Kiva.org and Donorschoose.org were given special attention in the pages of this month’s Fortune Magazine with their open frontiers approach to fundraising rapidly gaining popularity online.

And what do these two organizations have in common?

Decentralization… In other words, they get rid of the middleman between the people that need help and the people that want to help.

For example, let’s take the case of Peter Mukasa. Peter is the owner of a tiny liquor store in the Ugandan village of Makindye. Things have been going badly recently, and he needs $250 to stock his shelves. One afternoon in November, he posts a funding request on Kiva.org and within hours, ten lenders have given $25 each to help Peter’s business get back on its feet.

Donorschoose.org follows a similar format but with a focus on the US public education system and with donations rather than loans. Teachers post classroom projects that they need financial assistance with and donors can select the project that most inspires them.

With standard charities taking significant percentages of donated dollars, and donors never knowing exactly how their money is being spent, Kiva and Donorschoose provide users with the vital information that they have been lacking, connecting them directly to the project and bringing the financial and humanitarian aspects of a charity together in a way that has never before been conceived.

This was a concept that I used for my “Defending the Whales” project for Greenpeace International, which gave people the opportunity to organize their own campaign to stop whaling. It is amazing how much more effective a campaign can be when it offers direct involvement rather than assuming total responsibility over supporters and their donations.

It is clear that the nonprofit sector is changing rapidly, with new media breaking frontiers and giving the public access to the Peter Mukasa’s of the world that only social organizations could previously reach.

If this continues to develop, how will the role of traditional NGOs change? How will established non-profit organizations move forward to accommodate all of this new media, especially when very few are even taking it seriously.

But associations like Kiva.org and donorchoose do mean serious business and have the success rates to back it up.
Perhaps a quote that I heard from Tom Peters in a seminar would help established NGOs to think about the impact of new approaches in social change:
“The best swordsman in the
world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in
the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought
not to do and often it catches the expert out
and ends him on the spot.” —Mark Twain

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:59 am and is filed under Creativity, Home, Management Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.