In a short by thought-provoking article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the authors point out the difference between what people feel they are doing with their donations (47% said assist the needy) and where their donations were actually going (6% actually).   This is a big gap!

It’s even more astonishing that 67% of the people they asked “felt confident that their contributions would reach their intended targets.”  On what basis did were these people so confident?  This gets back to the question I asked in February – What % of your donations are to education?  Health?  Human Services? Most people don’t know.

I think that the number one issue here is that giving is a bit like a black box to most people.  You respond to some appeal, give from the hip, and hope for the best.  Hey!  We’re talking about $223 billion in donations from individuals!   Shouldn’t there be a better way to give so we can know where the money is going?

Stay tuned!

(p.s. thank you to Katya for highlighting the roundup post from Kivi.)

There are over 1.3 million nonprofits in the U.S., two-thirds of which are considered “public charities.” There’s a real long-tail phenomenon here in that very few nonprofits get to any real size.  In fact, over 81% of U.S. nonprofits see less than $1 million in annual revenues, and 93% are under $5 million according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics’ 2007 Nonprofit Almanac.   It’s no wonder that most charities struggle with maintaining a decent web site.  As we know, a good web site is crucial to the ability to engage with today’s younger donors and volunteers.

So many of these small nonprofits are staffed solely by volunteers, or perhaps 1-2 paid (underpaid) staffers.  I met recently with one such underpaid staffer from a local education-related nonprofit.  She’s the only employee – the cook, waiter and bottle washer.  Between writing grants, developing donors, searching for corporate sponsors, writing thank you notes to donors, and finding the time to squeeze in programs central to the nonprofit’s mission, she admitted to me that there’s no time left to maintain even a simple and flat web site (circa 1996).  Doing the “social media thing” is totally out of the question.

So many of the larger Web sites that engage with retail donors across multiple charities – like Causes on Facebook, or Change.or, or any of the others – do a fairly decent job of exposing the already exposed larger charities.  What about the little guys?  Who is there to help them get more visibility and financial support?  I’m not sure how well givvy will do with this either, but we will try.  We know that users will find the larger charities on our site easily – but we hope that our model will also highlight smaller local charities in ways that current sites have been unable to do.