Making it easier and easier to be charitable

The second edition of Giving Carnival (which is a periodic roundup of blog posts about a particular topic) added a couple of new entries to the growing list of new and interesting web-based services for would-be donors to non-profits, in addition to DonorsChoose.

For instance Changing the Present is working on several clever features aimed at encouraging charitable contributions in lieu of holiday or birthday gift-buying, such as a personal registry like a bridal registry. Network for Good is the leading "charity portal" online, where individuals can search for non-profits by keyword or name or type. Global Giving performs the same service, targeted at matching American donors with overseas causes.

iGive is I believe the oldest catalogue site that directs a portion of purchases to non-profits; they are a for-profit enterprise which collects commissions from the participating merchants. Their competition includes Greater Good and, in the United Kingdom, Shop2Give.

Give Meaning attempts to make it easy for individuals to band together, sort of create online giving circles around a specific cause or recipient non-profit. (An essay by the founder describing how he arrived at that notion is here.)

I'm curious what impact professional development directors are perceiving from all this. Are existing checkwriting donors going online, or is it bringing new ones -- has anyone done any hard datagathering yet around questions like that? For that matter does this sort of thing in the long term reduce the market value of salaried fundraising staffers (because it gets easier to fundraise without them) or increase it (because charitable impulses are more and more enabled thereby enlarging the pool of regular small givers from which to try to find future major donors)?

More direct giving services, and some caveats

In addition to DonorsChoose which I wrote about on Wednesday, there are at least a couple other examples of new organizations using the web to let donors choose exactly what project their small checks go to.

Modest Needs does the same thing with individual families that DonorsChoose does with teachers or students: families describe their immediate needs and donors pick and choose. The mission aim is what used to be called the "working poor" as well as folks with specific disabilities, so the lead goal expressed is "to prevent otherwise financially self-sufficient individuals and families from entering the cycle of poverty."

(I wonder though if Modest Needs doesn't actually demonstrate the limitations of this philanthropic concept...how is a well-meaning individual donor supposed to tell which requests are truly authentic? Which donees are truly "willing to work but temporarily unable to do so"? The value-added of trained professional staffs to vet and prioritize needs might become more apparent to a donor who's tried Modest Needs.)

And then MissionFish is enabling charitable impulses on the part of eBay sellers. The challenge here might be how complex the process inherently is -- a program that requires a large flow chart to explain itself seems relatively unlikely to really catch on.

So neither of these two seems as likely to gain traction as DonorsChoose, for different reasons.

The long tail of philanthropy is called DonorsChoose.org

My hometown newspaper recently put DonorsChoose.org on its front page, because for no obvious reason Chicago is the young organization's biggest market thus far. It belatedly occurs to me that we may all one day look back and see that DonorsChoose is to the staffed non-profit organizations as Napster was to the record labels: the specific vanguard of technology empowering customer demand that had until now been kept bottled up. In other words, the long tail phenomenon.

DonorsChoose is a service that matches up individual public-school needs (of a student or of a teacher) with individual donors. Charitably-minded individuals browse the site and if a specific need catches their eye they can donate to it right then. Students and teachers and principals post their unmet needs or projects at no cost; DonorsChoose is basically just being a highly-efficient middleman like eBay. That skips the whole vetting and sorting service for donors that is now provided by professional staffs of large non-profits and of foundations.

Whether that is overall a good or bad thing will quickly resemble the debate over whether citizens seeking news are better served with or without the sorting and ranking service provided by newspaper editors. At a minimum technology empowering such direct donor control might represent a new level of competition for the empowered donor's dollar which, frankly, a good number of current non-profits are not prepared for. On balance I'm all for this but anyone who doesn't think it could get real messy along the way might want to go talk to those record labels whose CD sales have crashed, or the Napster guys who they sued from here to eternity rather than figure out how to evolve their companies' business models to meet what their customer actually wanted.

Is the cello half-full or half-empty?

ArtsJournal does an interesting thing making excellent use of this technology: they invite people working in a specific sector to participate in a focused online discussion, a short-term blog. This seems to have all the useful advantages of online discourse (like the ability to easily point readers to sources) without the disadvantages which can render open online chats pointless.

So for instance they got several knowledgeable people to discuss the state of classical music in the U.S. It makes the most sense to read if you click the "older entries first" button. I wasn't aware for instance that the New York Times recently declared this to be a golden age for classical music in America...At least some experts in the field seem to agree: "Virtually all of recorded history is at our finger tips. There are more opportunities to hear live performances than ever before. More opportunities to play music in any of the thousands and thousands of community groups that have sprung up in recent decades. The level of performance generally across the land seems higher than ever..." The chairman of a big-city chamber orchestra asserts that "no one has put forth a credible argument that there has been a real decline in the percentage of the population that appreciates the classical music art form."

However they also report serious troubles at a lot of major symphony orchestras, which are struggling to fill seats as people are less interested in subscribing and have more choices. That reminds me of the sad story of the San Jose Symphony which was well described in this report; it's quite unusual (and scary) for a non-profit institution of that size and history to actually go belly-up. One ArtsJournal commenter places those difficulties in the context of that all "producers of "popular" culture are scrambling to reinvent the ways they do business." He provides some excellent examples which, without using the term, amount to the "long tail" trend in action (which I'm now finding just keeps popping up in all sorts of disparate contexts).