The $5 philanthropist

I'm back. Despite having been back from an incredibly refreshing vacation for about two weeks, I have found it incredibly difficult to get back in work mode, having so thoroughly relaxed on my vacation. Every vacation I've ever been on has been a "working vacation" complete with Blackberry, MacBook and the OCD-inspired habit of checking of email every two minutes.

This time was different and I must say, I really needed the break.

So I'm back and I have more than a few stories to tell. I'll try and catch-up over the next few days but first, three small little tidbits that I'm pretty proud of:

While vacationing on Saltspring Island, we found out that my wife, Jessie Farrell, has been nominated for two Canadian Country Music Awards!!! To be nominated for Female Artist of The Year and "Rising Star Award" is really exciting and we found out by listening to JR FM while pulling our car into a Goat Cheese factory!

The next week, I found out that I've been named one of Marketing Magazine's "top 30 under 30," which I'm very proud of. It's good timing because I'm thinking about re-tooling my blog or possibly maintaining two separate blogs. One on philanthropy and cause marketing, the other on more technology, marketing and other rants. I want to invest more time and energy in blogging and am going to pursue this in earnest in September.

Lastly, GiveMeaning was mentioned in today's print edition of the Wall St. Journal (page D4).

So that's my exciting news.

Now, on to where I left off.

Labels: givemeaning, marketingmag, nptech, wsj

I'm trying to spend less time on the computer on weekends so I've got to make this quick. Last night, we launched several new features to GiveMeaning including the ability to subscribe to RSS Feeds for any cause, location or combination of cause and locations. So you can subscribe to a feed for everything at GiveMeaning addressing "poverty" in "Vancouver" as an example.

It's a great way to find out what's going on about an issue or community you care about.

Check it out.

Labels: feeds, givemeaning, nptech, online, rss, web

Here's a heartwarming story whose moral is that giving doesn't need to be overly complicated. If we as individuals and families keep our eyes, ears and hearts open to people in our own social networks in need... Well.. Read the story, you'll see what I'm getting at.

On another note, Peter Deitz held a "webinar" on "group fundraising solutions" today. He lumped together what I'll call "vertical micro-philanthropy sites" such as ModestNeeds, GlobalGiving, Kiva, DonorsChoose with "horizontal group fundraising sites" like FirstGiving, SixDegrees.org and GiveMeaning.

GiveMeaning is unique in that it's both a micro-philanthropy site AND a horizontal group fundraising site but as it applies to most of the other organizations in online fundraising and philanthropy, the two concepts are exclusive of one another.

Let me explain: ModestNeeds allows people to fund specific individuals who have applied for funding for specific personal needs. DonorsChoose allows donors to donate to appeals made by teachers asking for funding for specific school-related projects. All of these sites offer great "catalog's" of giving options all around one specific cause. These vertical sites are generally donor-based but augmented through tools that facilitate spreading awareness about specific projects on that site via word-of-mouth.

Horizontal group fundraising sites are first and foremost "fundraiser centric." This means that without a specific fundraiser instigating traffic to their own fundraising page, (little to) no donations will occur. A horizontal group fundraising platform gives a motivated individual the ability to become a fundraiser for any charity. Group fundraising platforms allow motivated "evangelists" of an organization to fundraise within their own social network (thus also augmenting awareness of the org amongst that network). Very few true strangers are going to donate to a personal fundraising page.

GiveMeaning is unique in that we are fundraiser-centric but because most every fundraising page at GiveMeaning articulates a specific project. Projects can be very specific like this one or more broad and focused really on raising money for an existing program of a charity like this one.

Peter Deitz has done an amazing job and provided a great service in comparing various online giving and fundraising sites but I think it's important to create greater distinction when making comparisons about services that in many cases are comparing "apples to lugnuts."

Labels: fundraising, nptech, nten, peterdeitz

Peter Deitz wrote an article for TechSoup today based on a survey conducted amongst GiveMeaning, ChipIn, Firstgiving, SixDegrees, and JustGive.org,

We each gave our own data and Peter then created a composite of "average results" which is a great first-step at providing more knowledge to those contemplating money using group-fundraising campaign services like what GiveMeaning provides.

I'd like to see further studies sub-segmenting by cause and even "outcomes" because I believe our (and I mean all of my colleagues services too) services serve specific types of appeals very well and others not so much.

Peter, I hope TechSoup compensated you for this effort, otherwise, we'll need to throw a group-fundraiser just for Peter to continue this kind of output!

The one thing I think missing/misleading from the analysis in terms of recommendations is that it's not a simple CAMPAIGN GOAL / AVERAGE CAMPAIGNERS * AVERAGE AMOUNT RAISED formula.

Appoint an "Online Campaign Chairperson"
I think in order for a group fundraising campaign to be fully-functional, the organization needs to appoint a group fundraising chairperson and that person should actively on Facebook/LinkedIn/MySpace or all of them and contribute regularly or at least semi-regularly to a blog.

Work with the chairperson to identify "best campaigners" within your org.
They should be identified by a combination of their ability to evangelize the campaign in their own words, have a big social network, and also be on one major social network and ideally be posting a blog as well.

Feed your campaigners a steady stream of "fresh" content
The campaign chair should be organizing meet-ups, and online group chats and be sending fresh "tidbits" for each campaigner to blog about. If you have a ChipIn widget on your blog but the blog isn't talking actively about the campaign, your donations are going to reflect that.

Labels: groupfundraising, nptech, onlinefundraising, peterdeitz, techsoup

Well, I've finally gotten my first podcast uploaded to iTunes. For those iTunes users, you can download it from them here here
or if you don't use iTunes, you can get it here

The interview was recorded with Gavin Hollett, one of the founders of Opportunity Aequa, a Victoria-based non-profit that has raised nearly $15,000 through GiveMeaning to build soccer fields and bring soccer equipment to kids in Ecuador.

I blogged about Gavin just before he left for Ecuador but had no idea that he and the team would do such a good job of blogging while in Ecuador.

Their project is the best example of delivering their donors a "Return On Generosity." Go to their page and click on the "Blog" tab and read through their almost daily posts.

The Podcast is the first of what hopefully will be a regular series of interviews of project founders on GiveMeaning. Please let me know what you think of the Podcast.

Massive thanks to Ryland Haggis of RedPilot for creating the Podcast!

Labels: charity, media, nptech, philanthropy, podcast, web

Sean over at Tactical Philanthropy has started a group dialog amongst philanthropy bloggers called a "Giving Carnival" where we individually submit articles on a common topic and they are then linked-to from a central page for interested readers. You can learn more about the Giving Carnival here.

The topic he has asked us to speak to is that of "[Online] Resources For Donors," a perfect subject for a guy who runs the "leading social network for donors"

I hate reading blog posts that are more advertorial for someone's own site or service so while I will certainly explain GiveMeaning.com, the website I started two years ago, I will keep my evangelism of our services to a minimum.

I'll start by talking about my own frustrations as a donor, which was what lead me to start GiveMeaning.

The reality of it is that most of us don't wake up in the morning thinking about where we want to donate our money to. Online giving is not likely to become an online daily habit the same way CNN or TMZ.com (a sad admission of mine) is.

Geez, where am I going to give today?
For me, I'm someone who more often reacts to something I see in the news than pro-actively giving my money away. So three years ago, when I read a series of articles of a murder trial that made me weep with anger and pain, I resolved that I would do something meaningful to try to ensure the circumstances in which this little boy was killed would never happen in this Country.

The next day, I went online and tried searching for nonprofits in my community that were tackling child abuse both from an advocacy and government watchdog perspective and from a counseling and rehabilitation perspective.

Information at my fingertips? Overloaded or underwhelmed
The "first generation" of online donation portals (e.g. Network For Good) frustrated me no-end. Keyword searching brings either too many or too little results and then I'm left to read through pages of information trying to discern exactly what each of these nonprofits do. All in all, searching for "charity profiles" ends up almost always on unfortunate ends of the extreme: either way too much information or way too little.

Undeterred, I decided to "let my fingers do the walking" and placed calls to agencies that I found in the Phone Book. I couldn't get my phone call returned. And here's an important point. There are 1,000,000 nonprofits in the US. Hundreds of thousands in Canada. The ones I'm most interested in supporting are not the national agencies that spend millions of dollars on fundraising campaigns but the small, community-based charities that are often chronically underfunded.

An uneven playing field
Getting my phone calls returned, I later learned, was not because they didn't want to talk to me. It was that because of their lack of resources, the same person doing the fundraising was the one doing the counseling and managing the office. Forced to choose between a donor call that may never go anywhere and a traumatized child in need of immediate care, the decision is simple. But these organizations, the ones that I believe many of us donors want to donate to, if they can't identify themselves to us, how will we know to give to them? The answer lies unfortunately in the professional fundraising industry which presents a charity with the conflicting dilema of having to evaluate whether 40% of a semi-successful fundraising campaign is better than 100% of no fundraising campaign, only to draw the ire of donors who chastize them for high fundraising costs.

So if the "charity portals" under or overwhelmed, and I couldn't get my phone call returned, what then?

But before I tell you what I did, I should articulate my other frustrations, the issues that I believe we all share these days, and ultimately, I believe these issues are conspiring against our generosity at all levels of giving.

"Moving Me Up The Ladder? More like me pushing the ladder away from my window!"
So had one of these organizations returned my call promptly and I had felt compelled to donate to them, experience unfortunately conditions me to expect a never-ending stream of solicitations sometimes blatant and sometimes masked as "donor updates" but which ultimately end in an appeal. Take for example the internationally respected charity that I donated to back in November (by sending them a check in the mail) and 3 days after World Aids Day, I receive not one but two four-color glossy, two-sided post-cards "urgently asking for your continued support." Two days too late, and two too many. While I have all the respect for their actual programs, this kind of waste (a waste of my donation, a waste of paper, a waste of theirs and my time) is turning me and millions of donors like me off.

"Return On Generosity." Where is it?
Maybe it's my days as a venture capitalist but I treat my for-profit investments the same way I do my charitable giving. I demand a "Return on Generosity." Without it, why should I ever give again? Online, this has been addressed by many charities (especially charities focused on international relief or development) by creating "Ethical Gift catalog's" and other "anecdotal" messaging most of which comes with fine-print that articulates that the charitable gifts you are purchasing are not actually the items you are purchasing and that you're just giving to their general activities fund. New websites like ImportantGifts.org are attempting to create portals around this concept, all of which I feel, if these items being "sold" are largely anecdotal, is absolute hogwash. To think that these types of "ethical gift" give donors anything more than a "good feeling" is naive.

That's why Kiva, GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose are all high atop my list of respected online giving options, because they indicate exactly where your money is going.

But what are the costs?
DonorsChoose charges a "fulfillment fee" ranging between 15% to 25% on each project funded through its organization. GlobalGiving states that between "85-90% of your money goes directly to the project you choose to support." Kivadoesn't appear to charge fees currently but says that it intends to become self-sustainable by 2008 through "the implementation of a number of income streams which may include optional transaction charges to lenders and low debt capital fees to Field Partners."

I'm amazed at how off-putting even modest transactions can be to many donors. I think the word "admin fee" has become such a dirty-word, tarnished more often by outrageous fundraising expenses (which are distinct from administrative fees) such that many potential donors believe that any intermediary charging anything other than the basic credit card fee is highway robbery.

The problem of the $5 Philanthropist
Whether you have $5 or $5,000,000 to give away, you won't solve the problem alone. Pierre Omidyar's wife loved collecting Pez dispensers. Prior to eBay, finding other Pez dispenser collectors to trade with was near impossible. Prior to GiveMeaning, finding other donors who wanted to support the same initiatives as you was just as difficult.

GiveMeaning's response to donor frustration

I created GiveMeaningin response to these frustrations. Here's what we do. We allow anyone to create a fundraising page to achieve a specific charitable goal. The "founder" of the project submits a little write-up of what they want to achieve, and why they think it should get funded. Some of these projects are started by charities fundraising for specific projects that they've identified but the majority of them are started by people unaffiliated with an organization. What we've created is the beginning of the web's first real online marketplace for charitable giving. I say this because someone can come along and post a project and then GiveMeaning will go and find an organization qualified, willing and able to accomplish the goal(s) that has been defined by that project. With over 800 projects on the site that span the globe and the gamut of causes, we've never had a problem finding a suitable organization for any project.

The Power of Plenty
The project page concept brings together like-minded donors to pool their donations together. We call this the "Power of Plenty." Donors (many of whom have never met each other) pool their money together to accomplish the specific project. And whether I gave $5 and many others gave $500, the feeling I get in seeing the project accomplished is just the same as the donor who gave the most.

Anonymity and Return On Generosity
Our privacy policy is dead simple: We won't and we don't. We will never share your information with the charity that receives the money (unless you specifically ask us to) and you will never be solicited by GiveMeaning. As for a Return On Generosity, the only requirement that we impose on organizations that receive money from us is that they upload photos, video, blog updates, etc to their project page so that donors (if interested), can track the progress of their project.

GiveMeaning does all of this without charging any transaction fees, even covering the credit card fees associated with each transaction. We can afford do this because corporate sponsors who buy advertising on these project pages to align their brand to these specific accomplishments (without ever allowing "disingenuous sponsorship.") For our sponsors, a project page is like sponsoring a golf tournament or dinner except that instead of their brand value being forgotten after desert, their brand is intimately connected to this specific outcome for the months of fundraising and then many months thereafter as donors continue to check-in on their projects.

Who's in charge? Donors need to be empowered.

What bothers me about the vast majority of options that exist to facilitate online giving is that they are providing the donor a menu of choices to chose from as opposed to a breed of solutions that empower the donor. In other words, the majority of these services is still driven by a fundraising agenda as opposed to what the donor wants to fund. For those who hope to target only the "consumer philanthropists," who are content to buy Water Buffalos that don't exist, this might be good enough. But what I'd love to see is a crop of donor-centric services that smartly use the power of the internet (and associated technologies) to bring about a whole new donor-lead revolution in giving. For as long as all that we (the online charity services) are doing is giving the donor a choice of pre-selected donation options, we are not serving them properly. The internet has the potential to be a disruptive force that changes the charity sector for the better but as long as the online services mimic the status quo, this opportunity will be lost.

GiveMeaning has started to move this way by allowing literally anyone to start a project with the promise that we will find the charity best qualified, most willing and able to carry-out the specific goal as defined by that donor but this should be just the beginning.

Labels: nptech, philanthropy, Resources, The Giving Carnival

If you haven't seen this already, you have to check it out

A day after Christmas, Philip Greenspun wrote that a friend of his had received a "water buffalo for Christmas from her dad." The gift was made through Heifer International's catalog of "ethical gifts." On their website, they call their catalog "The most important gift catalog in the world." Wow. Quite the claim. We're all familiar with the appeal of buying "ethical gifts" for friends and family. Many international relief and development charities have similar catalogues and new websites have emerged in recent years as online catalogues of these gifts.

Here's the catch: As Phillip's blog post said "If you read the fine print on the page, however, it turns out that there is no actual buffalo and no actual family and you won’t get a photo of your family and your buffalo. The money simply gets dumped into the common fund at the charity. We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present."

The defense goes like this: "Donors are too lazy, or too uninterested in the details of our activities, so we're going to publish anecdotes that can be easily related and sold to the average consumer." At the best case, this is just lazy and unimaginative and at the worst case, well... In the days of heightened paranoia around "transparency ad accountability" and all of those other multisyllabic words that all cry "who can we trust?" isn't it some relatively dark shade of outright dishonesty?

The other problem with these unethically presented ethical gifts is that they let the donor off the hook. "Well ma, I bought you the Water Buffalo so that's my contribution for the year. Maybe for your birthday, I'll buy a pig, then we'll really have made a difference!"

Not only does it let the donor off the hook but it lessens the likelihood that you can engage that donor in the actual good work that really is happening on the ground.

I think it's high time we treat donors more intelligently, yes, even those that only have $100 to give. Instead of giving them this dumbed-down approach to giving, find new ways to express what it means to take on the problems of a community, embrace media like the one I linked to at the top of this post. Take some of your massive fund-raising budget and spend it on inexpensive video cameras, and a small centrally located edit suite, license some songs, and start posting 'em to YouTube like the clip I posted the other day.

That's the way to engage donors, not treat them like they need to be lied to.

Of course, I can't help but mention that it's this more respectful, intelligent approach that we do at GiveMeaning, but that aside, really, I'm saying to all my colleagues and "competitors" (your view, not mine): Treat donors with more respect and assume a higher degree of intelligence and interest in your work than in the "most important gifts" variety.

Labels: charitablegifts, charity, charitygifts, ethicalgifts, fundraising, greengifts, marketing, media, nptech, philanthropy

(Wickaninnish Gallery in Granville Island was the store who raised the most money)

We have picked-up all of our Christmas REAL CHANGE FROM SPARE CHANGE retail campaign experiment here in Vancouver and we're all totally blown away by the success!



By way of background, we built these beautiful red little boxes that we call "Pig-e-Banks" and gave them out to retailers throughout Vancouver. We asked them to pick any charity in Canada or any project on our site that they wanted to fundraise for and then ask their customers to donate their spare change.

After seeing how much money was raised by kids in our Halloween campaign pilot, we thought we would extend the experiment to retail stores.

Conventional wisdom warned that Point-of-Purchase retail real estate was far too valuable to give over to the Pig-e-Bank boxes, never-mind the business of the season would prevent employees from talking about the Pig-e-Bank or anything else during their busiest time of the year.


In less than three weeks, a total of $2082.05 was raised from participating retailers!!!

The top 5 stores (who raised the most money were):

1. Wickaninnish Gallery
2. Gloss Salon
3. Chic
4. Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
5. Heaven's Playground

The program validated everything I instinctively believed. It's perfectly fitting that the Chinese New Year is the "Year of the Pig." We're going to expand this coin collection program nation-wide.

GiveMeaning takes care of all of the logistics (picking-up, sorting, getting the participants the boxes etc). It's perfect for any store, any office, any desk at work. And our "Junior" version is ideal for kids groups and schools to raise money.

If you're interested in participating, click here



Dear, a store in South Granville got creative with their box and made a little sign to wave to customers asking them to donate in support of the BC SPCA.


Of course, the program couldn't have happened without Hannah & Anna, our dynamic duo who went store-to-store, spreading our Piggies throughout the city



Thanks to everyone who participated. In such a short amount of time, we raised a lot of money (given the denominations collected) and have proven the concept. Now it's time to roll-out these little Piggies across the Country!

Labels: charity, coin, community, fundraising, innovative, nptech, philanthropy, pig-e-bank, web