprofits? It’s not enough to put interns in charge of your social media strategy. The entire organization -- from its executive director and board members down to rank and file supporters -- need to adjust to the changing communications environment in order to stay relevant.

To develop a consistent personality online, new positions should be created that require the expertise and intuition of digital natives. Communications and development directors should update their skill sets. Executive drectors should start blogging. And most importantly, nonprofits should not be fearful of empowering extra-organizational activists to promote their work online and recruit new donors.

Here are a few excerpts from Taking Obama Seriously:

The first internet candidate

bama is among the first presidential candidates and potential world leaders to have integrated the web into his communications, and he is the first to have done so in a way that reflects and adapts the development of the technology itself: he has integrated social networking into his campaigning.

...

The large numbers of young people who have campaigned for him have seen him for themselves: on their computers. The success of an early Obama MySpace site, run by a volunteer, was a harbinger. Today his official Facebook site has 360,000 members (and the unofficial "Barack Obama for President" has nearly 450,000); by contrast, Hillary Clinton's official Facebook site has only 88,000 members (and "STOP Hillary Clinton" has over 750,000). There are sixteen social-network groups plugged into Obama's official site, Hillary's has five. It seems a telling comparison that Facebook's "McCain for President" has just 5,500 members and there seem to be no social-network links on his official site at all.

...

The web works best when it transforms by reinforcing and enhancing what people already want to do. This makes it open to incorporation by existing brands and companies even when it changes them greatly in the process. But it is very hard for individuals who were fully formed before the web to re-gear their communications. Obama, and his even younger advisors and speechwriters, are internet naturals at ease with its innovations. His website is easy to navigate (apart from the absence of a site search-engine) and itself feels at home with the medium.

...

If he wins, what will President Obama make of this exceptional force of his web and internet presence? His constant refrain is that "change does not happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up". Numerous times he has said that he cannot deliver unless the demand is there from below. While this is a wise perception, modest about his own power and inspiring for those to whom it is addressed, it is also a get-out-clause for an Obama presidency. For how can there be pressure from below? And without it, he has already declared, his promises may prove worthless.

There are steps he can take on the ground to encourage "bottom-up" pressure: by taking federal measures to ensure that all citizens have the right to vote and to prevent gerrymandering, not to speak of reforming the electoral college to prevent the scandal of 2000 from ever happening again. But a new president with the Obama team's know-how could well enable participation and organisation online. This, of course, is certain to generate its own energy and autonomy, unconstrained by beltway special interests. So there is now a way of putting pressure on Washington "from below".

Obama should be warned as well as congratulated: those who live by the web can die by it.

Continue reading "Taking Obama Seriously" >>

The coming weeks are bound to see many more blog posts on how nonprofits can base their communications and development strategies on the "Obama model". If you know of other articles on this subject, please post a link in the comments section below.

For a contrary view to the notion that nonprofits need to embrace social media, see The NonProfit Times article, Social Networking Becoming Old Technology In A Hurry.

Understanding Networks and Civil Society

in

Michael Gilbert
Michael GilbertIn September, I met Michael Gilbert of The Gilbert Center at a conference called Web of Change.

From his home-based research center, Michael conducts webinars, produces the Nonprofit Online News, and publishes extremely relevant articles for organizations coping with a shifting communications environment.

At the Web of Change Conference and during a follow-up meeting in his Seattle home, Michael, myself, and Chris Lundberg from DemocracyinAction discussed the enormous potential for the semantic web and micro-philanthropy to transform the nonprofit sector.

This morning I came across one of Michael's latest articles, entitled The End of the Organization?

Here's an excerpt:

Relationships within organizations, between organizations, with constituents, the media, funders, policy makers, and others all have distinct patterns of communication that shape the structures of organizations and civil society.

Throughout the world, these patterns of communication are changing. Whether because of the plummeting costs of communication in the developed world or the historical leapfrogging of modes of communication in the developing world, more and more people who wish to communicate with each other, are doing so.

Some existing communication patterns, however local or small scale they may be, genuinely reflect people's motivations and are thus scaling up as barriers to communication are lowered. In turn, they are displacing and destabilizing other patterns, particularly the hierarchical and insular ones that characterize the modern organization.

Is this the end of the organization? Probably not by name and certainly not in the broadest sense of the term. But the traditional, tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change. The organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today.

Whether the organization as we know it survives or not, it is by studying the changing patterns of communication that we will discover the new shape of civil society. Our methods of analysis - and possibly our methods of regulation, funding, and participation - will shift from those that reflect managerial thinking to those that reflect ecosystem thinking.

Continue reading The End of the Organization? >>

This article provides a link to The Gilbert Center's inaugural issue of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society. Have a look at the table of contents. The first issue of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society can be purchased on four different licenses ranging from $18.95 to $37.95.

Author:
Peter Deitz

Kings of Philanthropy and Princes of Micro-Philanthropy

in

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.

They Come in the Name of Helping

in

Below is an email interview with Peter Brock, the undergraduate student from Skidmore College who produced the online film, They Come in the Name of Helping.

Peter's film looks at international philanthropy and development projects from the perspectives of young adults living in Africa.

Aside from some of the videos published on the Umeebee blog, I don't know of other films that capture the voices of young Africans as well as this film does.

Peter's critique of philanthropy for philanthropy's sake is much needed. With the growing popularity of platforms for micro-philanthropy, I see plenty of reasons to step back and ask, "What project am I funding? And will it help empower the people it intends to?"

Watching They Come in the Name of Helping is an excellent way to provoke such questions.

On Monday, I sent Peter Brock an email:

Hello Peter,

I recently discovered your compelling film "They Come in the Name of Helping."

I write a blog called About Micro-Philanthropy, which discusses the work of social action platforms such as GiveMeaning, GlobalGiving, and ChangingthePresent. These platforms fund development projects in Africa and elsewhere through person-to-person fundraising initiatives. Each month, thousands of individuals donate to projects listed on these three sites, and others, with the intent of doing good.

I'd like to post a link to your video "They Come in the Name of Helping" on my blog along with a brief email interview with you. My intent is to bring social action platforms and small-scale philanthropists into a discussion on how to practice international philanthropy in a respectful and constructive way.

When you have a chance, can you please respond briefly to the questions listed below?

Thanks,
Peter

Here are his responses:

Can you introduce yourself to readers of About Micro-Philanthropy?

PB: My name is Peter Brock. I am twenty-two years old and a native of Berkeley, CA. I am currently a student at Skidmore College where I study Political Economy.

Why did you decide to make "They Come in the Name of Helping"?

PB: There were essentially two forces driving me to make the film. The first was my recent exposure to some academic critiques of the development industry such as William Easterly’s “The White Man’s Burden” and Thomas Dichter’s “Despite Good Intentions”. The second and perhaps more important force was my own internal reactions to volunteer experiences abroad and the way that I see my fellow westerners approach the issues of development and poverty. Perhaps the greatest motivating factor was the prevalence of dehumanizing and patronizing depictions of the poor used as fundraising tools by Western NGO’s and Media outlets. We all have seen the picture of a starving African child barefoot in the street followed by an invitation to donate money to the organization that will “save” them. I was essentially disgusted with the rampant dehumanization of the poor and self-glorifying that characterized many of those groups and individuals who claimed to be ‘ending poverty’.

How familiar are you with social action platforms such as GiveMeaning, GlobalGiving, ChangingthePresent?

PB: As an intern for Globalhood, an innovative development organization, I am responsible for establishing Globalhood’s presence on various social action platforms. While I am new to this role, I have already gained an appreciation for the vast potential of these websites and am eager to learn more.

From your experience, do communities in Africa need more philanthropists from the West helping to fund development projects? What kind of projects should small-scale philanthropists try to connect with?

PB: I’m sure that there are communities who do need help. However, there doesn’t seem to be a lack of money, but rather an inability to get that money into the hands of people who can use it well. I would say that Africa needs more responsible, scrutinizing and respectful philanthropists rather than more of them.

As for what philanthropists should try to support, I would say projects that are lead by members of the beneficiary community and that contribute to that community’s ability to undertake its own development. Philanthropists should also avoid projects that will build dependency or unnecessarily prolong the presence of foreign NGO’s.

Do you see a difference in the effectiveness of large-scale development projects overseen by international NGOs and small-scale projects perhaps created by Africans themselves?

PB: I have only a limited experience draw upon and am wary of generalizations, but I think that different issues and contexts will require both types of intervention. Having said this, it seems obvious to me that a project created and directed by Africans will have many advantages over one created by an outsider. Firstly, Africans are much better suited to designing successful solutions to their problems because they understand the cultural dynamics and history of their homeland. Secondly, as permanent residents of their particular community, an African would inherently be accountable for the results of their project. If you have to live in the house you build, then you are much more likely to build it well than if you get to retire to your hotel room each night.

What role do you think the internet can play in building mutual respect between donors and "beneficiaries" of grassroots development projects?

PB: I think that the Internet offers a fantastic vehicle for building respectful relations between the world’s poor and those who wish to help them. Organizations such as Kiva.org are already using the web to connect potential donors directly to beneficiaries in a way that fosters respectful interaction. As Kiva’s approach demonstrates, we need to move beyond the hierarchical and faceless notions of ‘donors’ and ‘beneficiaries’ and think of these relationships as interactions between real people, families and communities. There is a huge chasm of misunderstanding and assumptions about one another that divides the world’s rich from the poor, and I think that the Internet can help bridge this gap. Even if it is only in the form of reading the Facebook profile of a student in Accra or Calcutta, the point is to see each other as fellow humans.

Do you have any other insights about development and online giving that you would like to share with readers?

PB: While philanthropy can sometimes help those in need, I believe that we should focus first on the things that we know how to change. This does not mean that we should stop thinking and caring about the people of the developing world, but rather that we should be honest about what we will actually be able to change and who this task belongs to. The persistence of global poverty often frustrates westerners and makes us feel helpless, but as far as our role is concerned, the solution to these problems are not as distant as we think. We can begin by scrutinizing our own daily decisions and lifestyle to see if they contribute to or counteract the type of change we wish to see in the world. We should also begin to ask ourselves if our government and corporations are acting in ways that foster development or hinder it. We are responsible for the behavior of our country and its various actors in the world, and should therefore exercise our power over these bodies to bring them in line with the principles we believe in.

Help Me Clone Beth Kanter

in

Beth KanterBeth KanterLast night, I received an email from Beth Kanter requesting that I put out a final word about the charity badge on America’s Giving Challenge that was created in support of The Sharing Foundation.

The deadline for donating is 3pm EST on January 31st. Beth sits on the board of The Sharing Foundation and has done a tremendous job, along with Michele Martin, in recruiting donations. As one of the top four charity badges created for an international cause, The Sharing Foundation is likely to receive a $50,000 grant from The Case Foundation and Parade Magazine.

Assuming The Sharing Foundation wins on Thursday, Beth Kanter will add another victory to her list of successful peer-to-peer fundraising contests. In December 2006, she won a $49,537 matching grant from Yahoo during a competition organized by NetworkforGood.

Why do I mention all this?

1) So that readers can join a winning team in the final days of the contest. Beth is asking for donations as small as $10;

2) To draw attention to Beth’s extraordinary ability to leverage social media for online fundraising.

Currently, I am building an automated wizard that will assist in planning and implementing a peer-to-peer social change campaign. The wizard will recommend platforms to use and best practices for spreading the campaign through social networks. The wizard will also feature an after-action survey covering the tools used and the strategies implemented. This information will feed back into the system that recommends platforms and best practices.

If the Social Actions automated wizard helps produce peer-to-peer social change campaigns that compare to the ones that Beth has created in the past year, then I will have accomplished something significant.

My goal is to create a system that will walk even the most technologically challenged through the process of launching a successful social change campaign online. I have so many friends and family who would love to use the internet to rally support for a good cause – but they lack the knowledge base and social networking skills of Beth Kanter.

That’s why I’m asking people to help me clone this amazing woman.

Here’s the request:

If you want to help me assemble the knowledge-base required to build the system I’m describing, please leave a comment below or contact me directly. I have created a Backpack-It group to work on this collaborative project. I’m looking for technology consultants, online marketing gurus, and representatives from nonprofits, foundations, and independent projects. Thank you in advance for your interest and support. And thanks for making a donation to The Sharing Foundation!

Prize Philanthropy: The Next Frontier of Peer-to-Peer Social Change

in

Philippe Bradley
Philippe Bradley Philippe Bradley, an undergraduate biochemistry student at Oxford, is busy creating a new social action platform that will combine prize philanthropy with peer-to-peer social change. Imagine if contests like Parade Magazine's Giving Challenges or Kevin Bacon's matching grants could take place without Parade Magazine and Kevin Bacon leading the way.

Using Phil's new social action platform, ordinary people could create online contests, specifying the cash value of a prize and the criteria for judging. Contest creators would then invite their friends, family, and broader social networks to participate as funders of the prize or as participants in the contest. The prize would be awarded to the individual or organization that produces the best deliverable designated by the contest creator and voted on by the prize funders.

To learn more, contact Phil directly through his blog OverTheCounterCulture or by email (philbradley [at] gmail.com).

I met Phil through an interesting comment he left on About Micro-Philanthropy last week, which describes his vision of a future based on peer-to-peer social actions.

The 'Long Tail' effect will mean that even wild, off-the-wall (but innovative) niche ideas for DIY projects will find many backers across the country and the world. The flourishing of these projects will in turn cross-pollinate, creating a snowball effect as people come to recognize that a lot of 'social good' work no longer needs to be 'outsourced' to traditional institutions, ones that we donate to and then leave to their own devices.

The age of buying absolution this way is passing. We've recently seen the mega-wealthy getting their hands relatively dirty (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example), but the real potential of the internet is in harnessing crowds and the huge resources within them. The challenge is to provide tools for groups to form, collaborate, pool resources (including money), and if possible, to help snowball their cause and leverage the wider crowd for help and ideas. I'm working on an idea discussed with Phil Cubeta and others about bringing together two concepts—crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing—to create one such tool, but the field will need many more of these ideas and startups if it's to maximize its potential.

The benefits of a 'democratisation' and decentralisation of philanthropy and social change could be vast. I envisage a future where we've rediscovered the value - and fun - of collaborating to directly influence change (p2p philanthropy), rather than the current institutionalised environment where we outsource it and get on with our drab, isolated urban lives.

Over email, Phil explained his reason for setting up the new platform as a for-profit business.

The reason I'm thinking of setting this up as a business (for-profit) is that the world needs examples of true social enterprise, how to manage double/triple bottom lines, and yet still earn a good living, an example of the sort of 'kind capital' Bill Gates called for at Davos yesterday.

Being a company that allows people to do good would be fantastic. I would love going into work every day – it would have everything you want from work. Doing good has to stop being an activity limited to utterly selfless people, or the world will never change for the better and philanthropy will stay on the fringes, a 'finger in the levee' that is funded by 'selfish' people that want to feel good about themselves but not get their hands dirty, and that is done by the rare saints of this world.

Everyone should start businesses to do good or to make it easy for others to do it! But first, we need to really find out how to manage the often conflicting pressures of triple bottom lines – profit, social benefit, and environmental impact.

Thank you Phil Cubeta of GiftHub for directing Phil Bradley to About Micro-Philanthropy. I can't wait to see the beta version of this new platform.

Syndicate content