fundraising

Innovation often does not look like a brand new technology, but like a smart new combination of existing technologies. Solar panels have been around a long time, long enough for President Carter to famously put them on the roof of the White House and for President Reagan to infamously take them down. There’s also nothing new about crowd funding, where a group of people collectively pool their money together in order to finance a shared project.

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Network For Good, the online giving portal, just released The Online Giving Study covering 3.6 million gifts totaling $381 million from nearly 1.9 million unique donors to 66,470 nonprofit organizations from 2003 to 2009.  The study only covers giving made through Network For Good's system.

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Just about a month ago I returned from the NTEN NTC in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, Angus Parker of WiserEarth and Leif Utne of Zanby and organizing force behind Open Wiser. I then blogged about the OpenWiser fundraising drive to raise $10,000 to build an open API to WiserEarth's database of information about organizations around the world working towards a more sustainable civilization.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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Every once in a while it's good to review the basics and yesterday I virtually attended a website usability presentation given by NTen. Using three simple criteria they reviewed the websites of various not-for-profit organizations to deomonstrate how some simple changes could potentially have a positive impact on the site and, more importantly, online donations.

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I Heart Miro has created the absolute easiest (and most passive) way to support the Participatory Culture Foundation's FOSS Miro project. By just installing the Firefox extension, anytime you shop at Amazon a small portion of the proceeds will go to support Miro. The extension works by adding the Miro referral code to the URL when you browse on Amazon. When you buy something, the Amazon referral fee is donated to their a 501c3 non-profit. Joe Solomon introduced me to the project and posted on the NetSquared blog about abstracting the project to support any non-profit. What about going a step further, and being able to select Drupal, the Free Software Foundation or any other Free & Open Source Software project - and then select from a list of affiliate programs such as iTunes which will donate a 5% commission on all qualifying purchases. (like your DRM-free purchased music)

Architecture for Humanity, an organization co-founded by 2006 TED prize-winner Cameron Sinclair is employing a winning strategy to raise funds. They are using eBay to auction off a special VIP Pass to this year's TED Conference.

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