Filed under: General Charity Musings | Tags: Ashley Furniture HomeStore, city of hope, facebook fanpage
The Ashley Furniture HomeStore is supporting the City of Hope with a Facebook campaign for the next two months. For every “like” that they get on their Facebook fanpage, they’ll donate $0.25 to City of Hope, up to a max of $10k. Making a donation doesn’t get easier than a click, so why not do a good deed today? City of Hope is a cutting-edge research and treatment facility for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases – a truly worthy cause. Kudos to Ashley Furniture HomeStore for donating $4M to City of Hope already!
Filed under: General Charity Musings, Microphilanthropy, social media | Tags: canadahelps, online giving, stats, video
Charities are harnessing the power of social media to gain awareness, build communities and raise funds. Just how much has online social media enabled charities to reach out to donors? Check out this video prepared by CanadaHelps. It has some great stats surround what people do online, how they interact with charities, and what charities should be doing:
There’s no time like now for charities to start their presence in the online world, if they haven’t already done so!
Filed under: General Charity Musings | Tags: better the world, charity mother's day, global giving, huffpost, mother's day, war child
Mother’s Day is coming up this Sunday and as usual I don’t have anything planned yet! But part of my procrastination this year is because I’m off the hook for buying a gift. My mom has behaved quite out of character and purchased a handbag for herself 2 weeks ago that she’d like me to pitch in for, instead of buying her something new.
But still, I’d like to do something meaningful for mom, and having signed up to newsletters from a host of nonprofits, all I had to do was look at my inbox for ideas. Unfortunately there are too many ideas to write them all here, but here are some:
- Treat mom to a nice meal. War Child Canada is running a high tea at the King Eddy. It’s $65, and there will be speakers and an auction, with proceeds going towards War Child’s programs.
- Give the gift of helping women around the world by choosing from GlobalGiving’s Mother’s Day Menu. For $10 you can give learning materials for an adolescent girl, or for $65, give delivery kits for safe home births in Tibet.
- Recognize your mom by writing about how great she is! During May, HuffPost Impact will be featuring remarkable stories focused on motherhood. Send your stories to impact@huffingtonpost.com and make the subject line “My Inspiring Story.”
- Buy something for mom online while having a portion of the purchase go towards charity using BetterTheWorld’s new shopping application. For more details and gift ideas, see their Mother’s Day blog post.
For all the moms out there, Happy Mother’s Day!
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!
Charity CHAMPs - get involved with microphilanthropy now! 