March 31, 2011, 9:30 PM
On the Web, a Revolution in Giving
By TINA ROSENBERG
On Tuesday, I wrote about how crowdsourcing Web sites are allowing people to contribute knowledge and ideas to bring about social change. But virtually every social change organization will say that what it needs most is money. Giving to charity did not start with the Internet. But crowdfunding offers donors new ways to get more involvement and impact for their charity dollar.
In traditional giving, one of the things big donors can buy with their big checks is a sense of partnership with the organization — they can choose or even invent a project to finance, meet the staff, receive private briefings and get asked for their advice (sincerely or not). They know their largesse matters.
Smaller donors usually don’t have the same experience. For most people, giving money, as important as it is, can be a bloodless event. Your check seems to go off into the ether. You get back a thank-you letter for tax purposes. And that’s it. You may be confident that the organization you give to is making a difference, but you may not feel that you are.
This is a childish complaint. We are supposed to give to charity because we want to do good, not because we want to feel like we’re doing good. Yet without that feeling, people are less motivated to give.
It would not seem that crowdfunding — a large-group activity conducted by individuals sitting in front of computers — could create a sense of personal involvement and satisfaction. But it can.
It’s true that some crowdfunding is the online equivalent of what’s been going on in the real world for decades. There are numerous giving sites that try to take advantage of donors’ contacts — online contacts, but the idea is traditional. It is not unlike the marathon for leukemia or the AIDS Walk, events that rely on participants to fundraise among their friends, families and colleagues.
Other crowdfunding sites, however, offer something new. Scroll through these sites and you will find catalogs of dozens or even hundreds of small projects, each with its own mini-site, for potential donors to consider. Donorschoose.org, for example, carries hundreds of appeals from classroom teachers in American schools who need materials. Thekopernik.org offers high-tech products for the poor: solar lights for Nigerian farming families, or a bio-sand water filtration unit for a village in East Timor. Spot.us gives potential donors a peer-reviewed list of stories freelance journalists propose to report, write and sell to American media. Many deal with political corruption, environmental damage or consumer issues.
Sites like this distinguish themselves from the old-school fundraisers in several ways.
More information. When I was young there was an ad that ran in magazines with a picture of a disheveled little girl and the headline “Tina has never had a teddy bear.” (I put it up on my bedroom door.) It was a typical attempt to hook the donor by putting a face on the beneficiary. It was all emotion: the potential donor would find out very little about Tina, and most organizations that used such strategies tried to hide the fact that the money would, very sensibly, go to village improvement projects and not into Tina’s family’s purse. But the ease of posting videos and information on the Internet means that touching stories are now accompanied by lots of information. You can now watch video of Tina, see her village, meet her parents and tour her school. More to the point, you can hear her neighbors explain exactly why they need that new well and perhaps look at a scaled drawing of the proposed well annotated with information about the construction materials.
Bespoke giving. Crowdfunding sites offer display platforms for even the smallest projects. Instead of giving to a big organization, you can give to a project that does exactly what interests you.
Financing people. Remember patrons? The wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck was one. Without ever meeting Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, she provided him with a third of his income, enabling him to devote himself solely to composing. Now you, too, can be a patron. Changents.com is a catalog site that lists people, not projects. For example, eight people so far have sent money to James Nall to help him get more people to ride motorcycles instead of drive cars. Four people have backed Carter and Olivia Ries, who are elementary-school students, in their quest to rid the world of plastic bags.
The chance to be an angel on the cheap. Because these sites make it easy and inexpensive to have a Web presence, many of the projects featured on crowdfunding sites are tiny. Some don’t even exist yet — they are looking for start-up funding. While being a big donor to a nonprofit organization usually takes at least five figures, even $50 can give you the satisfaction of making a major difference with a crowdfunded project. A very small amount of money could launch a project that might someday grow into a large-scale force for social change. You can also be treated like a major donor: your project leader may well ask your advice, give you inside information and turn to you for more and more help.
Charity that pays you back. Social change crowdfunding sites are not all looking for charity. Some are seeking investment. Kiva.orgmatches micro-businesses in poor countries with micro-lenders. Working through micro-lending groups on the ground, Kiva allows people to look through a catalog of tiny businesses, lend as little as $25, and get the money back when the loan is repaid. Kiva claims a repayment rate of more than 98 percent. Inuka.org is another, newer site on which people can lend to women-owned small businesses in Africa.
There are some perils here. People give to Save the Children or Environmental Defense for a reason — we can be confident these proven organizations know what they are doing. Giving to Joe’s Social Change is a gamble. A good number of the projects you can find on crowdfunding sites seem more like whims than serious efforts, and many others look like well-meaning but inefficient efforts to duplicate work established groups are already doing.
Some sites do try to build in vetting mechanisms. In most cases, that means projects must pass muster with the site staff before they are posted. Kickstarter, perhaps the best-known crowdfunding site, funds creative projects as opposed to social change, but has an intriguing mechanism that social change sites might adopt. Kickstarter projects get posted with a dollar goal and a deadline. If the goal is not met by the deadline, all funds pledged are returned. “It imposes a lot of market discipline,” said Ethan Zuckerman, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “You can see whether an artist or organizer can get sufficient attention to a project.”
Another problem is that project funding alone is the equivalent of living on dessert. Every organization needs core funding to keep the lights on and staff paid. Most old-fashioned giving is unrestricted, and organizations jump at the chance to use this money for their core needs. But core funding isn’t glamorous enough to attract crowdfunding. Depending on crowdfunding can quickly hollow out an organization.
Donors, moreover, are fickle. They will give to what’s hot, even if it’s not a good use of their money. This year, for example, it might be democracy organizations in the Middle East that get funded. But what if these organizations are flawed or just poorly run?
Readers of the Tuesday column sent in many more suggestions for sites that allow people to get involved in social change. (You can see all the comments here.) One I should have mentioned is ioby.org, which matches volunteers to New York City neighborhood environmental projects, such as community gardens. Another issparked.com. You tell them what your skills are and what fields interest you, and they match you with micro-volunteering opportunities: projects you can do at your computer in five minutes. I logged in as a writer interested in health, and up came various requests to think of names and taglines for different groups, write copy for a Web site or brainstorm ways to commemorate World AIDS Day.
One reader, Wts from Colorado (18) will have the last word (for now) on this subject: “I encourage people to give to the latest trendy crisis-like Haiti or Katrina, but I also encourage people who care to find a local program that interests them and get involved as a donor and volunteer. Go a little deeper in the organization and learn how it works. Have fun by going to its special events. Meet some other volunteers who share a compassionate and energetic outlook. Meet beneficiaries first hand and walk in their shoes a bit. We need to remember that while the newsworthy crisis gets a lot of buzz, the poor and marginalized around the block still need day-to-day care.”
Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”
