Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: david roodman, kiva, kiva donor illusion, kiva scam, microcredit, microfinance
If you’ve been following the debate surrounding whether microcredit works or not you’ll be interested to read A Mostly Comprehensive Guide to the Kiva and Donor Illusion Debate, written earlier this month. While I’ve written several articles on this blog about microcredit and its impacts on third world communities, I have never focused in on any particular microcredit organization, and if you could only analyze one it would obviously be Kiva.
Kiva, the popular lending site that boasts over $27M in loans disbursed, is being critized for misleading users to believe that peer-to-peer connections exist when in fact there are intermediary lenders in the process. In the article Kiva Is Not Quite What It Seems, microfinance expert David Roodman cites examples of borrowers recieving money before any Kiva loan has established. And while Kiva doesn’t hide this information, it also doesn’t do much to make the fact clear. Of course, in cases like this it’s hard to put the blame on any one party – communication is 2-way, so who’s to say that it’s not the donors who are misleading themselves?
In the end, the question to ask is: does it matter? Kiva helps get money to entrepreneurs, and most importantly, Kiva makes donors feel good. Donors become educated, and are more involved with the issues plaguing various third world countries. And on this point I think most microfinance critics actually are in agreement – Kiva isn’t all bad.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: canadian athletes now fund, canadian microphilanthropy, toques & beavers
If you follow this blog you’d know that I’m always on the look-out for online microphilanthropies with a Canadian bent (I am Canadian afterall). For the most part I actually don’t think it really matters where the microphilanthropy is based, but sometimes it does affect whether as a Canadian I can participate in the programs, and other times it affects whether Canadian charities are the beneficiaries or not.
So I was quite delighted to discover Toques & Beavers. The site runs a trivia game similar to FreeRice, that not only educating Canadians but also to raises money for the Canadian Athletes Now Fund by taking donations. It focuses so much on Canadiana that it’s hilarious; the trivia is all Canadian trivia, the prizes are Toques & Beaver themed, and their slogan is “Eh! to Zed”. When you get a trivia question right, a beaver (in a toque, of course) pops up to congratulate you. It doesn’t get better than that. Check it out, and see how close you can get to the top score of 917000 currently held by campbellgary. And don’t forget to connect your account with Facebook so that the world could see how good you are at Canadian trivia.
Filed under: General Charity Musings | Tags: 10tothe100, Google 10^100, vote for projects
Google’s looking to help as many people as possible, and launched the 10^100 project to take ideas. They gathered all the ideas, grouped them into categories, and is taking votes until tomorrow to help decide which world saving projects will receive a portion of their $10M funding.
So if you haven’t yet, visit the site at http://www.project10tothe100.com and vote while you still can! Some categories include:
- Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
- Work toward socially conscious tax policies
- Drive innovation in public transport
- Create real-world issue reporting system
Personally I can’t decide amongst all the education options, they all sound good. But I will pick something before the deadline! Let me know if you have a top pick.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: digital music charity, fundtunes, raise money with music
Do you buy digital music online? If so, you should check out FundTunes. FundTunes is a recently launched site that is partnered with Universal Music Canada to sell digital music for the benefit of charities. Nonprofits get $3.00 per 10-song bundle and $1.50 from each 5-song bundle that you buy. Currently listed nonprofits include MADD, Best Buddies, WhiteCrow Village, and Canadian Cancer Society. And if you’re looking to donate to a specific nonprofit but can’t find the organization listed, all you have to do is email FundTunes to get the listing process started.
If you’re a nonprofit, using FundTunes gives you a novel way of fundraising, where you get 50% of the proceeds from music sales. It’s also super easy because you’ll receive an online music store, ready to be used as part of a campaign. There are no upfront costs.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, social media | Tags: cadbury bike campaign, call2action, moving windmills, video fundraising, video widget, william kamkwamba
Back in July I had written about how Call2Action was looking for Beta testers – well now they’ve launched! I got the launch email on Sept 18th and meant to write about it then, but didn’t get to it until now. If you haven’t yet you should check the site out. It’s s a “viral action tool for nonprofits”, so if you’re a nonprofit looking for a way to run a viral campaign online, this is the site for you. The Call2Action video widget lets you bundle campaign videos with actions together, so that you don’t have to worry again about making a video that doesn’t tie direction with a call-to-action.
Videos are a powerful way to get the message across. Some of my favourites:
- Jennifer Connelly in Charity:Water’s campaign video
- Moving Windmills – William Kamkwamba’s of building windmills in Malawi, learning how to do it himself with a library book
- Cadbury’s bike campaign video – I first saw this on TV and it almost made me go buy chocolate immediately (not that I need much convincing)
The key? Keep it simple with a concise message, 1 minute or less is best. Doesn’t have to be fancy either – I’ve seen plenty of good videos with just sketches and voice-over.
What’s your favourite video that inspires you to make a difference?
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: bluebin.org, free stuff, freecycle.org, recycle
As a former eBay employee, my first approach to getting rid of things I don’t want is selling. I’ve sold all sorts of things on on eBay, and for bigger items that are hard or expensive to ship, I’ve used Kijiji or Craigslist. As great as those sites are however, there have always been 2 things limiting me from using them more: 1) it’s very time consuming to make a posting (you need to do price comparisons, upload photos, write detailed descriptions, etc.), and 2) I always think that I can probably do more “good” by giving the items away to charity instead.
Well this month I have come across 2 sites that solve both those problems by being focused solely on the giving and receiving of free stuff for the purposes of doing good – both by diverting from landfills and by helping people in the local community who can use certain items.
- Freecycle.org – this organization has grown tremendously since its inception in 2003 and now has over 7M users worldwide. The interesting thing about FreeCycle is that it’s nothing super high-tech. It uses Yahoo Groups to bring together people in local communities, and “postings” are essentially emails to the group list. You can post both wanted and offer ads easily, with many ads being only one line long, so it’s really easy to list. What I like most about it is that by browsing the wanted ads I can basically offer things to people who are in need.
- Bluebin.org – this site was just launched this month, and while they don’t have the huge user base that Freecycle has just yet, it shows great promise. The site is more “web 2.0″, with a very easy and intuitive to use interface that does allow photos that you can’t do with FreeCycle, and a Twitter account for you to follow. Since they are new, they are looking for feedback for improvements and new features, so this would be a great way for you to get involved with a new microphilanthropy site.
And of course, if you’re actually looking for stuff, this is a great way to find things for free. A quick browse of FreeCycle right now gives you things from kid’s playhouses to shirts, fans, and even top soil! Try it out!
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: 12for12k, charity water, tipjoy, tweet-a-thon, tweetmyride, twestival, twitter fundrasing, twollars
Fundraising with Twitter has been getting a lot of press recently, with a lot of articles citing some novel ideas as well as success stories. For example:
- Twitter’s Twestival raised over $250k for charity just this past February
- 12for12k ran a Tweet-a-thon on March 19, and raised over $15k for Share our Strength by offering donors chances to win some great prizes for every $12 donated
- The Vancouver based Tweetmyride Charity Foundation is looking to raise $1M through their Twitter campaign, which encourages users to donate to 10 charities and then Tweet about the donations
- The Salvation Army recently launched the Kettle campaign to raise $10k
I had mentioned before that Tipjoy is a great tool to use if you’re looking to run your own campaign on Twitter. But if you’re looking for something slightly more fun, try out Twollars. Twollars is Twitter’s “currency of appreciation” – everybody on Twitter automatically starts off with 50 Twollars to give away. To see your balance, just go to http://twollars.com/your_twitter_username. You can give your Twollars to anybody you appreciate by just Tweeting (see Twollars FAQ for examples). If you give your Twollars to Charities who have Twollar accounts, the Twollars can be converted to real dollars by businesses who want to raise their social responsibility profile.
The idea may sound a little too flippant to work for very serious fundraisers, but so far Charity Water has already garnered $1500 from it. There are also no transaction costs involved so Twollars does not take any cut of the fundraised money.
So go get your Twollars and use them wisely!
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: diy fundraising, online fundraising, fundable, firstgiving, giveforward, givemeaning, givezooks, mycause, fundraising webpage, how to fundraise
Since writing the last article on DIY fundraising I’ve come across a plethora of other sites that help you to do fundraising, whether it’s for a specific charity, project, or your next door neighbour who’s in need of some help. Generally all the sites let you create a webpage of content, and help you market to potential donors, and of course, take donations. The sites charge differing fees as a percentage of your total donations, so make sure you know what the fees are before you plunge in. Other things to check include: what payment methods the site accepts from donors (PayPal and credit cards are common), what currencies are accepted, and how the site lets you withdraw the donated money.
Here are the sites, in no particular order:
- Fundable – Fundable’s differentiating factor is that money is collected only if the goal is reached. So donors don’t have to worry that they’ve given to a project that might not get enough money to be completed, and fundraisers won’t be in a situation where they only have 50% of their goal achieved and don’t know what to do with the money. While it’s free to set up the fundraising page and to receive pledges, Fundable charges a 10% fee if the goal is reached and transactions take place. With Fundable you can fundraise for anything you want.
- Firstgiving – Firstgiving is good if you want to fundraise for 501 (c) non-profits (the non-profits are vetted with GuideStar). They charge a 7.5% fee, and has helped raise $102M for 28k nonprofits.
- GiveForward – GiveForward, like Fundable, lets you fundraise for anything you want, but if you’re a non-profit, they’ll require identification, and regardless of who you are they’ll be vetting your project to make sure you’re not fraudulent. From a donor’s perspective I can definitely appreciate that, because there are a lot of deserving projects that aren’t tied to non-profits, but but there’s always the risk of fraud if you’re allowing everybody to ask for money. The GiveForward charge is 3%, and as part of their due-diligence, they send out cheques to fundraisers for donated dollars, and uses the time for the cheque to arrive to ensure that the reciepient is legit. Interest earned on fundraised money that has not been issued out as a cheque goes towards non-profit projects posted on GiveForward.org.
- GiveMeaning – GiveMeaning is free! Yes, no transactions charges for creating your page, as GiveMeaning uses donors and advertising dollars to cover all the costs, including the credit card processing costs. There is a caveat, however, and that is that they require to you gain 100 votes from the community for your project (which can be almost anything) before activating the page to receive money. This guarantees that there is at least some support for what you’re doing.
- Givezooks! – all the other sites listed above allow you to create a fundraising page, but once that’s done, there are limited marketing tools for you to get the word out there about your project. Of course the existing donor community on the site itself will see your page, and you can email out links or do your own marketing. But with Givezooks!, all of that is marketing can be right at your fingertips, if you’re a nonprofit organization. Givezooks! is fully integrated with the main social networking sites, has email marketing wired in, and even lets you create custom thank yous and gives you an analytics dashboard. With all this functionality there is a price, and while I couldn’t find the costs on the main site, there are sample costs posted here; it’s essentially a flat fee from $99 – $399 a month, depending on your organization’s size. Because it is a flat fee, the more you raise, the more economical it becomes.
- MyCause – MyCause allows you to fundraise for any registered charity, sporting, community, religious, political or social group, and charges 6.5% plus bank fees. Since MyCause is based in Australia, all donations are made in AUD. This month (August 2009) they are raising money for 247 different charities based on the projects that users have created.
If you’ve tried out any of the above sites and have positive or negative experiences to share, I’d love to hear them!
And if you have a few spare dollars, check out these sites – there are some amazing projects that can use your spare change.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: 1000classrooms.org, canadian tomato project, challenges, get involved, getinvolved, how to the change the world for 10 bucks, microactions, tvo
Have you ever watched the TVO television series called Get Involved? It showcases inspirational stories of people who are making a difference in their communities, mostly regular folks like you and me who have done some amazing things. There’s ROLF, an inventor who has taken his family home almost entirely off the municipal grid; Edney who wrote a book called “How to Change the World for 10 Bucks” to promote microphilanthropy; and Amanda, a 10 year old who raised over $100,000.00 for The Heart and Stroke Foundation with a lemonade stand.
Watching the show makes me question what I’ve done, and wish that I could do more. If you’re like me at all, you should definitely visit GetInvolved.ca, the companion site to the TV series. The site has a great community with microactions (or challenges) that you can post or commit to do. And for those of you who haven’t watched the TV show, the site offers full episodes.
Some cool challenges posted on the site right now include:
- Donating $3 to buy eggs from widows of Park rangers in Africa who were killed protecting endangered gorillas (see 1000classrooms.org). The eggs are donated to the children of the Kahuzi-Biega Environmental school to poor widows an income, feed hungry children, protect endangered gorillas, save valuable rainforest, and educate 1000’s of kids all at the same time.
- Planting tomatoes as part of the Canadian Tomato Project.
- Taking the CAMH mental health quiz to learn about a condition that affects 1 in 5 Canadians.
So what are you waiting for? Get Involved! And who knows, maybe next year it’ll be your turn to be featured on TVO.
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy | Tags: best idea reward, challenge your world, sustainable business
Have you ever sat around with friends discussing how this world could be a better place? Did you end up with some darn good ideas that you would love to see happen, but don’t know how to go about doing it? If that’s the case then check out Challenge Your World.
Your ideas can change the world, and Challenge Your World is there to help (just like Home Depot’s “you can do it; we can help” motto). You’ll find a space where ideamakers and emerging entrepreneurs can get support, resources, and feedback. It’s essentially an online innovation center, with the goal of balancing of social, environmental, and economic concerns. Just post your idea, and the community will give you feedback, and you can engage in discussions about implementation. This summer Challenge Your World is going to award the 20 most promising ideas with a pack of welcome books; all you have to do is post your idea and be one of the first ideas to reach 20 “thumbs ups”.
Even if you don’t have a whole bunch of ideas lined up it’s fun to read other people ideas and post comments. It’s about challenging the status quo and challenging yourself – all to make the world a better place. And if you know of good books on sustainable business, recommend them to the community and get a chance of winning a free copy for yourself. For more details visit the Summer Welcome Kit page.
The most popular page on this blog by far is the list of microphilanthopy organizations that I’ve complied over the months. If I ever have the time, I’d love to add a column to show where each organization is based, because as a Canadian I’ve found that some of the sites aren’t friendly towards non-American users. And while most of the organizations are US-based, I’m proud to say that Challenge Your World is Canadian!
