These are heady times, lots of memes in the air and the two I’m going to talk about are actually facets of Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. As you already know, Benkler’s main theoretical contribution was that he was able to present how the Internet lowers the cost of nonmarket transactions so that they become feasible to spread out over the free time of billions of people. You can build a pyramid of knowledge like Wikipedia by literally parsing out all the bricklaying and cement mixing over millions of hours of donated time. And that what is Economy 2.0 is all about – the migration of what was previously offline nonmarket activity to the Web. I’m not entirely sure if half the people who are making new sites under the Economy 2.0 rubric really quite understand what the hell they’re doing (aidpage comes to mind — frankly, it’s atrocious). On the other hand, the best practitioners of Economy 2.0 DO seem to get it. I’d choose donorschoose.org and modestneeds.org to be on MY Economy 2.0 kickball team.
Now there’s another meme coming from the philanthropy sector, I learned about it from Susan Herr’s blog, Philanthromedia. In her post, she refers back to Tom Watson’s entry in the Huffington Post of all places. Tom Watson basically talks about the size of the long tail in our sector and then goes on to discuss the commingling of corporate marketing with nonprofit goals. The RED campaign is not the last attempt at cause marketing. It’s only the beginning of an alliance between for-profits and non-profits. Basically, you buy this BMW and the proceeds go to [insert your cause] here.
But let’s take that whole notion of “consumer philanthropy” and put that back in the Economy 2.0 space. Wouldn’t it be possible to move the hardest social services cases in the nonprofit sector over to the Web? And wouldn’t it take just a little more thinking to get people to donate to those cases, in effect, becoming a consumer philanthropist? We’re basically applying the network effect to donations and ending up with another shading on the notion of consumer philanthropy. It’s not so much big-money philanthropy but online retail philanthropy. Unlike Tom Watson, I can’t proudly herald the notion that “consumer philanthropy” is here. However, I think I know what consumer philanthropy 2.0 might look like…
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Hey great post – lots of food for thought there, got me thinking about consumer philanthropy and web 2.0 the open sourced retail side of it. Very important, you’re 100% right. I’d love to hear more!
Thanks Tom! I’m really surprised and gladdened you took the time to find and answer my post. Yes, I think my startup will absolutely change the way Economy 2.0 web sites work and the way we think about consumer philanthropy today. I’ve been thinking about this for a year and I’m going to start posting screenshots and HTML pages to a currently fallow URL to be announced.
There’s much that Benkler talks about in his book that ultimately makes my site even possible in its in conception and business plan and without the current Economy 2.0 sites out there to provide me with a way on how to do things I’m not sure I’d be so confident. However, there are some glaring holes I’d like to fill in both the Economy 2.0 space and the nonprofit sector.
Economy 2.0 sites are, frankly, useless to many of the clients served by charities today. It’s partly because many of the people who make those sites have zero background in our sector and don’t understand internal operations for a nonprofit.
That said, many nonprofit agencies have a “closed” architecture — there’s no mechanism for exposing their inner workings to an Economy 2.0 site. This is why you do not see consumer philanthropy sites too often and when they do – they rely only on a subset of cases. Even the most successful sites, like modestneeds.org and donorschoose.org, rely on a “parallel” architecture to nonprofits primarily because that’s their workaround.
My startup will provide the magic recipe to open up that internal charity architecture and make nonprofits available on an Economy 2.0 site. It’s one major facet of the plan which in itself is multilayered in order to deal with many issues related to Economy 2.0 sites as a whole.
If your concept pans out, the potential here is to fundamentally change the way people view their involvement with the world. Everything is accessible quickly and easily. Any cause is right at your doorstep.
This has my cogs whirring…
Good post. from what I’ve seen, philanthropy is stimulated when the cost of giving appears low relative to the perceived rewards. Friends of mine, and many others are being jolted into becoming philanthropists, most commonly by travelling in countries where a few to a few hundred of their dispensible US dollars can change lives. A friend paid for a year of education for the neice of a man he met in China, who would otherwise been deprived of a now much more promising future. I call this micro-philanthropy. I think there are opportunities for harvesting the ripples of commerce to meet some civic needs, but I also see many needs that wouldn’t be met by this method — like the needs of older, very poor men & women for housing and food. So much depends upon the perception of value by the donor — which doesn’t map neatly to many kinds of needs.
Yes, I’m a big fan of microlending sites like kiva.org and globalgiving.com. However, that works in the context of helping entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, anyone who has ever worked at a charity knows that that’s not where funds are most needed.