[Chapter 15, page 249]

Microphilanthropy

Microphilanthropy matchmaker services are on-line philanthropic marketplaces through which individual donors give small grants to directly fund individuals or projects in need. They have been described as what happens when “Facebook meets pocketbook.”[1] Here are descriptions of four prominent electronic microphilanthropy forums: Donors Choose, Global Giving, Kiva, and Reality Charity.

Donors Choose facilitates grants to help teachers in America’s public schools fund projects for their students—mostly impoverished inner city school districts. Teachers submit proposals for materials or activities that their students need in order to learn. Donors then go online and provide tax-deductible contributions to projects of their choosing. When a donor funds an entire project, she receives student photos and thank you letters and an expenditure report detailing how the money was spent.

Global Giving has been termed “the eBay for development.” The brainchild of Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi, two former World Bank employees, it supports initiatives in the developing world. Global Giving is a web-based platform through which individuals, companies, and other groups or organizations find and fund grassroots projects in social and economic development. Individual donors on Global Giving have given grants of anywhere from $10 to $150,000 to individual projects. Would-be donors can search the site by cause – from AIDS relief to clean water – or by geographical region. For example, $12 will provide a Uganda clinic with HIV testing and counseling for three people while $50 will purchase 25 energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs for low-income families.[2] Donations can be as small as you want and it’s possible to get in touch with project leaders before committing money. The site also enables you to get continuous feedback on how your money is being used. As Whittle, one of the two founders, sums it up, “Global Giving just enables small-scale grassroots projects to match up with relatively small donors all around the world, who want to help them make a difference.” [3]

Kiva was founded by Matt and Jessica Jackley Flannery, on the belief that the unavailability of credit at a reasonable cost was impeding economic development. With Kiva, the couple combined their desire to promote international development with their technological savvy. While philanthropists make grants through GlobalGiving, Kiva facilitates microcredit loans by individual philanthropists to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Its website explains, “by choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can ‘sponsor a business’ and help the world’s working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you’ve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.”[4] You can lend, as New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof did, $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic.[5] Kiva collaborates with 67 microfinance institutions around the globe that recommend the borrowers and administer the loans.

Reality Charity allows any organization or individual in 50 countries around the world to request donations. As Alexander Blass, the site’s founder, explains: “This is 2007. There’s a Web site for everything. This is the new way to give. It’s gratifying. It’s personal. It’s community-oriented. It’s a viral-giving platform, because it’s contagious in a sense.” Reality Charity has helped Christy Gervais get $1,660 to repay back rent on the house that Hurricane Rita destroyed. It has also helped Anne Campbell to raise $5,000 to cover dental work so that she can pose for her June wedding photos “showing a beautiful, healthy smile.”

These on-line intermediaries reduce the transaction costs of giving in the same way that eBay has reduced the costs of selling and buying a wide variety of goods. If the microphilanthropy intermediary has done good due diligence on both the strategy and the organization’s integrity and capacity to implement it, and if the grants or gifts are within the purview of your own goals, they can facilitate strategic philanthropy. Global Giving’s focus on international development, its expertise, and its longstanding commitment to vetting its projects makes us optimistic about its possibilities.

But the attractive aspects of on-line giving also suggests its tension with strategic philanthropy. As one commentator observes: “People respond to compelling stories, not necessarily cold data and facts but personal stories about people. What [microphilanthropy] is doing is offering a potpourri of stories that affect our heartstrings, and we emotionally respond. And you’re able to establish relationships with someone, which is what so many people want to do on the Internet.”[6] The downside is that an estimation of impact may be replaced by the metric, “Whose posted photo has the cutest disadvantaged child?” The job of Money Well Spent is not to rate these and other intermediaries but to help provide you with the criteria for doing so yourself. So, if microphilanthropy is of potential value to you, take a critical look at the websites and at what thoughtful commentators have said about them.